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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBorn in the Gulag: Why a North Korean Boy Sent His Own Mother to Her Death
By Blaine Harden
Mar 28 2012, 7:01 AM ET 89
Nine years after watching his mother's hanging, Shin In Geun squirmed through the electric fence that surrounds Camp 14 and ran off through the snow into the North Korean wilderness. It was January 2, 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do it.
He was 23 years old and knew no one outside the fence.
Within a month, he had walked into China. Within two years, he was living in South Korea. Four years later, he was living in Southern California.
Stunted by malnutrition, he is short and slight -- five feet six inches, about 120 pounds. His arms are bowed from childhood labor. His lower back and buttocks are scarred with burns from the torturer's fire. The skin over his pubis bears a puncture scar from the hook used to hold him in place over the fire. His ankles are scarred by shackles, from which he was hung upside down in solitary confinement. His right middle finger is cut off at the first knuckle, a guard's punishment for dropping a sewing machine in a camp garment factory. His shins, from ankle to knee on both legs, are mutilated and scarred by burns from the electrified barbed-wire fence that failed to keep him inside Camp 14.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/born-in-the-gulag-why-a-north-korean-boy-sent-his-own-mother-to-her-death/255110/
mmonk
(52,589 posts)HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)Average height of male indonesians is 5'2". Bahrain, 5'5". Bolivia, 5'3". India, 5'5". Vietnam, 5'4", rural Chinese 5'5," Thais 5'6", Etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#cite_note-cdc-71
Are they all "stunted" too?
That word makes me wonder about the rest of the article.
Quantess
(27,630 posts)I'm assuming the interviewer was someone who happened to speak the same dialect as Shin, and wasn't all that great of a writer. Too bad, because it's one hell of a gruesome story.
marshall
(6,665 posts)Average height of a South Korean man is 5 feet 8.5 inches.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)marshall
(6,665 posts)The standard is that North Korean men are two inches shorter than South Korean men. His height is basically average by that number, which is remarkable since he grew up in a prison camp.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)So far as I can tell from a quick check of the net, average height in NK isn't so easy to know, but maybe it's about 5'5" (lots of news articles saying different things but they don't reference sources). The other estimates are even shorter than that.
So this kid, by NK standards, would be taller than average. And he'd be well within the range of variation even in SK at two inches less than average. Which doesn't quite jive with the story.
In my book "stunted" implies a period of severe nutritional deprivation such that the person's growth and development is affected in comparison with the norm of their society. This kid seems mentally normal and above average in height for NK, and within the normal range for SK and the rest of Asia. That's all I'm saying.
marshall
(6,665 posts)It would make more sense to point out how he is remarkably fit considering thee circumstances.
The data came from:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/short-north-koreans-and-americans/
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)"While the conditions for North Koreans are troubling, Americans have a similar height gap to worry about, and it also appears to be due to a lower standard of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition. Last summer, the journal Social Science Quarterly reported that Americans are, quite literally, falling short of Europeans. In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. Several Northern European countries rank the highest in height, with the Dutch coming in first, at just over 6 feet for the men and 5-feet-7-inches for the women.
The real answer may be that Northern European countries do a better job of spreading the wealth and taking care of their children. We conjecture that perhaps the Western and Northern European welfare states, with their universal socioeconomic safety nets, are able to provide a higher biological standard of living to their children and youth than the more free-market-oriented U.S. economy, wrote John Komlos, professor of economics at the University of Munich.
Just like with the North Koreans and South Koreans, the height gap between Americans and Europeans is a relatively new development. The New Yorker article notes that the average American soldier during World War I was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955, the data began to shift. The Germans and other Europeans grew an extra two centimeters a decade, or a little under an inch, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans havent grown taller in 50 years."
sakabatou
(42,152 posts)But it doesn't surprise me. I try to think about it, but it doesn't surprise. It's like a parallell between the camps in N. Korea and the Nazi camps.
trusty elf
(7,394 posts)No animal is as savage or cruel as are we humans.
talk about the hunger games
Suji to Seoul
(2,035 posts)North Koreans are the world's most brutalized people.
Mysfyt
(50 posts)he can find his piece of mind and his place in the sun.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)or why would he have even wanted to after doing that??
Luminous Animal
(27,310 posts)when he escaped he was 23. He escaped by crawling through the electric fence, receiving electric shocks and burns while doing so.
This information is in the article.