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

by Hyeonseo Lee

  I explained to him that I’d come from Luang Namtha, bringing five people who were now being held by immigration in Vientiane. ‘We expected to come directly here.’

  ‘Yes.’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. ‘We received a message from immigration in Luang Namtha that five North Koreans were on their way. But what’s your connection to them?’

  ‘I called you a month ago. Do you remember? To tell you that my family was imprisoned in Luang Namtha. You said that you’d take care of things, and that I should leave.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ He gave a look of mild surprise. ‘You didn’t leave? I’d never have thought you would manage this much. And you’ve done it alone? In a month? Amazing. Really.’

  He sounded like a bored uncle trying to show an interest in a child’s drawing.

  ‘We were told you’d go to the immigration office this afternoon,’ I said. ‘What’s the next step?’

  He gave a small apologetic laugh. ‘I can’t just go there when I like. I have to wait until they call.’

  ‘But they’re holding five North Koreans. They took my passport and my phone. Can they do that?’

  ‘We have no authority here. We can’t tell them what to do. But we’ll see if we can find out what’s going on.’

  On each step of this journey, every time I thought I’d spied hope, disappointment would plant itself firmly in the way. As I got up to leave, I told him something my mother had mentioned – that a group of twelve North Koreans had been caught a few days previously and thrown into Luang Namtha Prison just before she and Min-ho left yesterday. ‘But I’m sure you knew that.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said, as if I’d told him a crazy-but-true fact. ‘I’ll look into it.’

  I wondered how many North Korean refugees were sitting in prison cells around the country, waiting for this man to do something.

  The next morning a junior diplomat accompanied me to the Vientiane immigration office. In hindsight, this was not a good idea. The meeting took on the feel of a summit between two nations. It was held in a large conference room lined by national flags. Across a long, polished table we faced five uniformed immigration officials, including the woman chief.

  She insisted on conducting the meeting in Lao, and refused to budge from her position that I had committed a criminal offence by aiding illegal aliens. I would go to prison if I did not pay a statutory fine of $1,300.

  ‘She’s really furious with you,’ the diplomat whispered when we’d stepped outside the room for a moment. ‘She said you were extremely rude.’

  I saw that I’d made a tactical mistake. Had I returned alone and contrite, and apologized to her, I might have been let off, but matters had gone beyond that. By bringing a diplomat I had escalated the whole issue up a level.

  I showed my wallet to the immigration officials and explained my predicament. I had $800 that Dick had given me on the last day when he realized I didn’t have enough for my fare home to Seoul. It was sufficient for a one-way ticket. The woman took all the cash and handed back my passport and phone.

  ‘Don’t ever come back to my country in this way,’ she said. ‘If you do, you’ll be imprisoned as a broker. However …’ She gave me the most insincere smile I’d ever seen on another woman. ‘You may return as a tourist.’

  I wanted to slap her face.

  ‘We’ve granted a twenty-four-hour extension to your visa,’ she said. ‘If you’re still here this time tomorrow we’ll arrest you. Understand?’

  ‘I’d like to leave your country right now,’ I said. ‘But I have no money left for a ticket.’

  She pressed her lips together. Not my problem.

  On the way out of the building, the Korean diplomat reassured me that my mother, Min-ho and the other three North Koreans would be taken to the embassy the next day. All would be able to leave for Seoul after that. A few days, he said.

  They say people tend to believe what they want to believe, and I really wanted to believe this news. It was so wonderful to hear. I thanked him profusely. I should, of course, have tested the truth of what he was saying by asking further questions, but I was distracted by another immediate concern.

  ‘I’ve got nothing left for a ticket out of here. Could the embassy lend me the money?’

  Regrettably, he said, getting into his car, it was not embassy policy to lend money.

  Stupidly, I thanked him again. I was so grateful that my family’s ordeal was almost over that it was a few minutes before it occurred to me, as I stood alone again in the street, that he’d driven away knowing that I was penniless and had nowhere to go. When I later learned that embassies have an obligation under international law to protect and support their citizens, I found the attitude of the South Korean embassy in Vientiane very hard to understand.

  I had no idea what to do. I thought I would have to sleep in the street. Within moments of me turning on my phone it rang. It was Dick. I was beginning to think he was some divine being. When I explained the situation – in broken English – he offered to send more money, but I said no. He had given so much. I would figure something out for myself.

  I dawdled in the street for a while, but I knew I had only one option – to ask Kim. This was hard to do, harder than asking Dick. My pride did not want him to see me needy and desperate. It simply confirmed the gulf of status between us. I was afraid of repulsing him. He transferred the money, and again I insisted this was a loan, of which every penny would be paid back.

  I left Laos the next morning.

  It was the first week of December. I’d come from the subtropics to a bright, freezing day in Seoul, with high blue skies and air so cold there were ice crystals patterned like feathers on the inside of my apartment windows. I immediately had to shop for clothes. I’d given all my winter wear to that puzzled taxi driver in Kunming.

  That evening I was curled up in Kim’s apartment in Gangnam, cradling a coffee, wearing his knitted sweater, listening to jazz and describing my adventure. It seemed surreal, somehow, to be so suddenly back in the comfort and safety of the other universe, watching Kim, who’d never left it, stare at me as he tried to comprehend what I’d been through. He was silent for a long time, and kept shaking his head in bemusement at the sequence of disasters and the twists of good fortune we’d had in overcoming them. He was also deeply impressed by Dick Stolp.

  ‘To meet someone like that,’ he said, ‘at that moment, and in that place? It’s incredible. You’ve been very lucky.’

  ‘I’ve been lucky to have you, too,’ I said.

  The jazz track we were listening to had ended. Silence filled the room.

  I had been away so much longer than I’d expected – two months – that I’d missed the university entrance tests and interviews. It would be another year before I could apply. I didn’t really mind. I figured I’d be so busy helping my mother and Min-ho cope with life in Seoul.

  The day after I returned I called the South Korean embassy in Vientiane. I was in a positive mood, and expecting good news. I got through to an answering machine telling me in English to press various buttons for different services. I tried them all day but could never get through to anyone. It was the same the next day and the day after. I was not too concerned, however. I expected that my mother and Min-ho would arrive any day, and knew that once they were being processed by the NIS, they would disappear off the radar for a while. Even so, I would have liked some confirmation from the diplomats in Vientiane.

  After three weeks without news I was anxious. Kim tried to reassure me, telling me that nothing would happen quickly in Laos. Finally, in the fourth week, my phone rang with a number I did not recognize. It had an 856 prefix, the code for Laos. The voice was very faint.

  ‘Nuna?’

  ‘Min-ho?’

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘You’re still in the embassy?’

  ‘I’ve borrowed this phone. Will you call back?’

  Why is he whispering? I called him straight back. He answered befo
re the phone had rung once.

  ‘I’m in Phonthong Prison.’

  Chapter 50

  Long wait for freedom

  My apartment seemed to go into a spin around me. I was clutching the phone so tight my nails dug into my palm.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s where they put foreigners,’ Min-ho said. ‘It’s much bigger than the prison in Luang Namtha …’

  I was in that nightmare again, pitched straight back into the darkness. My lip began to wobble. But my kid brother was sounding imperturbable. It was as if he were describing a new school he’d started.

  ‘There are white people here, and black people, everyone except locals …’

  ‘Whose phone is this?’

  ‘My Chinese friend here in the cell,’ he whispered. ‘It’s against the rules to have them.’

  My head fell into my hand. ‘Why, why, why aren’t you in the South Korean embassy? They told me they’d get you the next day.’

  ‘The embassy? I’ve seen no one from there …’

  Min-ho explained that after I left the immigration office, the officials took him, my mother and the others to the cells on the ground floor. So they were in those mouldy concrete cells at the end of that corridor. A few days later they were taken to Phonthong Prison. My mother was there too, in the women’s section. Min-ho hadn’t seen the sun for weeks, he said, and his skin had gone very white. Yet he sounded cheerful. I marvelled at his ability to endure any physical discomfort or hardship. I realized then that it would be the pressures of the rich world he’d have trouble coping with.

  ‘There are two South Koreans here. One’s doing five years for selling amphetamines. The other had some sort of business disagreement in Laos. When they found out we were from the North they bought food from outside with their own money and gave it to me and sent some over to the women’s prison for Omma and the others. They’ve been here for a long time, but they encourage me. They’re telling me not to worry. They say a lot of North Koreans pass through and then get sent to the South Korean embassy. It’s the normal process, Nuna. Don’t worry. We’ll be all right.’

  Min-ho and his Chinese friend were sharing a cell with two others, he said, from Britain and from Ghana. The British man was serving a long sentence for possessing marijuana. His name was John and he was very kind.

  ‘Guess what, Nuna? I’m learning English!’

  At that the floodgates opened. I cried until my eyes and nose were streaming. Through the tears I managed to say: ‘We can speak English together when you get here.’

  Min-ho, in his characteristic way, was enjoying discovering the world, albeit from the inside of a prison cell. Starting from the very bottom. I admired him so much. He was not letting the prospect of months or even years in prison cast him down. He was facing the future, preparing for the next phase of his life.

  At least now I understood why that junior diplomat had been in such haste to drive off. He’d deliberately been untruthful about my family getting out in a day or two. He knew the process, but didn’t want me hanging around and getting into more trouble. Still, there was reason to hope the ordeal would end soon, and happily. Now that I thought about it, there had never been any suggestion, even from the Laotian immigration chief when she was furious with me, that my mother and Min-ho might be handed over to the North Korean embassy, or sent back to China.

  My mother and Min-ho spent another two months in Phonthong Prison in Vientiane before being handed over, as Min-ho’s friends had predicted, to the South Korean embassy. They then spent another three months there, in an embassy shelter where they joined the queue of North Koreans being slowly processed for exit by the Lao government.

  Finally, more than six months after I’d returned from Laos, in the late spring of 2010, I received a call from the National Intelligence Service in Seoul. Among the North Korean arrivals being processed, the agent told me, was a woman claiming to be my mother, and a man claiming to be my brother.

  The release of tension in hearing those words, and the deadpan, bureaucratic way the agent had said them, set off a fit of giggling in me, and I couldn’t stop. I tried to apologize to him. To his credit, he said: ‘Take your time. You must be relieved.’

  They had arrived.

  It was over.

  Chapter 51

  A series of small miracles

  Under new rules introduced after spies were discovered among the North Koreans seeking asylum, my family’s period of processing by the NIS was longer than mine. They were questioned for three months before being moved to Hanawon, where they stayed another three months. The women who had been held in Laos with my mother and Min-ho arrived at the same time. Sadly, after making it all the way here, the older lady died of cancer.

  In these weeks while I was waiting, I was contacted out of the blue by Shin-suh, the friendly video-chat girl who’d appeared naked on my laptop screen in Shanghai. She’d been trying to reach me, she said, but my change of name had made me hard to track down. I was thrilled that she’d made it to Seoul not long after me. I invited her over. But when I opened the door, the girl on my doorstep was a stranger, not the person I’d seen on the video-chat. It flashed across my mind that this was a trap. There were rumours throughout the defector community of Bowibu spies and assassins in our midst.

  My confusion amused her. ‘It’s me, Shin-suh.’ She clapped her hands together and laughed.

  I recognized her voice. She explained that she’d spent $20,000 on a total plastic surgery overhaul – eyes, forehead, nose, lips, breasts, everything. Her South Korean boyfriend had been so turned off by the transformation that he’d broken off their relationship.

  When I told her that I had got my family out of the North, the light went out of her eyes. She became quiet and pensive. Like me, she missed her family with an almost physical pain. She wanted to get hers out too, she said, but she was terrified of the risks. She had suffered far worse than I had. Like many North Korean women, Shin-suh had been trafficked, tricked by men who had posed as brokers helping her to escape. She considered herself fortunate that she’d been sold to an adult video-chat business, and not as a bride to an impoverished Chinese farmer. It made me blush to recall how, as an eighteen-year-old, I’d thought the worst thing in my life would be to go through with a marriage to the affluent, harmless Geun-soo in Shenyang.

  A week before my mother and Min-ho emerged from Hanawon I decided to have the long-overdue talk with Kim. I did not want to postpone it any longer. My family was about to join me. A new chapter was beginning, and I knew Kim would not be a part of it. My experiences had made me a realist. I was not going to be a romantic fool hoping that he’d defy his parents and marry me, nor did I expect him to. He’d never done anything to displease his family. Pining over lost love was for TV dramas, not for me. My priority now was to help my mother and Min-ho adjust to a new life. I had to move on.

  ‘I don’t think we have a future,’ I said to him. I think he’d guessed from my tone why I’d come to his apartment this evening.

  After a long, heavy pause he said: ‘I know. You’re right. It would be hard to deal with my family.’

  We sat for a while just looking at each other across the sofa in his apartment, listening to the sounds of the city. I hadn’t expected to feel as sad as I did. It was such a shame. We liked and respected each other very much. He’d come home from the gym and was wearing a sweatshirt that showed off his body. He was a beautiful man, and kind. But his future was as closely connected to his past, and to his family, as mine was to mine. And that meant separate destinies.

  ‘There’s not much left to say then.’ If I wasn’t going to cry, I needed to get this over with quickly.

  ‘I guess not,’ he said.

  I smiled at him warmly. ‘Let’s part as friends.’

  We embraced, and I left before he saw me break down.

  Two days later I was waiting anxiously at the top of the subway stairs for my mother and Min-ho. It was now August 2010, almost a full y
ear since our drama in Changbai, and nine months since I had last seen them in Laos. When I caught sight of them I bounded down the stairs and into their arms. At last they were free, South Korean citizens. My worry was how well they’d cope with the ‘free’.

  ‘You told me it would all take two weeks,’ was the first thing Mother said. ‘If I had known how long and awful the journey was going to be, I doubt I would have agreed.’

  ‘Well, we’re all here now,’ I said. ‘That’s what matters. Min-ho, look at you. You were too thin last time I saw you. Now you’re too fat.’ Actually, he looked much healthier.

  ‘No way,’ he said. He grinned at me, and I saw my father in him. ‘I’m hungry. Let’s eat.’

  Their eyes were everywhere. The subway had disgorged my family into the bustling area near City Hall. Their senses were being assaulted by the sights and sounds of the most modern city in the world. Seoul is bright with signage that competes to grab attention, and illuminated advertising designed to entice and allure. Streets are solid with more traffic than a North Korean could ever imagine. Crowds moved in every direction. These were the modern Koreans, whose language was recognizable to my mother but whose fashions, attitudes and indifference toward the thousands of foreigners of all races living unmolested in their midst were so at odds with what she had known. Everywhere she looked was a vast hive of activity, and prosperity.

  I had invited Ok-hee along, to join us for seolleongtang, ox-bone soup.

  ‘Eat a lot, Omma,’ I said. I was concerned that she looked frail. I’d hoped she would look relaxed and healthy after Hanawon.

  ‘I was too stressed to eat most of the time,’ she said.

  We chatted freely until the restaurant closed. I was so happy, and kept holding their hands. I had been fantasizing about a scene like this for more than a decade.

  My mother’s first few days of freedom in the developed world were overtaken by a series of small miracles. She struggled to keep up. At Dongdaemun, a popular night market of street-food vendors, she was transfixed by the ATM where I’d withdrawn cash. ‘I can’t figure it out,’ she said. She thought an extremely small teller was crouched inside a tiny room in the wall, counting out notes at high speed. ‘The poor thing, stuck in there without a window.’