Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Girl with Seven Names, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Oppression, Human Rights, and North Korea
Identity and Nationality
Family
Kindness
Summary
Analysis
When Hyeonseo turns 15, she is forced to take special classes, in which girls are taught knitting and housekeeping skills. They are taught nothing about sex, however, and Hyeonseo thinks one becomes pregnant by kissing and holding hands. She finally learns about sex from an illegal South Korean video, and during her very first menstrual cycle, Hyeonseo finds a dead baby in a plastic bag in a public bathroom, the placenta and umbilical cord still attached. Hyeonseo briefly dates her first boyfriend not long after—a local “hoodlum” and petty thief of the kind common to all North Korean cities—but she doesn’t tell Mother.
This further portrays the double oppression of women in North Korea. As a woman, Hyeonseo is expected to dedicate her life to domestic skills, and she isn’t allowed to refuse and study something else. The lack of sexual education and the tragic image of the dead baby intensify this gendered oppression even more. Safe medical services don’t exist, nor does a tolerance for single, unwed mothers. Woman are forced to commit such atrocities to avoid punishment by the cruel regime.
Themes
That same year, the Socialist Youth League is given more responsibilities, and they must plant extra rice saplings and dig tunnels around the schools. America and South Korea are planning a nuclear strike, Hyeonseo and the other students are told. After one long day of digging, Hyeonseo goes to a friend’s house . Hyeonseo is hungry after so much digging, so she asks her friend for a snack. Her friend says there aren’t any snacks, and offers her corn stalks from a boiling pot on the stove instead. Hyeonseo refuses, irritated. She can’t understand why her friend’s family is eating corn and not rice.
In 1994, the Clinton administration considered a military strike on the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center in North Korea’s Pyongan Province in an effort to denuclearize the Kim regime in accordance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1985. This, of course, never happened. However, the fact that Hyeonseo’s school is forced to plant extra rice saplings and her friend is eating corn, not rice, suggests the country is experiencing a rice shortage that the regime is blaming on foreign threats.
Themes
