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

Tragedy at the bridge
I was about to turn fourteen, by the Korean way of measuring age. It was
January 1994, the beginning of an eventful and tragic year that made me
grow up quickly.
I was now almost as tall as my mother. I was fit and active, playing a lot
of sport, which I enjoyed very much – ice skating, becoming good enough
to represent the school in a tournament, and taekwondo indoors when the
weather was cold. I was a good runner, and had run the Hyesan half-
marathon.
My birthday, however, got the year off to a terrible start.
I had long been pushing my luck with my appearance. The teachers had
never taken much notice when I didn’t wear the school uniform – they
knew they could depend on my mother when the school needed cash
donations, or fuel for heating. But I was not a child any more, and my
nonconformity was becoming conspicuous.
The inevitable happened.
A new teacher had joined the school a few months previously. Her name
was Mrs Kang, and she taught physics. She was a young woman, with
small, sharp eyes and a shrill voice. On the day of my birthday she wished
us good morning, and noticed me immediately. Every girl was in school
uniform and all had short hair, no longer than shoulder length. I stood out a
mile in my pink Chinese coat and my perm, and a new pair of tall,
fashionable boots.
Her eyes froze on the boots, and I knew I’d gone too far.
‘Why are you wearing those?’ She was addressing me in front of the
whole class. ‘And for that matter, why aren’t you ever in uniform, like
everyone else?’

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Before I could stop myself the words were out. ‘Why do you have a
problem? My mother doesn’t.’
The room tensed.
‘How dare you talk back to me!’ She was shrieking, and marching up to
my desk. ‘You want to look like some rotten capitalist? Fine!’ She swung
her arm out and slapped me hard across the face.
I put my hand to my cheek. The blood was singing in my ears. I was
shaking, and outraged. My mother had never slapped me. I stormed out of
the class, and ran home in tears.
That day, for the first time in a long time, I yearned for the comfort and
security my father always provided, but he was away again, on a business
trip to China. Each time he came home he seemed more and more tired and
subdued. My mother said he wasn’t sleeping. Something was wrong. He’d
told her he thought he was being watched.
I realize now that having the nerve to wear those boots and perm my hair
was just a symptom of a deeper and general disillusion I was feeling. I was
falling out of love with the ‘organizational life’ and the collective activities
that no one in the country was exempt from. Now that I was fourteen I was
no longer a Pioneer, and had to join the Socialist Youth League. This was
another important milestone. We were told to start thinking of our futures,
and of how we would serve our country. My childhood was over.
Members of the Socialist Youth League had to undergo military training.
I had to put on army fatigues and learn how to shoot with live ammunition
at a firing range in Hyesan. I hated this so much, and my mother was so
nervous about me being surrounded by children with guns, where accidents
could easily happen, and sometimes did, that she got me excused by bribing
the school authorities with cash.
Ideological indoctrination intensified. As model communist youths we
were now expected to deepen our emotional bond with the Great Leader,
and start learning about the Party’s ideology of juche (loosely translated as
‘self-reliance’), which promoted our country’s isolation and rejection of all
foreign influences.
I was now part of a Socialist Youth League ‘cell’ within my secondary
school. Fortunately, I managed to avoid joining the Maintenance of Social
Order Brigade – the vigilantes who monitored the streets for citizens whose

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ideological purity had lapsed. By 1994 there were several additions to the
list of banned items. Now the youths were cracking down on anyone caught
wearing clothing with Western lettering, which was in vogue in China.
By the time spring came there was no avoiding the revolutionary duty we
all had to undertake: the pilgrimage to the sacred sites surrounding Mount
Paektu. The mountains of Ryanggang Province were where Kim Il-sung
fought as a guerrilla against the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. To mark
this significance, three of the province’s eleven counties were renamed after
the great man’s wife, father and uncle. Young Pioneers and Socialist Youth
from all over North Korea visited this ‘outdoor revolutionary museum’,
with its statues and monuments to the Great Leader’s victories, and a
nearby village called Pochonbo, where in 1937 he had led a band of 150
guerrillas in an attack on the local Japanese police station. The battle is
famous in North Korean history as the great turning point in the struggle for
Korean independence, and stunning proof of Kim Il-sung’s tactical genius,
winning victory in the face of overwhelming odds.
Our guide showed us bullet holes on the old police station, circled in
white, and a cell where the Japanese had tortured communist partisans.
None of this impressed me. I just wanted to get out of there. With a
tremendous effort I had to control my face to hide my boredom.
Only when I finally saw, with my own eyes, the preserved log cabin
beneath the pines on the slopes of Mount Paektu, the site of the secret
guerrilla base where Kim Jong-il was born, did I feel like a child again, just
for a moment. I remembered painting the cabin, and the star in the sky, and
the rainbow over Mount Paektu. This magical story still had the power to
move me.
The disaffection I was feeling meant that my relationship with Min-ho
wasn’t getting any better. He was at elementary school in Hyesan. He’d
hear from the boys in his year what a cute girl their older brothers thought I
was. He must have thought they were talking about someone else. I still
wasn’t friends with him in the way I should have been. Deep down I wanted
an older brother to protect me, not a kid I had to watch out for. He was now
seven years old and developing quite an adventurous streak – I strongly
suspected him of making secret forays of his own to the opposite bank of
the river. He could be dogged, too. Given a chore, he’d get on with it. His
school once gave the students an absurd quota of ten kilos each of berries to

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pick. He was the only one to hit the target. In that sense he was quite unlike
me, who would find excuses to avoid physical work and not get my nice
clothes dirty. The one thing we both had in common was the Hyesan
stubbornness, like our mother’s.
A few days after the visit to Mount Paektu I came home from school to find
my mother pacing around the house in a state of high anxiety.
‘Your father’s still not back,’ she said, folding and unfolding her arms.
My father was supposed to have returned from his business trip to China
the previous day. She said he had seemed particularly anxious before
leaving.
Two days went by and still he did not return.
By the third day my mother was a wreck. She could not relax, sleep, eat,
or sit still. She tried several times to contact the bureau of the trading
company where he worked, but each time was stonewalled and told to wait
for information.
Another day passed in a dismal limbo. Min-ho was constantly asking if
someone could check where our father was.
Finally, a work colleague from the trading company called at the house.
The news was not good.
My father had been arrested four days ago at the Friendship Bridge as he
crossed the border back into North Korea.

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Chapter 13