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 in horror as people step over the woman and child without so much as a glance. “Kindness towards strangers is rare in North Korea,” Hyeonseo writes. In a country where daily life is a constant struggle, it is “the ruthless and the selfish” who survive. Yet Hyeonseo also catches quick glimpses of kindness—both from her family and from strangers—which suggest kindness isn’t as rare as she thinks. When Hyeonseo finds herself alone and broke in a foreign land, it is the kindness of a total stranger that saves her life and her family’s lives. With the depiction of kindness in The Girl with Seven Names, Hyeonseo Lee suggests that offering help is a privilege that poor or oppressed people are often unable to extend to others, but effectively argues that genuine kindness really does exist in the world, even in places like North Korea where it’s difficult to see it.
Even in very difficult circumstances, instances of kindness appear throughout in Hyeonseo’s book, which suggests that it’s not really as rare as it sometimes seems. Hyeonseo’s mother is detained at the train station in Anju because of an expired travel permit, and she fears she will be punished for unauthorized travel. The ticket inspector takes Hyeonseo’s mother’s ID, but a second, kind inspector gives it back and tells her to hide on the train with her children. When the ticket inspector comes looking for them, the other passengers point the inspector in the other direction. The kind inspector and every passenger on the train could be punished for helping Mother, but they do it anyway, and Mother never forgets their kindness. When Hyeonseo first escapes North Korea, she goes across the Yalu River to see Mr. Ahn, a business contact of her mother’s. “I realize now what an extraordinary imposition I was making on him and what a kindness he was doing me,” Lee writes. Assisting North Korean defectors in any way is a serious crime in China, but Mr. Ahn makes sure Hyeonseo gets to her family in Shenyang. Later, it is Mr. Ahn’s wife, Mrs. Ahn, who continues to help Hyeonseo and her family. Mrs. Ahn finds smugglers to check on Hyeonseo’s family for her and bring word back to China, another serious offense if caught in either North Korea or China. Like her husband, Mrs. Ahn is kind to Hyeonseo and her family, despite the potential trouble it poses for herself.
Perhaps the most important example of kindness in The Girl with Seven Names is Dick Stolp—an Australian man and a complete stranger—who helps Hyeonseo and her family in Laos. Dick’s kindness proves that strangers really do care about others, and that people are often willing to risk all to show others kindness. When Mother and Min-ho are arrested in Laos and the corrupt Laotian police extort all Hyeonseo’s money, Dick Stolp approaches Hyeonseo on the street, and after asking what is wrong, immediately pays to get Mother, Min-ho, and three other North Koreans out of police custody. Dick doesn’t know them, and he has no reason to help them, but he does simply because he can. Dick even gives Hyeonseo extra money for food and expenses—the equivalent of $800—and when the Laotian police accuse of Hyeonseo of being a criminal broker and extort that money out of her, too, Dick covers Hyeonseo’s travel expenses to get out of the country when they threaten to arrest her. Because of the kindness of a complete stranger, Hyeonseo is spared a lengthy Laotian prison sentence. Before Dick disappears forever, Hyeonseo asks him why he is helping her and being so kind. “I’m not helping you,” Dick says. “I’m helping the North Korean people.” As an Australian and a Westerner, Dick Stolp has no connection to Hyeonseo and the North Korean people, but he still cares and shows them kindness.
Dick Stolp’s kindness changes Hyeonseo’s life. She learns that kindness is a privilege, and that it exists more frequently where others have resources to share. North Koreans aren’t indifferent to other starving North Koreans because they don’t care, they simply can’t afford—psychologically or financially—to do any better. Dick, on the other hand, has plenty to share. Her experience in Laos teaches Hyeonseo that there is “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.” From the moment Hyeonseo meets Dick Stolp, the world feels “less cynical,” and she understands that true kindness really does exist.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Kindness ThemeTracker
Kindness Quotes in The Girl with Seven Names
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.
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.
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.
