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

A friend of Lee’s buys illegal cassette tapes of South Korean pop music. This is a serious offense; the tapes are “red-hot criminal contraband” (54). The young girls don’t realize how serious their crime is until they hear of local women being sent to a prison camp for listening to the same music. Lee’s favorite song is called “Rocky Island.” North Korea has pop music, but it’s different. North Korean songs have titles like “Our Happiness in our General’s Embrace” and “Young People, Forward!”. South Korean pop music is about love, and Lee finds it beautiful. The South Korean music also gives Lee “a vague awareness of a universe beyond the borders of North Korea” (55). She writes that “[i]f [she] had more awareness in general [she] might have spotted clues indicating that the world outside was undergoing dramatic changes–changes so great that the regime was being put under stresses it had never experienced before” (55). The Soviet Union then collapses, and Soviet aid for North Korea stops. Publicly-distributed rations are diminishing and those without side-hustles are beginning to suffer. 

Lee’s family moves into a new neighborhood on the Yalu River, perfect for smuggling black-market goods. They pay a lot of money for their new house: “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” (57).

Lee’s mother is careful not to flaunt her gains from illicit enterprises, but she does purchase one luxury: “a Toshiba colour television, which was a signal of social status” (58). North Korea only has one channel, which exclusively broadcasts propaganda, but their proximity to China allows them to watch Chinese TV stations. This is highly illegal, so Lee and Min-ho cover the windows with blankets and watch soap operas and glamorous commercials.

Lee’s father often bring gifts home from his foreign travels. On one occasion, he brings Lee a large doll and Min-ho a Game Boy. Lee writes:

I can only think of that doll now with immense sadness. I was a little too old for a doll, but it was such a beautiful, generous gift. I realize now that my father felt he had lost me and was trying to reconnect with me, somehow. He knew something had gone badly wrong between us, and he had probably figured out what it was. I certainly did not deserve the gift (60).

She adds that the doll “was the last thing [her father] ever gave [her]” (60). 

By the time she is 14, Lee is pushing the regime’s boundaries of appearance and her nonconformity is conspicuous. She is becoming disillusioned with the regime and collective activities. Lee now has to join the Socialist Youth League and undergo military training. Ideological indoctrination also increases and, just as she is becoming disillusioned with the regime, she is “expected to deepen [her] emotional bond with the Great Leader, and start learning about the Party’s ideology” (62).

Lee’s father confides in her mother that he suspects he’s being watched. Soon after, he does not return from a trip abroad. Two days pass, then three, then four, and he still does not return. Finally, a colleague calls and informs them that Lee’s father has been arrested at the border.

The Military Security Command, secret police who monitor the military, arrest Lee’s father. He’s detained for ten days, during which Lee’s family knows nothing but that his business conduct is being investigated. They’re fearful he’d be sent to the gulag:

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 (66).

About two weeks after his disappearance, Lee’s father is released to a hospital in Hyesan. He’s been physically assaulted and is not well. The investigation into him for bribery and abuse of position remains ongoing. Lee recognizes, “A more likely reason [for his detention] was that he had fallen out of political favour” (67). While he recovers in the hospital for six weeks, Lee and Min-ho are sent to the east coast with her Uncle Cinema and his family. There, she receives news that her father fell ill in the hospital and died. Lee is not afforded the opportunity to apologize for her resentment and the way she treated her father, or to say goodbye. His hospital death certificate states his death is a suicide by Valium overdose:

In North Korea, suicide is taboo. Not only is it considered gravely humiliating to the surviving family members, it also guarantees that any children left behind will be reclassified as ‘hostile’ in the songbun system and denied university entrance and the chance of a good job. Suicide in Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it as a form of defection. By punishing the surviving family, the regime attempts to disable this ultimate form of protest (69).

Lee’s mother bribes the hospital authorities to change the cause of death on her father’s certificate, which necessitates a hasty funeral. Lee and Min-ho do not return in time for the funeral. 

On July 8, 1994, Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader of North Korea dies. The radio broadcast proclaims, “The great heart has stopped beating” (70). North Koreans believes Kim Il-sung was a god-king that could control the weather. They believe he was almighty and existed above humankind: that he did not even need to sleep or urinate. It did not occur to them that he could die, but he had. After the mourning period, those who are observed not grieving fully enough are punished. Adults accused of faking their sorrow are arrested and publicly executed. 

When she turns 15, Lee attends a girls-only class, in which they “learned to knit and keep house” (75). North Koreans do not learn about sex and are ignorant of “the most basic facts of reproduction” (75). Lee eventually learns about sex by accidentally watching an illegal pornographic movie that she expects to be a South Korean drama. In 1995, Lee dates her first boyfriend, Tae-chul. Tae-chul is four years older than Lee and considered a hoodlum for engaging in low-level crime. Though they are dating, they “did not even kiss […] [h]olding hands was as far as it went,” and they are discrete even with that, “because when the word gets out that a girl has been dating, it’s not easy for her to find another match” (77). 

After Kim Il-sung dies, the government stops paying salaries and the amount of goods available for exchange with ration coupons dwindles. Lee’s mother reads her a letter one of her colleagues receives from a family member. It reads in part, “By the time you read this, the five of us will no longer exist in this world. We have not eaten for a few weeks” (79). The letter puzzles Lee. Food and minor luxuries are plentiful for her, and the state is supposed to provide for everyone, so how could families be starving to death?

Lee begins to realize that conditions are rapidly deteriorating for many around her, and that while some are starving, others are fattening. Before long, beggars appear everywhere, and it becomes common to see babies starving in the street and starving adults stealing food from them. Lee’s class at school shrinks by a third and teachers quit to become market traders. There’s no fuel, the landscape is becoming barren of trees, and power outages are increasingly frequent. Lee explains:

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 […][but] [t]he 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 (82-83).

Eventually, the government cuts off the Public Distribution System completely to areas with citizens of the lowest songbun, leaving them to die. Those resourceful enough turn to trade for survival. Others turn to cannibalism. Lee learns “that starvation can drive people to insanity” (86). In the summer, Lee visits her Uncle Money in the capital. What she sees shocks her:

[A]ll was normal in the Capital of the Revolution: well-fed people were going about their business; the vast boulevards had electrified streetcars, and traffic; I saw no beggars or hordes of vagrant children. The power stations were puffing smoke. The loyal class who lived here seemed insulated from what was happening in the rest of the country (86). 

By the time North Koreans graduate secondary school, they have reduced their expectations to be in accordance with their songbun. For Lee, this means she can plan modestly to have a career. Lee’s goal is to become an accordionist—a popular instrument in North Korea due to Soviet influence and one at which she is skilled—while making extra money trading on the blackmarket. Lee loves the accordion, but illicit trade “would be the only way to ensure that [her] own family, when one day [she] had children of [her] own, would have enough to eat” (89).

In January 1998, Lee is months away from turning 18 and being treated more sternly by the state. Lee desires to slip across the river to China while it’s still considered a harmless prank and not a serious crime. Though Min-ho crosses the border regularly, Lee’s mother forbids Lee from doing so. Because of her age, it’s a more serious risk for Lee and her family, but as her eighteenth birthday draws closer, she becomes more curious. Changbai, the Chinese border town, represents commerce, and is obviously more prosperous than North Korea, which confuses Lee, because “[her] country was the best in the world” (90).

During the famine, people flee North Korea in increasing numbers, so border security is increased. Border guards are required to have a high songbun. They are privileged and loyal, but far from home and lonely. Consequently, they can be manipulated. One guard, Ri Chang-ho, becomes close with Lee’s family. His bond with Lee’s family permits her to convince him to let her cross. She says that she will stay only a few hours, in order to observe China. Lee’s intention, however, is to stay for several days and visit her family in the Chinese city of Shenyang. In the second week of December 1997, Lee crosses the icy river and leaves North Korea for the first time in her life, not knowing she will never return.