The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

Chapter 8

The secret photograph

A few months after the visit to the fortune-teller, during the summer school vacation, my mother had taken Min-ho somewhere and had left me at my grandmother’s house for the day. She was a fascinating woman, intelligent, and always full of stories. Her silver hair was pinned back in the old Korean style, with a needle through the bun. On this particular visit, however, she told me a story that devastated me.

To this day I’m not sure why she did it. She wasn’t being mischievous. And I don’t think her mind was weakening, making her forgetful of what should stay secret. The only explanation I can think of is that she thought I should know the truth while I was young, because I’d find it easier to come to terms with as a girl than if I discovered it later, as a grown woman. If that’s what she was thinking, she made a terrible misjudgement.

It was a warm Saturday morning and the door and windows were open. Outside in the yard, jays were chirping and drinking water from a bowl. We were sitting at her table when she began looking at me with an odd intensity. She said softly: ‘You know, your father isn’t your real father.’

I didn’t take in what she’d said.

She reached across and squeezed my hand. ‘Your name is Kim. Not Park.’

There was a long pause. I didn’t see where this was going, but I might have smiled uncertainly. This could be one of her jokes. Like my mother, she had quite a sense of humour.

Seeing my confusion, she said: ‘It’s the truth.’

She stood and went over to the glass cabinet where she kept her best bowls and plates. It had a small drawer in the bottom. She bent down stiffly. At the back of her neck I could see the string on which she kept her Party card. She retrieved a cardboard envelope, and handed it to me. It smelled damp.

‘Open it.’

I put my hand inside and pulled out a black and white photograph. It showed a wedding party. I recognized my mother at once. She was the bride in the centre, wearing a beautiful chima jeogori. But the scene didn’t make sense. The groom next to her was not my father. He was tall and handsome with slicked-back hair, and dressed in a Western-style suit. Behind them was a vast bronze statue of Kim Il-sung, arm outstretched, as if giving traffic directions.

My grandmother pointed to the groom in the suit. ‘That’s your father. And this lady …’ She pointed to a beautiful woman to the man’s right. ‘… is his sister – your aunt. She’s a film actress in Pyongyang. You strongly resemble her.’ She sighed. ‘Your real father was a nice man, and he loved you a lot.’

The room seemed to go dim. Whatever tethered me to reality had just been cut. I was floating in unreality, and deeply confused.

She explained that my mother had loved my father so much that she could not live with the man she’d married, my biological father. She’d divorced him.

My father is not my father? My eyes started brimming with tears. How could she say that?

I said nothing. She seemed to read the next question forming in my mind. I couldn’t open my mouth to ask it. I think if I’d opened my mouth I would have fallen apart.

‘Min-ho is your half-brother,’ she said, nodding.

I stared at her, but she ploughed on.

‘A couple of years ago, when your mother visited your Uncle Money in Pyongyang, she bumped into your real father in the street …’

A chill went through me. I did not like her calling this person my father.

‘… She had a photo of you in her purse and showed it to him. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at it for a long time, then he slipped it into his pocket before she could stop him, and walked away. So he has your picture.’ My grandmother’s eyes drifted to the window and the mountains. ‘After that, I wrote to his sister the actress to ask what had happened to him. She told me he had remarried soon after the divorce and had twin girls, one of whom he named Ji-hae, after you.’

Ji-hae, my birth name.

A shadow passed over my grandmother’s face. ‘He shouldn’t have done that.’

There is a superstition in North Korea that if someone remarries and gives a child of the second marriage the same name as a child from the previous marriage, the second to receive the name will die.

‘When the girl was young, she fell sick and died.’

I left my grandmother’s house in a daze. I felt hollowed out, tearful and numb at the same time. She’d said nothing about keeping this a secret, but I knew I would never mention it to my mother or my father or anyone. I was too young to know that talking about it is exactly what I should have done. Instead I buried it inside me, and it started to gnaw at my heart. I was still utterly confused. The only thing I kind of understood was that it explained the coolness of my father’s parents toward me, and their generosity toward Min-ho. He had their blood. I didn’t.

When I got home Min-ho was sitting on the floor drawing a picture with coloured crayons. What he’d drawn stunned me, and I felt tears again. And something like anger. It was crude and charming and showed stick figures of me, him, my mother and my father, all holding hands together beneath a shining sun. Inside the sun was a face of a man wearing glasses – Kim Il-sung.

Min-ho was now five years old. He was growing up into a good-natured boy, who liked to help our mother. He had a very cute smile. But now I felt as if a glass wall had gone up between us. He was a half-brother.

Our relationship changed from then on. I became an older sister who provoked him and started fights with him that he could never win. I feel so sorry about that now. My mother would say: ‘What’s wrong with you? Why can’t you be more like Min-ho?’

It would be years before I could process maturely the information my grandmother had given me, and reach out to him.

At dinner that evening I said nothing. My mother chatted about some business venture of Aunt Pretty’s; Min-ho was told not to hold his chopsticks in the air; my father was calm as usual, as if nothing had changed. Eventually he said: ‘What’s up with you? You’re as quiet as a little mouse.’

I stared at my bowl. I could not look at him.

In North Korea family is everything. Bloodlines are everything. Songbun is everything. He’s not my father.

I began to push him away and withdraw from him, thinking I had lost my love for him. The pain I was feeling was making me think this.

I began to avoid him.

Chapter 9

To be a good communist

I joined the other children assembling on the street. No one was ever late. We straightened our red scarves, and got into formation. The class leader, who was also our marching-group leader, held up the red banner, and we fell in step behind him, swinging our arms and singing at the tops of our voices.

Who is the partisan whose deeds are unsurpassed?

Who is the patriot whose deeds shall ever last?

In September 1992 I had started secondary school in Hyesan, and marched there each morning at eight. We knew all the songs so well that we’d fall into harmony spontaneously.

So dear to our hearts is our glorious General’s name,

Our beloved Kim Il-sung of undying fame!

By now the red scarf I’d longed to wear had become an irritation to me. From my mother I was acquiring a distinct care for how I looked. I didn’t want the drab North Korean clothes. I wanted to look different. I’d also grown more conscious of my body after an incident earlier that year, in the spring.

My mother had come to my school to have lunch with me. We were sitting in the sun just outside the school building, eating rice balls on the riverbank, when a boy shouted from my classroom window on the second floor, so loud they would have heard him in China: ‘Hey, Min-young, your mother’s ugly. Not like you.’ There was laughter from other boys behind him. I was only twelve but my face was scarlet with fury. I’d never thought my mother was not pretty. I felt far more humiliated than she did. She actually laughed and told me to calm down. Then she pinched my cheek and said: ‘Boys are noticing you.’

We had classes in Korean, maths, music, art, and ‘communist ethics’ – a curious blend of North Korean nationalism and Confucian traditions that I don’t think had much to do with communism as it is understood in the West. I also began to learn Russian, Chinese characters, geography, chemistry and physics. My father was especially strict with me about learning Chinese calligraphy, which he said was important. Many words in Korean and Japanese derive from ancient Chinese, and although the languages have diverged over time, the people of these nations often find they can communicate through calligraphy. I did not see much point to this, when I had clothes and boys to think about. I did not know that a time would come when I would thank my father in prayers for making me study Chinese. It was a gift of great good fortune from him. One day it would help save my life.

Again, the most important lessons, the most deeply studied subjects, centred on the lives and thoughts of our Leaders Great and Dear. Much of the curriculum was taken up by the cult of Kim. The Kim ‘activities’ of elementary school became serious study in secondary school. The school had a ‘study room’ devoted to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-il’s mother, Kim Jong-suk. It was the most immaculate room in the school, made of the best building materials, and had been paid for with compulsory donations from parents. It was sealed shut so that dust did not settle on the photographs. We took our shoes off outside the door, and could only enter if we were wearing new white socks.

History lessons were superficial. The past was not set in stone, and was occasionally rewritten. My parents had learned at school that Admiral Yi Sun-shin, a naval commander whose tactics had defeated a massive Japanese invasion in the sixteenth century, was one of the great heroes of Korean history. By my day, his heroism had been downgraded. Admiral Yi had tried his best, we were told, but society was still backward at that time, and no figure in Korean history truly stood out until Kim Il-sung emerged as the greatest military commander in the history of humankind.

Lessons were taught with great conviction. The teacher was the only one to ask questions in class, and when she did, the student called upon to answer would stand up, hands at their sides, and shout out the answer as if addressing a regiment. We were not required to formulate any views of our own, or to discuss, or interpret ideas in any subject. Almost all of our homework was simply memorization, which I was good at, and often came top of the class.

Propaganda seeped into every subject. In our geography lesson we used a textbook that showed photographs of parched plots of land, so arid that the mud was cracked. ‘This is a normal farm in South Korea,’ the teacher said. ‘Farmers there can’t grow rice. That’s why the people suffer.’ Maths textbook questions were sometimes worded emotively. ‘In one battle of the Great Fatherland Liberation War, 3 brave uncles of the Korean People’s Army wiped out 30 American imperialist bastards. What was the ratio of the soldiers who fought?’

Everything we learned about Americans was negative. In cartoons they were snarling jackals. In the propaganda posters they were as thin as sticks with hook noses and blond hair. We were told they smelled bad. They had turned South Korea into a ‘hell on earth’ and were maintaining a puppet government there. The teachers never missed an opportunity to remind us of their villainy.

‘If you meet a Yankee bastard on the street and he offers you candy, do not take it!’ one teacher warned us, wagging a finger in the air. ‘If you do, he’ll claim North Korean children are beggars. Be on your guard if he asks you anything, even the most innocent questions.’

We all looked at each other. We had never seen an American. Few Westerners, let alone Americans, ever came to our country, but for some reason the threat of the unseen made this warning all the more chilling.

The teacher also told us to be wary of the Chinese, our allies in communism just across the river. They were envious of us, and not to be trusted. This made sense to me because many of the Chinese-made products I saw at the market were often of dubious quality. The lurid urban myths circulating in Hyesan seemed to confirm the teacher’s words. One story had it that the Chinese used human blood to dye fabrics red. This gave me nightmares. These stories affected my mother, too. When she once found insect eggs in the lining of some underwear she’d bought she wondered if they’d been put there deliberately by the Chinese manufacturer.

One day early in the first semester our teacher had an announcement to make. Training and drilling for the mass games would soon begin. Mass games, he said, were essential to our education. The training, organization and discipline needed for them would make good communists of us. He gave us an example of what he meant, quoting the words of Kim Jong-il: since every child knew that a single slip by an individual could ruin a display involving thousands of performers, every child learned to subordinate their will to that of the collective. In other words, though we were too young to know it, mass games helped to suppress individual thought.

Mass games marked the most sacred dates in the calendar. We practised all year long except during the coldest weeks. Practice was held on the school grounds, which could be especially arduous in the heat of summer, with the final rehearsals in Hyesan Stadium. The highlight of the year was Kim Il-sung’s birthday, on 15 April. I played the drums in the parade. This was followed by the gymnastics and parades for Children’s Day on 2 June, at which we’d march through the city holding tall, streaming red banners. Then we trained for the anniversary of the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (the Korean War) on 27 July, at which we’d join with other schools to form massed choirs. Shortly after this were the mass games for Liberation Day on 15 August (which commemorated the end of Japanese rule), and Party Foundation Day, on 10 October. There was little time left over in the year for proper education or private pursuits.

I didn’t enjoy these vast events. They were nerve-wracking and stressful. But no one complained and no one was excused. My friends and I were assigned to the card section of the mass games in Hyesan Stadium, which was made up of thousands of children executing an immaculately drilled display of different coloured cards flipped and held up to form a sequence of giant images – all timed to music, gymnastics or marching. Though none of us said it, we all used to worry about the ‘single slip’ that could ruin the entire display. That filled me with terror. We practised endlessly, and to perfection. Each of us had a large pack containing all our cards, which we displayed in order. We were led by a conductor who stood at the front holding up the number of the next card. When she gave the signal, everyone held up that card in unison. The final pattern in the display formed a vast image of the Great Leader’s face with a shimmering gold wreath around it, which the children moved to give it a dazzle effect. We never got to see the visual display that we were creating, but when the stadium was full, and we heard the roar of the crowd, with tens of thousands chanting ‘Long life!’ over and over – ‘MAN–SAE! MAN–SAE! MAN–SAE!’ – the adrenalin was electrifying.

At the end of that first year at secondary school the ceremonies held on the anniversary of the Korean War affected me deeply and made me very emotional. The day began at school with outdoor speeches from our teachers and headmaster. They opened with the solemn words, spoken into a microphone: ‘On the morning of 25 June 1950, at 3 a.m., the South Korean enemy attacked our country while our people slept, and killed many innocents …’

The images conjured for us of tanks rolling across the border and slaughtering our people in their homes moved us all to floods of tears. The South Koreans had made victims of us. I burned with thoughts of vengeance and righting injustice. All the children felt the same. We talked afterwards of what we would do to a South Korean if we ever saw one.

Despite the endless and exhausting communal activities I had one private realm I could escape to: in books. Reading was a habit I’d picked up from my mother. I had picture books of fairytales, myths and folktales. I had a Korean edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, a story I loved – but it had some pages glued together by the censor, and it was impossible to peel them apart. Tales of heroes struggling against oppression were permitted as long as they fitted the North Korean revolutionary worldview, but any inconvenient details got blotted out.

By the second year of secondary school I was reading North Korean spy thrillers. Some of them were so gripping they kept me up late, by candlelight. The best one was about a North Korean special agent operating in South Korea. He lived there with his South Korean wife, never telling her his true identity. He was controlled directly by the head of secret espionage operations, a figure he’d never met face to face but with whom he’d formed a relationship over time. The story climaxes when he discovers that his controller is his own wife. The best stories had endings that were obvious all along and yet took the reader completely by surprise.

One evening at the start of my second year at secondary school, I came home to find my mother cooking a special dinner to mark my father’s first day in a new job. I had known for a while that he was leaving the air force, but I wasn’t talking to him much these days, and taking little interest in what he told me. When he arrived home, I saw him wearing a civilian suit for the first time. He looked smart, and quite different. I was so used to seeing his grey-blue uniform. He was now working for a trading company, which was controlled by the military. He was grinning broadly, and said he would be crossing into China next week on business. He showed me his new passport. I had never seen a passport before, but affected a lack of interest. My mother, however, was in high spirits. A husband with permission to travel abroad was a real mark of status. We were moving up in the world.

The only time I spoke to him over dinner, and not very respectfully, was to ask what he actually did in this fancy new job. He gave some vague, unspecific response. Clearly it was supposed to be some big secret. I rolled my eyes and left the table, which angered my mother. My father remained silent. I knew I had hurt him, but I felt more resentful towards him than ever. This was yet another fact being kept hidden from me. The pain I felt over the truth about my parentage had not lessened at all. I did not realize that in not telling me about his job he was trying to protect me.

My father began crossing into China on business, sometimes staying away for a night or two. It was very fortunate, therefore, that he happened to be at home with my mother on the evening of the fire.

About two months later, I had gone to bed very early, aching and exhausted after mass games practice, and was already asleep next to Min-ho when my mother’s cry awoke me, and my father came crashing into the room. Behind him was a flickering orange light, and everywhere a sharp reek of aviation fuel. We saved nothing from the house but the clothes we had on and the portraits my father had snatched from the wall, just seconds before the roof collapsed. All my picture books, my novels, and my beloved accordion and guitar were destroyed.

But there was something else I treasured that was also destroyed by the fire. Something so dangerous to possess that it could have got us sent to a prison camp. Looking back, the fire may have been a mighty stroke of luck.

Chapter 10

‘Rocky island’

A few months before the fire one of my best friends had gathered a close-knit group of us together in the schoolyard. I tended to make friends with older girls, from similar backgrounds. This friend was the daughter of the city’s chief of police. She’d heard that cassette tapes of illegal South Korean pop music could be bought, very discreetly, from certain dealers.

Soon we were in possession of some of this red-hot criminal contraband. We were among the first in North Korea to hear these new hits.

A small group of us began secretly meeting up on the weekends in the houses of one of us, and when parents and siblings were out we’d dance and sing along to the music of the South Korean singers Ju Hyun-mi and Hyun Chul, twirling around and jiving our hips, keeping the volume low. We made up our own moves. In truth we had very little idea of how people danced to pop. We knew we were not supposed to enjoy the archenemy’s music, but we did not realize quite how grave our crime was until news spread around Hyesan that some local women had been sentenced to a prison camp for partying to South Korean pop. One in their group had denounced the others.

After that I listened to the tapes alone at home, lying on my bed.