 His father died at the age of 21, when Shin was only 4; his mother remarried the following year, sending he and his sister to live with his grandmother.In 1937, he and his family were deported to Central Asia along with all other ethnic Koreans in the Russian Far East.After the deportations, his family stayed in the Kazakh SSR for a few years before eventually settling in Tashkent, Uzbek SSR (now Uzbekistan) in 1940.