Hyeonseo Lee came to prominence after she gave a TEDTalk in 2013. Hyeonseo Lee is not her given name, it is actually the seventh name she has had and is a name she gave herself because it means sunshine and good fortune. Lee’s mother left her biological father when she was an infant to marry the man she had originally wanted to marry, the man Hyeonseo grew up believing was her father, which is where her first name change occurred. The rest came after she defected as a means of hiding her true identity from authorities.
Lee grew up as Park Min-young and had a relatively happy North Korean childhood. Her family had good songbun which helped them get good jobs and Min-young never went hungry. She went to school and happily believed North Korea was the best country in the world. When famine hit in the 1990s things got more difficult but the Park family was still well fed and comfortable. This was in large part to their proximity to a narrow, shallow river that separated North Korea and China that Min-young’s parents smuggled goods across. Unfortunately her father was eventually caught and arrested; he was then released but was gravely ill and eventually died.
When Min-young was 17 a lot of her friends were crossing into China for fun, it was their last year as minors and therefore they were less likely to get in trouble if they were caught, but Min-young’s mother said no. A month before her birthday she decided to go on her own and was caught by a border patrol officer who had a crush on her. He let her go when she promised to be back in a few hours. She ended up going to her mother’s smuggling partner who took her to her aunt and uncle’s when she stayed for a month. In her TEDTalk she says she was sent to live with family members in China but in her memoir she makes it sound more like an accident that she came to live in China. She had planned to go back but she had turned 18 and her mother managed to call her with a warning that it was no longer safe to come back because the police knew she was in China.
After a few years in China with her aunt & uncle Min-young, now going by Chae Mi-ran, got worried she was overstaying her welcome with her relatives and was also being pressured into marrying a boy she did not love. She ended up running away and ended up in Shanghai. She got a waitressing job and evaded the Chinese police looking for illegals. To make life easier in China she paid for a real identification card that said she was a Korean-Chinese girl named Park Sun-ja which opened better job opportunities but then she heard if she was able to get to South Korea she could seek political asylum. She told her boyfriend, who didn’t know she was North Korean, her desire to go to Seoul and he helped her with the complicated plan. Once she got established in South Korea she wanted to get her mother and brother out of North Korea but they weren’t immediately receptive to the idea. They eventually agreed and although their journey into freedom was more perilous than Hyeonseo’s the family was reunited. Even though there are pictures in the middle of the book showing her mother and brother in Chicago I was still concerned about their safety the whole time.
“This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.”
I am fascinated by North Korea in the same way that I am intrigued by cults. Hyeonseo is well spoken, even though English is not her first (or second) language, and this is an exceptionally well written memoir. She leaves a few details out, mostly to protect the family members still in North Korea, but overall The Girl With Seven Names is an honest story about survival. What was particularly interesting is Hyeonseo didn’t have an awful life in North Korea compared to the other memoirs I’ve read in that she never went hungry and would have most likely been alright living her life in North Korea. However she had become disenchanted with North Korea and her mother’s smuggling business meant that she was introduced to movies, music and fashions that piqued her interests. Her impulsive trip across the border changed her life, her family’s life and has help educate countless people across the world about the horrors of North Korea.