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
With her new ID, Hyeonseo is able to get a job at a tech company as a secretary for nearly four times as much as she made as a waitress. Most of her co-workers are South Korean, and they are all nice to her. Of course, no one knows she is North Korean. In Shanghai, they are all Koreans, speaking the same language and practicing the same customs. No one talks about the fact that their countries are at war. Time passes, and Hyeonseo grows more comfortable and secure, but she often thinks of North Korea. If she had never left, she would have graduated from school by now and would be working for the government and running illicit trade on the side like her mother. She wonders if such a life would have been so bad, but pushes such thoughts from her head.
Hyeonseo’s thoughts about what her life would be like in North Korea again reflects her connection to her homeland, which is clearly part of her core identity. The fact that there is no distinction between North and South Koreans in China implies that they are the same, even though the regime teaches North Koreans otherwise. North and South Korea are still at war because a formal peace treaty was never signed when the fighting stopped during the Korean War in 1953. The war reached a stalemate, not an end, and it continues as a frozen conflict.
Themes
Hyeonseo begins to frequent a North Korean restaurant in Shanghai owned by a business group in Pyongyang. The waitresses are all beautiful and selected based on their songbun. Hyeonseo knows the restaurant offers cover for Bowibu spies, but her new ID makes her brave. She becomes friendly with one of the waitresses who tells her she is saving her money to get a boob job. Hyeonseo is shocked. Then the woman tells her she has already had her eyes done, and Hyeonseo can hardly believe it when the woman says she had the cosmetic procedure in Pyongyang. The next day, the restaurant is closed. Apparently, the waitress had run off with a man, who, ironically, worked at Hyeonseo’s tech company. Both the woman and the man are eventually caught and deported. The man is sent back to South Korea, and the waitress is sent back to Pyongyang.
The fact that the restaurant is owned by a business in Pyongyang and that it is a front for Bowibu spies reflects the power of the North Korean regime, which extends all the way into China. Shanghai is hundreds of miles from the North Korean border and even further from Pyongyang—North Korea’s capital and home base for the Kim regime—but the Bowibu are still there, spying and rounding up defectors to punish and likely torture. The waitress’s cosmetic surgery in North Korea, the same country where people step over dead and starving babies in the street, illustrates the extreme differences between those of different songbun.
Themes
During Hyeonseo’s second year in Shanghai, she runs into the Korean-Chinese man from Shenyang who put her in touch with the broker, but she pretends not to recognize him. She is recognized again at a gathering with some friends and manages, somehow, to pretend to be someone else, until she meets one of the Shenyang waitresses she had known too well to fool. The woman’s name is Ok-hee, and she is on the run from authorities in Shenyang, too. They become close friends.
Like Hyeonseo, Ok-hee is a defector from North Korea who is constantly on the run, evading capture. Not only does Hyeonseo feel a kinship to Ok-hee because she is North Korean, but she also feels connected to Ok-hee because they share the same hardships as defectors illegally living abroad.
Themes
