Oppression, Human Rights, and North Korea
The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea chronicles the real-life experiences of Hyeonseo Lee, a North Korean woman born in the town of Hyesan, near the Chinese border. Growing up, Hyeonseo is taught that North Korea is the greatest country in the world, and since North Korea is a closed state and contact with the outside world is forbidden, she has no reason not to believe the claims of the government. Social…
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Identity and Nationality
As the title suggests, Hyeonseo Lee’s identity is at the center of The Girl with Seven Names, a memoir that chronicles her life growing up in North Korea and eventually defecting. Hyeonseo’s struggle with her identity begins when she is just a girl and discovers that her father isn’t her biological father. Hyeonseo’s mother was married to a man from Pyongyang before her marriage to Hyeonseo’s father, and this stranger is Hyeonseo’s biological…
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Family
Family is central in Hyeonseo Lee’s The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea. Hyeonseo’s mother is one of eight siblings and comes from a very large extended family. Hyeonseo and her brother, Min-ho, often visit Mother’s siblings, including Uncle Money, a rich businessman in Pyongyang, and Aunt Pretty, a trader of illicit foreign goods in Hamhung. Hyeonseo also spends a lot of time with her grandmother in Hyesan…
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Kindness
Kindness, especially the kindness of strangers, occurs very little in the beginning of Hyeonseo Lee’s memoir The Girl with Seven Names. When Hyeonseo is a young girl in the 1990s, a massive famine strikes North Korea, and citizens begin to quite literally in the streets. One day, while at the market outside the train station, Hyeonseo sees a starving woman lying in the street with an infant in her lifeless arms and watches…
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