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

our cousins. He took his shoes off and stepped into the house, closing the door carefully behind him.
    ‘Min-young, Min-ho, I am afraid I have bad news,’ he said.
    He looked grave and we knew something terrible had happened. He told us that our mother had telephoned him at his office. She said that our father had fallen very ill in hospital, and had died.
    Min-ho was devastated. He ran into the bedroom and shut the door.
    I walked numbly down to the beach and gazed out into the East Sea. From behind the clouds sharp rays made fields of light on the dark water. A few distant, rusted shipping boats were on the horizon. The sea was calm.
    The resentment I had nurtured towards my father had put such a wall between us. Why had I done that? I grew up understanding the importance of family and blood ties. Discovering that my blood did not come from him had shocked me and confused me. I had frozen him out. I was hurt by a secret that had been kept from me.
    I thought of how he’d met my mother, all those years ago on the train to Pyongyang. He had loved her so much that he had married her even though she was divorced and had a child by another man. Memories came back to me, dozens of them, of our happy times chasing dragonflies in fields near Anju, and of our family life in Hamhung, of the fun we’d all had together watching my mother eat
naengmyeon
, of how proud I’d been of him when he came to my Pioneer ceremony, how safe I’d always felt with him.
    I stared at the sea and the scale of my folly came home to me.
    He’d raised me lovingly, as his own child. My selfish feelings had stopped me seeing how much I loved him.
    I fell to my knees on the beach and cried bitter tears, clawing with my hands at the sand.
    After what seemed like hours, as the sun was setting, I walked back to the house. I knew that I would regret for the rest of my life the way I’d behaved towards my father. Knowing that he’d died thinking that I resented him would only make my bereavement more painful over the years ahead.
    My father’s death was a shock to everyone who knew him. He was still a young man, barely into his forties. No one was with him when he died.
    But before my mother had time to react to the blow of his death, she received another devastating piece of news. The hospital death certificate stated that he had committed suicide by overdosing on Diazepam (Valium). This drug was readily available in the markets. He must have gone out and bought it himself.
    In North Korea, suicide is taboo. Not only is it considered gravely humiliating to the surviving family members, it also guarantees that any children left behind will be reclassified as ‘hostile’ in the
songbun
system and denied university entrance and the chance of a good job. Suicide in Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it as a form of defection. By punishing the surviving family, the regime attempts to disable this ultimate form of protest.
    My mother was jolted out of her grief. She acted at once to protect us all.
    She had to get the hospital documentation changed very quickly, and this was a delicate and difficult task, but our futures depended on it. My mother’s tact and diplomacy succeeded. It cost her nearly all her hard-currency savings, but she did it. She bribed the hospital authorities. They agreed to change the cause of my father’s death to ‘heart attack’. The funeral was conducted in haste, before any questions were asked, and before Min-ho and I had arrived back from the coast. We did not even get a chance to say goodbye to him. Even worse, my father’s parents had cursed my mother angrily at the funeral, telling her that she had brought ill fortune upon their family.
    As a final, gratuitous humiliation, the investigating military authority wrote to inform my mother that my father had been formally dismissed from his post.
    After my father’s death I felt much closer to Min-ho. It was as if I was seeing him with