The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story- Hyeonseo Lee with David John

In the comments of my review of Barbara Demick's Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Susan from Bloggin' 'Bout Books recommended The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story by Hyeonseo Lee with David John, and I was thrilled to see that my library had a copy (I seriously love my library, if you couldn't tell. Their book collection is phenomenal). And so as soon as my stack of books began dwindling, I grabbed a copy of this book.

Hyeonseo Lee was born in North Korea to a family of good songbun, meaning their status was decently high. Their lives weren't terrible compared to their fellow countrymen scrounging for food and dying in the streets, but as Hyeonseo grew, the cracks in the system became visible, and the country she'd always been told was the greatest country on the face of this earth began to seem...maybe not quite that great at all. But surely the things she viewed on illegal South Korean movies and Chinese television can't be real, right? So many cars, all those buildings with flashing neon signs, fancy clothing...all that is just propaganda, right? Life can't be that good anywhere.

Just before she turns 18, Hyeonseo, wanting to do something adventurous for once in her life, decides to slip across the border (which she can see from her house), to visit family in China. But once she arrives, her mother and brother pay the price for her recklessness, and Hyeonseo can no longer return home. Thus begins her saga of living illegally in China, reinventing herself over and over as only one without a country must. Life on her own is a struggle, always worrying about those she left behind, and far too many people want to create a new kind of prison for her. After years of hard work and constant fear of deportation, Hyeonseo finally makes it to freedom in South Korea, where life becomes both better and more difficult. And there's still the question of her family in North Korea. Don't they deserve the kind of freedom she has, too?

Ms. Lee's story expands on Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy, showing the dangers North Koreans face when they leave the only home they've ever known. She points out that for people who escape because of starvation and fear of death, the transition to freedom comes little easier, since there's nowhere to go but up; for people like her mother and brother, who led a relatively comfortable existence, a free life in Seoul, where everything must be earned via a job (for which they are entirely unqualified, having been educated solely with North Korean propaganda), can be painful and confusing. Her story, and ultimately those of her mother and brother, are success stories, but how many are not?

This is a story of courage, strength, and indefatigable determination. Ms. Lee's description of homesickness is heartbreaking; even when a place is terrible and hurts so many people, it's still home, and knowing that you can never return home is a unique kind of pain. My heart aches for her and for the thousands upon thousands of North Koreans for whom home is only a memory and never again a destination.

Far from satisfying my curiosity about North Korea, Ms. Lee's story has only piqued it further. While Nothing to Envy told more about those who suffered deeply under the Kim family, The Girl With Seven Names explains what life was like for those who had it easier. I'd love to read a memoir by a defector who escaped due to dire circumstances, to understand exactly what their path to building a life in the outside world looks like. Goodreads has several lists of books on North Korea; the longest has 105 books, so it looks like I'll definitely have a few options.


Visit Hyeonseo Lee's website here.

Follow her on Twitter here.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea- Barbara Demick

How jarring is Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick? When I finished it, I set it down and turned over in my oversized chair to doze for a bit on this cold, gray, snowy day. I jolted myself awake just before a snowplow dropped in front of my house...because I'd been dreaming about North Korea.

Truly, I'd had no idea of the horrors citizens of North Korea live with every day of their lives. I'd heard the news reports calling North Korea the perpetrators of the worst human rights violations in the world, and I knew there were problems with food shortages, but otherwise, I knew very little about the country itself, and that was what moved me to pick up this deeply unsettling book.

North Korea is more 1984 than 1984 itself. Ms. Demick's writing paints a picture of a dystopian society where neighbor is encouraged (and sometimes paid by the government) to spy on neighbor, family on family. "By the accounts of defectors, there is at least one informer for every fifty people- more even than East Germany's notorious Stasi.." she writes, a chilling look into a society where everyone must be glancing over their shoulders and no one lets even the slightest hint of doubt show.

Consequences for individualism and free speech are severe. A joke against the leader, overheard by the wrong person, led to one man being imprisoned for life. Writing the wrong thing in her own diary earned another woman a similar life sentence. Selling rice was an automatic prison sentence; selling DVDs led to several people's executions. Even earning money for performing any service was at one point considered a crime. But even more brutal than these sentences were the descriptions of starvation.

Even in the best of times, North Korea is only able to produce about 60% of what it needs to survive, and after fuel shortages forced the factories to shut down, even the twice-a-day-for-an-hour-each bouts of electricity and water ended. Workers stopped being paid (although some were still expected to show up at their jobs), no one had any money, and the rations of food handed out by the government- the only source of food other than not-quite-legal gardens and definitely-illegal-black-market-food- trickled to a halt. The population began starving to death. At best estimates, between 600,000-2 million people died due to lack of food, and up to half of all children who survived show signs of stunted growth due to the extreme malnutrition they suffered. Citizens began eating grass and weeds, picking pieces of undigested corn out of animal feces they found on the road, and in 1997, the government began executing people who stole food or who stole materials they could sell in order to purchase food. The hospitals, which lacked heat or food, admitted ill people, but eventually patients stopped coming. Why bother, when the doctors could do nothing for them?

Ms. Demick tells the story of North Korean brutality through the stories of several people who eventually ended up defecting, which isn't as common as I would have thought- but now that I have a clearer picture of just how merciless the regime truly is, I understand both why escaping would be so daunting, and why so many might not want to escape. The propaganda is endless, woven into every aspect of life in the country, right down to children's math problems about killing American and Japanese soldiers. Knowing that your neighbors are listening in on your every word, even thinking the wrong thought probably feels terrifying.

This is a deeply heartbreaking book, but I don't regret reading it at all, and if anything, I regret that I hadn't read it sooner. If you know little about the country other than the alarming nuclear threats that pop up in the news from time to time, I highly recommend Nothing to Envy. This is a book that will stick with me.


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