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
Inside the airport, Hyeonseo makes her way to the immigration counter and stands in the line for foreigners. When she finally gets to the counter, Hyeonseo tells the man behind the counter that she is North Korean and is looking for asylum. A woman appears and asks if she is telling the truth, suspecting that Hyeonseo is Chinese and looking to gain South Korean citizenship. Hyeonseo tells the woman that she is in fact North Korean, and the woman leads her to an interrogation room. Hyeonseo smiles at the irony. Not so long ago, she convinced an interrogator that she wasn’t North Korean, and now here she is, trying to convince another interrogator of the exact opposite.
There is also widespread suffering in China (although not quite to the extent of North Korea) So many undocumented Chinese immigrants try to enter South Korea in search of a better life. There are well over 200,000 undocumented Asian immigrants in South Korea, and many of them come from China.
Themes
After a couple of hours, the woman leads Hyeonseo out of the airport to a waiting car. She is told that hundreds of North Koreans are showing up each week from Mongolia and Thailand, and she watches as Seoul passes in the window. The wealth of the buildings and people shock her. South Korea is not at all the country she had been told about as a child. Soon, the car arrives at the National Intelligence Service processing center. Her investigation will begin here.
As a child, Hyeonseo and the other North Korean children were taught that the South Koreans reside in poverty, living in shacks and eating garbage, but that isn’t at all the reality. Ironically, the description of South Korea given by the regime more aptly describes the conditions in North Korea, which are a humanitarian nightmare.
Themes
