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

kong da, kong kong da. I’d start hearing the ringtone in my dreams and
even imagine I’d heard it while I was awake. I would constantly check the
phone. Then, weeks later, it would ring. My relief was overwhelming.
‘Power cuts,’ my mother might say. ‘I couldn’t charge the phone.’
This happened regularly, but each time I could never suppress my panic
and paranoia.
On a weekend evening in spring 2004, I was enjoying a long chat with my
mother. I had my feet up. The television was on in the background as usual,
with the volume low. As we talked, I was distracted by news footage on the
screen. Ok-hee was with me in the apartment. She noticed it too.
‘Omma, I’ll call you back,’ I said.
I grabbed the remote and turned the sound up.
The footage replayed in slow motion. A group of men, women and
children were making a desperate bid to rush past some Chinese guards and
enter a gate. It was the South Korean embassy in Beijing. Somehow they
had distracted the guards, who were now lunging toward them and grabbing
them to prevent them reaching South Korean diplomatic territory. One or
two made it through, but a guard caught one woman by her coat and pulled
her to the ground. The violence he used was shocking. He picked her up by
her waist and carried her off. One of her shoes was left on the ground.
The news anchor said they were North Koreans seeking political asylum.
Asylum?
Ok-hee and I stared at each other.

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Chapter 33
The teddy-bear conversations
Over the following months, the television news showed similar events
unfolding outside other countries’ embassies in Beijing, and even at a
Japanese school. Sometimes none of the North Koreans made it through the
gates, and they were hauled away by police and plainclothes agents. The
howls of despair on their faces affected me deeply. These desperate bids for
asylum were being filmed by a human-rights organization to highlight
China’s inhumanity in refusing to treat escaped North Koreans as asylum
seekers.
I thought of my uncle’s tirade against North Korea when I’d arrived in
his apartment in Shenyang over six years ago, and the bizarre truths he’d
told me about the Korean War, and the private life of Kim Jong-il. I’d
refused to believe him. Ever since, I’d closed my mind to the reality of the
regime in North Korea. Unless it directly affected my family, I had never
wanted to know. I thought the reason people escaped was because of
hunger, or, like me, out of an unexamined sense of curiosity. It had never
occurred to me that people would escape for political reasons. I
remembered the two South Korean filmmakers I’d met in Shenyang, who’d
offered to pay the brokers’ fees for a defector trying to get to South Korea.
I’d had cold feet because I thought I’d be treated as an exotic arrival from
the North who’d have to give a press conference. Until now I’d had no idea
of the sheer numbers – thousands each year – trying to escape, or that most
of them did not want to live in China, but in South Korea.
The cellphone had transformed my life by reconnecting me with my
family. Now, so too did the internet, linking me to what the world was
saying about North Korea. I started discreetly researching online from
cybercafés. My searches were narrow in scope to begin with. The first

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intriguing fact I learned was that so many North Koreans were now
reaching South Korea that none of them had been asked to give a press
conference in years.
I had been in Shanghai more than two years now. In that time I’d learned
a great deal about South Korea from my colleagues. I regularly watched
South Korean TV dramas. Some of them were such addictive viewing that
Ok-hee and I would dash home to my tiny apartment and watch them
together, lying on my roll-out mat. But I had never imagined myself in
South Korea, until I saw these desperate people storming embassy gates.
They were risking their lives. The reward had to be worth it.
The more I thought about it, the more the idea of living among South
Koreans excited me. I was Korean and so were they. In China, however
fluent my Mandarin, however official my ID, I would always be, at heart, a
foreigner. This soon became the main topic of conversation between Ok-hee
and me. The idea had taken a powerful hold over her, too. Could we go to
South Korea together?
I knew I would do nothing so heroic as storming an embassy gate. With my
Korean-Chinese ID I thought I could simply apply for a visa and fly to
Seoul. From reading online, however, I learned that a visa wouldn’t be easy.
The South Koreans would need to be convinced that I would return to
China and not stay illegally.
Ok-hee had contacts with other North Koreans living secretly in
Shanghai. (She was the sole North Korean I knew in the city.) It was she
who found a broker. This man had a simple suggestion: she and I should
pose as South Koreans who’d lost our passports. We would report the loss
to the police, then go to the South Korean embassy in Beijing to apply for
new ones. The broker would prepare the necessary documents. He wanted
an advance of 10,000 yuan (about $1,400) from each of us on his fee. After
a long discussion in a café in Longbai over cups of melon soya milk tea Ok-
hee and I decided we’d go for it. We gave each other a high five. I went to
bed that night with a sense of destiny.
The next day, however, as we stood in line at the bank to withdraw our
money for the broker’s fee, Ok-hee was even quieter than usual, and
continually twirling her hair. I knew her well enough to see that she had the
jitters.

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‘I’m not sure this is going to work,’ she said. ‘The fortune-teller told me
it was not in my fortune this time to leave the country.’
‘It’ll work,’ I said. I felt confident.
‘I think we only have a fifty per cent chance. It could go either way.’
Her fear was that the broker would either take our money and disappear,
or the documents he produced would look so phoney it would be too risky
to use them.
I told her she was being paranoid. I thought our chances were good. If all
went well, we’d soon begin a new life. I could still call my family, using the
Chinese network, and even travel to Changbai when I had a South Korean
passport. Naively, I thought that if we didn’t like South Korea, I might still
eventually return home. I was still young. My mother was still trying to
persuade me back.
In fact, Ok-hee’s fears and superstitions were well founded. Fortune, as I
would soon find out, was not smiling on this venture.
I started to wind up my life in Shanghai, and get rid of my possessions.
There was something final about this that I found unsettling, and it was
mixed with deep feelings of guilt. I knew that my mother would be dead set
against me going to South Korea.
Over the following days, these thoughts sent my spirits into a downward
spiral. It was the result of a routine medical check-up that tipped me into
depression. I was told my blood sugar level was dangerously high. In my
despondent frame of mind I became convinced that I was about to die. Like
the time I was in the hospital in Shenyang after the attack, I thought that if I
died now, alone in my apartment, no one would know who I was. My
mother would spend the rest of her life trying to find me. The little money I
had in the bank would never reach her.
I stopped thinking about South Korea. I stopped caring about anything. I
lay awake on my mat at night, watching the fluorescent lights blinking in
the new office block built barely five yards from my apartment. My
thoughts turned suicidal. I did not feel able to talk to anyone, not even to
Ok-hee.
I bought a small teddy bear for company. Because I worried that I might
faint and die while I was eating, I sat the bear at the table where he could
watch over me. At first, we didn’t talk. But one evening after work I started

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talking to him as if he were a baby, in long babbling conversations. To ward
off the loneliness of the apartment I set a timer so that the television came
on thirty minutes before I got home. I criticized myself for wasting money
on electricity, then ignored the criticism. Throughout that month, convinced
that I was about to die alone without ever saying goodbye to my family, I
was utterly broken.
I decided to blow my savings on expensive clothes. Just for once, I’ll live