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

by Hyeonseo Lee

  Laos. I couldn’t even picture it. Just a dark place on the far edge of China that had swallowed my mother and my brother.

  The taxi pulled over. There were people everywhere wheeling luggage.

  All the strength had gone out of me. My voice sounded wan. ‘Please take me to the coach station.’

  ‘You said the airport,’ the driver exclaimed.

  ‘I know. But now I’m going to Laos.’

  He turned and peered at me as if I needed a psychiatric ward, not a coach station.

  ‘All right,’ he said slowly, starting the car again.

  I called Min-ho but his battery had died or the phone had been taken from him. How can I contact them now? Somehow, I would have to find him and my mother by myself.

  I felt so weak when I reached the coach station I could barely lift my backpack. I removed all the cold-weather clothing and gave it to the taxi driver. He was grateful, and again looked at me oddly.

  My journey ended at noon the next day, at the last station in China. My mother and brother had been here twenty-four hours earlier. During the long ride, and with some dinner, my energy had started to revive. I asked for directions, hoisted my backpack, and walked toward Laos.

  The Chinese passport control was in a modern building surrounded by low hills dotted with tropical trees. The sky was a beautiful, washed blue, I noticed, clearer than anything I’d seen in Shanghai or Seoul. Vast white clouds sailed over the hills.

  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.

  Standing apart from them was one white man no one could miss. He was in his early fifties, strongly built, and extremely tall, looming head and shoulders above everyone else. He had that pinkish skin and sandy-coloured hair that North Korean kids would gawp at on the rare occasions they saw a Westerner. He and I seemed to be the only lone travellers.

  We crossed the border. The contrast with modern China was stark. The Laotian passport office was a squat, mud-colour building. It was clear at once that this was a poor country. We filed on board a sputtering twenty-seater bus. The tall white man got on also, folding his legs awkwardly between the wooden seats.

  Bouncing through the hilly countryside on this boneshaker, I stared again at the clean turquoise sky. It made the vegetation seem extravagantly lush – hardwood trees and rubber trees, by the look of them, and fields of sugar cane, and wild flowers everywhere, enormous purple hibiscus and golden jasmine hanging down from the canopies of the trees. In a more relaxed frame of mind I probably wouldn’t have noticed such things so keenly, but in my anguish I was seeing all this as beauty denied to me. I would not have any chance to enjoy it.

  Laos is one of those big, small countries, like Korea. It’s a little larger than both Koreas combined, and much longer than it is wide, about 650 miles from north to south. It is landlocked and poor and surrounded by better-known countries – China, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Cambodia. I had entered the country at its northernmost tip and was heading south.

  The journey to Luang Namtha took an hour. When I got off, the tall white man and three or four others got off too.

  Luang Namtha is the capital of the province of the same name. There were many Westerners about, wandering the markets, and lounging on hostel verandas. Apart from the police station and one or two guesthouses the town was made up of single-storey houses, with telegraph wires crisscrossing every street. I had to find a local who could help me, so I asked directions for the local Chinese restaurant. The owner was a tubby, friendly family man, who reminded me a little of Mr Ahn.

  ‘I’m looking for two North Koreans who were arrested yesterday,’ I said in Mandarin. I gave him a big smile. ‘If you can help, I’ll eat my meals here every evening.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, start at the immigration office,’ he said. ‘There’s a holding cell there.’ Straight away he offered to take me there on the back of his scooter. His name was Yin, he said.

  The immigration office was closed and looked deserted. I stood outside, tilted my head back, and shouted: ‘Omma-ya! Min-ho-ya! Na-ya! (Mother! Min-ho! It’s me!)’ Nothing.

  ‘Let’s try the police station,’ the man said.

  The police shook their heads when we asked them. No North Koreans here, they said. Our last stop was the prison, some distance away. The police told us this place was for real criminals. I didn’t expect my family to be here. It was a compound of single-storey buildings surrounded by a high mud wall. Again, I yelled as loudly as I could: ‘Omma-ya! Min-ho-ya! Na-ya!’

  Outside the main gate, off-duty guards were sitting around with some local girls. They had taken their uniform jackets off and were drinking beer from bottles and laughing. ‘No North Koreans here,’ they said, ‘just drug dealers and murderers.’ They added that this was not the sort of place someone like me should be visiting.

  Darkness falls fast in the subtropics. Yin offered to take me to my guesthouse, saying it was dangerous for me to walk alone in the street. I thanked him and told him I’d be fine. I was clinging to any hope now. I thought there might be a chance that my mother and Min-ho had escaped and were wandering around. As I approached the lights of the town, the traffic increased – tuk-tuks slowed down beside me; the drivers shouted and whistled at me in Lao and stirred up clouds of dust and exhaust fumes. I walked around for hours, looking at every face I saw.

  It was a Friday night. My search could not resume until after the weekend. I had no choice but to stay in town.

  On Monday morning I went straight to the immigration office. A group of men in dark green uniforms were sitting about on the benches outside. The place seemed sunk in torpor. I sensed straight away that nothing here happened quickly. They eyed me with suspicion. I introduced myself as a volunteer from South Korea who’d come to Laos to help two North Koreans. I showed them my passport and the visa.

  None of them stirred. I thought no one had understood me.

  Then one said: ‘Yes,’ in Mandarin, and swatted a fly from his face. ‘Two North Koreans were caught at the border and brought here.’

  Chapter 47

  Whatever it takes

  At last I was getting somewhere. ‘Can I see them?’

  ‘You’ll have to make an official request. At the police station,’ the man said. ‘There’s no point doing that until we’ve completed the paperwork.’

  Nothing about the attitude of these men suggested that paperwork was given any priority. But I was finally on familiar ground.

  I spent the next seven days going back and forth between the police station and the immigration office, establishing relations with the officials, working on them to build a rapport. I knew I would have to bribe. I tried to think how my mother would have dealt with this – with a combination of charm, persuasion and cash. I was friendly. I flattered them. I learned their names and their foibles. I went to the immigration office early each morning, before anyone else, and waited on the bench outside, so that mine was the first face they saw. I took packets of cigarettes for everyone. If I didn’t do that, if I just sat and waited until I was called, I knew I could be here for weeks, or months. Here, an administrative matter that could have been dealt with in minutes would stretch to hours, or days. The humidity of the afternoons sapped the life out of everyone. But each day, I felt I was inching closer towards my goal.

  The officials in immigration wanted Marlboro Reds, they had told me, the most expensive cigarettes. Once it was plain to them that I was agreeable, and opening a channel to them, their corruption became naked. At every one of my visits they’d ask how much money I had withdrawn from the ATM.

  ‘A hundred dollars,’ I’d say. Or: ‘Just fifty.’

  With a flick of the hand they’d ask to see it. Then I’d hand over th
e wad of kip, the local currency, to show them; they’d take about half the notes, sometimes more, and give the rest back to me.

  After a few days of this extortion, and the cost of my meals and my lodging, my money was almost gone. I had no choice but to make the call I was loath to make – to Kim in Seoul, who immediately transferred funds. I was immensely grateful, and told him this was strictly a loan. I would repay him, just as I had repaid my uncle in Shenyang.

  After my morning visit to immigration, I had little to do in the afternoons, so I would sit and read in a place called the Coffee House, a Western-style café that served Thai and Western food. I could remember a little English but could not read the menu, so I asked a waiter what another customer near me was eating.

  ‘Noodles,’ he said, using the English word.

  I ate noodles every day. After a week, I wanted a change and rang Kim to ask him the English word for bab.

  ‘Rice,’ he said.

  ‘Lice,’ I repeated.

  ‘Not lice, rice. They’re two different things. You must ask for rice.’

  ‘Got it. Lice.’

  I had my lunch every day at the Coffee House and dinner at Yin’s Chinese restaurant. To cut down on spending, I started skipping breakfast. I didn’t care. It made me feel solidarity with my mother and brother. I didn’t dare imagine what they were eating, or how little. One afternoon at the Coffee House I saw the tall sandy-haired man again, who had gone very pink from the sun. His eyes met mine in greeting as he lumbered by, like a giant. I smiled.

  After seven days, the immigration office chief, a big lazy man whose gut strained against his green uniform shirt, said that he would take me to where the two North Koreans were being held. I felt an enormous relief.

  We got into his car. He said: ‘How much money are you bringing?’

  I showed him what was in my wallet. Without counting, he helped himself to half. There was no pretence about a fee or expenses. This casual, shameless robbery by one of the town’s senior officials angers me now, but at the time it didn’t. I had a single-minded strategy to reach my family. Whatever it takes, I thought. I’ll do whatever it takes. Humans are selfish and care only for themselves and their families. Am I any different?

  To my surprise, we arrived at the main prison I had visited the first day, where the people drinking outside had told me indifferently that there were no North Koreans here. If I’d known that my omma and Min-ho were indeed in this place I would have visited every day, even if all I could do was send them good thoughts. I would have yelled over the wall: ‘Omma-ya! Min-ho-ya! Don’t worry. I’m here.’ I would have come from the immigration office every afternoon and sat here until dusk had fallen and the cicada sounds filled the night.

  The prison wardens told me I could meet my mother in the women’s section of the prison, but would not be allowed into the men’s section to see Min-ho. They led me through a courtyard of mud walls to a large black gate. With a clanking of locks and a ferrous groan it opened sideways. Standing behind it, alone, was my mother.

  She glared at me for a moment with an odd, distant expression. Her appearance devastated me. She was much thinner. Her hair was greasy and plastered to her head. For some reason she had one hand on her hip and was tilting oddly to one side.

  Suddenly she ran toward me, threw her arms around me and began to sob. She had on the same clothes and rubber flip-flops as when I’d last seen her in Kunming.

  ‘I thought you’d gone,’ she wailed. ‘I thought I’d never see you again. A second ago I thought I was dreaming, so I pinched my side until it hurt.’

  No wonder she’d looked at me strangely.

  She ran her hands over my face, just as she had after she’d crossed the Yalu, making sure I was real.

  Holding her in my arms, I too had begun to cry, but I forced myself to stop. I wiped my eyes with the palm of my hand and composed myself. I didn’t want to complicate matters by letting the guards know I was her daughter.

  I sat with her in the prison courtyard. She was being held in a cell for foreign women. One Chinese woman had been there for ten years, she said. Pictures of her family hung on the walls. They had no clean water. They had to drink and wash from the same ration of dirty water each day. A couple of days earlier, they’d heard the guards beat a Thai male prisoner to death. His wife was in the same cell as my mother, and she wailed without cease.

  ‘It’s pure hell,’ she said. ‘We should never have left home.’

  Images I’d blotted out until now – of fouled latrines, female violence, public sex and a murderous lack of hygiene – came flooding into my mind.

  There was nothing I could say, but there was no going back now. The police had taken all the money I’d given her in Kunming. I slipped her some local currency when the guards weren’t looking so she could buy some food.

  After I’d seen her I returned to town and at once called the South Korean embassy in Vientiane.

  ‘It’s dangerous for you to stay there by yourself,’ the consul said. ‘Leave Laos now, and let the embassy take care of matters.’

  This sounded encouraging. ‘How long will it take to get them out?’

  ‘We have to go by the book, unfortunately. There are no shortcuts. We’ll submit a request for information and ask permission to visit, but of course that all takes time—’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Five to six months.’

  My head slumped into my hand. But I was not surprised. I’d seen for myself the sluggish apathy of this country’s bureaucracy.

  I simply could not leave my mother and Min-ho in that place.

  The prison interpreter turned to me. ‘Five thousand dollars,’ he said simply.

  My mouth fell open. I looked from him back to the superintendent. His elbows were on his desk, his fingers tapping together. He did not blink. A slow-turning electric fan ruffled his hair, which he periodically smoothed back into place.

  ‘Impossible,’ I said.

  The superintendent shrugged. ‘In US dollars,’ he said, and made an up to you gesture with his hands.

  Over the following days, I went early to the prison, with gifts and bribes for the superintendent. Again I was creating a rapport. The interpreter told me that I was very lucky – until two years earlier, Laos had sent all defectors back. The policy had only changed after an international outcry.

  ‘Now, we just fine them,’ he said.

  Slowly, I managed to bring the amount down. Negotiations finally stalled at $700 apiece. Every time I was allowed into the courtyard to see my mother, the superintendent took half of my cash, however little it was. I would sit with her in a shaded spot and update her on my progress. When I told her I was struggling to raise the funds, she handed me a small dirty plastic cylinder. Inside was the cash I’d given her earlier. She’d only used a little to buy drinking water.

  I figured that $700 was probably close to the official fine, but it was still far out of my reach. By this time almost all the money Kim had sent had been used up. To add to my worries, during my next visit to my mother she had brought along three bedraggled people to meet me – North Korean defectors who had been caught a month earlier. They were an old woman, and an unrelated middle-aged mother and her daughter. My mother was overwhelmed with compassion for them. She wanted me to help them, too. I looked at them in dismay, yet I knew I would try to help. They handed me all the money they had hidden in their private parts. It came to $1,500 – far short of the total we’d need.

  By now my fifteen-day visa was about to expire. The two female officials who ran the visa office in Luang Namtha told me they could go to the capital, Vientiane, with my passport to renew my visa, but as it was expiring in just one day, they would have to fly. I’d have to pay their airfare and expenses. It would come to several hundred dollars.

  I walked back to the Coffee House in a trance. I felt as if I was being fleeced of everything I had, and my family held to ransom. I slumped into a chair in the window and tried to think, but every
thought came to a dead end. There were no options. I had no idea what to do.

  I closed my eyes. I was about to start beseeching aloud the spirits of my ancestors, not caring who heard me, when a very tall figure blocked my light and spoke to me in English. I looked up. Sunlight glinted through sandy hair.

  ‘Are you a traveller?’ he said.

  Chapter 48

  The kindness of strangers

  The tall white man had said the word ‘traveller’. I vaguely knew it but I hadn’t understood his question. By now I had got to know the waiters at the Coffee House, and called over the one who could speak English and some Mandarin. He translated for us.

  ‘Most people only stay here a day or two,’ the tall man was saying. ‘You’ve been here weeks, like me. Are you on business? I’m just curious.’

  This was the first time a white person had ever spoken to me. His eyes were a pale blue and he had a trim, sandy beard that was turning grey. He seemed more shy of me than I was of him. The English threw me. I couldn’t find the words. I gestured for him to join me, and opened an English–Korean translation function on my cellphone.

  Slowly, and with many embarrassed laughs and pauses, we communicated. I told him that I was a South Korean volunteer trying to help five North Korean defectors who were now in prison for illegal entry into Laos. The man looked very surprised, and I saw pain in his eyes. I searched for more words and told him that the Laotian government was demanding a huge fine.

  ‘How much?’ he asked.

  ‘Each person, $700. American money.’

  He scratched his beard and stared into the road for a while. Then he made a gesture that said, Wait here a moment. And another to indicate that he had to make a phone call. He walked to the other end of the café, made a call, and returned after a few minutes. I would never in my life have imagined what happened next. He tapped the words into my cellphone.