He has quit smoking, but he says he can still taste the harsh North Korean cigarettes that burned your lips when lighted. There are other legacies of the nightmare: On an island where sashimi is plentiful, Jenkins says he can't bring himself to eat raw fish.
He's afraid the taste will evoke the sickening feeling he had in North Korea, eating fish he was sure had fed on the bodies of starvation victims dumped into rivers.
He feels anxious about money, so he keeps working. "I can't retire, ever," he says. "I'm not living off my wife -- I'm not doing that."
He might, he says, write another book about his life in North Korea -- half for the money and half to spite Kim Jong Il. "I don't have to get his permission to do something anymore," he says.
He keeps tabs on his old captors via the news on cable TV and says he pities the two U.S. reporters being held in North Korea. They're being played like cheap marionettes, just like he was, "dancing to Kim Jong Il's fiddle."
And he does a lot of remembering. The rest of his family just wants to forget, but Jenkins cannot. So on long walks along the scenic island back roads with his Labrador named Biscuit, the dog hears his stories.
Jenkins wonders about the soldiers he left behind that night before crossing the border north: Are they alive? Would they ever forgive him?
Often, involuntarily, the mindless North Korean political tracts Jenkins was once forced to learn invade his mind. He can't help but remember the beatings he received if he didn't know them well enough, and he winces.
Struggling with Japanese, he insists that the language isn't hard because it's grammatically similar to Korean. "All I've got to do is memorize the words," Jenkins says. Then he sighs. "But I'm tired of memorizing things."
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john.glionna@latimes.com
