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

by Hyeonseo Lee

My mind’s eye endlessly reran the taxi ride along the river and that final second when I’d seen my house through the trees. Why didn’t I ask the driver to pull over and let me out? I couldn’t stop thinking of that last phone call from my mother. How desperate she’d sounded, and we didn’t even say goodbye.

  I was trapped in a foreign country with no identity. My aunt and uncle were being good to me, but our family connection was so distant it was beginning to make me uncomfortable. I would not be able to trespass on their kindness for ever. The day would come when they’d want me to go.

  What if I were to go home now?

  No, I couldn’t. I had come too far. It was too late.

  My cousin had left a guitar behind when he moved away. I started playing the songs I used to sing in North Korea. These would make me cry. I cried every day, so much that it became impossible to conceal from my uncle and aunt. They were sympathetic but I could sense they were getting fed up with me. I didn’t blame them.

  At about this time, I had the first nightmare. I dreamed that my mother had been arrested by the Bowibu and sent to a labour camp, one of the political zones of no return, and had died there. Min-ho was now an orphan and a beggar. I saw him – so vividly in my dream – walking alone along a desolate dirt track. He was in rags and barefoot. His features had turned mean and he was obsessed with food, like a feral dog. I felt paralysed with guilt. The dream changed scene. Before she died, my mother had written to me. It began: My dear daughter, I’m so sorry that I went first and that I couldn’t take care of Min-ho …

  I woke up gasping for air. When I realized it was a dream I started to sob and became hysterical. The noise woke my aunt. She ran in to see what was wrong, and held me as I cried. It had been so lucid, this dream, that I was convinced something very bad had happened. There was no way to know. The next day I was subdued. I felt bereaved.

  The following night I had the second nightmare. I had sneaked over the frozen river and was walking alone through a deserted Hyesan. It was night-time, and nothing was lit. It was like a city of the dead. I went to my house. Through the window I could make out my mother and Min-ho huddled together. My mother was weeping and Min-ho was comforting her. They had no money and no food. It was all my fault. I could only watch. If I entered the gate the neighbours would see me and inform on me. I walked to the river to find Chang-ho. I felt guilty about him, too. I saw him patrolling the bank but I couldn’t approach him, so I hid in some trees and watched from a distance. Suddenly, Bowibu agents emerged from the shadows all around me. I ran for my life back across the ice to China, with the sounds of whistles and police dogs behind me. Then I woke up.

  These two dreams would replay over and over again. The same scenes played on a loop, hundreds of times, night after night.

  Any feeling that I was living a liberated life of excitement and discovery in Shenyang had vanished. From that summer of 1998, I had entered a long lonely valley. I deserved my fate. I had brought this upon myself.

  If the chance came now I would do it, I thought. I would go back.

  By now I knew that North Korea was not the greatest country on earth. Not one of the Korean-Chinese friends of my uncle and aunt had a good word to say about the place, and the Chinese media seemed to regard it as a relic, an embarrassment. Shenyang’s newspapers openly lampooned Kim Jong-il.

  I didn’t care about any of that. My country was wherever my mother and Min-ho lived. It was where my memories were from. It was where I’d been happy. The very things I’d regarded as symbols of our backwardness I now missed the most. Burning yontan, kerosene lamps, even Korea Central Television with its Pioneer ensembles playing accordions. The simplicity of life. One thing was for sure – I’d never known true misery until now.

  One morning when my uncle and aunt had gone to work I called Mr Ahn’s number in Changbai, hoping he could pass a message to my mother. His phone was no longer in service. I got a dead signal each time I tried. In the end I called his next-door neighbour, Mr Chang, the other trader my mother knew.

  He was very angry to receive my call.

  ‘Why are you calling me?’

  ‘I want to send a message to my mother.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I don’t know you.’

  ‘Yes, you—’

  ‘Don’t ever call this number again,’ he shouted, and hung up. I thought perhaps he’d been drunk and so I tried again the next day. This time, the line was dead.

  My lifelines to Hyesan had been cut.

  Aunt Sang-hee became desperate to pull me out of my despair. I was becoming a serious worry to her. I had no role in life, and she could see I was becoming depressed. She began to hatch a plan that she thought would be the solution to my situation.

  I knew nothing about it until one evening when the doorbell rang. I was in my bedroom, as usual, playing sad songs on the guitar. She knocked softly on the door, and told me I had a visitor.

  My heart leapt. My depressed mind was making all kinds of irrational connections. I thought maybe it was someone from Hyesan.

  I followed her into the living room.

  A tall young man I did not recognize was standing on the rug, holding a bunch of pink azaleas. He was in his mid-twenties and looking sweaty and ill at ease in a jacket and tie.

  My aunt beamed. ‘Mi-ran,’ she said, using my alias, ‘this is Geun-soo.’

  ‘It’s my pleasure to meet you,’ he said, using the honorific form of address. He bowed, and presented me with the azaleas, but his eyes did not meet mine.

  Chapter 22

  The wedding trap

  Geun-soo, my aunt explained, was the son of her good friend Mrs Jang, a member of her Korean-Chinese social circle. He was gangly and so nondescript I’m not sure I could have picked him out in a crowd. He had the sallow complexion of someone whose pursuits all took place indoors, and an adolescent sheen to his skin.

  There was an awkward pause after the introductions were made. I looked at my aunt. To my mortification, she said: ‘Now, why don’t you youngsters go out for an ice cream?’

  In an ice-cream parlour near my uncle and aunt’s apartment, I saw that Geun-soo was even more uncomfortable than I was. To put him at his ease I suggested we share a tub of my favourite, the heavenly purple taro. He seemed to relax a little. He was twenty-two, he told me, and had two older sisters. He’d graduated from a university in Shenyang, but seemed in no hurry to find a job. His family ran a successful chain of restaurants, and had money. He spoke with great deference about his widowed mother, more than I would have expected from a young man. It made him seem filial and kind, which I liked. He admitted that he enjoyed nights out drinking with his old college buddies. I thought he must be daring and fun. I knew no young people in North Korea who drank.

  This was the first of many dates with Geun-soo. Over the following months he would take me for walks in Beiling Park during the day, or to noodle bars, or out to a noraebang bar, the Korean version of karaoke, in the evenings. He was harmless, but I soon began to find him glib and uninspiring. I felt no emotional bond.

  No matter how hard I challenged him to an interesting discussion, even to the point of provoking him, he seemed unable to offer a firm opinion on anything. We often spent our dates in silence. I got the feeling that when he wasn’t seeing me he spent his days playing video games. He also had such a devotion to his mother that I began to dread meeting her. He seemed content for her to decide everything for him.

  Geun-soo knew that I was North Korean, but believed my name was Chae Mi-ran. I saw no reason to reveal my real name to him. In fact I was getting so used to being called Mi-ran it felt as if I was shedding the name Min-young like a former skin. I went along with the dating and would occasionally hold Geun-soo’s hand. The relationship wasn’t serious; it was pleasing my uncle and aunt; it helped to keep me distracted as the Western New Year passed again, then my nineteenth birthday, then the Chinese New Year, and to ward off miserable thoughts that it was now well over a year since I’d last seen m
y mother and Min-ho.

  I should have seen the warning lights when Geun-soo began urging me to improve my Mandarin and correcting me on points of etiquette.

  When he took me to meet his mother, I was made to feel the significance of the occasion. The family apartment was far larger and more luxurious than my uncle and aunt’s. Mrs Jang greeted me in the hallway. I had never seen such a rich lady. She was elegant and very slim. Her hair was pulled back in a mother-of-pearl barrette; she wore an Hermès scarf around her neck, and beautiful Japanese pearl jewellery.

  ‘Welcome, Mi-ran,’ she said. Her smile was tepid.

  I could guess what she was thinking. A North Korean girl was beneath her son. Yet I also knew from Geun-soo that she did not approve of him dating Chinese girls, a cultural prejudice against the Chinese shared by many ethnic Koreans.

  Mrs Jang was a pragmatic, calculating woman: she was willing to put her misgivings aside because she thought a North Korean girl would make a compliant and obedient wife. After all, I was an illegal, and hardly in any position to complain. She also knew that I was raised in a culture that revered elders. I would be submissive to her, my mother-in-law. Although her conversation was excruciatingly polite I watched her looking me up and down as if she were inspecting livestock.

  Over the next few months, whenever I was taken to Geun-soo’s home, Mrs Jang began to talk about my future with her son. The family would open a new restaurant for him and me to manage together, she said. Not long after that, without anyone asking me what I felt about the idea, she was mentioning marriage. Her son was a little too young to marry, she told me, but out of consideration towards her he wanted to provide her with grandchildren as soon as possible.

  I began to feel caught in a gathering wave. Geun-soo had not proposed marriage to me. In fact, I wasn’t even sure how he felt about me. I found it difficult to picture him getting aroused and passionate about anything. Perhaps he became livelier when he went out drinking, but it was clear that he was keeping that side of his life separate from me. He was passive in all his mother’s schemes.

  My dates with him started to become stifling. He kept repeating the need to improve my Mandarin, and would correct me often. His main concern seemed to be that I should not embarrass his family by making mistakes when I spoke. I felt as if I had been enrolled in a training programme to join his family, without once having given my assent. My situation was becoming deeply awkward because my uncle and aunt saw marriage as the solution to my problem, and to theirs. My five-day visit had already turned into a stay of nearly two years.

  One afternoon toward the end of 1999, when I was at Geun-soo’s home, Mrs Jang came home laden with department-store shopping bags and mentioned, quite casually, that she had given my birth details to a fortune-teller, who had recommended a propitious date in the summer for our wedding. And she had found a home for us in a nearby apartment, she said. She would soon start choosing our furniture.

  That evening, lying on my bed, I was forced to examine – really, truly examine – whether I had any options. I tried to think calculatingly, like Mrs Jang. Regardless of my feelings about the feckless Geun-soo, I asked myself whether this marriage would help me, or trap me. I knew I had a desire to be a businesswoman, and to travel. But if I were to marry now and have children, I’d have to put any career on hold. On the other hand, my position was precarious. I could not stay at my uncle and aunt’s much longer. I had no prospects, least of all of becoming a businesswoman. The alternative was a life on the run.

  And if I’m caught?

  Arrest, repatriation, beatings, prison camp. The ruin of my family’s songbun. A spasm of terror ran through me.

  No matter which way I looked at it, I had no choice.

  So I tried hard to convince myself. Geun-soo’s all right. A girl could do a lot worse. If I married him I’d have a comfortable life without fear, and a Chinese ID. I spent weeks thinking these thoughts, arguing in silence with myself.

  There was just one problem, however, and it was a major one. I wasn’t choosing any of this. It was all happening to me.

  Through connections, Geun-soo’s family obtained a new identity for me. He even showed me the ID card and let me hold it. I recognized my face, but not the name. It was a new name, another one I had not chosen. I was to be a Korean-Chinese called Jang Soon-hyang. As I was too young to marry – the legal marriage age in China is twenty – they’d made me older.

  ‘You’ll get it after the wedding,’ Geun-soo said with a smirk, and picked it out of my hands. Even he could tell I was having misgivings – more so when I learned that my new name meant ‘the person who respects elders, and makes a good wife by following her husband and listening really well to him’.

  The millennium passed, then another birthday. My uncle gave me a Motorola cellphone as a present, so that I could chat with Geun-soo whenever I liked, he said. The wedding plans gathered pace.

  Mrs Jang sensed that I was feeling pressured by her will. She tried to reassure me. ‘After you’re married, we’ll take care of you,’ she said, squeezing my hand with her bony fingers and rings. ‘You won’t have to worry about a thing.’

  It was kind of her to say that. It emboldened me to ask the question I wanted to ask. I don’t know why I thought I had to ask her permission.

  ‘When I’m married would it be all right to visit my family?’

  I thought my new Chinese ID would mean I could visit North Korea legally.

  We were sitting around the kitchen table at her home. Mrs Jang and Geun-soo’s two sisters stared at me in horror.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ she said, as if there’d been some gross misunderstanding. ‘You can never go back. Do you understand?’ Her voice carried an edge of warning. ‘They might find out who you are. Then we’d all be in trouble. We’ve had to break rules to get your ID as it is. In fact, it’s too dangerous even to contact your family again.’

  She saw the shock on my face and she gave a thin, quick smile, like a sudden crack in ice.

  ‘After you marry, you will have a new family. You will join our family.’

  When I told Geun-soo what his mother had said, I was still emotional. He knew how badly I wanted to see my mother and Min-ho again. I thought this was his moment – to comfort his future wife, show understanding, tell me we’d find a way to achieve it, somehow, and not to worry. Instead he said blandly: ‘My mother’s right. It’s for the best.’ He wasn’t even looking at me. He was playing a video game.

  I was stunned. He and my future in-laws were closing down any talk of my seeing my family again. If I even managed to contact them, I would have to keep it secret from those closest to me.

  I looked at Geun-soo’s face, pale in the reflected light of the video game, and knew I could not marry this man.

  Whatever happened next I would be on my own, but I didn’t care. I would find a way to fly in life. I didn’t know how, but I would take my chances.

  My uncle and aunt were talking excitedly about the wedding at almost every mealtime. I could not bear to tell them of my decision, or to witness their disappointment. I was fearful, too, that Mrs Jang might feel so angry and humiliated by the loss of face that she would report me to the authorities as a fugitive. I had no one to talk to. The situation left only one door open.

  Escape.

  It was the summer of 2000. The wedding was just weeks away. I thought hard about when I would make my move. It was a phone call from Geun-soo that decided the matter for me. He told me that his mother, without asking us, had booked our honeymoon at a luxurious beach resort at Sanya, on the South China Sea.

  That did it. I would leave straight away.

  I threw some clothes into a bag, and waited until my aunt and uncle had left for work. I took the elevator down to the lobby and smiled at the caretaker. The blood was rushing to my temples. A memory flashed across my mind of my foot stepping onto the ice of the Yalu River. I walked calmly out of the apartment building, took the chip out of my cellphone, and dropped it in
a trash can.

  Chapter 23

  Shenyang girl

  The cab driver’s eyes regarded me in the mirror, waiting for me to say where to go. I was in an agony of hesitation. I had no plan. For the first time in my life I had no one to turn to.

  Shenyang is a vast metropolis. I could go anywhere, but my gut feeling told me to stay away from the district known as Xita, or West Pagoda. This was Shenyang’s Koreatown, where most of the city’s ethnic Koreans lived and ran businesses. If anyone searched for me, it would be there. I told the driver to head to a district I did not know, on the opposite side of the city, where no one would find me. I would have to speak Mandarin, but after two years of study, my ability was adequate. I felt I could handle things.

  But once we were on the freeway and passing through unfamiliar districts, I was again filled with doubts.

  Although it was risky, the best chance of finding a job and someone to help me would be in Xita, among Koreans. I had been there several times with my aunt and remembered seeing an informal job market where people hung about, waiting to be offered a casual day’s work. And I needed to find work, fast. My uncle had been giving me some modest living expenses, but I had only saved enough to last me a couple of days. I told the driver to change direction and head to Xita.

  Among the crowd of jobseekers I didn’t know whether to appear eager or nonchalant. I’d been standing there only a few minutes when a woman approached me and spoke in Mandarin.

  ‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘Are you looking for a job?’

  She was middle-aged, but with very girlish makeup, and a cotton dress that showed bare shoulders.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m the manager of a hair salon and need another stylist. Are you interested?’ Her voice was girlish too. ‘You’ll be trained. And the lodgings are free.’

  I could not believe my luck.

  ‘It’s on the edge of the city. We can go by cab. It’ll take about thirty minutes.’