The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story, is Hyeonseo Lee’s 2015 autobiography. Lee leaves North Korea shortly before her eighteenth birthday. She does not intend to defect. She has received a lifetime of propaganda and truly believes her country is the best in the world. She is simply a curious child who wanted to see China, and intends to return to North Korea within days. Once in China, however, she is exposed to things she never dreamed of. Lee stays for over a month. Her absence draws the attention of the North Korean regime, and her mother informs Lee that Lee can’t return.

Now an illegal immigrant in China—one of the only countries that returns fugitive North Koreans to their homeland, to be punished in gulags—Lee relies on her resourcefulness, intelligence, and strength to survive. She flees an arranged marriage and a sex trafficker, escapes a police deportation interrogation, survives a brutal assault, is taken hostage by a Chinese gang, and on multiple occasions loses all her possessions and savings, while simultaneously becoming increasingly educated and upwardly-mobile in a system foreign to her, and in which she is ill-equipped to survive.

After several years in China, Lee arrives in South Korea and claims asylum. Most North Koreans in South Korea are relegated to menial work, but Lee is too strong to resign herself to that. By the time Lee returns to China to help her mother and brother defect, she’s a certified tax accountant. Lee escorts her mother and brother across hostile China and arranges their safe passage to South Korea after they were arrested at the Laotian border. After she returns from this ordeal, she enrolls in Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and further improves her status.

Lee, her mother, and her brother are safe in South Korea, but her extended family remains in North Korea. Lee marries an American man from Wisconsin and now advocates for North Korean defectors and speaks publicly against the regime. 

NOTE: Lee does not use real names for many of the figures in her memoir because they are still in North Korea and Lee fears for their safety. Many characters are simply referred to as “mother” or “father,” with no name provided.