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

‘By the time you read this, the five of us will no
longer exist in this world’
My mother came home from work looking tired and distracted. She hadn’t
been sleeping much since my father had died and had more lines beneath
her eyes and around her mouth. It had been months since I’d seen her smile.
But at least she was able to provide for us through her small business deals.
We had food and money. Her job at the local government bureau also meant
that she had access to farm produce managed by her office. This gave her
an opportunity for graft that she was expected to exercise. Soon after Kim
Il-sung’s death the government had stopped paying salaries. It continued to
give out ration coupons through the workplace, but these were becoming
increasingly worthless. For some reason there were fewer and fewer goods
to exchange for them.
She’d brought home a letter received by one of her colleagues. It was
from the woman’s sister who lived in North Hamgyong Province, a
neighbouring province to the east of ours. My mother wanted to show it to
us.
‘I need you and Min-ho to know something. People are having a hard
time. You ask me for this and complain we don’t have that. Not everyone
has what we have.’
She handed me the letter.
Dear Sister,
By the time you read this, the five of us will no longer exist in this world. We have not eaten
for a few weeks. We are emaciated, though recently our bodies have become bloated. We are
waiting to die. My one hope before I go is to eat some corn cake.
My first response was puzzlement.

---

Why hadn’t they eaten for weeks? This was one of the most prosperous
countries in the world. Every evening the news showed factories and farms
producing in abundance, well-fed people enjoying leisure time, and the
department stores in Pyongyang filled with goods. And why was this
woman’s last wish to eat corn cake – ‘poor man’s cake’? Shouldn’t she
want to see her sister one last time?
The realization was slow in coming.
I thought of how offhand I’d been with my friend Sun-i because she
hadn’t offered me a snack at her house. I was mortified.
Her family was struggling to find food.
A few days later, I witnessed famine for the first time.
I was at the market outside Wiyeon Station in Hyesan and saw a woman
lying on her side on the ground with a baby in her arms. She was young, in
her twenties. The baby, a boy, was about two years old, and staring at his
mother. They were pale and skeletal, and dressed in rags. The woman’s face
was caked with filth and her hair badly matted. She looked sick. To my
astonishment people were walking past her and the baby as if they were
invisible.
I could not ignore her. I put a 100-won note on the baby’s lap. I thought it
was hopeless to give it to the mother. Her eyes were clouded and not
focusing. She wasn’t seeing me. I guessed she was close to death. The
money would have bought food for a couple of days.
‘I rescued a baby today,’ I told my mother when I got home. I thought
she would be proud to know that I had cared while others had walked by.
‘What do you mean?’
I told her what I had done.
She dropped what she was doing and turned to me, highly annoyed. ‘Are
you completely stupid? How can a baby buy anything? Some thief will
have snatched that note straight off him. You should have just bought food
for them.’
She was right, and I felt responsible.
After that I started thinking a lot about charity. Sharing what we had
made us good communists, but at the same time it seemed futile. People had
so little, and had to take care of their own families first. I could spare the
100-won note I’d given to the baby and his mother, but I realized it would

---

have solved their problem only for a couple of days. This thought depressed
me utterly.
A shadow began to fall across Hyesan. Beggars were appearing
everywhere, especially around the markets. This was a sight I’d never seen
in our country before. There were vagrant children, too. At first, only in
twos and threes, but soon many of them, migrating to Hyesan from the
countryside. Their parents had perished of hunger, leaving them to fend for
themselves, without relatives. They were nicknamed kotchebi (‘flowering
swallows’) and, like birds, they seemed to gather in flocks. One of their
survival tricks was to distract a market vendor while accomplices snatched
the food and ran off. In a horrible twist of irony they were regularly seen
scavenging in the dirt for grains, peel or gristle – exactly how we’d been
told the children in South Korea lived. At school, children whose parents
were struggling to feed them came less regularly, and then stopped coming
altogether. My class shrank in size by a third. Some of the teachers stopped
coming, too. They were making a living as market traders instead.
Food was not the only thing in short supply. There was no fertilizer for
crops. In the villages children had to bring a quota of their own excrement
to school for use as fertilizer. Families locked their outhouses in case
thieves stole what little they had. There was no fuel. The steel and lumber
mills fell idle. Factory chimneys stopped puffing smoke, and the city streets
fell silent and empty during the day. The larches and pines that made the
foothills of the mountains so beautiful began to disappear. The landscape
was being denuded of trees. People were foraging for fuel as a freezing
wind swept down from Manchuria with the onset of winter. Power cuts
became more frequent, to the point where the electricity hardly came on at
all. To light our home in the evening my mother made a lamp from a pot of
diesel with a strip of cotton as a wick. This gave off such a dirty smoke that
Min-ho and I would have a circle of soot around our mouths.
One cold morning early in winter, a few weeks before the river froze, I
took a walk in the sunshine along the riverside path and saw what looked
like a rag gliding in the slow current. Then I saw that the rag had an
upturned human face. The eyes were open. I watched in horror as it passed,
heading downriver past my house. Just before dawn, before people on the
Chinese bank would notice, the border guards had been retrieving corpses

---

from the water and covering them with straw. They were people who had
tried to cross somewhere upriver and were too weak to make it. The current
could be fast after it had rained in the mountains.
In early 1996, not long after my sixteenth birthday, I saw a crowd gathered
around a middle-aged man at a market outside the city. He was giving a
speech, speaking with a Korean-Chinese accent. He had a pot belly and a
good-quality padded coat. He looked well off. I guessed he had come from
China for the day to visit relatives.
‘Why has this suffering fallen upon our people?’ he said. Tears were
rolling down his plump cheeks. ‘People are starving and dying. How could
this happen to our country?’
He reached into his breast pocket and took out a wad of blue Chinese ten-
yuan notes. An instant tension ran through the crowd. He began handing the
notes out to everyone and anyone. As if summoned by a whistle, beggars in
rags materialized from everywhere, holding out their hands. The man was
surrounded in every direction by outstretched arms. He gave away all his
notes.
His question stuck in my mind.
What exactly was happening? There had been no war. In fact everyone
had forgotten all about the nuclear strike for which we’d spent so much
time digging and practising air-raid drills. Famine had appeared out of
nowhere like a plague.
The official explanation for the ‘arduous march’, as the propaganda
obliquely called the famine, was the Yankee-backed UN economic
sanctions, coupled with crop failures and freak flooding that had made the
situation worse. When I heard this I believed that Kim Jong-il was doing his
very best for us in terrible circumstances. What would the people do
without him? The true reason, which I did not learn until years later, and
which was known to very few people in North Korea, had more to do with
the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the refusal of the new Russian
government to continue subsidizing us with fuel and food.
Kim Jong-il was now in charge of the country. We listened to a television
news anchor quavering with emotion as she described how our Dear Leader
was eating only simple meals of rice balls and potatoes in sympathy with
the people’s suffering. But on the screen he looked as portly and well fed as

---

ever. As a distraction from the economy, which seemed not to be
functioning at all, news reports showed him endlessly inspecting the
nation’s defences and army bases. A war for unification with the South
would solve everything, people were saying.
I could tell from their accents that a lot of the beggars in the city were not
from Hyesan – they had come from North Hamgyong and South Hamgyong
provinces. We’d heard that the situation there was very bad. I did not realize
how bad until I made a visit to Aunt Pretty in Hamhung that spring of 1996.
It was a journey through the landscape of hell.
Spring is the leanest season in North Korea, when food stocks from the
previous harvest are exhausted and the year’s crops have not yet grown.
The land was bare and brown. It looked blighted, cursed. On every hill,
trees had been felled, and for miles around individual people dotted the
open countryside, roaming listlessly like living dead, foraging for food,
aimless; or they sat on their haunches along the side of the track, doing
nothing, waiting for nothing.
Before the famine, no one could make a journey without a travel permit
stamped in their ID passbook, which was scanned by inspectors at the train
station. Now there were no controls. Order was breaking down everywhere.
Soldiers turned thieves. Police became muggers. The trains ran to no
timetable. At each stop there were hundreds more passengers than seats,
and the journey became terrifying. At one stop I narrowly avoided being hit
by shards of smashed glass as people broke a carriage window to climb
straight in and avoid the bottleneck at the doors. The carriage was
dangerously packed. Workless, hungry people were travelling in the hope of
selling something for food. The crowds became so thick and tight that when
we finally reached Hamhung I had to climb over people to get to the door.
On the platform, I looked back and saw there were hundreds of people on
the roof of the carriage. People smuggling goods to sell chose to sit on the
roof. No official would risk his life going up there to inspect.
At around this time, my mother, on a journey of her own to Wonsan to
visit Uncle Cinema, saw a policeman order an old woman down. Her
clothing was bulging with some contraband she was hoping to sell. The
police were always alert for smuggled goods that they could confiscate for
themselves and sell.

---

‘Please don’t search me.’ She was begging him from the top of the train.
‘It’s all I have.’
‘Get down right now, you old bitch,’ the policeman yelled.
The woman asked to be helped down.
The policeman reached up to her. As she took his hand, her free arm shot
up and her fist closed over the electrified wire above the train. Both were
killed instantly. She must have thought, If I’m going, I’m taking this bastard