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

New rules lengthen the processing time for North Korean defectors. Lee’s mother and Min-ho are questioned for three months, then spend another three months in Hanawon. What was meant to be a two-week journey from North Korea to South Korea takes almost a year. Lee and Kim end their relationship just before Lee’s mother and Min-ho are released to Seoul. They part as friends, with a mutual understanding that their relationship has no future. Lee writes, “Two days later I was waiting anxiously at the top of the subway stairs for my mother and Min-ho. It was now August 2010” (278).

Lee’s family is “free, South Korean citizens,” she worries about “how well they’d cope with the ‘free’” (279). Lee’s mother and Min-ho struggle to keep up with the astonishing society in which they are now a part. After several days, Lee’s mother says to Lee, “It wasn’t all bull” (280). Lee questions what she is referring to and Lee’s mother explains:

‘All these cars. All these lights. I’d seen them in the illegal South Korean TV dramas, but I’d always thought it was propaganda, that they’d brought all the cars in the city to the same street where they were filming.