The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea

by Hyeonseo Lee

As children we have a need, as our awareness of the larger world develops, to feel part of something bigger than family, to belong to a nation. The next step is to identify with humanity, as a global citizen.

punishment awaited those who had shed too few tears.

In a horrible twist of irony they were regularly seen scavenging in the dirt for grains, peel or gristle – exactly how we’d been told the children in South Korea lived.

People were unlearning lifetimes of ideology, and reverting to what humans have practised for thousands of years – trade.

I started noticing that not one of the Chinese people I saw – not the border guards on the other side, who looked awesome in their green uniforms, or the children playing in the river – looked thin or hungry. They were clearly doing better – much better – than we were. This realization began to dislodge one of my longest-held core beliefs – that our country was the best in the world.

The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless.

At times this felt surreal. We were all Koreans, sharing the same language and culture, yet we were technically at war.

‘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.’

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.

When she had turned eighteen, special scouts that selected musicians and beautiful girls to attend upon Kim Jong-il came to her school and singled her out to join the Dear Leader’s Joy Division.

some escapers carry poison with them to kill themselves if they’re caught, rather than face the consequences of being returned to the North.

as the historian Andrei Lankov put it, a regime that’s willing to kill as many people as it takes to stay in power tends to stay in power for a very long time.