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

The transition is too much for Lee’s mother and Min-ho. By September of 2010, Lee is thriving and about to begin school at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, but Lee’s mother and Min-ho are struggling to adjust to South Korea:

Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting. It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition (281).

Lee’s mother works many hours at a laborious job. She laments that she never sees the sun and that her life has no meaning in South Korea. Miserable, she wishes to return to North Korea. Lee tries many times to convince her otherwise, and that if she just sticks it out she will find happiness, but it’s to no avail. Lee finally acquiesces: “With a heavy heart I told her I would help her get back there safely, if that’s what she truly wanted” (282).

Min-ho is also struggling. He works on a construction site and misses Yoon-ji and his pleasant life in North Korea. His mother’s intentions to return to North Korea intensify Min-ho’s similar desires. After about six months working in construction, Min-ho quits, in order to apply to university. Min-ho convinces Yoon-ji to defect to South Korea with him, but when he travels to Changbai to retrieve her, not only does she back out, but she also convinces Min-ho to return to North Korea. On the phone, under duress, Lee convinces Min-ho to cancel his North Korean plans. Lee’s mother also abandons her plans to return to North Korea, telling Lee that the loss she would feel being separated from Lee and Min-ho is far worse than her complaints about life in South Korea. 

Ok-hee introduces Lee to PSCORE, the organization otherwise known as “People for Successful Corean Reunification” (286). Through PSCORE, Lee meets Brian, an American graduate student from Wisconsin studying at Yonsei University in Seoul. They fall in love and marry:

Brian was the first to show me a free intelligence, with a humorous skeptical mind that took nothing as given. It made me open unexamined thoughts of my own. He made me realize that the wider world cares about the suffering in North Korea, and is well informed about it, too (287).

Lee’s mother and Min-ho are not immediately fond of Brian. Min-ho hates Brian on sight, calling him “[a]n American bastard”; her mother is simply shocked (288). Lee relates a well-known North Korean saying: “Just as a jackal cannot become a lamb, so American imperialists cannot change their rapacious nature” (288). Lee’s mother and Min-ho have not been outside North Korea long; Lee says she can’t expect their convictions to change so quickly.

The exposure Brian provides Lee emboldens her to speak publicly in defense of defectors and against North Korean human rights abuses:

I started thinking deeply about human rights. One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist. This is also why most people escape because they’re hungry or in trouble–not because they’re craving liberty. Many defectors hiding in China even baulk at the idea of going to South Korea–they’d see it as a betrayal of their country and the legacy of the Great Leader. If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their rights, of individual freedoms and democracy, the game would be up for the regime in Pyongyang. The people would realize that full human rights are exercised and enjoyed by one person only–the ruling Kim. He is the only figure in North Korea who exercises freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, his right not to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed without trial, and his right to proper healthcare and food (289).

Lee observes a change in her mother’s attitude towards North Korea on December 17, 2011, when Kim Jong-il dies. Lee’s mother celebrates his death and does something she had only recently learned: she gives Lee a high-five.

In 2013, Lee is chosen to tell her story at a TED conference, a technology, education, and design organization that “holds annual conferences to present interesting ideas to a broad audience” (290). The talk goes viral and receives a global positive response. Lee is subsequently invited to testify before the United Nations Commission of Enquiry on Human Rights in North Korea, along with other defectors, some of which had been held in gulags. In response, the Central News Agency in Pyongyang proclaims, “One day, the world will learn the truth about these […] criminals. The West will be so embarrassed when they realize they invited these terrorists [to testify]” (290). 

Dick Stolp sees Lee’s TED talk and invites her to Australia. Australian media hear of the story and create a spectacle of it. Lee marries Brian. Her mother and Min-ho attend the wedding and now have a great relationship with Brian. Lee writes:

And so, my mother accompanied us on a journey into the belly of the Yankee imperialist beast, the United States of America. Had her mother, my grandmother, who’d hidden her Workers’ Party card in a chimney from American soldiers sixty years before, and worn it for the rest of her life on a string around her neck, been able to see my mother marvel at the view from the hundredth floor of the John Hancock Center in Chicago, or watch her, as I did, sitting in an American diner, sampling American food, she would not have believed her eyes. She would surely also have been astounded, as Brian and I were, to see her asking a waitress, in English, for another cup of coffee, and humming to herself, gazing across the sunlit canyon of skyscrapers, completely at her ease (293).