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

The man beneath the bridge
On a hot afternoon when I was seven years old, my mother sent me on
some errand into town. It was unpleasantly humid. A fetid smell came off
the river. There were flies everywhere. I was heading home along the
riverbank when I saw the crowd ahead of me. A dense mass of people had
gathered on the road beneath the railroad bridge. I had an odd intuition that
this was something bad, but I could not resist going to look. I slipped my
way into the crowd to see what was going on. The people near the front
were looking upward. I followed their gaze, and saw a man hanging by his
neck.
His face was covered with a dirty cloth sack and his hands were tied
behind his back. He was wearing the indigo uniform of a factory worker. He
wasn’t moving but his body swayed slightly on a rope tied from the iron
railing of the bridge. Several soldiers were standing about, stony-faced,
with rifles on their backs. The people watching were still and quiet, as if
this were some sort of ceremony. The rope creaked. I caught a reek of male
sweat. The scene confused me because people were watching but no one
was moving and no one was helping the man.
The most random detail stuck in my mind. I remember how the man
standing next to me lit a cigarette and held it down by his side so that the
smoke gathered foggily in his fingers. There was no breeze. Suddenly it
seemed like there was no air to breathe.
I had to get out of there. I almost fought my way out.
When I told my mother what I’d seen she went as pale as a fish. She
turned her back to me and pretended to busy herself with something. Then
she muttered: ‘Don’t ever watch those things.’

---

Over the next few days there was a spate of hangings across the city, and
my mother became unnerved. One of the victims was someone she knew –
a woman named Baek Kyeong-sul. She was accused of seducing a state
bank official in order to steal money, and was sentenced at a people’s trial.
My mother was there. These were not actually trials at all – the charges
were simply read out and the victim executed on the spot. If the accused
were to pass out from terror beforehand, the authorities were meant to
adjourn to another day, so the victim was kept from knowing what was
happening until the last moment.
It was near the start of the rainy season and the skies over Anju had been
rumbling with thunder all morning, which further set my mother’s nerves
on edge. She was pregnant with Min-ho, and not feeling herself.
The woman emerged from the back of a police van and found herself
facing eight judges seated behind a table set up in a public square, which
was surrounded by a cordon of police and a large silent crowd. Her hands
were bound behind her back and her face so blackened and puffy from
beatings that my mother hardly recognized her. She was disorientated and
stared about with an animal terror in her eyes.
In a hail of static, the charges were read out through a loudspeaker.
The woman fell to her knees and began to whimper, saying she was
deeply sorry and ashamed for what she had done. My mother knew that the
woman had a son who was a police officer; the woman must have believed
that her son’s connections would save her.
‘The sentence is death by hanging.’
The woman’s head jerked upward in shock. She looked around at the
crowd as if appealing to them. Behind the police vans was a tall wooden
pole with a noose hanging from it that had been kept hidden from her view.
Police grabbed her at once and frogmarched her to the pole. She struggled
and kicked out and wailed, but the noose was over her head in an instant.
The rope was yanked taut, lifting her up into the air. She writhed and
twitched for a few seconds before going limp.
When my mother returned home, the rain was coming down in lead rods.
She had an odd, vacant stare in her eyes. She said she hadn’t realized until
then that it was as easy to kill a person as to kill an animal. The corpse had
been thrown roughly onto the back of a truck. She’d asked one of the court

---

officials where it was to be buried, and was told it would be taken to a
garbage pit and covered in ash.
That was the detail that unhinged my mother.
Without an ancestral grave for her descendants to honour, the woman’s
spirit would find no rest. It would haunt the living.
That summer my father’s work had been taking him to military bases all
over the country. Without his reassuring presence, my mother was having
problems sleeping after the hangings. At breakfast she’d be hollow-eyed,
saying she’d seen the ghosts of the victims in nightmares. She couldn’t
concentrate on the simplest task. She was badly spooked and wanted to get
out of Anju. I’m not sure whether it was after pressure from her, or simply
an extraordinary coincidence, but she was immensely relieved when my
father announced that we were relocating – to North Korea’s second-largest
city, Hamhung.
We left Anju, but did not go immediately to Hamhung. My parents wanted
the new baby to be born in our home city, Hyesan, so that his birth
documentation would be registered there, the same as the rest of the
family’s. So it was in Hyesan that my little brother was born. North Korean
families have a tradition of naming children with the same first syllable, so
although I was Min-young, my brother became Min-ho. I was seven years
old, and feeling peevish at all the cooing and adoring the new arrival was
receiving, and the stream of family visitors – Aunt Old, Aunt Pretty, Aunt
Tall, Uncle Opium and Uncle Cinema – coming to see him, with
congratulations and armfuls of gifts, but my mother was radiant, and
overjoyed to be surrounded by family members and old neighbours once
again.
There was one family matter, however, that she was not looking forward
to. My father’s parents wanted to meet their new grandson. At this time I
still had not learned the truth about my parentage. I thought my father’s
parents were my blood grandparents, but for reasons obscure to me we had
never got around to meeting them.
Their house had cold wooden floors. I didn’t like being there. Neither, I
sensed, did my mother. My grandfather was a forbidding presence who did
not invite conversation. At dinner, he sat on the floor away from us, at a
separate table. My grandmother served him first. It was a mark of respect,

---

but it seemed to put a distance between everyone. My father, who normally
exuded calm and confidence, was decidedly tense and talking too much to
fill the silences. There was none of the chatter that surrounded us when we
visited my mother’s mother and my uncles and aunts.
I sensed the moment I arrived at their house that these grandparents liked
Min-ho much more than me. The only time their faces lit up was when they
held him, or when he gurgled and cried. With him they were affectionate.
With my mother and me they were cool and civil. I told myself it was
because Min-ho was a boy and these formal, old-fashioned people preferred
grandsons to granddaughters. He was my parents’ only son, which gave him
a position of supreme importance in the family. Over the coming years,
each time we visited, they would have gifts for Min-ho, but not for me. I
realize now that my mother must have known that this was how it would be.
It was why she went out of her way to be generous and bighearted toward
me, to give me pocket money and sweets when I asked for them, and nice
clothes. It was also the reason she presented me, on my ninth birthday, with
the most marvellous gift I ever received in North Korea.

---

Chapter 6