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

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She was doing volunteer work "out of gratitude for all the aid [she has] received since [she] came here and of hope to return the favor to other people in need." [6] As of May 2014, Lee was still studying at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and working as a student journalist with the Ministry of Unification. [7] Activist work [ edit ] a b "Oslo Freedom Forum: Speakers" (PDF). OsloFreedomForum.com. May 12, 2014. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-04-21.

As part of their brainwashing, North Koreans were taught that South Korea was steeped in poverty; South Korean people were depraved; South Korea started the Korean War (North Korea started it); and western nations - especially the United States - were evil incarnate.Ideological indoctrination is omnipresent in Hyonseo’s childhood and teenage years. At first, she buys into and believes in North Korean propaganda. Her family’s wealth and privilege protect her from many of the harsh realities of average North Korean life. However, she is not shielded from witnessing public executions and life-ending famine. Hyeonseo’s childhood is kept busy with school, mandatory government run programs, and compulsory participation in the National Socialist Youth League. I admit, during brief moments while reading, not feeling very sympathetic to the author , because I couldn't understand why she made so many of the choices she did. Many of them seemed born of supreme self-centeredness, but to be fair, I didn't grow up in a dictatorship and can't begin to get into the mind of someone who did. Perhaps she felt those were her only good options. No judgement. To her credit, she seems to be the first to admit that those choices were costly to a lot of people and always seemed to repay those she imposed upon. I think her life now, as a free person advocating for the human rights of her native country's people, has more than paid off whatever debt she may have had. She's remarkably brave and she's done a wonderful job telling her story. I can't imagine it was a pleasant experience to relive and bare to the world.

There's literally no way for me to talk about this book without spoilers, other than to say, if we were listening to her inner monologue during this journey to freedom, it might look something like this: In 2009, a little over a decade after she left North Korea at age 18, the opportunity arose for Hyeonseo Lee to get her mother and brother out, taking them on a long, extremely risky route through China to Laos or Thailand, where South Korean government officials would take them as refugees as they did her a few years earlier.

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.” Hyeonseo grew up in northernmost North Korea, in Hyesan - a small city right across the Yalu River from China.