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

by Hyeonseo Lee

  One of the others murmured agreement. Shaven-head remained silent. There was another toast of soju. Face-piercings seemed to back down. The conversation moved on.

  All night I remained crouched in the corner with my arms around my knees, not daring to move, watching the moon’s progress across the windowpane, silken and faint behind cloud, like a moth cocoon. It was the same moon my mother and Min-ho could see. I told myself that if I stayed in its light I would be safe.

  Safe. I thought of my policeman boyfriend in Shenyang, Sergeant Shin Jin-su. I wondered what he’d do if I asked him for help, if I told him the truth about me. The thought of the shock on his face almost made me smile.

  At first light I called my uncle in Shenyang. It was the first time I had spoken to him since fleeing his apartment. My voice was fragile with fear and shame. I asked him to help me. I told him I would devote my life to repaying him.

  He said: ‘I’ll do it at once.’ He would transfer the money to the gang’s account.

  I tried to thank him but the words choked in my throat. He had my father’s genes, and the same love and generosity my father had shown me.

  We had to wait two days for the money to clear. I noticed that the two Korean-Chinese took turns to guard me in the next room, not Face-piercings. They didn’t trust him. I was grateful to them for that.

  After almost a week as their prisoner, the gang took me with them to the bank in Changbai, and withdrew the money.

  Face-piercings’ eyes shone when he saw the thick wads of red 100-yuan bills in an envelope. He clasped the others by the shoulders and pulled them toward him. ‘Oh, we did well.’

  Shaven-head took me to the coach station. Before he left he held out his hand and said: ‘Give me your fucking phone.’

  I gave it to him.

  When he’d gone, I reached into a hidden pocket in the lining of my long winter coat and retrieved some money I had hidden there in a tight roll. I used it to buy a bus ticket for Shenyang.

  On the journey back, I rested my head on the cold glass of the window and stared out at a world of white, an empty dimension. Sixty thousand yuan – a fortune representing ten years’ wages at the restaurant – and a week’s imprisonment with the threat of rape, and all I’d achieved was a three-minute reunion with Min-ho.

  But I had made contact with my family. I knew they were alive and not in prison. And they knew that I was alive, and that, somehow, I was fine.

  With the stress of my ordeals, not to mention the debt that would take me decades to repay, I fell sick once I got back to my apartment, and developed such painful mouth ulcers I found it hard to eat or drink. I was anxious and paranoid. I wanted to get out of Shenyang. Fast. I had an idea of where I would go, but, thinking of what my mother would do, I visited a fortune-teller for good luck.

  ‘If you move …’ the lady said, pausing for effect, ‘you should go south, to a warmer place.’

  ‘Such as Shanghai?’ I did not care that I was prompting her with the response I wanted.

  She pronounced her next words with an air of profound wisdom, as if she hadn’t heard me. ‘The best place for you would be Shanghai.’

  That was all the confirmation I needed.

  I gave notice on my apartment. I quit my job at the restaurant. I was about to call Police Sergeant Shin Jin-su to arrange a final meeting and tell him our relationship was over, but changed my mind. He’d soon figure that out for himself.

  Just days into January 2002, I packed everything I had into two light bags, bought a one-way ticket to Shanghai, and boarded the fast train.

  Chapter 30

  The biggest, brashest city in Asia

  I took the train with a Korean-Chinese acquaintance of mine named Yee-un, who was also moving to Shanghai. She was a waitress I’d met once or twice. I noticed that she avoided the subject of her past, which was fine by me. I told her nothing of mine. I guessed we were both running away from something. She was good-natured, with a blunt manner and a foghorn voice. I liked her. When we talked of how we would get by in Shanghai we both had the same thought at once: we could share an apartment. The moment we agreed on it I felt the tension and anxiety that had been in me for weeks begin to dissolve. Sharing with Yee-un meant I would not have to cope with everything alone all over again. We were both almost penniless, but now starting anew didn’t seem so daunting.

  We were laughing over the fact that we’d be eating nothing but instant noodles until we found work when I saw a forest-green police uniform and cap enter the far end of the long carriage, and people reaching for jackets and wallets.

  They were holding up their IDs. Beads of cold sweat broke out on my brow.

  I knew that these checks sometimes happened on buses and trains, but until now I’d been lucky.

  The policeman was examining each one with a nod, moving along the rows, coming closer.

  He was fifteen yards away. What to do? My chest felt as if it were stuffed with hot wool. Panic was rising in me. Yee-un’s mouth was moving. I heard her voice as if it were underwater.

  ‘Soon-hyang, I said are you all right?’

  ‘Bit travel-sick,’ I said, and shot out of my seat.

  I locked the door of the toilet and waited, listening to a rushing, keening noise as the train entered a long tunnel and picked up speed. When I emerged after almost an hour, I peeped into the carriages to the left and the right. The policeman had gone.

  I found Yee-un asleep in her seat. For the rest of the journey I sat upright and alert, my stomach clenching with nerves.

  The train approached Shanghai Station at dawn. Against a feathered peach sky I glimpsed the faint outlines of towers half a kilometre high, the skyline of Pudong. Maybe it was because I was hearing snatches of Shanghainese and other dialects around me in the carriage, but it didn’t feel like I was even in China any more.

  Many of the passengers disembarking with huge holdalls and rucksacks were people like Yee-un and me. Young migrants, some of the thousands arriving every week in the biggest, brashest city in Asia to start new lives, to be someone, make fortunes, create new identities, or to hide. Back in Shenyang I’d sometimes felt like a special, secret visitor. Here I was utterly insignificant. This realization was alienating and exciting at the same time. Here, perhaps I could be anyone I wanted to be.

  The year I arrived, about 17 million people were living in this megalopolis, of which the ethnic Korean population was small, about 80,000. About a third of those were South Korean expatriates; the rest were Korean-Chinese, as I was pretending to be.

  Yee-un and I headed straight to a district called Longbai, where there was a small, prospering Koreatown. By the end of the same day it was our great good fortune to find a cramped, shabby, two-room apartment for a modest monthly rent without any deposit required. It had a tiny hotplate, a leaking sink, and a view onto a construction site where illegal drilling and hammering went on through the night.

  We didn’t care. We both felt we’d been given a new chance.

  You get three chances in life. This time, I’d seized one.

  My plan was to get a job in a restaurant until I found something better. Again, everything seemed to happen at once. Nothing stood still in Shanghai. Within a day Yee-un and I both got work in the same nearby restaurant. I was at the counter; she waited tables.

  To mark this new start I changed my name again. This time I decided to call myself Chae In-hee. My fifth name. I had told too many people in Shenyang I was North Korean. I needed to bury the name Soon-hyang.

  Yee-un was incredulous. ‘Eh? Why? What’s wrong with Soon-hyang?’

  ‘The fortune-teller said this name would bring me luck.’

  I had become an accomplished liar, even to the people who thought they were close to me.

  By day the skyscrapers of Lujiazui were grey and blurred in a haze of smog. By night they were glittering displays of colour and crystal, each with a distinct character of its own, their summits forming atolls of light in the clouds, their bases competi
ng for attention with vast moving images, of a soccer ball kicked into goal by a Nike shoe, of Coca-Cola being poured into a glass of sparkling LED bubbles.

  One evening not long after I arrived, I went window-shopping along the exclusive strip on Huaihai Lu, wandering through the golden glow of displayed diamond jewellery and luxury Western-brand watches. 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 here.

  If I was to get out of waitressing I needed what every illegal in the city craved: a legitimate ID card. The absence of this small vital item was what barred me from opportunity. Without an ID, there was no chance of better-paid, more meaningful work.

  Over the next few months I made discreet enquiries among the waitresses in Koreatown. Many illegals were drawn to the glamour of Shanghai, and restaurants were often where they found their first jobs. Some of these girls must have obtained IDs, somehow. A few of them admitted to me that their IDs were fakes, but I was wary of acquiring a fake. It was a dangerous thing to possess if the police checked it. The safest option was to buy a real ID from someone. For that I would need a broker.

  The first broker I met, a contact of one of these waitresses, asked for the equivalent of $16,000. I told him to forget it. The second one asked for even more. The predicament reminded me of the gang in Changbai. Anyone who knew I was an illegal was going to take advantage – they would fleece me for as much as they could get and feel little motivation to help me.

  To avoid the gangsters, I needed a better tactic. I needed to make up a story.

  A mild fresh spring turned to the torpor of summer in my first year in Shanghai. I was cooling off after work in an ice-cream parlour with Yee-un when a man at the next table tried to flirt with us. He was a Korean-Chinese in his thirties, with his own shop in Koreatown. He was slightly tipsy, I realized. Somehow, the conversation got onto his aunt.

  ‘She’s a marriage broker for women wanting to marry South Korean men,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that?’

  Instinctively, I sensed a possibility. ‘I wish I could study in South Korea,’ I said. Yee-un turned to stare at me as if I’d grown a second head. ‘But I’m too old for a student visa. I need to make myself a few years younger, somehow.’

  ‘With a new ID,’ he said, finishing my thought. Perhaps he was trying to impress two pretty girls in an ice-cream parlour, but he was suddenly eager to help.

  ‘Let me ask her for you. Let’s see what she says …’

  He took my phone number.

  Weeks passed, summer stretched far into September, and then to a mild and pleasant autumn, and I forgot about the man in the ice-cream parlour. Then, in November, near the end of my first year in the city, an unfamiliar number called my phone.

  It took me a minute to figure out what the woman at the other end was on about. It was the aunt of the man from the ice-cream parlour.

  She asked me to visit her in Harbin. She would sort me out with a new ID.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. Harbin … where is that?

  ‘A thousand miles from Shanghai, in the far northeast, that’s where,’ Yee-un said when I asked her. She had a good laugh about that.

  I lied to the manager of the restaurant, saying that my mother was sick in hospital and that I had to see her. I bought a train ticket to Harbin. The journey to the northeast took almost two days. I arrived from the mild Shanghai winter totally underdressed for the snowed-under, below-freezing northeast. I stayed in Harbin just two hours, long enough to meet a tiny lady so muffled in furs she looked like some woodland animal, have an official photo taken, then catch a train back.

  A month later an envelope arrived through the mail at my apartment. I opened it and held in my hands my own ID card. My new name was Park Sun-ja.

  Sun-ja. I sighed. My sixth name.

  The identity had belonged to a Korean-Chinese girl who, the lady in Harbin told me, had a mental illness. Her parents wanted to raise money for her care by selling her ID. It had cost me all the money I had saved in Shanghai, but now I was legal, or at least I could pass for legal with little fear of discovery.

  As if sensing my new status, within days the city was lifting the curtain onto a much brighter side of life.

  Chapter 31

  Career woman

  About a week after receiving my ID, I found a job that paid almost four times what I earned as a waitress. I became an interpreter and secretary at a South Korean tech company that made compact discs and LED lights. Its office was in Koreatown. My boss was one of the South Korean directors, and part of my role was to accompany him on visits to clients and manufacturing plants. I noticed that the Chinese looked up to South Koreans and addressed them respectfully. I had usually known them to scowl down their noses at North Koreans.

  Everything had happened so fast. Overnight I had gone from waiting tables to sitting in boardrooms, interpreting in negotiations, learning how a modern company operated, and the culture in which business was conducted. I was meeting clients and buyers from Taiwan and Malaysia, and mingling socially with South Korean co-workers. The friends I’d made while waitressing knew me as In-hee. In my new job I used the name on my ID card and documentation, Sun-ja. I would have to take care that these two worlds never collided.

  The company’s products were manufactured in a plant that was modern even by Shanghai standards. The process was kept entirely dust-free. To enter we passed through a special machine that blew contaminates from our clothing.

  The South Koreans treated me well. I could not bear to imagine their reaction if they’d known I’d grown up in the bosom of their archenemy. At times this felt surreal. We were all Koreans, sharing the same language and culture, yet we were technically at war.

  I began to relax and enjoy life a little. I felt financially more secure, though there was still the enormous debt to my uncle, which I repaid in monthly instalments. I started to dress as nicely as I could afford. I noticed how the businesswomen I saw along Nanjing Lu judged their clothes well, and carried stylish accessories. I took driving lessons and got my driver’s licence. The rent on our apartment became too high for Yee-un. She moved out, and I kept the place to myself.

  I felt more confident. I no longer lived in the shadows.

  The cloud in my sky was the absence of my family. It was now more than five years since that last call from my mother. That ache of longing I felt had not lessened. After the ordeal with the gang I was frightened of returning to Changbai. I had no plan. A sense of profound resignation crept over me. The path that led back to my mother and brother was becoming darker and fainter with time. I wasn’t even sure I’d find it again. I was twenty-two years old. If I’d stayed in North Korea I’d have graduated from Hyesan Economics School by now. I’d probably have a government job in Hyesan, like my mother, a house on the river, and a network of trading contacts shared with my uncles and aunts. Would that have been so bad?

  I pushed such thoughts from my mind.

  I now felt safe enough with my new identity to eat at two restaurants in Shanghai that were owned and operated by North Korea. One of them, near my home in Koreatown, was the Morangak; the other, in the downtown Jianguo Hotel, was the Pyongyang Okryugwan, where I went often. These restaurants were foreign-currency earners for whichever bureau of the Party in Pyongyang operated them. The waitresses were selected for their loyalty, their songbun and their beauty. Because they were popular with South Koreans, I suspected also that they provided cover for Bowibu agents spying on overseas Korean communities.

  The first time I walked into the Pyongyang Okryugwan and sat down I felt I was back home. The waitresses spoke Korean with the strong acc
ents familiar to me, and wore their hair in the conservative fashion of North Korea, almost unchanged since the time of the Korean War. They were polite but reserved when engaging with customers. They knew they were each being watched by their co-workers. They were forbidden to form friendships with any customer. I guessed that at night they were confined to a dorm and not permitted to go out into the city.

  One particular waitress often served me and, against the rules, became quite familiar with me. She was from Pyongyang. One time she astonished me by saying that she hoped to have a boob job done in Shanghai.

  ‘You can leave here to have it done?’

  She lowered her voice. ‘I haven’t asked yet, but it might be possible.’

  That surprised me. Some rules could be bent, but I didn’t think that was one of them. As soon as she mentioned it I found myself searching her face.

  ‘You’ve had your eyes done,’ I exclaimed.

  She had double eyelids, a popular procedure among Korean women to make their eyes appear larger.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘In Pyongyang.’

  I almost dropped my glass. The elite in Pyongyang had access to beauty surgery? It seemed almost obscene given the poverty and hunger of most of the population.

  Clients visiting my company from South Korea would often ask to be taken to these restaurants, and the behaviour of some of the men made me uncomfortable. There is an old Korean proverb, ‘south man, north woman’, meaning that the most handsome men are in the south of the peninsula, the prettiest women in the north. The proverb seemed borne out by the beauty of the waitresses, whose sheer unavailability turned some of the men into romantic idiots. They would become besotted, returning night after night to see a girl they had fallen for. I witnessed some of them handing over small, elegant gift boxes of jewellery from the luxury-brand stores. To my great surprise the waitresses would smile coyly and accept the gifts. I figured that the restaurant allowed this and confiscated them on behalf of the North Korean state. Not only were these men unwittingly donating valuables to Pyongyang, they were placing the women in a compromising and potentially dangerous situation. I don’t think any of them understood the risk for a North Korean woman should they actually get what they wanted. But one of them was to find out.