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

Geun-soo is depressed over me? ‘Could I talk to him?’
He was weeping when he came to the phone. He sounded drunk and
couldn’t form his words properly.
‘Please come back,’ he said. ‘I still have the honeymoon tickets. We can
go away.’
These were the first strong sentiments I’d ever heard from him. I felt very
sorry for him, and dismayed. I’d had to abandon him before he was able to
figure out how he felt about me. But it was too late. I could not go back.
The clearest desire in my mind was to reconnect with my family. He and his
mother would be a barrier to that.
I kept saying over and over how sorry I was. I had humiliated him and
insulted his family.
When the call ended, I slumped against the wall next to the pay phone
and buried my face in my hands. I had brought great misfortune upon
Geun-soo.
Our Respected Father Leader commands that we respect our elders and
honour our families. I have noticed that Comrade Mi-ran does nothing but
hurt the people closest to her. Would she agree that she is a person of bad
character?
Yes. That’s what I was. A bad person.
I had no one to talk to, no one who might have told me that, for my own
wellbeing, the choice I had made did not make me bad.
Instead, this scathing self-assessment sank in, and a part of me turned
cold. When I was crying in my uncle’s apartment, missing my mother, my
heart was there. But now something inside me had hardened and the tears
had stopped.
I no longer liked myself.
I swore that I would do penance for the harm I had done Geun-soo. For
weeks I thought about how I might do this. In the end, I decided that my
punishment would be never to marry. I would not add to the hurt and insult
I had caused him by marrying someone else.

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Whenever people asked when I would marry, I got into the habit of
saying: ‘Never. It’s not important to me.’

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Chapter 25
The men from the South
In January 2001, two sleek young men came into the restaurant at
lunchtime. They were friendly and asked me about Shenyang. They had
perfect teeth, I noticed.
That day we were short-staffed so I was waiting tables. I was laying out
banchan dishes in front of them when one of them spoke in a low voice.
‘You wouldn’t know any North Koreans, would you?’
I avoided their eyes. ‘Why do you want to know?’
They put their business cards on the table and told me they were
filmmakers from one of South Korea’s main television stations.
‘We’re making a documentary,’ one of them said. ‘We want to find a
North Korean defector trying to reach South Korea. We’ll pay the brokers’
fees to make sure they get there, and any other expenses.’
I was taken aback. The North and the South were mortal enemies. The
Korean War had ended in 1953 with a ceasefire, not a peace treaty. The two
countries were still at war.
‘How can a North Korean go to South Korea?’ I said. This was the first
I’d heard of such a thing.
‘Many come these days,’ the man said.
I told them I’d ask around. I walked away intrigued.
Am I the one you’re looking for?
Each day the two men came in for lunch. I was seriously considering
telling them my secret, but my instinct was urging extreme caution. This
could be a trap. Before I did anything rash I needed some facts. I told Ji-
woo, my dorm friend, what the South Koreans had said to me, sounding as
casual as I could. What she said in response came as a massive surprise.
South Korea considered all North Koreans to be South Korean citizens, she

---

said. Any who succeeded in reaching Seoul were given a South Korean
passport and quite a large allowance to help them resettle.
This got me thinking. I knew from my uncle and aunt that South Korea
was not the ‘hell on earth’ portrayed by the Party’s propaganda. My uncle
had visited the South on business and told me it was even richer and freer
than China. I thought he was exaggerating. In truth I had given very little
thought to South Korea. I had been so focused on learning Mandarin that I
had not even watched South Korean soap operas on the cable channels. I
also still believed that the North’s problems were all down to the Yankee-
backed UN sanctions. Going to pro-Yankee South Korea would be a
betrayal of my own country, wouldn’t it? What’s more, I remembered that
on the rare occasions someone had defected to North Korea, the Party
propagandists had held a press conference. If I defected to the South,
wouldn’t I have to do the same, in front of a bank of microphones and
flashing cameras? That could get my family into terrible trouble.
I was still undecided when, after a week, the two South Koreans stopped
coming to the restaurant. They must have found what they were looking for.
Uncle Opium had once told me you get three chances in life. I couldn’t
shake the feeling that I had just let a major one go flying past my ears.
That evening I went on a night out with the dorm girls. We ate skewered
lamb from a market food stall, then went to a café for bubble-milk tea. The
girls chatted about their private lives, family worries, boyfriend problems.
Each one of them wanted a better life. One of them, a Korean-Chinese girl
from Yanbian, gave me a sideways look and said: ‘You never say much
about yourself. You’re not an orphan, are you?’
For months I had dreaded the curiosity of others, but after the missed
opportunity with the filmmakers I was feeling reckless. It was my extreme
caution that had caused me to miss the chance. I was sick of lying.
‘No, not an orphan,’ I said. I had a habit of pausing before I spoke, to
give myself a second to weigh the consequences. This time I came straight
out with it. ‘I’m from North Korea.’
The girls looked at each other. Ji-woo, the most savvy of the group, said
she’d had no idea. Suddenly they were intensely interested. So I told them
my story. We were in the café until closing time.

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For the first time I became curious about other fugitive North Koreans in
Shenyang. So many were in hiding that every few months the police
launched a city-wide sweep to catch them and send them back. At a
birthday party for one of the waitresses, I heard a girl whose Mandarin was
so halting that I guessed she was North Korean. I introduced myself.
Gradually and discreetly, I got to know several other North Korean girls, all
of them, like me, hiding in plain sight.
The girl I’d met at the birthday party was called Soo-jin. She had the oval
face, large eyes and full, bow-shaped red lips considered very beautiful in
North Korea. She too was a waitress. I began to enjoy long chats with her
on the phone once or twice a week. She was living in Shenyang with her
South Korean boyfriend. Living with a South Korean boyfriend. I was
scandalized when she told me that, and thrilled.
But after a few weeks her calls suddenly stopped. When I called her
phone, I got a number discontinued tone. I sensed disaster in it.
Six months later I thought I spotted Soo-jin in the street in Koreatown
after dark, but I wasn’t sure. I called her name, and a face turned toward me
with a hunted look, like an animal caught ferreting in trash. It was her. Her
features had grown thin and drawn. I could see her shoulder bones poking
through her T-shirt.
Far from being happy to see me, her eyes were darting about, as if she
thought she was being followed. She said the police had come to her
apartment and asked for her ID. She didn’t have one. They arrested her and
processed her at the Xita Road Police Station, then deported her back to
North Korea. She was imprisoned for three months in a Bowibu holding
camp. Hygiene was non-existent and each meal consisted of ten kernels of
corn. New arrivals quickly contracted diarrhoea, which, with starvation
rations, killed many in a matter of days.
On her release she was made to sign a document vowing never to escape
again. She knew that if she was caught a second time, she would not
survive the punishment. Scars from kicks and beatings were livid on her
legs. She said that China was too dangerous for her now. She was
determined to get to South Korea.
Soo-jin was desperate to keep a low profile. She was convinced that she
had been betrayed by a mutual North Korean friend of ours in Shenyang

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called Choon-hi, who she believed had been let off by the Chinese police in
exchange for becoming an informer.
Soo-jin squeezed my hand. ‘Soon-hyang, be careful.’
I watched her go. I never saw her again.
What Soo-jin told me spooked me and made me paranoid about informers.
How many knew I was North Korean? I kept going over and over this.
Whom had I told?
Even then, I didn’t see disaster coming.
A week later, the receptionist at the restaurant called my cellphone at
about ten in the morning. It was my day off and I was in the dormitory. Two
good-looking young men were in the restaurant, she said, sounding upbeat.
‘They’ve asked for you by name.’
My heart leapt. No one ever asked for me by name, but I had given my
name to the two South Korean filmmakers.
‘Ask them to wait,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right there.’
I put on some makeup, and rushed to the restaurant.
At that time of morning there were few customers. The receptionist
pointed to a table. Two men I did not recognize stood up.
‘Soon-hyang?’ one of them said.
‘Yes.’
They opened their jackets to reveal their warrant badges.
‘Police. You’re coming with us.’

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Chapter 26