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

clear vision for the first time in years. The stupid delusion that had made me withdraw from my father was the same one that had stopped me feeling close to my own sibling. I started to see him for who he was – my brother, as bereaved and as heartbroken as I was.
    I no longer felt the same about our house on the river. Within a short time of moving there we’d had a tragedy in the family. It made me think the curse on the place was real, and potent.
    We were still trying to come to terms with what had happened, when an event occurred that united the entire country in grief – in such wailing, brow-beating scenes of mass hysteria as the world’s media had never before seen. It was an event that reverberates in North Korea to this day.

Chapter 14
‘The great heart has stopped beating’
    I went to school as usual on the morning of 8 July 1994. Just before lunchtime, our lesson was interrupted when a teacher entered and told us that the school was closing for the day. We were all instructed to return home and turn on the television. This was odd, since there was no daytime television during weekdays.
    Instead of going home, I went with a girl friend to her apartment near the school. We turned on the television. Shortly after, the famous news anchor Ri Chun-hui came on, dressed in black. Her eyes were red from crying. She then announced the impossible. Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, the father of our nation, was dead. The announcement made on the radio was equally dramatic: ‘The great heart has stopped beating.’
    My friend broke into a wail and couldn’t stop. Her crying affected me a little, but it was my mind that was moved, not my heart. How could he die? Incredible as it may sound now, it had never occurred to me, or to many North Koreans, that this god-king, so powerful that he could control the weather, might die. He was flawless and almighty. He existed so far above humankind that a part of me didn’t think he was real. We did not even think he needed to sleep or urinate. But he’d died.
    A door opened in my mind.
    He’s an eighty-two-year-old man, I thought. He grew old and weak. He was human after all. I sat there listening to my friend’s sobs, but my eyes were dry. I was too raw with grief for my father to spend my tears on the Great Leader.
    The next morning the entire school gathered in front of the school building. We stood in long, regimented lines. The sky was a milky blue and the day was warming up uncomfortably. Emotional speeches were made by the headmaster and the teachers, all of whom were choking with tears, to a background accompaniment of piped funeral music. Hour after hour it went on. I had felt sad at first, but after three hours of standing under the hot sun, I was becoming thirsty and tired.
    Nobody had ordered us to cry. No one had hinted that if we didn’t cry we would fall under suspicion. But we knew our tears were being demanded. From all around me came the sounds of sniffing, sobbing and wailing. It looked as if everyone was beside themselves with grief. My survival instinct kicked in. If I didn’t cry like everyone else I’d be in trouble. So I rubbed my face in false distress, surreptitiously spat on my fingertips, and dabbed my eyes. I made a gasping noise that I hoped sounded like I was heaving with despair.
    After a long time doing this, I felt I could not stand there for much longer. The sun now was overhead. It was very warm. So I stumbled a little. The teachers thought I was about to faint, so they put me in the ambulance that was there on standby. That was a relief.
    The next day there was a similar event joined by all the city’s schools at the Victorious Battle of Pochonbo Memorial in Hyesan Park. This time several thousand students and teachers joined in the sobbing and the wailing. The grief seemed to be getting more extreme by the hour. A kind of hysteria was spreading across the city. Our schooling stopped. The steel and lumber mills, the factories, shops and