The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story (40 page)

I try to appreciate what I have and keep a smile on my face. I have recently graduated from university, thanks to that friendly encouragement from Mr Park the policeman. Min-ho is at university, speaks English, and these days is best of friends with Brian. Both of them laugh, now, at that dinner when they first met. In many ways it symbolized the ludicrous misconceptions created by politics.

And my mother, my wonderful omma, cries far less. She even manages to smile from time to time, especially when Brian mangles something in Korean. Those she left behind – my uncles and aunts – still appear to her in dreams. She tries to be strong for me, but some nights I hear her weeping quietly.

Perhaps the most remarkable step in my mother’s own journey came when we asked her to Brian’s hometown in the Midwest to attend our wedding. She surprised me by neither objecting nor complaining.

And so, my mother accompanied us on a journey into the belly of the Yankee imperialist beast, the United States of America. Had her mother, my grandmother, who’d hidden her Workers’ Party card in a chimney from American soldiers sixty years before, and worn it for the rest of her life on a string around her neck, been able to see my mother marvel at the view from the hundredth floor of the John Hancock Center in Chicago, or watch her, as I did, sitting in an American diner, sampling American food, she would not have believed her eyes. She would surely also have been astounded, as Brian and I were, to see her asking a waitress, in English, for another cup of coffee, and humming to herself, gazing across the sunlit canyon of skyscrapers, completely at her ease.

1
Hyeonseo with her mother, or ‘Omma’, 1984, at a photography studio.

2
Hyeonseo’s mother with Aunt Pretty, her younger sister.

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The Mansudae complex of skyscrapers in Pyongyang. Courtesy of breathoflifestar

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A housing estate on Kwangbok Street in Pyongyang. Courtesy of breathoflifestar

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Placards from the vast, extravagant performance of the Mass Games that captivate foreign audiences. Courtesy of breathoflifestar

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Visitors bow to the bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill. Courtesy of breathoflifestar

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A procession float featuring a painting of Kim Jong-il. Courtesy of breathoflifestar

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Factory workers going to work together in the city of Hyesan, on the border of China’s Changbai County. © REUTERS/Reinhard Krause

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A building in Hyesan pronounces slogans as Kim Il-sung looks over women working in front, 2009. © REUTERS/Reinhard Krause

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Hyesan, from the Chinese border. Photograph by Hyeonseo Lee

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An infamous picture, seen around the world in May 2002, taken at the Japanese consulate in Shenyang, China. Kim Han-mi, aged two, watches her mother being dragged by Chinese policemen as her family attempt to enter the Japanese consulate in order to seek asylum. The Han-mi family, including her uncle and grandmother, had dashed into the Japanese consulate gate in Shenyang, China in May 2002. Two male relatives had slipped through successfully, but the two women and the girl were forcibly apprehended, sparking a diplomatic incident between Japan and China. This image of Han-mi looking on as her mother was being wrestled to the ground was broadcast worldwide. © REUTERS/Kyodo

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Hyeonseo and her family at Navy Pier in Chicago.

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Hyeonseo’s mother and brother in their first water fight. Photograph by Hyeonseo Lee

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Hyeonseo (misspelled on her identification panel) testifying at the United Nations Security Council in April 2014.

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Hyeonseo with the US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power.

This studio photo of me on my mother’s back was taken when I was three. It is the only photo I have of me in North Korea.

My mother and Aunt Pretty pose for a photo just before my mother escaped North Korea. They were extremely close, but like many divided families on the Korean peninsula, accept that they may never meet again.

These towers in Pyongyang were completed in time for the centenary of Kim Il-sung’s birth in 2012, the year in which North Korea was to become ‘a strong and prosperous nation’. They house high-ranking members of the Workers’ Party and their families.

However, even for families of the ‘loyal class’, housing can be poor.

Portraits of Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim Jong-il, are formed by thousands of children holding up cards in unison during a mass games display. In the stadium at Hyesan my classmates and I rehearsed for hours in the card section without being allowed a toilet break. We had no choice but to urinate in our clothes.

Citizens bow before the colossal bronzes of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill, Pyongyang, a major shrine in the cult of Kim. Foreigners visiting the capital are brought here and are asked to bow. In this way the regime creates the impression on ordinary North Koreans that the Kims are respected and admired the world over.

A propaganda painting of Kim Jong-il adorns a float in a parade. He is depicted on a rainswept terrace gazing into the dawn. The symbolism here is that he steered the country through tempestuous times towards a bright future. A slogan on a f oat in the background says ‘Regeneration through self-effort!

Factory workers in Hyesan march to work behind their unit leader. Children set of to school in the same way.