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

The lights of Changbai
The boy shouted his answer. ‘I want to be a tank driver.’
Our teacher beamed approvingly. ‘And why do you want to be a tank
driver?’
‘To defend our country from the Yankee bastards.’
The boy sat back down. It was my final year at secondary school, and we
were each being asked about our careers.
Like all obedient Socialist Youth we were telling the teacher what she
wanted to hear. When we’d been taught for as long as we could remember
how the Respected Father Leader had dedicated his entire life to the
people’s cause, and how great a burden he had shouldered to keep our
country safe from its enemies, even a kindergarten kid would have known it
would not have pleased the teacher if I’d put my hand up and said: ‘I want
to be a pop star.’
You would expect between school friends a more honest conversation
about our hopes for the future, and what we wanted to do with our lives,
and that did happen, to an extent. But by the time we were ready to
graduate, we had learned to trim our expectations in line with our songbun.
Our choices fell within a certain range. In my class, the few of us with good
songbun either took the university entrance exam or, if they were boys,
went straight to military service. A few were able, through family
connections, to land good jobs with the police or the Bowibu. More than
half the students in my class were in the songbun ‘hostile’ category. A list
of their names was sent to a government office in Hyesan, where officials
assigned them to mines and farms. One girl from this group took the test to
enter university, and passed, but was not permitted to go.

---

My good songbun meant I could plan. My dreams were private and
modest. I wanted to be an accordionist. It’s a popular instrument in North
Korea and a woman who could play it well had no difficulty making a
living. That would be my official career, but, like my mother, I also wanted
to trade, start an illicit business, and make money. I thought this would be
exciting. I also knew that it would be the only way to ensure that my own
family, when one day I had children of my own, would have enough to eat.
My mother fully supported the accordion career choice, and found a
musician from the theatre in Hyesan to give me tuition. She said my father
would have been pleased, as he’d always enjoyed accordion music. This
made me cry.
I was seventeen years old. In just a few months, in January 1998, I would
turn eighteen. This thought weighed heavy. At eighteen, we were adult
citizens and received our official ID passbooks. The pranks and
misdemeanours that children could get away with became serious crimes
once we turned eighteen. And there was one prank I was increasingly
tempted to commit, before it was too late.
In the winter of 1997, a school friend who lived near our house asked if
I’d like to slip across the river with her to the border county of Changbai, in
China. Her mother, like mine, had trading contacts there. She had already
crossed a few times, so she knew what she was doing.
The idea thrilled me. My plan after the winter vacation was to try for a
place at Hyesan Economics School, which ran two-year courses. It was
harder to get into than a four-year university course. Graduates were
expected to work for state-run companies, of course, not in illegal private
trade. Grades didn’t matter much. Money and influence were what counted.
I wanted to study there and start a business trading in imported goods. So
why not take a sneak look at Changbai? Changbai, to me, represented
business.
By then, Min-ho had crossed illegally many times. Young boys often did.
He wanted to play with the Chinese boys on the other side. Sometimes,
when the guards weren’t looking, he’d slip across to visit Mr Ahn and his
wife, or Mr Chang, my mother’s trading contacts, whose homes were
nearby. If he could do it, why couldn’t I?

---

From my house I marvelled at the halogen lights and neon signs of
Changbai across the river, which never suffered power cuts. At school, the
teachers had always told us that the Chinese were envious of us and worse
off than we were. I had believed this for years, even though evidence to the
contrary was everywhere before my eyes, from the abundant Chinese
products on sale in our market to the fashionable Chinese business people
walking about Hyesan. In the end it was something Aunt Pretty said that
made a light come on in my head. She told me that hungry people headed to
Hyesan because there was always more food at border towns.