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

Rabbit-fur for the soldiers who keep us safe; scrap iron for their guns,
copper for their bullets.
Behind them, hundreds of squat houses poured yontan smoke from
stovepipe chimneys, creating a low haze. Through the trees I caught a
glimpse, just for a second, of my house with its tall white wall. The gate
was shut. It made me wistful.
I’ll be back soon.
At the same time I was feeling a mounting elation, like bubbles rising in
my chest, a sense of freedom and anticipation – that now I could do
anything. In the darkness at the edge of the ice I had taken a terrible risk,
but now look where I was. I had done it. I felt brave, and proud.

---

For a few minutes the snow everywhere seemed to blanket and silence
the doubts in my head. But soon an internal self-criticism was in session. I
notice that Comrade Min-young is feeling happy. I would like to remind her
that she doesn’t have the first idea about what’s going to happen next.
Then I had a vision of my mother’s face, of the love and trust in her eyes
as she’d said: ‘Don’t stay out late,’ and pictured her scolding Min-ho for not
having told her earlier where I’d gone. My thoughts became less elated – I
felt pangs of guilt, and selfishness and stupidity.
I’ll be back soon.
The road curved to the right, the trees became thicker, and Hyesan
disappeared from view.

---

Chapter 20
Home truths
The road twisted and turned through the Changbai Mountains. We passed
sparse villages of squat, tile-roofed houses along the way. They didn’t look
much different from those in North Korea. But after a few hours’ distance
the villages were larger and looked more prosperous. Gradually they
merged into towns, and the towns into suburbs. The two-lane road became
four lanes. Soon the traffic was a broad, slow-moving river of steel and
glowing red taillights. We were caught in an ant-like crawl of thousands of
cars, more than I had ever seen. Far from being bored, my eyes were
everywhere, taking this in. Every vehicle looked new. There were none of
the heavy green military trucks, the most common vehicles around Hyesan.
We stopped for lunch at a service station at the side of the freeway, which
had photographs of mouthwatering dishes displayed in illuminated signs. In
North Korea, there were only state-owned restaurants, which saw no reason
or need to entice customers or make any effort to sell; and private, semi-
legal ones operating furtively in markets or in people’s homes. But here the
restaurants were advertising themselves brightly, inviting me to stop and
look. I ordered egg fried rice and the waitress brought a huge plateful.
Chinese people eat so much. I looked up at Mr Ahn. He laughed heartily at
my expression. He was enjoying my reactions to everything.
We approached Shenyang in the late afternoon along an eight-lane
expressway. Nothing had prepared me for my first sight of the city. Huge
towers of steel and glass rose on either side, their tips aflame in the last
light of the sun. The taxi stopped at a crossing as the lights turned red, and
hundreds of people crossed the road. Every one of them was dressed
differently. No one was in uniform. I glanced up and saw a soaring
billboard of an underwear model.

---

I had not known that Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, is one
of the largest cities in China. More than 8 million people live there. It made
Pyongyang look like a provincial backwater.
We reached the neighbourhood where my relatives lived, and after
stopping several times to ask for directions, found the address. It was in a
large, glitzy apartment complex. Each block was twenty storeys high. Mr
Ahn and the taxi driver came with me in the elevator up to the eleventh
floor. I rang the doorbell and felt a flutter of anxiety. I had no idea what to
expect.
My Uncle Jung-gil opened the door and looked from me to Mr Ahn to
the taxi driver.
‘Uncle, it’s me, Min-young.’
It took him a second to absorb this, and then his face was agog, like a
cartoon character. Aunt Sang-hee joined him in the door. She was as
astonished as he was.
My ‘uncle’ was in fact my father’s cousin. His family had fled Hyesan
during the Korean War and he had grown up in Shenyang. He had visited us
in Hyesan twice, but not for several years. He had seemed wealthy to us, a
little plump, very outgoing, and always laden with gifts. He was now in his
late forties.
I introduced Mr Ahn, and explained that it was my vacation and I wanted
to see China before I started college. My uncle paid the enormous taxi fare
and the driver left. After chatting for a while, Mr Ahn said that he was
going to do some shopping and return to Changbai. We said our goodbyes.
My uncle and aunt made me feel instantly welcome. I was family – it
made no difference to them that they had not seen me in years. Their
apartment was modern and spacious, with small elegant spotlights set into
the ceiling. This was like the homes I’d seen in the TV dramas. Floor-to-
ceiling windows gave sweeping views onto a dozen tall apartment buildings
identical to theirs. The sky had turned a deep orange. Lights were coming
on in the other towers, making them look like jewel boxes. Beyond them,
all the way to the horizon, hundreds more towers, glittering in the dusk,
were being built or had been newly completed.
My uncle asked my aunt to pop out and buy some ice cream. She came
back with every variety she could find.
‘Try these,’ she said. ‘Some of them are new.’

---

We opened them all and I took a spoonful from each. They were the most
heavenly flavours I had ever tasted. Jasmine flavour, green tea, mango,
black sesame, a luscious fuchsia variety called taro, and a Japanese one
called red bean. Red bean. Flavours I had not imagined possible. Oh, how
this made me want to stay in China.
My uncle was tall, and slimmer than I remembered him. As a girl I’d
thought he looked plump because I had grown up in a country where there
were no fat people, but compared with the large and rounded Chinese
people I’d been seeing everywhere, I saw that his face had the boniness of
someone who had endured decades of hardship. Wealth, for him, had come
late in life.
I had been so caught up in describing my journey and enjoying the ice
cream that we had not yet got onto the subject of family. My uncle asked
after my father.
The spoon stopped halfway to my mouth. He did not know that my
father, his cousin, was dead.
When I explained what had happened, my uncle’s mood darkened. ‘How
dare they do that to him?’ he muttered. He pressed me for details. He
wanted to know everything about my father’s arrest, the charges, the
interrogation. I didn’t want to talk about this. When I’d finished he brooded
in silence for several minutes, then, to my great surprise, he stood up and
launched into a tirade against my country. Years of bottled resentment were
suddenly on his lips.
‘You know all the history they teach you at school is a lie?’ This was his
opening shot.
He started counting off the fallacies he said I’d been taught. He said that
at the end of the Second World War the Japanese had not been defeated by
Kim Il-sung’s military genius. They’d been driven out by the Soviet Red
Army, which had installed Kim Il-sung in power. There had been no
‘Revolution’.
I had never before heard my country being criticized. I thought he’d gone
crazy.
‘And they taught you the South started the Korean War, didn’t they?
Well, here’s some news for you. It was the North that invaded the South,
and Kim Il-sung would have lost badly to the Yankees if China hadn’t
stepped in to save his arse.’

---

Now I knew he’d gone crazy.
‘Were you shown the little wooden cabin on Mount Paektu where Kim
Jong-il was born?’ His tone was heavy with sarcasm. ‘It’s a complete myth.
He wasn’t even born in Korea. He was born in Siberia, where his father was
serving with the Red Army.’
He could see from my face I did not believe a word of this. He might as
well have been telling me the earth was flat.
‘He’s not even a communist.’ My uncle had worked himself up into a
rage. ‘He lives in palaces and beach condos, with brigades of pleasure girls.
He drinks fine cognacs and eats Swiss cheeses – while his people go
hungry. His only belief is in power.’
This rant was making me uncomfortable. At home we never mentioned
the personal lives of the Leaders. Ever. Any such talk was ‘gossip’, and
highly dangerous.
But my uncle was far from finished. He was pacing the room now. ‘Do
you know how Kim Il-sung died?’ he said, pointing at me.
‘A heart attack.’
‘That’s right, and his son drove him to it.’
I looked to Aunt Sang-hee for help, but her expression was as serious as
my uncle’s.
‘Kim Jong-il killed him. By the end of his life his father was a powerless
old man who’d been turned into a god. Kim Jong-il was running the
country. His father had no influence left except in foreign affairs.’
My uncle’s theory was this: just before Kim Il-sung died, former US
president Jimmy Carter had visited him to open the way for a summit with
sitting US president Bill Clinton. As his legacy to Korea Kim Il-sung was
willing to make the peninsula nuclear-free, and told Carter that North Korea
would give up its nuclear weapons programme. This incensed Kim Jong-il,
who set about blocking the summit. The two had a blazing row. Kim Il-sung
got so worked up that his heart failed.
I refused to believe this nonsense. But at the same time parts of it rang
true. I’d heard rumours at school that beautiful girls were selected for the
Dear Leader’s pleasure, and I’d seen for myself on the television news that
he hadn’t been fasting on simple meals of rice balls during the famine as the
propaganda claimed. In truth I didn’t know what to think. And so a shutter
came down in my mind. My response, as a seventeen-year-old girl, was to

---

enjoy the ice cream. What my uncle said about my country had a depressing
and a repelling effect on me. I did not want to know.
Uncle Jung-gil ran a trading company. He had started off by selling
pharmaceuticals to South Korea but his business had diversified and
prospered. He drove a new Audi. Aunt Sang-hee was a pharmacist. They
had a grown-up son who lived in another province. Both of them were
talkative and extroverted, and loved dining out, dancing and socializing.
Before they took me on my first night out in Shenyang, they suggested I
assumed a new name. This was for my own protection. The name they
concocted for me was Chae Mi-ran. I liked it. It seemed fun to use an alias.
When my uncle and aunt’s friends dropped by, I was introduced as Mi-ran. I
was visiting from Yanbian, they were told, the Korean region of China
where many people speak Korean as a first language and may not speak
Mandarin so well. The friends gave a knowing ‘Aah’ and accepted this
explanation.
Shenyang was a revelation. In North Korea, streets are dark and deserted
at night. Here, the city came alive at sunset. The sidewalks of Taiyuan
Street heaved with shoppers and young people my own age on a night out,
boys and girls mixing together, stylish and laughing. Music boomed and
throbbed from cars and bars. Everything seemed suffused with a kind of
super-reality, as if I’d come from a world of black and white into one of
Technicolor. It was magical – an illusion enhanced by the myriad sparkling
lights in every window display, restaurant and lobby, and on the fir trees
that stood everywhere. Aunt Sang-hee explained that they were Christmas
trees, a Western custom that had caught on in China. Each evening we
dined somewhere new. ‘What’re you in the mood for?’ my uncle would say,
clapping his hands together. ‘Chinese, Korean, Japanese, European? Or
something else?’ One restaurant had fish swimming in a tank illuminated an
electric blue. I chose the one I wanted to eat. Menus overwhelmed me with
choice. I ate ice cream every night.
Aunt Sang-hee showed me how to work the karaoke machine in the
apartment. At first I sang South Korean ballads with the volume turned low
and the door closed, until she yelled from the next room: ‘Turn it up, I like
that one.’ In this country, there was no secret music.

---

After that they took me, along with a large crowd of their friends, to a
noisy karaoke bar, another new experience for me. I could not believe I was
singing my beloved ‘Rocky Island’ in public, and got a round of applause. I
had never enjoyed a night out so much.
When, at the end of four or five days, Aunt Sang-hee said: ‘Can’t you
stay a while longer?’ I took no persuading.
During the day, while my uncle and aunt were at work, I had to stay
inside. But even that was fascinating. I could freely watch any television I
wanted without having to close the curtains or keep the volume down or
worry about the neighbours. This was pure freedom.
Before I knew it, a month had shot by and I had celebrated my eighteenth
birthday in Shenyang. I could not delay my return any longer. My uncle
said he would drive me back to Changbai. These weeks had been such a
whirl of discovery and enjoyment that I had given little thought to the
implications of turning eighteen.
The day before our departure, the home phone rang in the kitchen. My
uncle answered it. His face tensed, then without a word he passed the phone
to me.
Behind the crackle and hiss on the line the voice was faint. ‘Min-young,
listen to me …’
It was my mother.
‘Don’t come back. We’re in trouble.’

---

Chapter 21