The Girl with Seven Names: a north Korean Defector’s Story

Boomtown
Our new home in Hyesan was another house allocated to us by the military.
Our neighbours were other military officials and their families. The
accommodation was good by North Korean standards. It had two rooms and
a squat toilet. The heating in the floor was piping hot, making the glue
beneath the reja – a kind of linoleum – give off a smell like mushrooms, but
the building was poorly insulated. In winter we’d have warm backsides and
freezing noses. We had to boil water when we wanted a hot bath.
My mother did her usual makeover, replacing the wallpaper and the
furniture. She didn’t mind. She was thrilled to be back in Hyesan and
reconnected with our family social circles. We felt settled.
Hyesan had been booming in the years we’d been away. The illicit trade
coming over the border from China seemed greater than ever and my
mother wanted to get in on some deals. She had found a job with a local
government bureau, but her salary, as with all state jobs, was negligible.
She wanted to make serious money, like Aunt Pretty, Uncle Money and
Uncle Opium.
It seemed that everything was available in Hyesan – from high-value
liquor and expensive foreign perfume to Western-brand clothing and
Japanese electronics – at a price. Smugglers brought goods from the county
of Changbai, on the Chinese side, across the narrow, shallow river for
collection by a Korean contact, or across the Changbai–Hyesan
International Bridge (known to locals as the Friendship Bridge). Illegal
trade across the bridge required bribing the North Korean customs officials;
smuggling across the river required bribing the border guards. When the
river froze solid in winter smugglers crept over the ice; the rest of the year

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they waded across at night, or in broad daylight, if the guards at key points
had been bribed and were in on the deal.
We could see the prosperity. This would not have been at all obvious to
outsiders, since North Koreans are poor and do not wish to draw the state’s
attention. Anyone looking across from China would have seen a city in
deep blackout at night, with a few kerosene lamps flickering in windows,
and a colourless, drab place by day, with people cycling joylessly to work.
But the signs were all around us. The special hotel for foreigners, where our
parents sometimes took Min-ho and me for an overnight stay as a treat (the
manager was a friend of my mother’s), was always full with Chinese
business people. In the morning we’d join them for breakfast but never talk
to them, in case any informers or Bowibu agents were listening. The city’s
dollar store, opposite Hyesan Station, had plenty of customers spending
hard currency on goods not obtainable anywhere else, and certainly not
through the state’s Public Distribution System. Going there was like being
admitted into a magical cavern. I couldn’t believe how brightly the goods
were packaged – foreign-made cookies and chocolates in wrappers of silver
and purple that made them irresistibly tempting, and fruit juices – orange,
apple, grape – in clear bottles marked with Western letters, that came from
some faraway land of plenty. Outside the store, a few illegal
moneychangers hung about like flies. My mother walked straight past them
and would have nothing to do with them, saying they swindled people by
wrapping newsprint into a bundle and putting a few genuine notes on top,
knowing that anyone illegally trying to change money couldn’t complain.
The state beauty parlour was always fully booked, with women having their
hair permed (not dyed, which was prohibited), and the state restaurants
were doing a roaring trade. Most significantly, business was brisk and busy
at the open-air local markets.
Markets occupy an ambiguous place in North Korean society. The
government tried several times to ban them altogether, or narrowly restrict
their opening times, since Kim Jong-il, who was now effectively running
the country for his father, declared that they were breeding grounds for
every type of unsocialist practice. (He was right about that.) But he couldn’t
abolish them while the Public Distribution System kept breaking down or
failing to provide people with sufficient essentials. Occasionally, during
some crackdown ordered by Pyongyang, the markets would be closed

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without notice, only to sprout up again within days, like sturdy and fertile
weeds. The rules for market traders changed as often as the wind. For many
years it was illegal to sell rice because rice was sacred and in the gift of the
Great Leader. But when I went to the markets, quite regularly with my
mother, rice was for sale, along with meat, vegetables, kitchenware, and
also Chinese fashions, cosmetics and – concealed beneath mats at enormous
personal risk to vendor and buyer alike – cassette tapes of foreign pop
music. Goods from Japan were considered the best quality. Next were South
Korean products (with the archenemy’s labels and trademarks carefully
removed), and lastly Chinese.
My mother wasted no time. Soon she had made contacts among the
Chinese traders just across the river in Changbai and was arranging for
goods to be sent over, which she would sell on, and make a nice profit. Her
chief trading partners were a Mr Ahn and a Mr Chang, both Korean-
Chinese, who had houses on the Chinese side of the riverbank.
It was in connection with my mother’s thriving business activities that she
took me to a fortune-teller in the second year after we arrived back in
Hyesan.
We woke extremely early, while it was still dark. My father and Min-ho
were asleep. It was spring, and vivid green shoots were starting to sprout
along the empty dirt streets. We hurried to the station to catch the first
commuter train for Daeoh-cheon, the village where the fortune-teller
woman lived.
My mother knew a number of these mystics and spent a lot of money on
them. I was irritable about being woken so early, but she told me that the
channel to the spirits is clearest at dawn. ‘She’ll be more accurate.’
My mother also wanted to beat the queue. Sometimes she’d arrive to find
the fortune-teller out. A neighbour would say she’d been driven away in a
Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows, for a discreet session with a high-
ranking Party cadre. North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in
possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is
the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers,
too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard
that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice.

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The fortune-teller’s house was very old. Single-storey, and wood-framed
with walls of mud and a thatched roof. I hadn’t known that such houses still
existed. It was at a tilt and smelled damp. The lady was elderly, with thick,
dishevelled hair. She was raising a granddaughter on her own.
‘I have a question about trade,’ my mother said in a whisper. ‘My
Chinese partner has goods. I wish to know when to receive them.’
In other words, she wanted to know the best day to smuggle and not get
into trouble. Sometimes, if the date was already fixed, my mother would
pay for a ceremony to ward off bad luck.
The lady spilled a fistful of rice on the tabletop and used her fingernails
to separate individual grains into portions. She examined this little pile
intensely, then she started to speak in a rapid patter. I couldn’t tell if she was
addressing us, or the spirits. She spoke of the day on which it was most
propitious to receive the goods.
‘When you leave the house that morning, you must step out with your
left foot first. Then spread some salt around and pray to the mountain spirit
for good fortune.’
My mother nodded. She was satisfied.
‘This is my daughter,’ she said, and told her the time and date of my
birth. The fortune-teller looked straight at me in a way that unnerved me.
Then she closed her eyes theatrically.
‘Your daughter is clever,’ she said. ‘She has a future connected with
music. She will eat foreign rice.’
As we walked back to the station the sun was coming up and the air was
beautifully clear and crisp. The crags at the tops of the mountains were
etched sharply against the sky but a white mist lingered in the foothills
among the pines. My mother walked slowly down the dirt track, holding my
hand. She was thinking about the prediction. She interpreted ‘foreign rice’
to mean that I would live overseas. Then she sighed, realizing she’d
probably wasted her money. No ordinary North Koreans were allowed to
travel abroad, let alone emigrate. That’s how it was with fortune-tellers.
They told you things and you chose what you believed. But despite my
scepticism about predicting dates for smuggling, I was more accepting of
what the woman had said about me. I too thought my future was in music. I
had been learning the accordion from a private tutor and was good at it.
Accordion playing is popular in North Korea, a legacy from the end of the

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Second World War when our half of the peninsula was filled with Russian
troops of the Soviet Red Army, although the Party never acknowledged any
foreign influence on our culture. I thought the old woman’s prophecy meant
that I would have a career as a professional accordionist and marry
someone from another province. Maybe I would live in Pyongyang. That
would be a dream come true. Only privileged people lived there. I
fantasized about this for weeks until an event occurred that obliterated my
daydreams and cast a shadow over my whole childhood.

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Chapter 8