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

Sunlight on dark water
A group of men from Pyongyang were waiting for my father at the bridge.
They were officers of the Military Security Command. This organization is
separate from the Ministry of State Security, the Bowibu. It is a secret police
that watches the military.
Another ten days went by with no news. We knew only that he had been
detained while investigations were made into his business conduct. To the
outside world my mother presented the hardened, no-nonsense mask she
always wore. At home, she became brittle and tearful. She began to steel
herself for the worst. She knew that few people ever emerged from such
detentions unharmed, or even emerged at all. I had never seen her like this.
It was while she was in this restless state that she told me a family story I
had never heard before. It concerned the marriage of Aunt Old, my
mother’s eldest sister. She had been married before I was born and had three
children I did not know about. Her husband had been a Korean-Chinese
man who had escaped the Cultural Revolution in China in the late 1960s to
what he thought was a communist utopia in North Korea. My mother said
he was a kind man with a very forthright and honest nature. My
grandmother opposed the marriage because he was a foreigner, but Aunt
Old said she would rather die if she couldn’t be with him. And so they were
married.
After a few years he got sick of the propaganda and said he wanted to
return to China. Aunt Old refused to leave home, so he went alone, and was
stopped at the border. Had he told the border police he simply wanted to
visit family in China and return to North Korea, he might have got off
lightly. But his honesty was his undoing. He told his interrogators that he
had become disenchanted. They sent him straight to a political prison camp

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without trial. My grandmother then stepped in to protect the family and
fixed it so that Aunt Old could divorce her husband and put the three
children up for adoption. This way, the family could avoid the guilt by
association with a ‘criminal element’ that would degrade their songbun and
blight the family for generations. This is a common arrangement when a
spouse is imprisoned.
The three children were each adopted by good families. One of them
became an army officer. Aunt Old met him when he had grown up, and told
him the story. He broke down and hugged her, swearing that he didn’t care
about his family background and from then on wanted his real mother and
siblings to be his family.
This son travelled to the prison camp to try and meet his father, but was
turned away at the gates. There are two kinds of prison in the gulag. One is
for prisoners sentenced to ‘revolutionary re-education through labour’. If
they survive their punishment they will be released back into society, and
monitored closely for the rest of their lives. The other is a zone of no return
– prisoners there are worked to death. The son feared that his father was in
the second type, and was still there.
This story distressed me a lot. On the rare occasions we mentioned
anyone we knew who had fallen foul of the authorities we did so without
analysis or judgement, or any comment on the fairness of the punishment.
We just described the bare facts. That’s how North Koreans talk. But now
my mother was speaking emotionally of how the gulag had affected our
own family.
No one spoke openly of the gulag. We knew of it only through terrifying
rumours and whispers. We did not know where the camps were located or
what conditions there were like. All I knew about was Baekam County, a
less extreme place of punishment not far from Hyesan. We knew a family
who’d been deported there from Pyongyang because the father had rolled a
cigarette using a square of cut newspaper without noticing that the Great
Leader’s face was printed on the other side. His whole family was sent to
the mountains for a backbreaking life of potato digging on the 10.18
Collective Farm.
Now I was picturing my father being sent to a prison camp. A great fog
swirled in my head. The resentment I’d felt towards him was becoming a
mess of confused feelings.

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While we were waiting for news, five uniformed military officials
hammered on our door one evening, entered without removing their boots,
and ransacked our home in search of cash and valuables my father had
allegedly hidden. They ripped open the walls, tore up the floor and pulled
down the ceiling. They left, empty-handed, after an hour of destruction. My
mother and I were in shock as we stared about at the damage. Our house
was completely wrecked.
About two weeks after my father had disappeared, my mother was told that
he had suddenly been released to the hospital in Hyesan. When she saw him
she was overwhelmed, and began sobbing freely. His appearance shocked
her. He was haggard, with sunken eyes, but he tried to give her a grin. He
seemed much older.
The investigation into him was still ongoing, he said. He’d been accused
of bribery and abuse of position. A more likely reason was that he had
fallen out of political favour, or had put some senior cadre’s nose out of
joint. He had been interrogated many times, and ordered to write his
confession over and over again. Each time, the interrogator ripped it up in
his face and told him to start again.
My mother did not ask what else they had done to him. She did not want
him to relive the trauma, but she could see that he had been badly beaten,
and had not been allowed to sleep. At the hospital he slept for days with the
covers pulled over his head.
My father kept everything bottled up, as many North Korean men did.
They could not talk about their feelings, or mention the fear and stress they
were under. It was the reason I would see terrible drunken fights breaking
out among men in Hyesan during the public holidays. My father never
drank alcohol, but he turned his feelings inward. He had lost a lot of weight,
and had become very listless. We realize now that he had fallen into a
severe depression, an illness that is not acknowledged in North Korea. He
spent about six weeks in the hospital in Hyesan.
My mother needed Min-ho and me out of the way while she tended to my
father, visiting him daily for hours at the hospital. We were sent to the east
coast to stay with Uncle Cinema, his wife, and their children, my cousins.
One afternoon, Uncle Cinema came home early. Min-ho and I were in the
living room with our aunt and our cousins. He took his shoes off and

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stepped into the house, closing the door carefully behind him.
‘Min-young, Min-ho, I am afraid I have bad news,’ he said.
He looked grave and we knew something terrible had happened. He told
us that our mother had telephoned him at his office. She said that our father
had fallen very ill in hospital, and had died.
Min-ho was devastated. He ran into the bedroom and shut the door.
I walked numbly down to the beach and gazed out into the East Sea.
From behind the clouds sharp rays made fields of light on the dark water. A
few distant, rusted shipping boats were on the horizon. The sea was calm.
The resentment I had nurtured towards my father had put such a wall
between us. Why had I done that? I grew up understanding the importance
of family and blood ties. Discovering that my blood did not come from him
had shocked me and confused me. I had frozen him out. I was hurt by a
secret that had been kept from me.
I thought of how he’d met my mother, all those years ago on the train to
Pyongyang. He had loved her so much that he had married her even though
she was divorced and had a child by another man. Memories came back to
me, dozens of them, of our happy times chasing dragonflies in fields near
Anju, and of our family life in Hamhung, of the fun we’d all had together
watching my mother eat naengmyeon, of how proud I’d been of him when
he came to my Pioneer ceremony, how safe I’d always felt with him.
I stared at the sea and the scale of my folly came home to me.
He’d raised me lovingly, as his own child. My selfish feelings had
stopped me seeing how much I loved him.
I fell to my knees on the beach and cried bitter tears, clawing with my
hands at the sand.
After what seemed like hours, as the sun was setting, I walked back to
the house. I knew that I would regret for the rest of my life the way I’d
behaved towards my father. Knowing that he’d died thinking that I resented
him would only make my bereavement more painful over the years ahead.
My father’s death was a shock to everyone who knew him. He was still a
young man, barely into his forties. No one was with him when he died.
But before my mother had time to react to the blow of his death, she
received another devastating piece of news. The hospital death certificate
stated that he had committed suicide by overdosing on Diazepam (Valium).

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This drug was readily available in the markets. He must have gone out and
bought it himself.
In North Korea, suicide is taboo. Not only is it considered gravely
humiliating to the surviving family members, it also guarantees that any
children left behind will be reclassified as ‘hostile’ in the songbun system
and denied university entrance and the chance of a good job. Suicide in
Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it
as a form of defection. By punishing the surviving family, the regime
attempts to disable this ultimate form of protest.
My mother was jolted out of her grief. She acted at once to protect us all.
She had to get the hospital documentation changed very quickly, and this
was a delicate and difficult task, but our futures depended on it. My
mother’s tact and diplomacy succeeded. It cost her nearly all her hard-
currency savings, but she did it. She bribed the hospital authorities. They
agreed to change the cause of my father’s death to ‘heart attack’. The
funeral was conducted in haste, before any questions were asked, and
before Min-ho and I had arrived back from the coast. We did not even get a
chance to say goodbye to him. Even worse, my father’s parents had cursed
my mother angrily at the funeral, telling her that she had brought ill fortune
upon their family.
As a final, gratuitous humiliation, the investigating military authority
wrote to inform my mother that my father had been formally dismissed
from his post.
After my father’s death I felt much closer to Min-ho. It was as if I was
seeing him with clear vision for the first time in years. The stupid delusion
that had made me withdraw from my father was the same one that had
stopped me feeling close to my own sibling. I started to see him for who he
was – my brother, as bereaved and as heartbroken as I was.
I no longer felt the same about our house on the river. Within a short time
of moving there we’d had a tragedy in the family. It made me think the
curse on the place was real, and potent.
We were still trying to come to terms with what had happened, when an
event occurred that united the entire country in grief – in such wailing,
brow-beating scenes of mass hysteria as the world’s media had never before
seen. It was an event that reverberates in North Korea to this day.

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Chapter 14