The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee

The book tells the story of Hyeonseo Lee, who was born in Hyesan, North Korea in 1980. Even with these preconceptions of life under a totalitarian regime, nothing could ever prepare me for what I discovered in The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea.

Movie depictions and media portrayals have always characterised life inside North Korea as life marked by adversity, lack of freedom, and unconditional loyalty to a dictator. Many characters are simply referred to as “mother” or “father,” with no name provided.“To know 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.” - Hyeonseo Lee NOTE: Lee does not use real names for many of the figures in her memoir because they are still in North Korea and Lee fears for their safety. Lee marries an American man from Wisconsin and now advocates for North Korean defectors and speaks publicly against the regime.

Lee, her mother, and her brother are safe in South Korea, but her extended family remains in North Korea. After she returns from this ordeal, she enrolls in Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and further improves her status. Lee escorts her mother and brother across hostile China and arranges their safe passage to South Korea after they were arrested at the Laotian border. By the time Lee returns to China to help her mother and brother defect, she’s a certified tax accountant. Most North Koreans in South Korea are relegated to menial work, but Lee is too strong to resign herself to that. She flees an arranged marriage and a sex trafficker, escapes a police deportation interrogation, survives a brutal assault, is taken hostage by a Chinese gang, and on multiple occasions loses all her possessions and savings, while simultaneously becoming increasingly educated and upwardly-mobile in a system foreign to her, and in which she is ill-equipped to survive.Īfter several years in China, Lee arrives in South Korea and claims asylum. Now an illegal immigrant in China-one of the only countries that returns fugitive North Koreans to their homeland, to be punished in gulags-Lee relies on her resourcefulness, intelligence, and strength to survive.

The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee