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, who tells Hyeonseo and Min-ho about the history of their family through the Korean War and before that, during the Japanese Occupation of 1910-1945. Families share the same songbun—the North Korean caste system—and when one family member falls in songbun status, the rest usually follow. North Korea is not an easy place in which to live—the Kim regime is notoriously cruel and oppressive, and widespread famine and supply shortages make life a constant struggle—but Hyeonseo’s “colorful family life” makes North Korea “a magical place” to live. When Hyeonseo defects to China to escape the oppression of North Korea, she risks everything to get her mother and Min-ho safely out of North Korea. With her memoir, The Girl with Seven Names, Hyeonseo Lee underscores the importance of family and ultimately argues that family and togetherness are all that truly matter in life.
The importance of family is well-established in The Girl with Seven Names, which highlights Lee’s primary argument that family is what matters most in life. As Hyeonseo introduces her mother, she describes her rather large extended family. “Family was everything to my mother,” Lee writes. “Our social life took place within the family and she formed few outside friends.” Hyeonseo and her family live for each other, and they very rarely rely on other people. When Hyeonseo discovers that her biological father is actually a man from Pyongyang, she is devastated. “In North Korea family is everything. Bloodlines are everything. Songbun is everything.” The truth about her parentage upsets Hyeonseo’s family life and connections, which is exceedingly difficult in a country like North Korea. After Hyeonseo defects to China, she goes immediately to her father’s cousins in Shenyang, Uncle Jung-gil and Aunt Sang-hee, and they welcome her warmly. “I was family,” Hyeonseo says, “it made no difference to them that they had not seen me years.” Of course, Uncle Jung-gil and Aunt Sang-hee don’t appear to know the truth about Hyeonseo’s actual parentage. For North Koreans, even those who defect and leave their home country, family remains an extremely important part of life.
After Hyeonseo defects to China and finally makes it to freedom in South Korea, she goes to great lengths to get her mother and Min-ho safely out of North Korea, which again underscores the importance of family within the book. Even after escaping the oppression of North Korea, Hyeonseo doesn’t feel complete without her family. Crossing the border between North and South Korea is nearly impossible, so Hyeonseo and her family must escape over the border into China and reach South Korea from there. After Mother and Min-ho make it over the Yalu River to Changbai, China, Hyeonseo guides them 2,000 miles across China in coach accommodations. The journey is long, uncomfortable, and crawling with police and Bowibu (the North Korean secret police)—but to Hyeonseo and her family, it is worth it to be together. Once Hyeonseo, Mother, and Min-ho make it out of China and into Laos, Mother and Min-ho are arrested by the Laotian police as illegal immigrants, and Hyeonseo is accused of operating as a criminal broker. The Laotian police extort all of Hyeonseo’s money out of her, but she willingly pays their bribes just to get her family back. Mother and Min-ho are held in Laos for months in Phonthong Prison, a prison for foreigners in Vientiane, but Hyeonseo never gives up trying to get them out. Mother and Min-ho are finally released from the Laotian prison nearly one year after their journey began in Changbai, China. Again, their journey is not easy and is full of pain and heartache, but they are together in the end, which is all any of them care about.
Through all of Hyeonseo’s experiences, both good and bad, her love for her family is unyielding. She learns early on from her mother and father that keeping their family together and safe is all that truly matters. “We can do without almost anything,” Hyeonseo writes, “our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.” By the time Mother and Min-ho escape China, Father has been dead for many years, and Hyeonseo never does reunite with her extended family, which is exceedingly difficult for Mother. However, this strong belief in the importance of family keeps Hyeonseo going throughout the book, even when it seems she has nothing to continue for.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family ThemeTracker
Family Quotes in The Girl with Seven Names
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.
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.
My uncle and aunt made me feel instantly welcome. I was family - it made no difference to them that they had not seen me in years.
I thought of my uncle’s tirade against North Korea when I’d arrived in his apartment in Shenyang over six years ago, and the bizarre truths he’d told me about the Korean War, and the private life of Kim Jong-il. I’d refused to believe him. Ever since, I’d closed my mind to the reality of the regime in North Korea. Unless it directly affected my family, I had never wanted to know. I thought the reason people escaped was because of hunger, or, like me, out of an unexamined sense of curiosity. It had never occurred to me that people would escape for political reasons.
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.
