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PRODUCT
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
Product Description:
Price:
$11.49
Detailed description:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?
Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.
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Product group:
Categories: Women Writers
Product name:
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story
Price:
$11.49
NINGTHOUJAM NONGLEMBA MANGANGCHA –
Very nice book! And easy to read, the story was caprivating, sad, encouraging. Leaving your country and knowing that you can never go back, never see your friends, never see your family… And this is the reality for so many people
Graham M. Flower –
I’ve read several accounts of escaping from North korea. This is a good one because it covers several subjects that are not covered in other books. For example hyeonseo grew up right on the border next to the Yalu river. There is extensive discussion of cross border smuggling in the book as her mother and other relatives were participants in this trade. Being so close to the border they could also get Chinese cell phone service and calls could be made to North Korea using Chinese cells. The other thing that is quite different about her story is that she spend more than a decade in China and was continually hiding from being discovered as an illegal therr. In one period she mentioned to others that she was from North Korea and its clear somebody reported her. She withstood an interrogation by the Chinese police and was able to convince them she was Chinese due to her ability to speak Mandarin and her mastery of Chinese Characters, which she attributes to her father pushing her to study while she was in school.
She has dangerous interactions with gangs, which she survives, was assaulted badly by an unknown assailant with a 1 liter beer bottle, an incident that did put her in the hospital and other adventures. One learns a bit about China and North Korea in this book. She has relatives which span several classes of North Korean society and one can get a feeling for what those strata are like. She also talks about the great amount of indoctrination she received during her education, of course this is common among the accounts of DPRK defectors.
Different that most of the defectors books she does describe the challenges facing defectors in South Korea. Their education is worthless and hence most of them severely struggle to obtain a college degree, which is important in South Korea. she also describes the process by which they vet defectors as well as the interrogation techniques of the Chinese police.
Once she has made it to South Korea she brings her mother and brother out of North Korea. This activity has several difficult twists which meant that the plan had to change in major ways on the fly and the challenges of getting through China to another country to defect to a South Korean embassy are shown. They chose Laos, a backwater whose insufferable bureaucracy and corrupt civil service made things hard. A very helpful Australian saves the day.
The story is interesting and one learns a fair bit about North Korea and China.
NINGTHOUJAM NONGLEMBA MANGANGCHA –
Hyonseo Lee’s hardship & painful journey is beyond imagination. A girl of twenties suffered so much of hardship just to get her right to live. She is a brave girl with full of challenges & every line of the book is exciting & well written. How low she felt when she & her mother & brother Min Ho struggled to teach S Korea just broke me heart.I admired Lee & the co writer David John for presenting such a wonderful & heart touching book. It reminds me of the line – Fortune favours the brave.
God Bless You & Your Family.
susan ANDRADE –
I really enjoyed learning about life in North Korea through the eyes of a teenager, who really possesses more maturity than her age. Her determination to navigate the problems encountered during defection, her creativity adopting diversions, and her willingness to accept responsibility for her actions were refreshing. We all try our best in life given the circumstances presented to us. I hope we earned a new citizen in the US!
The book received 5 stars because it was a well-written, easy to read, and engaging story that taught me something new.
RachelSophia –
This wasn’t my usual type of book, however it was recommended to me and i first read the sample on my amazon kindle app. I was keen to read on.
As i started reading i could not put the book down! At the end of each chapter i felt compelled to read on. The story is incredibly shocking to me, I frequently relayed specific parts to my boyfriend and just had no words to describe it other than ‘crazy’.
The way it is written is wonderful, it feels as though you really get to experience the author grow up and change with each chapter. By the end of the book I couldn’t hold back tears, such an incredible story to share.
It’s certainly though provoking and raises awareness on the struggles of those who are defecting, the regime, and the importance of simple acts of kindness towards strangers.
I will forever recommend this book to people.
Jaz –
Lo compre por qué me lo recomendaron…llegó en perfecto estado…..
Nefeli –
Da leggere. Consiglio
Julie –
There are some books that stay with you after the last page. This is one of those books. Days after finishing it, I continue to think about it and talk about with friends and family
This is a moving story of a brave young woman who escaped from North Korea, hid for years in China, and eventually found amnesty in South Korea. She provides great insights in to life in North Korea, and the plight of refugees.
In the past I had read books and articles about North Korea written by outsiders or by one man who had escaped from the Gulag. Hyeonseo Lee shows that for some in North Korea there is a very different way of life. Her family was relatively privileged and fairly high in the social hierarchy. She was in many ways a typical teenage girl who loved fashion, who loved music, who liked to have her hair done. Her family even had a television and her mother enjoyed redecorating the house. Her family didn’t go hungry during the famine. Her life was filled with friends and family that she loved.
At the same time she talks about the indoctrination she experienced from a young age, and of how even children were expected to report disloyalty of classmates, teachers, and family. When her house burned down, her father ran in to the burning building to save the portraits of the leaders that hang in every home, because not to do so could bring punishment to the family. She saw her first public execution at the age of seven, she witnessed people starving, and ultimately even her family couldn’t escape the violence.
Another way this book opened my eyes was to show the plight of North Korean refugees. Her life in China was as terrifying to me as her life in North Korea; perhaps even more so because she was in an entirely alien environment, alone, as a teenager with limited life experience. It took a great deal of intelligence, skill, and luck to survive and even thrive as she did, but she had some very frightening close calls. I hadn’t realized that the Chinese don’t just deport North Koreans they find, but that they actually hunt down refugees for deportation, and that they guard embassies to prevent North Koreans from seeking sanctuary. The stories she tells of other refugees are heart breaking. Those who offer to help North Koreans escape through other countries are most often dangerous thugs who are in it for their own profit. Hyeonson Lee’s stories from Laos are chilling.
What she also does well is to help readers understand the hardships faced by those North Koreans who do eventually reach South Korea. The challenges in learning that all the history they’ve been taught was a lie. The challenge of learning to live with absolute freedom. The challenge of being looked down upon by South Koreans.
Hyeonseo Lee writes with such a rare honesty – even about her own mistakes and self-doubt. I was so impressed by her strength, her determination and by her incredible resilience.