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

Lee wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of her mother’s cry. Her little brother, Min-ho, is still asleep when her father bounds into the room and pushes them out of the house. They can see dark flames enveloping the walls. Lee, her brother, and her mother are safely outside, but her father runs back into the house, which is now covered in flames. The roof collapses while he is inside the house. He emerges “holding two flat, rectangular objects”: the portraits of Kim II-sung and Kim Jong-il (xvi). He has risked his life for these portraits.

Lee’s parents met in the summer of 1977, on a train to Pyongyang. Lee’s mother was visiting her brother and Lee’s father was a young military officer on the train. Both were from the North Korean city of Hyesan, in the northeast. Hyesan is on the border of China.

Lee’s father was subsequently sent on military exercises and could not contact Lee’s mother for several months. Six months after they met on the train, he visited her home and they began courting. They were young and in love, and after courting for twelve months, he requested her hand in marriage. Lee’s maternal grandmother, however, “refused to give permission for the marriage” (7) because she believed her daughter should marry someone with a higher songbun:

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 (6).

Lee writes, “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” (6). Citizens are not told their precise songbun ranking, but it’s easy to approximate by intuition. Further, while it’s impossible to rise in the system, it’s very easy to sink.

Lee’s mother’s family had “exceptionally good songbun” because Lee’s grandmother, who “had become an ardent communist when she was a college student,” safeguarded her communist party cards instead of destroying them when American troops entered her city during the Korean War (6-7). This act was viewed as very loyal to the party, and because loyalty is rewarded above all else in North Korea, it ensured her family’s high songbun. She did not want her daughter to lower her family’s songbun by marrying beneath her class. Lee’s grandmother instead arranged a marriage for her with an official at the National Trading Company in Pyeongyang. Lee’s mother reluctantly married the suitor arranged for her and gave birth to Lee soon after. Lee’s birth name was Kim Ji-hae, the first of her seven names. Lee’s mother, however, could not remain with a man she did not love, and left him just after Lee was born. Lee’s mother then reunited with the man she loved. He accepted Lee as his daughter and married Lee’s mother over the objections of both families. Lee’s paternal grandparents reluctantly consented under the condition that Lee’s name be changed to symbolize her joining a new family. Lee’s second name was Park Min-young. 

Lee grows up with extended family in Ryanggang Province. Geographically, Ryanggang Province has the highest elevation in Korea. It is beautiful and contains sacred revolutionary sites surrounding Mount Paektu. Lee’s city, Hyesan, sits along the narrow Yalu River on the border with China. This makes Hyesan a haven for smugglers trafficking in black-market goods and permitted a higher quality of life than in other areas of North Korea:

People from Hyesan were therefore more business-minded and often better off than people elsewhere in North Korea. The grown-ups would tell me that we were fortunate to live there. It was the best place in the whole country after Pyongyang, they said (12).

In Hyesan, Lee spends much time with her mother’s siblings and their families: Uncle Money, Uncle Poor, Uncle Cinema, Uncle Opium, Aunt Old, Aunt Tall, and Aunt Pretty (all aliases Lee uses to protect them and their families, who are still in North Korea). Lee’s mother and many others in her family are born entrepreneurs. This enabled their survival in the future, during the great famine.

Just before Lee begins kindergarten, her father is transferred to Anju, a city near North Korea’s west coast.

Lee’s family arrives in Anju in early 1984, when she is 5. The Chongchon River runs through Anju. The city’s coal-mining industry has turned the river black with silt and coal slag. When they move into their house, the banjang, who has the job of monitoring residents for the government, presents them with two portraits: one of Kim Il-sung and one of Kim Jong-il. Lee recalls, “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” (17).

The portraits are inspected by government officials once per month. If they have so much as “a single mote of dust on the glass,” the family is punished (17). Those who take efforts to save the portraits from disaster, such as fires or mudslides, are hailed as heroes of the republic. Lee writes that “[t]his intrusion of the state into our home did not seem oppressive or unnatural” (18). She also recalls that politics and other serious topics were never discussed inside their home, and that she learned to avoid them as dangerous taboos.

Lee’s mother “was good at managing the banjang” (19). She befriends the banjang and gives her small gifts to appease her and keep her from overzealous scrutiny. Lee says that if her mother “couldn’t solve a problem with reason and good will, she’d try to solve it with money,” which she would resort to more frequently as time progressed with the banjang and “volunteers”—vigilantes that prowled the city in search of citizens violating North Korea’s social laws(19). Lee laments that “[i]n North Korea, bribery is often the only way of making anything happen, or circumventing a harsh law, or a piece of nonsense ideology” (19-20).

In Anju, where they have no family, Lee’s parents avoid being sociable and like most other North Koreans, wear figurative masks that “they let slip at their peril” (20). 

North Korean schooling consists mostly of indoctrination, which begins on the first day. Loyalty to the regime is more important in North Korea than formal education, so ideological indoctrination is emphasized over traditional subjects, such as math and science. North Korean schoolchildren memorize everything about the Great Leader and his family, and are taught that they are “the children of Kim Il-sung, and that [makes them] children of the greatest nation on earth” (22). Lee believed every word:

Even the toys we played with were used for our ideological education. If I built a train out of building blocks, the teacher would tell me that I could drive it to South Korea to save the starving children there. My mission was to bring them home to the bosom of the Respected Father Leader (22).

She is taught that South Koreans are poor and dressed in rags, that they scavenge for food, and suffer “the sadistic cruelty of American soldiers, who used them for target practice, ran them over in jeeps, or made them polish boots” (22). The Great Leader views children as the future of North Korea and mandates that they be treated like royalty. While being indoctrinated and suffering sub-par education, they “felt loved, confident and grateful” (23).

Lee’s parents do not reinforce what she learns in school, but do not criticize it, either, for fear of the Bowibu, the secret police. The Bowibu disregard real crimes, such as theft or corruption. Their jurisdiction is “political disloyalty, the faintest hint of which, real or imagined, was enough to make an entire family–grandparents, parents and children–disappear” (23). 

Lee witnesses her first public execution at 7 years old. While running errands for her mother, she encounters a crowd. She enters the crowd and sees a man hanging by his neck, his face covered with a sack. Hangings occur frequently. If someone is accused of a crime against the state, they are given a trial and hung. Lee explains that “[t]hese were not actually trials at all–the charges were simply read out and the victim executed on the spot” (28). The offender is then dumped in a garbage pit and covered in ash.

That summer, Lee’s father is again transferred and they relocate to North Korea’s second-largest city, Hamhung. They first return to Hyesan so Lee’s younger brother can be born in their home city. 

Hamhung is an industrial city that produces “Vinylon–a synthetic fibre, used in uniforms, that was invented in North Korea” (31). In Hamhung, Lee’s father’s military rank allows the family access to goods unavailable to others:

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 (32).

The communist central planning system frequently breaks down and people rely on bribery and black markets to obtain essentials.

Lee attends school six days a week and spends her free time on school-related activities. Everyone’s time is filled in this way. Citizens in North Korea are constantly busied with organizational meetings and mind-numbing activities like ideological study groups. This allows the party “to ensure that no one could ever deviate into a selfish, individualistic or private life–but it was also a system of surveillance” (33).

There are very few moments Lee and her family aren’t being watched. Both children and adults engage in “‘life purification time,’ or self-criticism sessions” (33). In these sessions, everyone takes turns accusing someone of an offense and confessing to an offense. The sessions make participants fearful and bitter, and teach citizens to be discreet and wary of others. They help North Koreans develop the masks they wear throughout their lives.

At age 9, Lee is accepted to the Young Pioneer Corps, North Korea’s communist youth movement. Lee and her family are proud that she is accepted at such a young age, and her mother buys her a special pair of foreign-made red shoes for the ceremony, “from a dollar store–a special shop for people who had access to foreign currency and wanted to spend it” (35).

Not long after, she observes for the first time a contrast in the lives of North Koreans. She is able to afford trendy foreign-made shoes, while one of her classmates who is chronically absent is exposed to living in a bare house that smells strongly of sewage: “The experience was deeply confusing for me. I knew there were degrees of privilege, but we were also equal citizens in the best country in the world. The Leaders were dedicating their lives to providing for all of us. Weren’t they?” (36).

Lee adds that:

Schooling in North Korea is free, though in reality parents are perpetually being given quotas for donations of goods, which the school sells to pay for facilities. My friend had not been attending because her parents could not afford these donations (36).

In 1990, when Lee is 10, the family moves back to Hyesan. 

When Lee returns, Hyesan is prospering from the illicit trade of smuggled Chinese goods. Everything from high-value liquor to Western-brand clothing and Japanese electronics is available for a price. Though Lee and her family can see the prosperity, it’s not obvious to outsiders. Avoiding the state’s attention, North Koreans indulge in their luxuries under veils of secrecy:

Anyone looking across from China would have seen a city in deep blackout at night, with a few kerosene lamps flickering in windows, and a colourless, drab place by day, with people cycling joylessly to work. But the signs were all around us (40).

The government tries several times to ban open-air local markets because Kim Jong-il “declared that they were breeding grounds for every type of unsocialist practice,” but constant break-downs in the Public Distribution System make the markets a necessity (40). Lee’s mother quickly finds a black-market hustle smuggling goods across the river from China and selling them at a profit. 

At age 10, Lee still does not know the truth of her parentage. One day, during school vacation, Lee is alone with her grandmother: “We were sitting at her table when she began looking at me with an odd intensity. She said softly: ‘You know, your father isn’t your real father’” (44). Lee’s grandmother then retrieves a photo of her mother’s wedding to her biological father. This news, and the fact that her parents hid it from her, torments Lee. She buries her pain inside “and it start[s] to gnaw at [her] heart” (46). She realizes Min-ho is her half-brother and their relationship digresses, as does her relationship with her father—the one who raised her as his own. Lee explains, “In North Korea family is everything. Bloodlines are everything. Songbun is everything” (47). She withdraws from her father, believing she no longer loves him.