The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (39 page)

‘America? Why the hell would I go there?’

‘We can do anything, Min-ho. We can go anywhere. We are free people. We only have to set our heart on it, and we can do it.’

We talked like this for over an hour. Slowly he came back to reality. The whole time I was walking in circles in the middle of a quadrangle, with students flowing around me, chatting, pushing bicycles.

‘I think of the path along the river all the time,’ he said. ‘I miss knowing what I’m doing.’

‘I know.’

‘But you’re right. I’ll come back. I’ll try again.’

He hung up. I found a bench and sat down. My whole body was shaking. I felt like a pilot who’d narrowly averted a plane crash.

Not long after my family had arrived, Ok-hee introduced me to an organization called PSCORE (an acronym for ‘People for Successful Corean Reunification’), which helps improve the lives of North Korean defectors. One Saturday evening she and I joined a group of PSCORE volunteers for a night out in Hongdae, a district of crowded bars thumping with music and clubs popular with Seoul’s students. The others in our group were South Koreans and, curiously, three young male Westerners. At dinner I found myself sitting next to one of them. Ever since meeting Dick Stolp in Laos, I was much more curious about Westerners. If even just a few of them were as wonderful as Dick, I was interested to meet more. And I confess that I was also struck by how fine-looking this one was, next to me. He was fair-haired, with chestnut-brown eyes and a friendly, unassuming manner. He was in his mid-twenties, I guessed.

His name was Brian, he said. He was a graduate student at Yonsei University in Seoul. He asked where I was from.

‘A city called Hyesan,’ I said matter-of-factly, as if everyone knew where that was, and watched with amusement as he scratched his chin.

‘Hyesan, Hyesan,’ he muttered. He was trying to think where it was on the map. ‘That’s weird. I know this country pretty well.’

‘It’s in the North,’ I said. ‘Near China.’

He turned to me with a look of wonder. ‘You’re kidding me.’ I was the first North Korean he’d ever met.

He told me he was from Wisconsin. He saw the blank look on my face. ‘In the USA.’

We spent the rest of the evening deep in conversation. I was struck by how open and honest he was about everything. He spoke without guile or evasiveness. He wasn’t defensive, or status-conscious. I felt completely at ease with this stranger. I was honest with him, too, until the very end of the evening. Foolishly, I’d brought up the subject of age.

‘Well, how old are you?’ he laughed.

‘Twenty-five.’ It was an instant, reflexive lie. I’d snapped straight back into that cynical mode of calculating every benefit. It also came from years of lying about my identity. I’d shaved a few years off so that I’d seem more attractive to him. I didn’t feel too guilty, and didn’t imagine we would meet again.

What I did not expect was that Brian would call me, that we would start dating, and that a few months after meeting, we would start a serious relationship. That small lie did matter now. I kept putting off telling him the truth until it became unbearable. I had to get it over with.

‘Brian, I’ve got to apologize,’ I said, while we were walking in the street. ‘I lied to you. I’m not twenty-five. I’m twenty-nine.’

‘Oh.’ He gave me a puzzled look. ‘I don’t care about that. But I want you to know that you can always be honest with me. I’m not going to judge you.’

Brian was the first to show me a free intelligence, with a humorous, sceptical mind that took nothing as given. It made me open unexamined thoughts of my own. He made me realize that the wider world cares about the suffering in North Korea, and is well informed about it, too. His attitude emboldened me to confront the stultifying prejudice in South Korea against defectors – something they would never experience in the United States. Most defectors I knew in the South hid their identities out of fear of being seen as low-status. I was damned if I was going to hide mine. Now that my family was safely with me, I had nothing to hide.

But Brian also presented me with a problem I had not foreseen. It wasn’t just South Korean prejudices I was confronting. I had to change some defectors’ attitudes, too, and some of them were very close to home.

My mother and Min-ho knew that I’d got romantically involved with someone. They wanted to meet him, and wondered why I kept making excuses, not even telling them his name. As my relationship with Brian deepened, I realized they would have to know. In the end, I decided shock would be the best therapy.

And so it was that Brian was introduced to my mother and to Min-ho in a restaurant, and they found themselves face to face with one of the reviled Yankee jackals of North Korean propaganda. We sat down in silence. My mother, normally the epitome of good manners, gaped at him with her mouth open. She and my brother looked stunned and offended. I knew what they were thinking. A well-known saying in North Korea goes: ‘Just as a jackal cannot become a lamb, so American imperialists cannot change their rapacious nature.’ I acted as interpreter. After a brief and excruciating dinner, Brian left as soon as he politely could. Min-ho remained silent and stared at the table. My mother said only one thing, muttering to herself: ‘I’ve lived too long. I’m too old for this shit.’

Later Min-ho admitted to me that he’d hated Brian on sight. He was a
miguk nom,
he said. An American bastard.

I did not feel bad for offending them. I felt bad for Brian, who was decent and kind and had done nothing to deserve their contempt. But I knew I would achieve nothing by having a row with my mother and Min-ho. They had only been out of North Korea a few months. Some convictions would not change overnight.

Slowly, I started speaking out in defence of defectors, and about the human rights abuses in North Korea – first, in defector group meetings, then in small public speeches, then on a new television show called
Now on My Way to Meet You
, in which all the guests were female defectors, given new clothes in vibrant colours to dispel public perceptions of North Koreans as shabby and pitiful. The show had a big impact in transforming attitudes in South Korea toward defectors.

I started thinking deeply about human rights. One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist. This is also why most people escape because they’re hungry or in trouble – not because they’re craving liberty. Many defectors hiding in China even baulk at the idea of going to South Korea – they’d see it as a betrayal of their country and the legacy of the Great Leader. If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their rights, of individual freedoms and democracy, the game would be up for the regime in Pyongyang. The people would realize that full human rights are exercised and enjoyed by one person only – the ruling Kim. He is the only figure in North Korea who exercises freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, his right not to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed without trial, and his right to proper healthcare and food.

By coincidence, it was at the time I was having these thoughts that something happened that no defector expected.

My mother and I were watching television on the evening of 17 December 2011 when news came through that Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader, was dead. He had died on his private train, the distraught North Korean news anchor said, from the ‘excessive mental and physical strain’ of his lifelong dedication to the people’s cause.

I turned in shock to my mother. We were yelling. Her palm was raised. She was giving me a high five. Ok-hee was on the phone straight away. We wanted to celebrate. Naively, we thought major changes were about to happen in the North.

We couldn’t believe it. He was seventy. We’d all thought he had at least ten more years in him. An entire scientific institute in Pyongyang was dedicated to his longevity. He had access to the best healthcare in the world, and the best food. Every single grain of rice he ate was inspected for imperfections.

Our mood soured a few days later, however, when we saw footage of the forced public outpouring of crying and wailing for this callous tyrant. Kim Jong-il had been a disastrously bad ruler, doing almost nothing to alleviate one of the worst events in Korean history, the Great Famine. Yet from his point of view, he’d been highly successful – his power had remained absolute, he’d died peacefully, and he’d passed the reins to his youngest son, Kim Jong-un.

Brian brought stability to my life. I felt settled and less distracted; I attacked my studies and began to gain confidence at school, especially in English. I continued speaking out on behalf of defectors, and then something else occurred that I could never have anticipated. I was chosen through a worldwide talent search to give a talk at a TED conference. (TED stands for technology, education and design, and holds annual conferences to present interesting ideas to a broad audience.) In February 2013, I was flown to California to tell my story before a large audience.

To my astonishment the talk received an overwhelmingly positive response from people all over the world. Some of the most inspiring messages came from China, a country I love but which caused me so much hardship. Many expressed their shame at the complicity of their government in hounding escaped North Koreans. I also received hate messages, calling me a traitor, and worse. Brian laughed those off and suggested I did the same.

Later that year, I was invited to New York to testify before the United Nations Commission of Enquiry on Human Rights in North Korea, alongside some defectors who had survived the North Korean gulag. The international outcry that followed the Commission’s verdict on North Korea’s crimes against humanity finally brought me to the attention of the regime in Pyongyang. Its Central News Agency, in its inimitable style, proclaimed this: ‘One day, the world will learn the truth about these […] criminals. The West will be so embarrassed when they realize they invited these terrorists [to testify].’

Behind the bluster, I sensed fear. Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear. They are governed by the whim of one man, who can’t draw upon a wealth of discussion and debate, as democracies can, because he rules through terror and the only truth permitted is his own. Even so, I don’t think Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship is so weak that it will collapse any time soon. Sadly, 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.

So when might this suffering end? Some Koreans will say with reunification. That should be our dream on both sides of the border, although, after more than sixty years of separation, and a radical divergence in living standards, many in the South face the prospect with trepidation. But we can’t sit on our hands while we wait for the miracle of a new, unified Korea. If we do, the descendants of divided families will reconnect as strangers. Reunification, when it happens, and it will happen, may be less turbulent if the ordinary people of North and South can at least have some contact, be permitted to have family vacations together, or attend the weddings of nephews and nieces. The least that could be done for defectors is to ensure that they know, when they risk everything to escape, that they will not be lost for ever to the people they left behind, that they have supporters and well-wishers the world over, that they are not crossing the border alone.

With the wide publicity I received after these events, my mother could no longer ignore the fact of my relationship with Brian. He had been so supportive of me. What’s more, the attention I was receiving for my work was causing a change of attitude in her and Min-ho. Through me, circumstance was forcing them to take a more international view of their lives. Slowly, they were starting to see themselves as citizens of a larger world, rather than displaced people from a tiny area of Ryanggang Province, North Korea.

Nevertheless, the next step was a major one for my mother to accept. She became quiet and forbearing when I told her the news.

‘Omma, Brian has asked me to marry him. It means so much to me that I receive your blessing.’

Incredible as it may seem in our connected world, I lost touch with Dick Stolp shortly after leaving Laos. The email server I was with went out of business, and with it, all my addresses. I wrote letters to the editors of several Australian newspapers hoping that they’d be published and that Dick would see one of them and get in touch. I wanted him to know what his kindness and his heroism had achieved. None of my letters was published. It was only after the attention generated by the TED talk that an email eventually appeared in my inbox. ‘Hyeonseo, is that you?’ Dick wasn’t sure that it was me he was writing to, since he’d had no idea I was North Korean. An Australian news programme,
SBS Insight
, got wind of the story and flew me to Australia to thank Dick in person. TV cameras were there to film the reunion. Normally, such public pressure would have kept my North Korean mask firmly on my face, but the moment I saw Dick’s towering figure and the same gentle, kind smile I’d seen that day outside the Coffee House in Luang Namtha, I threw my arms around him and wept.

I know that the mask may never fully come off. The smallest thing occasionally sends me back into a steel-plated survival mode, or I may ice over when people expect me to be open. In one edition of the popular South Korean defectors’ show, each woman’s story was spoken through floods of tears. But not mine.

I still go through bouts of self-loathing. Somewhere, years ago in China, I stopped liking myself. After leaving my family behind, I felt I didn’t deserve to celebrate my birthday, so I never did. I am perpetually dissatisfied. No sooner do I achieve something than I become unhappy with myself for not doing better, and achieving the next thing.