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

She remembers the exact date and time. A lump rose to my throat. I felt
horrible. My omma.
Then it was her turn. She too wondered if I was an impostor. My accent
was no longer North Korean. She asked a few questions to which only I
would know the answers. After I’d answered the last one, she tried to say
something but choked on the word daughter. She was unable to speak.
Then I too began to cry. Streams of hot tears rolled down my cheeks and
onto my lap. We held our phones to our ears, a thousand miles apart,
listening to the pent-up silence for several minutes without saying a word.
When I reflect on the pain I had caused my mother, I know it is
something I cannot fully know. I may never fathom it completely, although

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maybe, when I have children of my own, I will begin to understand a part of
her despair.
Hearing my mother’s voice brought me right back to original truth, as if a
mooring had been pulled tight. For years my sense of identity had drifted.
In Shenyang I had sometimes thought of myself as Korean-Chinese; in
Shanghai I even sometimes thought of myself as South Korean. Her voice
reactivated something strongly in me to do with identity. All the lies I’d
spun around myself fell away. I was born and raised in Hyesan, on the
banks of the Yalu River, in the province of Mount Paektu. I could not be
anything else.
She told me that she had visited several fortune-tellers over the years
since I’d been gone, ‘I don’t know where my daughter is but I miss her.’
She couldn’t say I was in China.
‘She is not in our land.’ Every one of them said that.
One said: ‘She is like the one tree growing on rock on the side of the
mountain. It’s hard to survive. She is tough and she is smart. But she is
lonely.’
‘She is well, do not worry,’ another said. ‘She is living like a nobleman’s
wife in China.’
She told me she had even invited a shaman to the house to perform
traditional ceremonies for my good fortune and safety in China. My mother
reached out to me in the void like this, half believing and briefly comforted.
‘My daughter,’ she said to me.
We got into a routine of calling every weekend. Each time, my mother
would call me and I would call her back. We’d talk for one or two hours.
Sometimes, we spoke for so long I would fall asleep. Her voice was so
comforting. The charges for these calls came to about 150 yuan ($20) a
month, but sometimes it would be 300 yuan for a single call.
I had been away so long that it took weeks to catch up on all that had
happened in Hyesan.
When my mother had reported me missing, the police were highly
suspicious. She had to bribe them. After that, as I’d dreaded would happen,
she and Min-ho were placed under close surveillance, by the banjang, the
neighbours, and the local police. She and Min-ho moved house to a
neighbourhood in Hyesan where nobody knew them. At work she received

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a promotion. This was not a sign of favour, but a way of bringing her into
closer contact with the authorities, so that she could be more closely
watched. One day a colleague whispered to her that he had been ordered to
provide weekly reports on her for the past three years. He warned her to be
careful. After that, she quit her job at the government bureau and got
involved in the same business as Aunt Pretty – sending Chinese goods on
the train for sale in Pyongyang and Hamhung.
My mother admitted that she had started to have negative thoughts about
the Party and system. But she used highly coded language. In all of our
conversations, she made the assumption that the Bowibu might be listening.
The secret police were trying to catch cellphone users but they did not yet
have the technology to detect signals.
The Bowibu, in fact, had already paid her a visit. I found the incident she
described particularly unsettling.
My mother arrived home from work to find two plainclothes Bowibu
officers waiting in the house with Min-ho. The one in charge started to ask
about me.
‘He was extremely polite,’ she said. ‘It was chilling.’
He asked to see my photograph, and she showed him the family album.
He leafed carefully through every page. ‘She’s very beautiful,’ he said, and
then: ‘Would you describe for me again how she went missing?’
My mother told him what she’d reported to the police at the time.
He then made an extraordinary offer. If I was indeed in China, he said,
and I paid 50,000 yuan (more than $6,000), I could come home to North
Korea, have my old life back, and not face charges.
He sounded very conciliatory, but my mother baulked at the idea of me
returning and publicly admitting where I’d been. It felt like a trap. She stuck
to the story that I had gone missing.
My mother was convinced that she could get me home to North Korea
without me having to admit anything, and she badly wanted me to come
home. She had already spoken to the authorities about what would happen
if I were to come back.
‘They said that, as you were not an adult when you left, you committed
no crime.’
‘But the records will show I’ve been officially missing for years.’

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‘We can pay to have the record changed. Look, you’re at an age when
you should think of getting married. You have to marry in North Korea.’
‘Would it be safe to go back?’
‘I’ll make it safe for you.’ She was adamant.
We had this conversation many times. Returning to Hyesan, being united
with her and my uncles and aunts, was a dream. But could I really cross
back secretly and then report to the authorities as my mother was
suggesting, saying that I was a child when I left and had committed no
crime? The more I thought about it, the more I was tempted to make the
decision to go home, and have the life I should have had. But a small
insistent voice in my head was stopping me. A part of me knew that she and
I were deluding ourselves. Returning now, after so many years away, was
insanely dangerous.
On one occasion, my mother called me with an alarming question.
Normally we spoke on the weekends, but this time her call came during the
day while I was at work.
She sounded excited. ‘I’ve got a few kilos of ice.’
‘What?’ I sank down in my seat, out of sight of my colleagues.
She wanted to know if I had connections in China who could sell it.
Ice, or crystal methamphetamine, had long replaced heroin in North
Korea as the foreign-currency earner of choice for the state. It’s a synthetic
drug that is not dependent on crops, as heroin is, and can be manufactured
to a high purity in state labs. Most of the addicts in China were getting high
on crystal meth made in North Korea. Like the opium of the past, crystal
meth, though just as illegal, had become an alternative currency in North
Korea, and given as gifts and bribes.
‘Omma.’ My voice was a furious whisper. ‘Do you know what that is?
It’s highly illegal.’
‘Well, lots of things are illegal.’
In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to
live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is
not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans.
It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it,
where’s the harm? In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for
which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to

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the Kim dynasty. This is well understood by all North Koreans. To my
mother, the legality of the ice was a trifling matter. It was just another
product to trade.
She said one of the big local traders brought it to the house because he
knew I was in China and wondered if I could sell it there.
‘Give it back to him. Never get involved. There are bad people in that
trade, and they won’t care if you’re caught.’
She never asked me again.
Sometimes, neither she nor Min-ho would call for two or three weeks. At
those times, I couldn’t focus on anything. I became convinced they were in
a Bowibu cell. I’d just stare at the phone and will it to ring. I’d made a
special ringtone for their calls. It was a Korean comedy rap that went kong