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

real mother and siblings to be his family.
    This son travelled to the prison camp to try and meet his father, but was turned away at the gates. There are two kinds of prison in the gulag. One is for prisoners sentenced to ‘revolutionary re-education through labour’. If they survive their punishment they will be released back into society, and monitored closely for the rest of their lives. The other is a zone of no return – prisoners there are worked to death. The son feared that his father was in the second type, and was still there.
    This story distressed me a lot. On the rare occasions we mentioned anyone we knew who had fallen foul of the authorities we did so without analysis or judgement, or any comment on the fairness of the punishment. We just described the bare facts. That’s how North Koreans talk. But now my mother was speaking emotionally of how the gulag had affected our own family.
    No one spoke openly of the gulag. We knew of it only through terrifying rumours and whispers. We did not know where the camps were located or what conditions there were like. All I knew about was Baekam County, a less extreme place of punishment not far from Hyesan. We knew a family who’d been deported there from Pyongyang because the father had rolled a cigarette using a square of cut newspaper without noticing that the Great Leader’s face was printed on the other side. His whole family was sent to the mountains for a backbreaking life of potato digging on the 10.18 Collective Farm.
    Now I was picturing my father being sent to a prison camp. A great fog swirled in my head. The resentment I’d felt towards him was becoming a mess of confused feelings.
    While we were waiting for news, five uniformed military officials hammered on our door one evening, entered without removing their boots, and ransacked our home in search of cash and valuables my father had allegedly hidden. They ripped open the walls, tore up the floor and pulled down the ceiling. They left, empty-handed, after an hour of destruction. My mother and I were in shock as we stared about at the damage. Our house was completely wrecked.
    About two weeks after my father had disappeared, my mother was told that he had suddenly been released to the hospital in Hyesan. When she saw him she was overwhelmed, and began sobbing freely. His appearance shocked her. He was haggard, with sunken eyes, but he tried to give her a grin. He seemed much older.
    The investigation into him was still ongoing, he said. He’d been accused of bribery and abuse of position. A more likely reason was that he had fallen out of political favour, or had put some senior cadre’s nose out of joint. He had been interrogated many times, and ordered to write his confession over and over again. Each time, the interrogator ripped it up in his face and told him to start again.
    My mother did not ask what else they had done to him. She did not want him to relive the trauma, but she could see that he had been badly beaten, and had not been allowed to sleep. At the hospital he slept for days with the covers pulled over his head.
    My father kept everything bottled up, as many North Korean men did. They could not talk about their feelings, or mention the fear and stress they were under. It was the reason I would see terrible drunken fights breaking out among men in Hyesan during the public holidays. My father never drank alcohol, but he turned his feelings inward. He had lost a lot of weight, and had become very listless. We realize now that he had fallen into a severe depression, an illness that is not acknowledged in North Korea. He spent about six weeks in the hospital in Hyesan.
    My mother needed Min-ho and me out of the way while she tended to my father, visiting him daily for hours at the hospital. We were sent to the east coast to stay with Uncle Cinema, his wife, and their children, my cousins.
    One afternoon, Uncle Cinema came home early. Min-ho and I were in the living room with our aunt and