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

‘Rocky island’
A few months before the fire one of my best friends had gathered a close-
knit group of us together in the schoolyard. I tended to make friends with
older girls, from similar backgrounds. This friend was the daughter of the
city’s chief of police. She’d heard that cassette tapes of illegal South Korean
pop music could be bought, very discreetly, from certain dealers.
Soon we were in possession of some of this red-hot criminal contraband.
We were among the first in North Korea to hear these new hits.
A small group of us began secretly meeting up on the weekends in the
houses of one of us, and when parents and siblings were out we’d dance and
sing along to the music of the South Korean singers Ju Hyun-mi and Hyun
Chul, twirling around and jiving our hips, keeping the volume low. We
made up our own moves. In truth we had very little idea of how people
danced to pop. We knew we were not supposed to enjoy the archenemy’s
music, but we did not realize quite how grave our crime was until news
spread around Hyesan that some local women had been sentenced to a
prison camp for partying to South Korean pop. One in their group had
denounced the others.
After that I listened to the tapes alone at home, lying on my bed.
My favourite was a song called ‘Rocky Island’ by the singer Kim Weon-
joong. The rocky island of the title referred to a woman he loved, and the
chorus went:
Even if you don’t like me, I love you so much,
Even if I can’t wake up, I love you so much …
I adored this mush. It was about teenage love, and touched my heart in a
way that filled me with longing. It was changing me, making me feel I was
growing up. I got nothing like this from North Korean music. Our country

---

had pop music of its own, but with songs called ‘Our Happiness in our
General’s Embrace’ or ‘Young People, Forward!’ I cringed to listen to it.
I taught myself to play ‘Rocky Island’ on my accordion. I took care to
play quietly, keeping the door and windows shut, but one morning while I
was practising a hard knock sounded on the front door.
I froze.
One of our neighbours was on the doorstep. He was on his way to work.
He told me he had heard me playing.
A pool of cold fear gathered in the pit of my stomach. Was he going to
denounce me, or just warn me? But to my great surprise he smiled and told
me that hearing that song made him emotional and gave him energy. Then
he got back on his bicycle and rode off. It was such a weird thing to say. I
wonder now if he knew full well it was a South Korean song and was
reaching out to me, giving me a signal, like a secret handshake.
A few months later, by the time the illicit pop cassettes had gone up in
flames with the house, I knew all the songs off by heart. The melody and
lyrics of ‘Rocky Island’, especially, would be a great comfort to me in the
times ahead.
The South Korean pop songs had given me a vague awareness of a
universe beyond the borders of North Korea. If I’d had more awareness in
general I might have spotted clues indicating that the world outside was
undergoing dramatic changes – changes so great that the regime was being
put under stresses it had never experienced before. I was oblivious to the
fact that the Russians had allowed communism to collapse in the Soviet
Union, ‘without even a shot fired’, as Kim Jong-il would put it. But this was
affecting our country in ways that were starting to become impossible for
the regime to conceal. My parents’ jobs and business dealings meant that
we had enough food. I had not yet noticed that the rations of basic food
essentials provided by the Public Distribution System were dwindling or
becoming irregular, nor had I paid attention when the government launched
a widely publicized campaign in 1992 called ‘Let us eat two meals a day’,
which it said was healthier than eating three. Anyone who hadn’t yet
figured out a moneymaking hustle of their own was still depending on the
state for essentials, and they were beginning to suffer.
As it happened, our next move as a family took us to the very edge of
that world outside, as close to it as anyone could go, as if fortune was

---

contriving to make us look outward. Our new house faced directly onto the
bank of the Yalu River itself. I could throw a stone from our front gate over
the water into China.

---

Chapter 11