The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee With David John was a rapid read that told about Lee’s life in the DPRK and the conditions that led her to escape. Lee was from the northern city of Hyesan which was devastated by the famine which decimated the country in the mid-nineties. She decided, at age seventeen in 1997, to escape to the People’s Republic of China by crossing the Yalu River, which forms the border between the two countries.
Fortunately Lee’s mother had a history of cross-border trade, in other words low-key smuggling, so she had a network of friends and relatives on the Chinese side. Lee therefore knew what to do and who to bribe in order to make a successful crossing. In order to do this, however, she couldn’t tell anyone her plans, not even her own family.
As Lee contemplated crossing the Yalu River, she made this poignant observation:
“The river ran more quietly than before, as if it were depressed by its role as a prison fence.”
Since China does not recognize North Koreans as asylum seekers and rather as economic illegals, were Lee discovered she faced the almost certain likelihood of being sent back home to a labour camp. She was able to blend in among Chinese society and eventually find work, but it wasn’t easy. The title refers to seven names, which Lee had to adopt and then shed like a snakeskin in order to survive under a new persona, as each step she took in her life of exile needed new documents to cover up any clue to her past.
Lee’s story was one I was well familiar with as I have read much already about the DPRK and the people who used to live there. For a country so poor I wondered where she could have acquired so much money for all the bribes she needed to pay, in addition to the day-to-day expenses to survive. In one story, after Lee had arrived in South Korea and worked successfully to get her mother and brother out of the north, they all found themselves together in Laos. Lee was looking at her remaining cash and who she still owed it to. After doing the deductions she knew that she still needed to have enough to buy an airplane ticket back to Seoul. Surely the pittance she had left wouldn’t have been enough to pay for such a ticket. I don’t doubt defectors’ stories but Lee seemed to travel as if money grew on trees.
Even when she thought the worst was behind her after finally arriving in Seoul, she risked being jailed and sent back to China because the South Korean authorities didn’t believe she was from the north. Lee had integrated herself into Chinese society so well, by being able to speak Mandarin, losing her North Korean accent, and being able to pass as a Chinese citizen with her upscale luggage and legitimate passport, that the South Korean National Intelligence Service doubted her claims for asylum. Imagine coming so far with both feet on the ground in South Korea yet still at the risk of being deported:
“The irony. In Shenyang, I’d had to convince suspicious police that I was Chinese, not North Korean. Here, I was trying to do the opposite.”
Lee outlined the difficulties North Koreans have while trying to adapt to life in the south. Both her mother and brother wanted to return to Hyesan as they found life in Seoul too foreign and lonely. Lee managed to convince them that a return to their home would almost certainly mean a death sentence or years in a labour camp.
Problems that South Koreans faced were nothing like those experienced back home, and I liked the line Lee gave after she listened to some of her new countrywomen:
“Every country has worries of its own. Sometimes their complaints sounded like plotlines from TV melodramas.”
When faced with starvation and exile to labour camps up north, Lee wondered how South Korean women could complain about such trivial things as being a tad overweight or breaking up with a boyfriend. They made their problems seem like fabrications exaggerated to a TV drama level.
Lee and her Korean family now live in the US.