THE GIRL WITH SEVEN NAMES brings fascinating insight into one of the world’s most oppressed societies. Author, Hyeonseo Lee, grew up in Hyesan, next to the Chinese border. She grew up believing that their country was the best in the world and that the South Koreans were planning to attack them. She survived North Korea’s repressive regime, indoctrination, and even the Great Famine, to escape in 1997.

In a Ted Talk in 2013, Lee said, “Among those of us who were born in North Korea and who have escaped it, the story I am telling is not uncommon.” She then tells the audience she understands that they are probably asking themselves, “why does a country such as mine still exist in the world?” She follows, saying she “still loves her country and misses it very much.”

Her father’s job in the military in her early life was why they were relatively well off. Things changed when the secret police arrested her father under the pretense of spying.  He was beaten so severely that he later died.

Hyesan was located right on the Chinese border with nothing but a river between the countries. Crossing the river was often a source of illegal trade and eventually a way to defect. Lee’s relatives included her “Uncle Opium,” who smuggled North Korean heroin into China. (Lee gave unique names to her many family members to protect their identity)

Lee began questioning her life because of the poverty and starvation she witnessed and felt it didn’t make sense if her country was, as she had been told, “the best on the planet.”

At age seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was to be reunited with her family. She never expected that the years between her escape from the North and her arrival in the South would be far more dangerous for her: going first to China, then later for family members to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Lee’s survival skills were her ability to quickly pick up the Chinese language and using her savings for the many bribes she had to pay. Getting new names and identities helped a lot too.

She writes in her epilogue that "the smallest thing sends me back into steel-plated survival mode.”  The story made me recall the book “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick,” which presented a similar view of the North. 

More books by those who have escaped North Korea are coming out and hopefully will help bring about positive changes. This is a must-read book that you will not want to put down.

See Hyeonseo Lee’s Ted Talk Click Here to Link to Talk

Lee Hyeon-Seo (Korean: 이현서, born January 1980), best known for her book, is a North Korean defector and activist who lives in Seoul, South Korea, where she is a student.