One fateful night, just when she
is one month shy of her 18th birthday, Hyeonseo Lee crosses the
frozen Yalu river into China, with little more than curiosity and a rebelling
spirit. The first words of her mother
when she calls was “Don’t come back.”
Thus begins a tormenting and gripping story of fear and the
uncertainty in which Lee must figure out how to navigate in a foreign country
with no money and identity.
It’s a story of one woman’s
terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to
freedom.
Lee was born in North Korea, one
of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. At age
seven, she witnesses her first public execution and self-criticism sessions were
part of her daily sessions at school. Those who did not cry when Kim Il-Sung died mysteriously disappeared.
In this powerful memoir, Lee recounts
her life inside the secretive communist brutal regime. As a survival strategy,
she changed her name for seven times, thus the title of the book.
In her dire effort to reunite
with her mother and brother, she plans to meet her brother arranged through the
local broker.
‘Sixty thousand yuan - a fortune representing ten years’ wages at the restaurant-and a week’s imprisonment with the threat of rape, and all I achieved was a three minute reunion with Min-ho.’
In 2009, a little over a decade
after she left North Korea, Lee gets an opportunity to get her mother and
brother out, taking them on a long, extremely risky route through China to Laos
where they could seek asylum in South Korea.
I’m aware that there is a ‘situation’
in North Korea. Yet other than knowing the name of the leader Kim Jong-un, I
was unaware of the tightly suppressive dictatorship. The movie The Interview provides a better insight, perhaps.
I’ve
thought that such regimes existed only in Hitler’s Germany. However, I’m
baffled to learn that this is happening right under the sky we live in.
I couldn’t stop thinking about
the ordeals she went through to escape to South Korea. Lee’s journey is
harrowing and inspirational. She is a hero. This memoir is simply unputdownable. What happens
next? Will she survive the journey? are the constant questions that looms your
mind until you turn the last page. It’s an incredible book.
The Girl with Seven Names is one of the best memoirs I’ve
read so far. And it was terribly hard for me to come to terms that this is not a work of fiction.
