FLEEING NORTH KOREA
Author Hyeonseo Lee took a long walk to freedom — then came back for her family,
Seventeen years after she left North Korea, walking over a frozen river on a wintry night into China, thinking she would return a few days later, a question still haunts Hyeonseo Lee: If she hadn’t been so naive, would she have been so brave? No, she figures. “If someone had told me right before I crossed (the border) that you are never coming back, that you will be separated from your family for a very long time, that you will be an orphan in China, that you will have to hide your identity and live alone there . . . I couldn’t have.”
But she doesn’t regret it. Had she not left, she likely wouldn’t have written a book chronicling her life in North Korea. She also likely wouldn’t have been sitting here, in a posh Toronto hotel, if she hadn’t been so naive.
Lee, 35, is about 4-foot-10 and slender — almost waiflike. She is at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Yorkville, where she is doing interviews for the Canadian launch of her memoir The Girl With Seven Names. It gives rare insight into the bizarre and barbaric reality of daily life in the world’s most secretive and repressed state.
In recent months, North Korean defectors have come under scrutiny. Shin Dong-Hyuk, 32, a prison camp survivor, wrote a dramatic account in his bestseller Escape from Camp 14. But in January, he admitted that parts of the book were inaccurate, and apologized. Other accounts of persecution have also been questioned.
Lee’s book is matter-of-fact and, for much of it, without drama. That makes it exceptional.
She tells how all family life took place beneath the obligatory portraits of the country’s revered founder, Kim Il-sung, and his son, Kim Jong-il. The portraits were assigned by the government and hung in every home. This intrusion did not feel oppressive or unnatural to her.
She tells how her childhood was happy and her family was relatively well-off. There was always plenty of food, even money for fashionable shoes. On rare visits to friends’ homes, she did wonder why they didn’t have enough food. She also remembers public executions, betrayals and famines.
She tells how she became an unlikely defector when she crossed the Yalu River to spend a few days with relatives in China. She wound up on the run in China for more than 10 years until she made it to South Korea and applied for asylum in 2008.
“Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe.”
Lee might never have written this book if it hadn’t been for giving a TED talk in the United States in 2013. Her straightforward approach endeared her to the audience. The video of the talk went viral; it has been viewed more than three million times. Lee laughs at that. “It changed my life but the best thing that came out was that I met Dick again.”
Dick Stolp, a lanky Australian tourist with grey hair and beard, helped Lee and her family during one of its direst moments.
When Lee’s mother and brother fled North Korea, their route to the other Korea was through China and Laos, fraught with danger. Lee’s audacious plan to smuggle them out of the country involved a short cab ride, a long train journey and treks on foot. She guided them across almost 4,000 kilometres — they were almost caught many times. At one point, Lee told a police officer that her family was deaf and dumb and she was chaperoning them.
In Laos, they were caught and jailed for crossing the border illegally and police demanded money to let them go. Lee paid the bribe. She then travelled with them to Vientiane, where they were arrested and jailed again, a short distance from the South Korean Embassy, where they were headed. There were demands for more bribes, money Lee did not have. That’s when she serendipitously bumped into Stolp. He withdrew hundreds of dollars from an ATM and Lee’s family was able to escape.
Somehow, Lee lost Stolp’s email address and thought she would never be able to thank him.
But he recognized her from the TED talk and emailed her. An Australian network then flew Lee there to meet him. Lee, who admits she wears a mask in public, threw her arms around him and wept.
The TED talk, says Lee, made her realize that she had a responsibility toward her people — she now gives talks and is a human-rights activist.
She understands her country is a place of darkness, a virtual prison for most people. Yet, she misses it and yearns to return.
She also knows it will likely not happen in her lifetime.
Kim Jong Un, she had hoped, would be progressive and change the country after he replaced his father. Instead, she says, “he is killing even high-ranking officials . . . I think he is out of his mind.”
Lee, who has changed her name seven times for seven different reasons, eventually settled on “Hyeonseo,” which means “sunshine” and “good fortune” in English.
She says she is very grateful to South Korea for everything — the asylum, the apartment. But sometimes, Lee says, it doesn’t feel like her life.
“I miss home.”