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

‘The great heart has stopped beating’
I went to school as usual on the morning of 8 July 1994. Just before
lunchtime, our lesson was interrupted when a teacher entered and told us
that the school was closing for the day. We were all instructed to return
home and turn on the television. This was odd, since there was no daytime
television during weekdays.
Instead of going home, I went with a girl friend to her apartment near the
school. We turned on the television. Shortly after, the famous news anchor
Ri Chun-hui came on, dressed in black. Her eyes were red from crying. She
then announced the impossible. Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, the father of
our nation, was dead. The announcement made on the radio was equally
dramatic: ‘The great heart has stopped beating.’
My friend broke into a wail and couldn’t stop. Her crying affected me a
little, but it was my mind that was moved, not my heart. How could he die?
Incredible as it may sound now, it had never occurred to me, or to many
North Koreans, that this god-king, so powerful that he could control the
weather, might die. He was flawless and almighty. He existed so far above
humankind that a part of me didn’t think he was real. We did not even think
he needed to sleep or urinate. But he’d died.
A door opened in my mind.
He’s an eighty-two-year-old man, I thought. He grew old and weak. He
was human after all. I sat there listening to my friend’s sobs, but my eyes
were dry. I was too raw with grief for my father to spend my tears on the
Great Leader.
The next morning the entire school gathered in front of the school
building. We stood in long, regimented lines. The sky was a milky blue and
the day was warming up uncomfortably. Emotional speeches were made by

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the headmaster and the teachers, all of whom were choking with tears, to a
background accompaniment of piped funeral music. Hour after hour it went
on. I had felt sad at first, but after three hours of standing under the hot sun,
I was becoming thirsty and tired.
Nobody had ordered us to cry. No one had hinted that if we didn’t cry we
would fall under suspicion. But we knew our tears were being demanded.
From all around me came the sounds of sniffing, sobbing and wailing. It
looked as if everyone was beside themselves with grief. My survival
instinct kicked in. If I didn’t cry like everyone else I’d be in trouble. So I
rubbed my face in false distress, surreptitiously spat on my fingertips, and
dabbed my eyes. I made a gasping noise that I hoped sounded like I was
heaving with despair.
After a long time doing this, I felt I could not stand there for much
longer. The sun now was overhead. It was very warm. So I stumbled a little.
The teachers thought I was about to faint, so they put me in the ambulance
that was there on standby. That was a relief.
The next day there was a similar event joined by all the city’s schools at
the Victorious Battle of Pochonbo Memorial in Hyesan Park. This time
several thousand students and teachers joined in the sobbing and the
wailing. The grief seemed to be getting more extreme by the hour. A kind
of hysteria was spreading across the city. Our schooling stopped. The steel
and lumber mills, the factories, shops and markets closed. Every citizen had
to participate in daily mass events to demonstrate their inconsolable sorrow.
Day after day a teacher took us into the hills to pick wild flowers to place
before the bronze statue of Kim Il-sung in Hyesan Park. After a few days,
every flower had been picked, but we had to find them from somewhere. To
turn up with one flower was an insult to the Great Leader.
On one of these searches for flowers a swarm of dragonflies flew
alongside us in the field.
‘Look.’ In a voice full of wonder the teacher said: ‘Even the dragonflies
are sad at the Great Leader’s death.’
She was being serious, and we took the comment uncritically.
After the mourning period, as I’d feared might happen, punishment
awaited those who had shed too few tears. On the day classes resumed the
entire student body gathered in front of the school to hurl criticism and
abuse at a girl accused of faking her tears. The girl was terrified, and this

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time really crying. I felt sorry for her, but my main emotion was relief. As a
fake crier myself, I was just glad no one had seen through my performance.
Many adults across the city were similarly accused and the Bowibu made
a spate of arrests. It wasn’t long before notices began appearing, giving the
time and place for clusters of public executions.
It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions.
Often classes would be cancelled so students could go. Factories would
send their workers, to ensure a large crowd. I always tried to avoid
attending, but on one occasion that summer I made an exception, because I
knew one of the men being killed. Many people in Hyesan knew him. You
might think the execution of an acquaintance is the last thing you’d want to
see. In fact, people made excuses not to go if they didn’t know the victim.
But if they knew the victim, they felt obliged to go, as they would to a
funeral.
He was in his twenties and always seemed to have money. He was
popular with the girls, and had followers among the city’s hoodlums. His
crime was helping people to escape to China and selling banned goods. But
his real offence was to continue his illegal activity during the mourning
period following Kim Il-sung’s death.
He was to be shot along with three others at Hyesan Airport, a common
site for executions. The three men were brought out of a van before a large
crowd waiting in the glaring heat. Immediately, people around me began to
whisper. The popular guy had to be lifted up and dragged to the post by a
group of police, with the tips of his feet scraping along in the dust. He
seemed half dead already.
Each of the three had his head, chest and waist tied to a stake. His hands
and feet were tied together behind the stake. A perfunctory people’s trial
opened, in which the judge announced that the criminals had confessed
their crimes. He asked if they had any last words. He wasn’t expecting a
response, since all three had been gagged and had stones pushed into their
mouths to stop them cursing the regime with their final breath.
Three uniformed marksmen then lined up opposite each of them, and
took aim. The marksmen’s faces were flushed, I noticed. Executioners were
known to drink alcohol beforehand. The noise of the reports ricocheted in
the dry air – three shots, the first in the head; the second in the chest; the
third in the stomach. When the shot hit the popular guy’s head, it exploded,

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leaving a fine pink mist. His family had been forced to watch from the front
row.

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Chapter 15
Girlfriend of a hoodlum
When I turned fifteen I began attending a special class for girls only, where
we learned to knit and keep house. We should have been learning about sex.
All of us were astonishingly ignorant about men, and about the most
basic facts of reproduction. For all its interference in our lives, the Party
was extraordinarily bashful when it came to telling us how life itself was
made. This was despite the fact that a teenage pregnancy could land a girl in
a terrible situation – she’d have to marry immediately to avoid trouble. An
abortion would have been difficult to arrange and probably would not even
have been suggested. Instead she’d have been forced to give the baby up for
adoption, or to a state orphanage.
I believed that I could get pregnant if I kissed a man, or held hands with
him. My girl friends thought the same. The boys’ ignorance of sex was just
as bad. I once saw a group of youths in their early teens near the pharmacy
opposite Hyesan Station blowing up condoms as if they were balloons, and
kicking them about in the street. If someone had told them what those items
were for, they would have run away red-faced.
With such an utter lack of sexual awareness, none of us blossoming girls
showed off our maturing bodies, or flirted, or teased boys at school. The
North Korean brassiere is shaped like a blouse designed to flatten rather
than enhance our breasts. One of the girls in my class had large breasts.
Instead of being envied by the girls, she was teased.
I finally learned about the sexual act from an unexpected source. A girl
friend from school invited me home one afternoon to watch an illegal South
Korean drama on video. When we turned on the recorder, however, we
found that one of the adults of the house had left another type of video
inside. It took me a minute to figure out what I was seeing. The screen filled

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with a jumble of limbs and intimate body parts, accompanied by rhythmic
grunting and moaning. My friend started chuckling at my shocked face. I
had never even seen anyone kiss in a North Korean movie. Pornography, in