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

When Lee arrives in Changbai, Mrs. Ahn is frail and Mr. Ahn is bedridden. Mr. Ahn had been caught smuggling and had been beaten by guards. Mr. Chang had been convicted of selling North Korean women as brides and prostitutes, and is in prison. Lee arranges for a broker to find her family and return to her apartment in Shenyang. In a few weeks, she receives word that the broker has located her family and Min-ho has crossed the river into China. Lee’s overjoyed; she hadn’t known if they were alive, and now she is to reunite with them. Her happiness fades, though, when she receives a call from the Korean-Chinese restaurant patron stating that he, too, has found her family. Lee hasn’t expected both brokers to find her family and has only enough money to pay one.

Lee arrives at Mr. Ahn’s house in Changbai and has barely said hello before four men knock on the door and instruct Lee, “you have to come with us now” (149). Lee notices that “[t]hese were not locals from Changbai. They were from a gang” (148). These are men sent by the Korean-Chinese restaurant patron hired to find Lee’s family and they demand $8,500.00: much more than she has agreed to. They threaten that if she does not pay, they will return her to North Korea.

Lee begins this chapter with one of the most profound passages of the book:

Sympathetic people I’d met in China would sometimes express their bewilderment that the Kim dynasty had been tyrannizing North Korea for almost six decades. How does that family get away with it? Just as baffling, how do their subjects go on coping? In truth there is no dividing line between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens. The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless. A terrorized Party cadre will terrorize his subordinates, and so on down the chain; a friend will inform on a friend out of fear of punishment for not informing. A nicely brought-up boy will become a guard who kicks to death a girl caught trying to escape to China, because her songbun has sunk to the bottom of the heap and she’s worthless and hostile in the eyes of the state. Ordinary people are made persecutors, denouncers, thieves. They use the fear flowing from the top to win some advantage, or to survive. (150).

Lee explains to the gang leader that she doesn’t have access to the sum of money he’s asked for. She convinces him to let her use his phone to call for what money she can get. Lee then calls her own phone. When the gang leader figures out how to answer Lee’s phone, Lee tells him to remove the cash from her wallet, pay Mrs. Ahn, leave the rest, and depart. He does as she asks and escapes back into North Korea.

After holding Lee for several days, the gang reduces their fee to $7,250.00 and Lee ashamedly calls her uncle in Shenyang for the money. Lee assures him it’s a loan and he pays the amount. The gang releases Lee and she returns to Shenyang. Soon after, in January 2002, Lee decides Shenyang is too dangerous and that she can disappear in Shanghai, so she boards a train and leaves.

Lee moves to Shanghai with Yee-un, a Korean-Chinese acquaintance of hers. They’re both penniless and move in together. Shanghai is the largest and brashest city Lee has ever seen. Lee recalls, “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” (156). About 17 million people live in Shanghai at the time; just over 50,000 of them are Korean-Chinese, as Lee is pretending to be. Lee again changes her name, this time to Chae In-hee. It’s her fifth name.

In Shanghai, Lee realizes:

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 there (157).

Lee acquires a real ID from a broker—not a fake ID, but rather the ID of a real person, illegally acquired. It takes time to arrive, but with the new ID, Lee acquires her sixth name: Park Sun-ja, and “[a]s if sensing [her] new status, within days the city was lifting the curtain onto a much brighter side of life” (159). 

Soon after receiving her new ID, Lee obtains a job with a South Korean tech company, which pays almost four times what she made waitressing:

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 (160).

Lee begins to relax, learns to drive and obtains a license, and becomes confident enough to eat at two restaurants in Shanghai owned and operated by North Korea: “These restaurants were foreign-currency earners for whichever bureau of the Party in Pyongyang operated them” (161). At the restaurant, Chinese and South Korean businessmen would present gifts to North Korean waitresses they found exotic and beautiful:

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 (162).

After two years in Shanghai, Lee sometimes forgets she’s North Korean. She soon comes to miss having a North Korean friend with which she “could confide in and trust” (165). This problem is alleviated when she runs into Ok-hee, a North Korean fugitive she knew in Shenyang who has also moved to Shanghai.

Lee receives a call from Min-ho: they have gone through the cash Lee gave him in Changbai. Lee’s mother has used it to help Lee’s aunts and uncles. He asks her to send more money and a cellphone, explaining that “people in the border area had started using cellphones to make calls to China, using the Chinese network. It was highly illegal, of course” (167). Lee sends some money and a cellphone. The phone becomes her lifeline to her family and North Korea.

Lee and Min-ho develops a routine of calling every weekend and getting caught up on each other’s lives—they’ve had no contact for years. Lee learns that when her mother reported Lee missing, the North Korean government was suspicious and placed her family under close surveillance. Lee’s mother received a promotion at work so she could be more closely monitored, and the Bowibu paid her frequent visits. The ordeal sparked in Lee’s mother negative thoughts about the Party and system in North Korea. They spoke on many occasions of Lee returning to North Korea. Her mother insisted that she could bribe the right people and make it okay, although, Lee admits, “[a] part of [Lee] knew that she and [Lee] were deluding [them]selves. Returning now, after so many years away, was insanely dangerous” (170).

In 2004, Lee sees on television, for the first time, North Koreans attempting to rush past guards and enter a South Korean embassy in Beijing, China: “The news anchor said they were North Koreans seeking political asylum. Asylum? Ok-hee and I stared at each other” (172). 

Over the next few weeks, Lee sees on the television many “desperate bids for asylum” that “were being filmed by a human-rights organization to highlight China’s inhumanity in refusing to treat escaped North Koreans as asylum seekers” (173). Lee writes:

I’d closed my mind to the reality of the regime in North Korea. Unless it directly affected my family, I had never wanted to know. I thought the reason people escaped was because of hunger, or, like me, out of an unexamined sense of curiosity. It had never occurred to me that people would escape for political reasons (173).

Lee hasn’t realized that thousands of people each year attempt to escape North Korea, nor that those fleeing want to live in South Korea, not China. Lee researches the issue on the internet. She and Ok-hee decide to travel to South Korea and seek asylum. 

In preparation to leave Shanghai, Lee sends money and most of her belongings to Mr. Ahn’s house in Changbai. She then travels to Changbai herself. Mr. Ahn has died. Mrs. Ahn welcomes Lee and they arrange to send her belongings to Min-ho in North Korea. While in Changbai, Lee looks across the river to North Korea and notices that “[e]verything looked dilapidated and poor. Nothing had changed. In China, nothing stayed the same. Everywhere was such a frenzy of construction and reinvention that a city could be unrecognizable within a year” (178).

After sending her belongings across the river, Lee grows anxious because she does not hear from her brother, Min-ho. After four days, she returns to Shanghai. A week later, she receives a call from Min-ho asking what she’d sent. She answers, but Min-ho continues inquiring. Confused, she hangs up. The next morning, she receives a call from someone claiming to be a friend of her mother’s, asking how much money is in the sack she sent. Lee can’t remember the amount and tells the man to ask her mother. About a week later, Lee receives another call from Min-ho. He tells her, “You did well” (179). Lee’s confused, so Min-ho explains: “Our calls for the past week have been recorded” (179).

Min-ho is surprised by an army officer when retrieving the sacks. The government confiscates the goods, but Min-ho hides the cash. They beat him mercilessly to make him divulge the location of the cash, but Min-ho tells Lee “he’d rather die than let these bastards have it” (180). Lee’s mother, however, can’t bear to hear her son being assaulted in the room next to her. She breaks down and tells the senior army commander where the cash was. Min-ho tells Lee that “[h]e said he had never seen so large a sum coming across the border. He thought it was a fund sent by South Korean spies, and that [he] might be an agent of the South Korean intelligence service, the Angibu” (180).

Days later, Pyongyang orders a crackdown against corruption and capitalism. Worried, Lee’s mother and Min-ho leave Hyesan to lay low with Lee’s Aunt Pretty in Hamhung. They are not able to contact Lee. 

Lee remains in Shanghai for another year. Most of her friends, apart from Ok-hee, are South Korean expatriates. Through them, she meets Kim, an affluent South Korean real estate mogul in Shanghai on business from Seoul. Their attraction is instant and they begin dating soon after meeting:

Until now I had never been open to the possibility of romance. My emotional devotion to my mother and brother had always eclipsed all other feelings. The sexual instinct I knew existed inside me was one I’d always kept deeply hidden. In fact, I had hardly ever even kissed a man before (184).

Kim was only meant to be in Shanghai for a few days, but he rents an apartment close to Lee’s and stays for two years. Lee decides that she wants to trust Kim with her secret and become certain she wants to marry him. Until now, she did not dare tell her mother of her plan to move to South Korea, “the enemy country,” but if she was to marry Kim, a South Korean man, it was unavoidable (185).

Lee eventually quits her job and lives off savings while investigating full time how to move to Seoul. She calls a helpline in Seoul, which connects her with a broker. The broker presents her with three options to get to South Korea, none of which seem plausible. Lee becomes depressed at her prospects of reaching South Korea, where she could legally live free, instead of hiding illegally in China: “After almost ten years living in China, I was no longer accepting of my indeterminate status. I wanted to resolve it. And I wanted to marry Kim” (186-87).

One day, looking at a map of China in a restaurant, Lee gets an idea: “I don’t need a fake visa. I don’t need to seek asylum in a faraway country. And I don’t need to marry a Chinese man […] all I need to do is get to Incheon International Airport in Seoul” (187).

Lee reasons that she could obtain a visa for Thailand and book a flight to Bangkok via Incheon International Airport in Seoul. Upon reaching Seoul, she could declare that she was North Korean and seek asylum. It is “a route that defied all logic,” but it’s her best chance at reaching South Korea (188). Ok-hee doesn’t have a Chinese ID and opts to take a ferry from Qingdao to Incheon.

Lee tells Kim she’s North Korean and wants to move to Seoul. Kim “was far more upset at my deceiving him than at learning that I came from the enemy country” (190). He encourages her to move to South Korea and proposes leaving after the new year. Lee thinks she “loved him more at that moment than [she] ever did before or after” (190). Lee books her plane ticket and departs January 2008. While flying over Korea, Lee notices that “[t]he border between North and South Korea is narrow, and the distance from Pyongyang to Seoul is barely 120 miles. Yet the two countries are as far away from each other as any in the world” (193).