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

The biggest, brashest city in Asia
I took the train with a Korean-Chinese acquaintance of mine named Yee-un,
who was also moving to Shanghai. She was a waitress I’d met once or
twice. I noticed that she avoided the subject of her past, which was fine by
me. I told her nothing of mine. I guessed we were both running away from
something. She was good-natured, with a blunt manner and a foghorn
voice. I liked her. When we talked of how we would get by in Shanghai we
both had the same thought at once: we could share an apartment. The
moment we agreed on it I felt the tension and anxiety that had been in me
for weeks begin to dissolve. Sharing with Yee-un meant I would not have to
cope with everything alone all over again. We were both almost penniless,
but now starting anew didn’t seem so daunting.
We were laughing over the fact that we’d be eating nothing but instant
noodles until we found work when I saw a forest-green police uniform and
cap enter the far end of the long carriage, and people reaching for jackets
and wallets.
They were holding up their IDs. Beads of cold sweat broke out on my
brow.
I knew that these checks sometimes happened on buses and trains, but
until now I’d been lucky.
The policeman was examining each one with a nod, moving along the
rows, coming closer.
He was fifteen yards away. What to do? My chest felt as if it were stuffed
with hot wool. Panic was rising in me. Yee-un’s mouth was moving. I heard
her voice as if it were underwater.
‘Soon-hyang, I said are you all right?’
‘Bit travel-sick,’ I said, and shot out of my seat.

---

I locked the door of the toilet and waited, listening to a rushing, keening
noise as the train entered a long tunnel and picked up speed. When I
emerged after almost an hour, I peeped into the carriages to the left and the
right. The policeman had gone.
I found Yee-un asleep in her seat. For the rest of the journey I sat upright
and alert, my stomach clenching with nerves.
The train approached Shanghai Station at dawn. Against a feathered peach
sky I glimpsed the faint outlines of towers half a kilometre high, the skyline
of Pudong. Maybe it was because I was hearing snatches of Shanghainese
and other dialects around me in the carriage, but it didn’t feel like I was
even in China any more.
Many of the passengers disembarking with huge holdalls and rucksacks
were people like Yee-un and me. Young migrants, some of the thousands
arriving every week in the biggest, brashest city in Asia to start new lives,
to be someone, make fortunes, create new identities, or to hide. Back in
Shenyang I’d sometimes felt like a special, secret visitor. Here I was utterly
insignificant. This realization was alienating and exciting at the same time.
Here, perhaps I could be anyone I wanted to be.
The year I arrived, about 17 million people were living in this
megalopolis, of which the ethnic Korean population was small, about
80,000. About a third of those were South Korean expatriates; the rest were
Korean-Chinese, as I was pretending to be.
Yee-un and I headed straight to a district called Longbai, where there was
a small, prospering Koreatown. By the end of the same day it was our great
good fortune to find a cramped, shabby, two-room apartment for a modest
monthly rent without any deposit required. It had a tiny hotplate, a leaking
sink, and a view onto a construction site where illegal drilling and
hammering went on through the night.
We didn’t care. We both felt we’d been given a new chance.
You get three chances in life. This time, I’d seized one.
My plan was to get a job in a restaurant until I found something better.
Again, everything seemed to happen at once. Nothing stood still in
Shanghai. Within a day Yee-un and I both got work in the same nearby
restaurant. I was at the counter; she waited tables.

---

To mark this new start I changed my name again. This time I decided to
call myself Chae In-hee. My fifth name. I had told too many people in
Shenyang I was North Korean. I needed to bury the name Soon-hyang.
Yee-un was incredulous. ‘Eh? Why? What’s wrong with Soon-hyang?’
‘The fortune-teller said this name would bring me luck.’
I had become an accomplished liar, even to the people who thought they
were close to me.
By day the skyscrapers of Lujiazui were grey and blurred in a haze of smog.
By night they were glittering displays of colour and crystal, each with a
distinct character of its own, their summits forming atolls of light in the
clouds, their bases competing for attention with vast moving images, of a
soccer ball kicked into goal by a Nike shoe, of Coca-Cola being poured into
a glass of sparkling LED bubbles.
One evening not long after I arrived, I went window-shopping along the
exclusive strip on Huaihai Lu, wandering through the golden glow of
displayed diamond jewellery and luxury Western-brand watches. I realized
that I wasn’t simply in another country; I was in another universe from the
one where I’d grown up. Money was the obsession here, and celebrity and
fame. I had dreaded the curiosity of others about my past, but in Shanghai
no one cared where you were from, as long as you weren’t illegal. Fortunes
were being made overnight in property, stocks and retail. The city opened
doors to those with nerve, ambition and talent. It was uncaring and cruel to
those with no right to be here.
If I was to get out of waitressing I needed what every illegal in the city
craved: a legitimate ID card. The absence of this small vital item was what
barred me from opportunity. Without an ID, there was no chance of better-
paid, more meaningful work.
Over the next few months I made discreet enquiries among the waitresses
in Koreatown. Many illegals were drawn to the glamour of Shanghai, and
restaurants were often where they found their first jobs. Some of these girls
must have obtained IDs, somehow. A few of them admitted to me that their
IDs were fakes, but I was wary of acquiring a fake. It was a dangerous thing
to possess if the police checked it. The safest option was to buy a real ID
from someone. For that I would need a broker.

---

The first broker I met, a contact of one of these waitresses, asked for the
equivalent of $16,000. I told him to forget it. The second one asked for even
more. The predicament reminded me of the gang in Changbai. Anyone who
knew I was an illegal was going to take advantage – they would fleece me
for as much as they could get and feel little motivation to help me.
To avoid the gangsters, I needed a better tactic. I needed to make up a
story.
A mild fresh spring turned to the torpor of summer in my first year in
Shanghai. I was cooling off after work in an ice-cream parlour with Yee-un
when a man at the next table tried to flirt with us. He was a Korean-Chinese
in his thirties, with his own shop in Koreatown. He was slightly tipsy, I
realized. Somehow, the conversation got onto his aunt.
‘She’s a marriage broker for women wanting to marry South Korean
men,’ he said. ‘Can you believe that?’
Instinctively, I sensed a possibility. ‘I wish I could study in South Korea,’
I said. Yee-un turned to stare at me as if I’d grown a second head. ‘But I’m
too old for a student visa. I need to make myself a few years younger,
somehow.’
‘With a new ID,’ he said, finishing my thought. Perhaps he was trying to
impress two pretty girls in an ice-cream parlour, but he was suddenly eager
to help.
‘Let me ask her for you. Let’s see what she says …’
He took my phone number.
Weeks passed, summer stretched far into September, and then to a mild and
pleasant autumn, and I forgot about the man in the ice-cream parlour. Then,
in November, near the end of my first year in the city, an unfamiliar number
called my phone.
It took me a minute to figure out what the woman at the other end was on
about. It was the aunt of the man from the ice-cream parlour.
She asked me to visit her in Harbin. She would sort me out with a new
ID.
‘Thank you,’ I said. Harbin … where is that?
‘A thousand miles from Shanghai, in the far northeast, that’s where,’
Yee-un said when I asked her. She had a good laugh about that.

---

I lied to the manager of the restaurant, saying that my mother was sick in
hospital and that I had to see her. I bought a train ticket to Harbin. The
journey to the northeast took almost two days. I arrived from the mild
Shanghai winter totally underdressed for the snowed-under, below-freezing
northeast. I stayed in Harbin just two hours, long enough to meet a tiny lady
so muffled in furs she looked like some woodland animal, have an official
photo taken, then catch a train back.
A month later an envelope arrived through the mail at my apartment. I
opened it and held in my hands my own ID card. My new name was Park
Sun-ja.
Sun-ja. I sighed. My sixth name.
The identity had belonged to a Korean-Chinese girl who, the lady in
Harbin told me, had a mental illness. Her parents wanted to raise money for
her care by selling her ID. It had cost me all the money I had saved in
Shanghai, but now I was legal, or at least I could pass for legal with little
fear of discovery.
As if sensing my new status, within days the city was lifting the curtain
onto a much brighter side of life.

---

Chapter 31