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

The suitor
I didn’t know how she was calling. We didn’t have a home phone. She
would not have called from her workplace because the Bowibu monitored
the line. Wherever she was calling from, it was dangerous. She was
speaking quickly. She wasn’t angry; she had no time to tell me off, or for
any chitchat.
‘The day after you left, they started a census for the next elections,’ she
said.
I felt myself break out in a sweat.
Every so often the authorities registered voters in order to find out who
was missing and why. I had turned eighteen and was old enough to vote in
North Korea’s ‘elections’, which always returned Kim Jong-il, with a
hundred per cent approval.
‘The inspectors wanted to know where you were. The banjang was with
them. I said you were visiting Aunt Pretty in Hamhung. The banjang
doesn’t know it’s not true, but you know how gossip gets around. There’s
already a rumour that you’re in China.’
It was Chang-ho, my friend the border guard, who’d told her where I’d
gone. ‘She’ll be back soon,’ he’d said cheerfully. He’d always had more
looks than brains. My mother had almost fainted. For the next few days
she’d been in an agony of nerves. She knew she had to do something. So a
week after telling the census inspectors I’d gone to Hamhung, she reported
me missing to the police.
‘The rumour that you’ve been in China may be too strong for me to take
care of if you suddenly reappear. You’re young. You have your future ahead
of you. I don’t want you to live your life with this stain on your record.’
What did that mean? That I could not go back at all?

---

Her voice was tense, urgent.
‘Our situation will be dangerous for a while. Don’t contact us. The
neighbours are watching us. We’ll sell the house and move. I don’t know
where, but you know what I mean.’
I understood. My mother and Min-ho would have to move to a
neighbourhood where people didn’t know us and would accept the story
that the family had a missing daughter.
‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly.
There was a click as she hung up. The line went dead. The call had lasted
under a minute.
I handed the phone back to my uncle in a daze. I was perspiring as if I’d
been for a hard run. There was something desperate about the way she’d
ended the call, without even a goodbye.
When I told my uncle and aunt what she’d said they looked at each other.
‘Well, then, you should stay in China,’ my aunt said gravely. They were
taken aback. They knew I had nowhere to go.
I didn’t want to be a burden, I said, but they reassured me. Things would
work out, somehow. My aunt turned to stare out of the window. They were
still digesting this news.
I am ashamed to admit that my first emotion, when I was alone in my
room, was relief. I was just glad that I didn’t have to go back. I thought life
in Shenyang was a marvellous vacation.
Over the years to come, when my loneliness would become unbearable,
and the full realization of the trouble I had brought upon my mother sank in,
the memory of that relief would make me so guilty that I would lie awake at
night. If I’d known that when reality began to bite, and I began to miss my
mother, Min-ho, and my uncles and aunts in Hyesan so much that the
feeling was almost a physical pain, I would have disobeyed her and gone
straight back to Hyesan.
Now that I was to stay indefinitely in China, I had to learn Mandarin. And I
had the best teacher – necessity. You can study a language for years at
school, but nothing helps you succeed like need, and mine was clear, and
urgent. If I didn’t want the apartment to become my prison, I had to become
as fluent in Mandarin as any Chinese girl my age.

---

My uncle started me off with a kindergarten book that I studied alone
during the day and practised in conversations with him and my aunt at
night. I soon progressed to children’s stories. I watched hours of television
daily. As China has so many ethnic groups for whom Mandarin is a second
language, most TV dramas and news had subtitles in Chinese characters.
Not only was it more interesting to learn this way, but I didn’t have to limit
myself to kids’ shows because I already had a basic grasp of characters,
having learned them at school. I had my father to thank for that. Back then I
hadn’t seen the point of learning them, but my father had been adamant. As
a result, Chinese characters became one of my best subjects.
Being free from all other distractions, I made fast progress in basic
Mandarin. Recognizing a word in a subtitle that I had just learned was
always a Yes! moment of satisfaction for me.
For six months I did little else apart from sneaking out for the occasional
walk, and my days became monotonous. Each morning I felt more and
more homesick. Eventually the day came when I stared out at the rain,
seeing the other apartment towers disappear up into cloud like unfinished
sketches, and it dawned on me.