A North Korean Defector’s Story

Excitedly turning the pages of The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story, written under her current name of Hyeonseo Lee, one gets the impression that an equally apt title would have been “The Girl with Nine Lives.” So exciting and frightening is the story that it is easy to see why, as of this writing, the book which was published in 2015, has now garnered 2,678 customer reviews on Amazon.com and ranks #1 in both book and Kindle sales in the category of “Political Freedom” and #2 in Kindle sales in the category, “Emigration & Immigration.” It’s a truly gripping, exciting story, and you can’t put the book down until you see how it ends.

One also gets a very good idea from the book of what it is like to live in the ultimate totalitarian, Stalinist-Communist, Kim-dynastic state of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It is every bit the hell on earth that one might have imagined it to be from what little we are able to learn about it in the Western press. Actually, it’s probably a little worse than one can gather from Lee’s book, because her family was rather privileged as things go in North Korea.

This reviewer, who served in the U.S. Army in South Korea in 1967-68, got his first inkling of the oppression of North Korea in the summer of 1968 while working in the periodicals room of the University of North Carolina library beginning his first year of graduate school. One of the publications available there was the English language Pyongyang Times. It was meant to be a propaganda publication, painting the DPRK in the most favorable light and its enemies in the worst, but it managed to achieve precisely the opposite end. Abject fear radiated from every article. One got the impression that the person whose name accompanied the article, right up the ladder to the functionaries putting the rag out, lived in terror that they might leave the impression that they had failed to give enough credit to the beloved and respected leader Kim Il Sung. What horrible fate must have awaited them should they slip out of line was not hard to imagine.

Not only is North Korea a human rights horror—one huge prison camp—but it is also an economic disaster. Both are the clear results of Communism practiced in its purest, most extreme, form. We have seen it before in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, in China under Mao Tse Tung, and in Southeast Asia. It has disappeared in Europe and has greatly softened in the rest of Asia, but now under the third generation of Kims, it persists at its worst in North Korea.

Koreans, as I noted in my review of the movie, Chunhyang, have a tendency to take things to extremes. In the 19^th century Korea was already known in the West as the Hermit Kingdom for its xenophobia and isolation. North Korea has found Soviet-style Communism to be a perfect philosophy for perpetuating that attitude. By contrast, South Korea moved the American expatriate columnist for the English language Korea Times, James Wade, to use a word for its people that I had never before encountered, “xenophiles.” No country in the world is more open to foreign influence. As Wade observed, South Koreans, even then, in 1968, seemed to have the attitude that anything foreign had to be better. I noted, as well, that that small newspaper had a lot better coverage of international news than anything that I had observed in the United States. This openness to all things foreign goes a long ways toward explaining South Korea’s economic success. It also explains why the creation of its popular culture in drama and music has exported so well to the rest of the world, particularly to the other countries of East Asia. The Koreans have drawn the best from what they have found abroad, in the East and the West, even Mexico’s popular telenovelas, and put their unique stamp upon it.

As wretched as conditions are for the people of North Korea, one risks life and limb to suggest to a Korean, at least to one of my generation, that the people in that part of the peninsula would have been better off had they never been liberated from Japan, a proposition which to me seems almost self-evident. Older Koreans will have none of such talk. Emotions are still raw over the half-century of humiliation that Koreans suffered at the hands of the brutal, ethnic-supremacist Japanese. One can get a good idea of the difference in attitude of South Koreans toward Japan versus North Korea by watching two fairly recent Korean movies, Battleship Island and Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War. The Japanese are the vilest of villains in the former World War II drama, while the North Koreans come across as hardly worse than the South Koreans in the latter epic of the Korean War.

The North Koreans, of course, retain a similar animus towards the Japanese as the South Koreans, and as do the people throughout East Asia who suffered under Japan’s brutal occupation, for that matter. Hyeonseo Lee tells us that the families lowest in the rather strict pecking order in the North are the descendants of those who worked for the Japanese occupiers. There is a certain irony in this, because the system that the Kim’s have imposed upon the North is in many ways similar to the one imposed by the Japanese. Emperor worship has been replaced by Kim family worship, the people still live in great fear of the people running the government, and as Lee tells us, every North Korean wears two faces, a public and a private one.

One can get an appreciation for the similarities in the opening pages of the very moving memoir, The Divided Land: A Tale of Survival in War-Torn Korea, by Korean-American, Theresa Lee. Theresa was a young schoolgirl when Emperor Hirohito made his surrender speech on the radio. She was devastated and was very surprised to find that her parents’ reaction was quite the opposite. The public face that they had kept up to avoid trouble with the ruling authorities had, up to that point, extended even to their own children to keep them out of political trouble with the authorities at school. Theresa thought they were all just good Japanese although she was a bit puzzled by the fact that she had three names, a Japanese name, a Korean name, and a Catholic name.

Fear of the authorities was also quite strong in South Korea during the period in which the country was ruled by military dictators. I met a Korean civilian who worked for my U.S. Army command during my tour at a restaurant upon revisiting the country in 1974. He looked around warily at the nearby booths to make sure that our conversation would not be overheard by anyone. One can get a very good idea of what things were like in the country by watching the 2017 Korean movie, A Taxi Driver, about the bloody 1980 uprising in Gwangju, in the far southwest part of the peninsula.

The fact that such movies can be made now in the South is a very good measure of how far the Republic of Korea has progressed politically. It is also a bit of a measure of how very difficult reunification will be, so deep are the continuing divisions between the North and the South. One can gather from Hyeonseo Lee’s book that only the slightest bit of liberalization by the young, third-generation dictator, Kim Jong Un, would be very dangerous for him. While he might fear meeting the fate of Muammar Gaddafi by giving up his nuclear weapons, what happened to Romanian Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, should he begin to relax the barriers between the North and the South and to liberalize in even the slightest degree must surely be very much in his mind.

One might have hoped that at least the great economic liberalization that has occurred in neighboring China would have spilled over into North Korea, but apparently there has not been much of it. Free interchange of goods and people between the two countries would be a big threat to the Kim tyranny, and so it is not permitted. It is distressing to see the degree to which the Chinese government is complicit in the tyranny. Almost all of Lee’s Perils of Pauline-like adventures occur in China, where the Chinese government cooperates with the North Korean government in returning people like Lee to their home country, no matter what unspeakable retribution might await them there.

Hyeonseo Lee has a very good TED talk on the Internet, which might well be called the “Gangnam Style” of that genre when it comes to popularity. As of this writing it has 11,142,036 views. It is certainly well worth watching, but if you have any plans to read the book—which I heartily recommend—don’t watch the talk until you have finished the book. It’s full of spoilers.

David Martin

August 29, 2018

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