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

The women
I spent my first night in Seoul in a general detention room shared with
about thirty North Korean women. The moment I entered, faces turned
toward me, and I knew I would have trouble. Most of the women were
older than me. Their eyes took in my fashionable Shanghai clothes, and I
saw resentment. I had come straight from the airport. They looked as if
they’d spent years behind bars. Straight away, one of them demanded that I
give her my clothes.
About twenty of them, I learned, had indeed just come from prison. They
had escaped on an epic journey across China to Thailand, where they had
been jailed by Thai police before being released to the South Korean
embassy. The experience had brutalized them. They lost no time in making
sure I learned every detail. Some 300 women had been packed into a space
built to hold 100. Often, there wasn’t even room to sit. If they didn’t have
cash to pay for a good spot, newcomers had to sleep next to a stinking
latrine. In these conditions, tempers were continually at boiling point, and
fights broke out. The Thai authorities released only a few detainees each
week, so the wait lasted months. Since pregnant girls were given priority,
some of the nastier women accused them of being queue-jumping sluts
who’d deliberately conceived en route to Thailand. These accounts shocked
me. I had thought that once defectors had made it out of China to another
country they could safely claim asylum. But in many of the women’s
stories, the real nightmare had begun only once they’d left China. The
exceptions were the few women who had escaped via Mongolia, where the
authorities had treated them well, housing them in decent facilities with
their own kitchens.

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Violence was so casual among the women that the NIS guards had
warned them: physical fighting was a criminal offence and would hinder
their progress toward South Korean citizenship. Despite this, heated rows
erupted almost every day in our room.
Almost all of them considered me soft, and a fraud. ‘You would never
have survived Thailand,’ was a common snipe. ‘You’re not North Korean,
are you?’ was another. ‘You look and sound Chinese.’ I let them believe
whatever they wanted – I owed them no explanation – but their attitude
saddened me deeply. They were on the cusp of freedom, yet their negativity
was so caustic it could have dissolved the bars on the window. North
Koreans have a gift for negativity toward others, the effect of a lifetime of
compulsory criticism sessions.
Lesbians were a frequent topic of conversation. In the humid crush of
bodies in the Thai women’s prison, I learned, everything took place in
public, including sex.
The dominant woman in our room was a large, imposing figure with hair
cropped like a soldier’s. The others referred to her as The Bully. She’d
established her primacy in the Thai prison by physically assaulting any
challengers. I was told she was a lesbian, and that her girlfriend was in a
separate room. The woman herself was candid about it, and made her
attraction to me plain.
This was the first time I had ever known that North Korea has gay
people. I am embarrassed to admit that I had thought of homosexuality
purely as a foreign phenomenon, or a plotline in TV dramas. One woman in
the room told me that homosexuals in North Korea are sent to labour
camps, that they suffer alone and cannot even confide in their families. I
had not known this either. In fact, this was the first of many things I was to
learn about my country. My political awakening was only just beginning.
To avoid being bothered I had adopted a brusque manner, and said little.
Unfortunately, this afforded me no protection from The Bully. I can only
imagine how difficult her life had been in North Korea, and what she must
have suffered there; even so, she made my time in this room pure hell. I am
5 feet 2 inches tall and weigh just 100 pounds. She was so much larger than
me she could have flattened me with one blow. Initially I tried to befriend
her, for my own safety. But as the days passed, teasing turned to taunting,

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with an increasingly aggressive, sexual edge. ‘I won’t do anything bad to
you until you’re asleep.’
Twice, a guard came in and told her to cool it. She terrified me, but I
knew the one thing I should not do was show fear. Soon, she was singling
me out almost hourly. She couldn’t leave me alone. I realized I was going to
have to talk back to her, even though she was older than me and, according
to Korean culture, should be respected. Each day her taunts made me more
tense and nervous, but I kept it hidden behind a mask of indifference. No
one stood up to her, not even the older women.
One of the younger of us was a subdued girl called Sun-mi. We struck up
a friendship of sorts. She had been caught three times in China, she told me,
and each time she was sent back to North Korea, where the Bowibu kicked
her and beat her with batons. They asked over and over if she had met any
South Koreans or Christians in China.
‘What are Christians?’ she said. ‘I didn’t know, so they kept hitting me.’
The slightest noise, I noticed, of a door closing or of a chair scraping,
sent Sun-mi into a bunker in her mind.
On an afternoon toward the end of my first week in the women’s room,
Sun-mi was watching a television show I knew she’d been looking forward
to. I was reading a book. The Bully entered, sat directly in front of Sun-mi
so that she blocked her view of the screen, picked up the remote, and
changed channel.
It’s funny how the final straw is invariably a trivial incident.
I heard a voice yelling. It was mine. It was using foul language, which I
had never used before in my life, and it was speaking disrespectfully to an
older person – also a first. In a scene that still seems unreal, I was directing
a torrent of invective at this woman – the worst I could think of, finding
within myself a rage I never knew I possessed. The others gaped open-
mouthed. The Bully looked diminished, suddenly. I didn’t stop until I was
out of breath. In the silence that followed there was just the sound of my
panting.
One of the oldest women there turned to her. ‘This is what your
behaviour’s earned you. The disrespect of a young person. You’ve been
humiliated.’

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After two weeks in the women’s room, a guard came for me. It was time for
my face-to-face interrogation with a special investigator. I was taken to a
windowless cell, and kept in solitary. It was grim, but I was relieved to be
by myself. The cell had a wooden desk, two chairs and a metal-frame bed,
with a blue woollen blanket and a small white pillow. It was five steps long
and four steps wide. A bare bulb cast an anaemic glow; a tiny surveillance
camera watched me from one corner. The door was kept locked. Beside it
was a telephone that connected me to a young guard who would unlock the
door when I needed the bathroom.
On the second morning, a middle-aged man in a suit entered, looked at
me, glanced at his file, and left. A minute later, he returned.
‘You’re twenty-eight?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your name’s Park Min-young?’
‘Yes.’
‘And your present age is twenty-eight?’
‘Yes, that’s correct.’
This man was my interrogator. I wondered why he’d double-checked and
looked confused. The information must have been there in his hand.
He asked me to write out my life story in as much detail as I could. Some
people submit a thick wad of paper, like an autobiography, he said. This
document would form the basis for his questions. He also asked me to draw
a map of the part of Hyesan where I had lived. I spent a long time doing this
and put in as much detail as I could remember.
Often during the questioning he went silent and stared deep into my eyes,
tilting his head slightly as if searching for something. It was unnerving. It
crossed my mind that this was some bizarre form of flirting. After what the
women had told me about the Thai prison, nothing would have surprised
me. I tried to keep a blank face. I didn’t want to give him any ideas.
I remained in solitary for a week. At first, I’d felt intimidated by my
interrogator, but after a few days I looked forward to seeing him every
morning at nine. He was my only human company. During one of my long
afternoons alone, for something to do I practised my Chinese calligraphy,
writing down my thoughts and feelings on a couple of pages. I described
the oppressive bleakness of the cell walls and stated my conviction that a
room was incomplete without a window. Then I screwed the paper up and

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threw it in the trash can. The next morning, the young guard came into my
cell.
‘Did you write this?’ he asked. He was holding my crumpled sheet of
paper.