The Girl with Seven Names

The Girl with Seven Names

by

Hyeonseo Lee

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Mother Character Analysis

Father’s wife, and Hyeonseo and Min-ho’s mother. After Mother divorces the man from Pyongyang and marries Father, he immediately accepts Hyeonseo as his own. Mother comes from a rather large family of exceptionally high songbun, and she is especially close with her sister, Aunt Pretty. Mother works a government job, as many North Koreans do, but she also maintains a side gig smuggling illegal foreign goods over the Yalu River from China. Mother has a strong mind for business, and she makes sure that her family has everything they need in life, despite their meager rations from the North Korean government. Mother provides her family with many luxuries, like the latest Chinese fashions and a perm for Hyeonseo, and she even manages to afford a color television. During the 1990s, when a massive famine strikes North Korea and the government stops paying salaries, Mother’s illicit side business keeps her family living in the manner they are accustomed to. Mother is devastated when Father commits suicide after being accused by the government of bribery and abuse of position in his new civilian job, but she manages to bribe the hospital to change his cause of death to heart attack to save their family’s songbun. After Hyeonseo crosses the Yalu River and defects to China, Mother remains in North Korea with Min-ho; however, after an important North Korean politician is suspected of defecting, Mother finally agrees to leave. She crosses the Yalu River with Min-ho, and Hyeonseo guides them all the way across China and into Laos, where both she and Min-ho are arrested and imprisoned by the Laotian government. She finally makes it to freedom in South Korea nearly a year after leaving Hyesan, but she is never happy. Mother was considered quite privileged in North Korea, but in South Korea, she is just another immigrant working a menial job. Mother represents the importance of family within the book. She misses her family terribly living in South Korea, and it is a constant struggle not to return to them.

Mother Quotes in The Girl with Seven Names

The The Girl with Seven Names quotes below are all either spoken by Mother or refer to Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Oppression, Human Rights, and North Korea Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Yet what struck me most was that neither of my parents seemed that upset. Our home was just a low, two-room house with state-issue furniture, common in North Korea. It’s hard to imagine now how anyone would have missed it. But my parents’ reaction made a strong impression on me. The four of us were together and safe - that was all that mattered to them.

This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything - our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Father, Min-ho
Page Number: xvi
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

No one was ever told their precise ranking in the songbun system, and yet I think most people knew by intuition, in the same way that in a flock of fifty-one sheep every individual will know precisely which sheep ranks above it and below it in the pecking order. The insidious beauty of it was that it was very easy to sink, but almost impossible to rise in the system, even through marriage, except by some special indulgence of the Great Leader himself. The elite, about 10 or 15 per cent of the population, had to be careful never to make mistakes.

At the time my parents met, a family’s songbun was of great importance. It determined a person’s life, and the lives of their children.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Father, Kim Il-sung/The Great Leader
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

The one luxury we did buy for the new house was a Toshiba colour television, which was a signal of social status. The television would expand my horizon, and Min-ho’s, dramatically. Not for the “news” it broadcast—we had one channel, Korea Central Television, which showed endlessly repeated footage of the Great Leader or the Dear Leader visiting factories, schools or farms and delivering their on-the-spot guidance on everything from nitrate fertilizers to women’s shoes. Nor for the entertainment, which consisted of old North Korean movies, Pioneers performing in musical ensembles, or vast army choruses praising the Revolution and the Party. Its attraction was that we could pick up Chinese TV stations that broadcast soap operas and glamorous commercials for luscious products. Though we could not understand Mandarin, just watching them provided a window onto an entirely different way of life. Watching foreign TV stations was highly illegal and a very serious offence.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Min-ho, Kim Il-sung/The Great Leader, Kim Jong-il/The Dear Leader
Page Number: 58-9
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

As I travelled back to Hyesan, I thought the whole visit had seemed like a strange dream. I could not believe Pyongyang was in the same country where people were dying on the sidewalks in Hamhung, and vagrant children swarmed in the markets of Hyesan. In the end, though, not even Pyongyang stayed immune. The regime could not prevent famine coming to the heart of its own power base

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

I realize now what an extraordinary imposition I was making on him and what a kindness he was doing me. I thanked him, but he held up his palm. He’d been trading with my mother for years, he said. He valued her custom and trusted her.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Mr. Ahn
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 41 Quotes

“People may be hungry now,” my mother said. Her voice trailed off uncertainly. “But things will get better. We’re all waiting for 2012.”

I groaned. This date was the centenary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, now less than three years away. For years, Party propaganda had been trumpeting it as the moment when North Korea would achieve its goal of becoming a “strong and prosperous nation.”

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother (speaker), Kim Il-sung/The Great Leader
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

The officials in immigration wanted Marlboro Reds, they had told me, the most expensive cigarettes. Once it was plain to them that I was agreeable, and opening a channel to them, their corruption became naked. At every one of my visits they’d ask how much money I had withdrawn from the ATM.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Min-ho
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 48 Quotes

I’d seen Korean-Chinese expose North Korean escapees to the police in return for money. I’d known people who’d been trafficked by other humans as if they were livestock. That world was familiar to me. All my life, random acts of kindness had been so rare that they’d stick in my memory, and I’d think: how strange. What Dick had done changed my life. He showed me that there was another world where strangers helped strangers for no other reason than that it is good to do so, and where callousness was unusual, not the norm.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Dick Stolp, Min-ho
Page Number: 262
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

I know that the mask may never fully come off. The smallest thing occasionally sends me back into a steel-plated survival mode, or I may ice over when people expect me to be open. In one edition of the popular South Korean defectors’ show, each woman’s story was spoken through floods of tears. But not mine.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother
Page Number: 292
Explanation and Analysis:
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Mother Quotes in The Girl with Seven Names

The The Girl with Seven Names quotes below are all either spoken by Mother or refer to Mother. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Oppression, Human Rights, and North Korea Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Yet what struck me most was that neither of my parents seemed that upset. Our home was just a low, two-room house with state-issue furniture, common in North Korea. It’s hard to imagine now how anyone would have missed it. But my parents’ reaction made a strong impression on me. The four of us were together and safe - that was all that mattered to them.

This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything - our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Father, Min-ho
Page Number: xvi
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

No one was ever told their precise ranking in the songbun system, and yet I think most people knew by intuition, in the same way that in a flock of fifty-one sheep every individual will know precisely which sheep ranks above it and below it in the pecking order. The insidious beauty of it was that it was very easy to sink, but almost impossible to rise in the system, even through marriage, except by some special indulgence of the Great Leader himself. The elite, about 10 or 15 per cent of the population, had to be careful never to make mistakes.

At the time my parents met, a family’s songbun was of great importance. It determined a person’s life, and the lives of their children.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Father, Kim Il-sung/The Great Leader
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother
Page Number: 38
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

The one luxury we did buy for the new house was a Toshiba colour television, which was a signal of social status. The television would expand my horizon, and Min-ho’s, dramatically. Not for the “news” it broadcast—we had one channel, Korea Central Television, which showed endlessly repeated footage of the Great Leader or the Dear Leader visiting factories, schools or farms and delivering their on-the-spot guidance on everything from nitrate fertilizers to women’s shoes. Nor for the entertainment, which consisted of old North Korean movies, Pioneers performing in musical ensembles, or vast army choruses praising the Revolution and the Party. Its attraction was that we could pick up Chinese TV stations that broadcast soap operas and glamorous commercials for luscious products. Though we could not understand Mandarin, just watching them provided a window onto an entirely different way of life. Watching foreign TV stations was highly illegal and a very serious offence.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Min-ho, Kim Il-sung/The Great Leader, Kim Jong-il/The Dear Leader
Page Number: 58-9
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

As I travelled back to Hyesan, I thought the whole visit had seemed like a strange dream. I could not believe Pyongyang was in the same country where people were dying on the sidewalks in Hamhung, and vagrant children swarmed in the markets of Hyesan. In the end, though, not even Pyongyang stayed immune. The regime could not prevent famine coming to the heart of its own power base

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother
Page Number: 87
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

I realize now what an extraordinary imposition I was making on him and what a kindness he was doing me. I thanked him, but he held up his palm. He’d been trading with my mother for years, he said. He valued her custom and trusted her.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Mr. Ahn
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 41 Quotes

“People may be hungry now,” my mother said. Her voice trailed off uncertainly. “But things will get better. We’re all waiting for 2012.”

I groaned. This date was the centenary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, now less than three years away. For years, Party propaganda had been trumpeting it as the moment when North Korea would achieve its goal of becoming a “strong and prosperous nation.”

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother (speaker), Kim Il-sung/The Great Leader
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

The officials in immigration wanted Marlboro Reds, they had told me, the most expensive cigarettes. Once it was plain to them that I was agreeable, and opening a channel to them, their corruption became naked. At every one of my visits they’d ask how much money I had withdrawn from the ATM.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Min-ho
Page Number: 254
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 48 Quotes

I’d seen Korean-Chinese expose North Korean escapees to the police in return for money. I’d known people who’d been trafficked by other humans as if they were livestock. That world was familiar to me. All my life, random acts of kindness had been so rare that they’d stick in my memory, and I’d think: how strange. What Dick had done changed my life. He showed me that there was another world where strangers helped strangers for no other reason than that it is good to do so, and where callousness was unusual, not the norm.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother, Dick Stolp, Min-ho
Page Number: 262
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

I know that the mask may never fully come off. The smallest thing occasionally sends me back into a steel-plated survival mode, or I may ice over when people expect me to be open. In one edition of the popular South Korean defectors’ show, each woman’s story was spoken through floods of tears. But not mine.

Related Characters: Hyeonseo Lee (speaker), Mother
Page Number: 292
Explanation and Analysis: