The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

“I would like to shed my North Korean identity, erase the mark it has made on me. But I can’t. I’m not sure why this is so, but I suspect it is because I had a happy childhood. As children we have a need, as our awareness of the larger world develops, to feel part of something bigger than family, to belong to a nation. The next step is to identify with humanity, as a global citizen. But in me this development got stuck.” 

Lee feels that her North Korean upbringing caused her to be developmentally stunted. She believes her development ceased at love for her nation, and that she never developed a love of humanity. Her book and life experiences contradict this self-assertion.

“Songbun is a caste system that operates in North Korea. A family is classified as loyal, wavering or hostile, depending on what the father’s family was doing at the time just before, during and after the founding of the state in 1948. If your grandfather was descended from workers and peasants, and fought on the right side in the Korean War, your family would be classified as loyal. If, however, your ancestors included landlords, or officials who worked for the Japanese during the colonial occupation, or anyone who had fled to South Korea during the Korean War, your family would be categorized as hostile. Within the three broad categories there are fifty-one gradations of status, ranging from the ruling Kim family at the top, to political prisoners with no hope of release at the bottom. The irony was that the new communist state had created a social hierarchy more elaborate and stratified than anything seen in the time of the feudal emperors.” 

Social structures and the limitations they place on persons are universal among societies. North Korea is meant to be a communist/socialist utopia free of class, but the country observes a strict class hierarchy enforced by the state. Lee observes similar social classes in China and South Korea. The basis of social status differs in those countries, but the class system remains.

“Our entire family life, eating, socializing and sleeping, took place beneath the portraits. I was growing up under their gaze. Looking after them was the first rule of every family. In fact they represented a second family, wiser and more benign even than our own parents. They depicted our Great Leader Kim Il-sung, who founded our country, and his beloved son Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader, who would one day succeed him. Their distant, airbrushed faces took pride of place in our home, and in all homes. They hung like icons in every building I ever entered.” 

From birth, North Koreans are conditioned to adore the Kim family above their own. The regime requires every family hang portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il (they likely now also include Kim Jong-un). The mandatory portraits and rules governing their care foster an idyllic reverence for the leaders and condition North Koreans to accept state intrusion into their personal lives.

“In theory the government provided for everyone’s needs – food, fuel, housing and clothing – through the Public Distribution System. The quality and the amount you received depended on the importance of your work. Twice a month your workplace provided you with ration coupons to exchange for the goods. Until a few years previously, the Party had still seriously been thinking of abolishing money. When the system actually worked, money was only needed as pocket money, or for the beauty parlour. But most of the time, the communist central planning system was so inefficient that it frequently broke down, rations dwindled or disappeared through theft, and people relied more and more on bribery or on unofficial markets for their essentials – for which cash, and often hard foreign currency, not the Korean won, was required.” 

North Korea’s Public Distribution System for goods breaks down so frequently that the government is forced to tacitly accept black-markets. Without black-markets and illegal trade, many in North Korea do not survive.

“Training and drilling for the mass games would soon begin. Mass games, he said were essential to our education. The training, organization and discipline needed for them would make good communists of us. He gave us an example of what he meant, quoting the words of Kim Jong-il: since every child knew that a single slip by an individual could ruin a display involving thousands of performers, every child learned to subordinate their will to that of the collective. In other words, though we were too young to know it, mass games helped to suppress individual thought.” 

Societies values are reflected in their education system and cultural activities. North Korean society is structured around indoctrination. Loyalty is prioritized over education and critical thinking is nonexistent. The mass games allow North Korea to instill the value of collectivism over individualism, and raise good communists.

“Officially, there is no private property in North Korea, and no real-estate business, but in reality people who have been allocated desirable or conveniently located housing often do sell or swap them if the price is right.” 

Markets are natural, inevitable, and essential. North Korean citizens technically have no private property, yet real estate markets exist in which citizens sell their homes to one another. South Korean music is banned, yet children listen to it. Trade is illegal, yet North Koreans regularly procure foreign-made products.

“There are two kinds of prison in the gulag. One is for prisoners sentenced to ‘revolutionary re-education through labour’. If they survive their punishment they will be released back into society, and monitored closely for the rest of their lives. The other is a zone of no return–prisoners there are worked to death.” 

The gulags are harsh prison camps. Citizens are not sent to the gulags for typical crimes, such as drug dealing or theft, but rather for disloyalty to the regime. North Koreans are sentenced to gulags or executed for seemingly minor offenses. For the most disloyal, gulags are a death sentence.

“The official explanation for the ‘arduous march’, as the propaganda obliquely called the famine, was the Yankee-backed UN economic sanctions, coupled with crop failures and freak flooding that had made the situation worse. When I heard this I believed that Kim Jong-il was doing his very best for us in terrible circumstances. What would the people do without him? The true reason, which I did not learn until years later, and which was known to very few people in North Korea, had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the refusal of the new Russian government to continue subsidizing us with fuel and food.” 

This passage illustrates the complexity of governance and ascribing causation to tragedies. It’s true that the North Korean regime is cruel and oppressive. North Korea was sustained for many years by the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed and discontinued their support, it coincided with North Korean crop failure. The cruel and oppressive North Korean regime suffered. This suffering was compounded by United Nations sanctions, which eliminated other avenues for North Korea to alleviate the suffering of its people. The famine was caused by environmental conditions. The suffering was exacerbated and prolonged by poorly-timed geopolitical conditions. The result was the deaths of many innocent people. 

“In North Korea, there were only state-owned restaurants, which saw no reason or need to entice customers or make any effort to sell; and private, semi-legal ones operating furtively in markets or in people’s homes. But here the restaurants were advertising themselves brightly, inviting me to stop and look.” 

The differences between North Korea and China are near immediate to Lee. North Korea was supposed to be a utopia, but to Lee, China is the utopia with its bright lights, energy, and fervent activity. Lee knows nothing of the underlying reasons for the differences, but she’s immediately attracted to the life China presents. 

“South Korea considered all North Koreans to be South Korean citizens, she said. Any who succeeded in reaching Seoul were given a South Korean passport and quite a large allowance to help them resettle.” 

Lee states in another section that North and South Korea evolved in two different directions. North Korea continued to view the South as its enemy. South Korea took a more caring approach towards North Koreans. South Korea considered citizens of both countries Korean and granted North Koreans citizenship if they reached Seoul.

“The experience I’d just had was deeply dehumanizing. A police bureaucracy, with its correct procedures and trick questions, and inspectors in pressed shirts, thought it reasonable and right to send people from my country to a Bowibu torture cell for beatings with wire cables.” 

Lee highlights China’s inhumanity towards North Koreans throughout her memoir. China searches for North Korean refugees and returns them to North Korea, where they are tortured and beaten. China does this to preserve its relationship with its communist neighbor.

“Sympathetic people I’d met in China would sometimes express their bewilderment that the Kim dynasty had been tyrannizing North Korea for almost six decades. How does that family get away with it? Just as baffling, how do their subjects go on coping? In truth there is no dividing line between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens. The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless. A terrorized Party cadre will terrorize his subordinates, and so on down the chain; a friend will inform on a friend out of fear of punishment for not informing. A nicely brought-up boy will become a guard who kicks to death a girl caught trying to escape to China, because her songbun has sunk to the bottom of the heap and she’s worthless and hostile in the eyes of the state. Ordinary people are made persecutors, denouncers, thieves. They use the fear flowing from the top to win some advantage, or to survive.” 

Authoritarian regimes do not just happen. They require a lot of work to build and maintain. Lee explains that North Korea’s regime is maintained partly by ensuring all citizens are complicit in its brutality. With blood on their hands for the regime’s cause, they are more susceptible to its propaganda. In this way, the harsh economic conditions under which most North Koreans live contribute to the regime’s authority. Scarcity causes people to commit atrocious acts for survival, which are then used as leverage by the regime to increase its authority.

“I realized that I wasn’t simply in another country; I was in another universe from the one where I’d grown up. Money was the obsession here, and celebrity and fame. I had dreaded the curiosity of others about my past, but in Shanghai no one cared where you were from, as long as you weren’t illegal. Fortunes were being made overnight in property, stocks and retail. The city opened doors to those with nerve, ambition and talent. It was uncaring and cruel to those with no right to be there.” 

Shanghai is as different as Lee can imagine from North Korea. In North Korea, citizens worship the Kims. In Shanghai, people worship money. They live lavish, unconservative lives, in brutal competition for riches. Lee embraces this life.

“In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm? In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to the Kim dynasty. This is well understood by all North Koreans.” 

The law is different in North Korea than in most other places. In North Korea, the only laws that matter concern loyalty to the regime. A person can steal, commit assault, use or sell drugs, and receive a slap on the wrist. If that same person is caught insufficiently bereaving the death of the Dear Leader, they’re executed. This is why Lee’s mother sees nothing wrong with using crystal meth, and recommended Lee use it, to clear her skin.

“My heart began beating so fast it made my voice sound strange, like a tape recording. ‘I’m from North Korea,’ I said. ‘I would like asylum.’ The officers all looked up. Then their eyes drifted back to their screens. The man who had looked up first gave me a tired smile. ‘Welcome to Korea,’ he said, and took a sip from a plastic coffee cup. I felt deflated. I had thought my arrival would create a drama.” 

Lee believes her defection to South Korea will be a big deal, with press conferences and public appearances demanded by the South Koreans. She’s nervous to defect and expects her request of asylum to be met with a more serious response. In reality, thousands of North Koreans defect every year. Lee’s request for asylum is routine and treated as such by the South Korean officers from whom she requests it.

“We also attended some extraordinary history classes–for many at Hanawon, their first dogma-free window onto the world. Most defectors’ knowledge of history consisted of little more than shining legends from the lives of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. This was when they were told that it was an unprovoked attack from the North, not from the South, that began the Korean War on 25 June 1950. Many rejected this loudly, and outright. They could not accept that [their] country’s main article of faith – believed by most North Koreans – was a deliberate lie. Even those who knew that North Korea was rotten to the core found the truth about the war very hard to accept. It meant that everything else they had learned was a lie. It meant that the tears they’d cried every 25 June, their decade of military service, all the ‘high-speed battles’ for production they had fought, had no meaning. They had been made part of the lie. It was the undoing of their lives.” 

The shock of being reeducated is too much for most North Korean defectors to South Korea. Most leave North Korea for better material conditions, but remain unaware of the lies they’ve been told their entire lives. Like persons in other societies, North Koreans build their lives and undertake actions based on a history they accept as truth. When confronted with actual truth, real history, they are confronted with the realization that much of what they’ve done throughout their entire lives has been for nothing, useless, insignificant, forgettable. 

“After more than sixty years of division, and near-zero exchange, I would find that the language and values I thought North and South shared had evolved in very different directions. We were no longer the same people.” 

It has been more than half a century since North and South Korea split. What was once one culture has evolved into two separate, very different cultures that shard little in the way of culture, language, or values. Lee believes that once she arrives in South Korea, she’ll be among kin and feel like less of an outsider than in China, but she’s just as lost.

“It is hard for outsiders to grasp how difficult it is for North Koreans to arrive at a point where they accept that the Kim regime is not only very bad, but also very wrong. In many ways our lives in North Korea are normal–we have money worries, find joy in our children, drink too much, and fret about our careers. What we don’t do is question the word of the Party, which could bring very serious trouble. North Koreans who have never left don’t think critically because they have no point of comparison–with previous governments, different policies, or with other societies in the outside world.” 

In most ways, North Koreans lives are the same as people’s lives everywhere. They have the same priorities, worries, and struggles. Where North Koreans’ lives differ from other societies, they are unaware because they have nothing with which to compare their society. They cannot think critically about their society and work to improve it if they do not observer any other societies for comparison. If locked in a windowless house and told it is the largest on the block, what is preventing a person from believing it?

“About twenty people were waiting in line to have their passports stamped. A few were backpacking white Westerners in high spirits. I looked at them with envy. They were inhabitants of that other universe, governed by laws, human rights and welcoming tourist boards. It was oblivious to the one I inhabited, of secret police, assumed IDs and low-life brokers.” 

Lee expresses envy of others who, by circumstance of birth, belong to societies free of the problems she and her family face. The tourists with whom she’s in line know nothing of the restrictions on humanity with which she’s contending and likely couldn’t comprehend them if forced. They are from different worlds.

“My most basic assumptions about human nature were being overturned. In North Korea I’d learned from my mother that to trust anyone outside the family was risky and dangerous. In China I’d lived by cunning since I was a teenager, lying to hide the truth of my identity in order to survive. On the only occasion I’d trusted people I’d got into a world of trouble with the Shenyang police. Not only did I believe that humans were selfish and base, I also knew that plenty of them were actually bad–content to destroy lives for their own gain. I’d seen Korean-Chinese expose North Korean escapees to the police in return for money. I’d known people who’d been trafficked by other humans as if they were livestock. That world was familiar to me. All my life, random acts of kindness had been so rare that they’d stick in my memory, and I’d think: how strange. What Dick had done changed my life. He showed me that there was another world where strangers helped strangers for no other reason than that it is good to do so, and where callousness was unusual, not the norm. Dick had treated me as if I were his family, or an old friend. Even now, I do not fully grasp his motivation. But from the day I met him the world was a less cynical place. I started feeling warmth for other people. This seemed so natural, and yet I’d never felt it before.” 

Unconditional benevolence was foreign to Lee before Dick Stolp introduced it to her through his actions. In North Korea and as an illegal immigrant, every action was calculated to achieve some gain. It is not a mindset she willingly adopted, but rather one of necessity, dictated by her conditions. Others around her operated in the same manner. Dick introduces her to a wonderful benevolence that seems natural to Lee, and which she adopts in her own actions. 

“The embassies of both Koreas were just yards from each other. For the second time that day I felt caught in an absurd situation. East and West Germany had long since reunified. So had North and South Vietnam. Why were we the only nation on earth still suffering from a bizarre division that should have vanished into history? Why was my family paying the price of that division in this faraway and unwelcoming country? I stood still in the empty street, thinking that my whole life lay in the distance between these two flags.” 

The location of the North Korean and South Korean embassies in Laos, just yards apart, symbolizes to Lee the ridiculousness of her country, the conflict with South Korea, and the years of suffering she has endured. The entire conflict between North Korea and South Korea is rooted in ridiculousness: a former Japanese colony, after World War II, the Soviets and the United States installed puppet leaders in the North and South to protect their own interests. Both puppet leaders wanted to control the entire peninsula and waged war after North Korea invaded the South. South Korea would have lost the war if the United States didn’t intervene, and then North Korea would have lost the war if China had not intervened. The two countries, formerly one, never decided their own fates. They were pushed and prodded, taught to hate one another to accomplish minor objectives of other countries. Now, Lee stands in Laos, able to throw a rock from one country’s embassy to the other’s.

“Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting. It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition.” 

Not everyone who leaves North Korea thrives. Those of a higher social status, who had a comfortable life in North Korea, have trouble adapting to life in a capitalist country. Many return, willing to face punishment and a lower status, to regain the order North Korean life provides. Low status, poor defectors adapt more quickly because whatever struggles they face in South Korea, it is preferable to North Korea.

“One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist. This is also why most people escape because they’re hungry or in trouble–not because they’re craving liberty. Many defectors hiding in China even baulk at the idea of going to South Korea–they’d see it as a betrayal of their country and the legacy of the Great Leader. If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their rights, of individual freedoms and democracy, the game would be up for the regime in Pyongyang. The people would realize that full human rights are exercised and enjoyed by one person only – the ruling Kim. He is the only figure in North Korea who exercises freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, his right not to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed without trial, and his right to proper healthcare and food.” 

Knowledge of rights is essential to discern when those rights are violated. In North Korea, citizens’ ignorance of human rights permits the state to deny those rights. North Koreans don’t revolt at the limits placed on their freedom of speech or freedom of movement because they are unaware that such rights exist.