Hyeonseo Lee

Her safekeeping of the cards ensured the family’s high songbun. Those who destroyed their cards as the Americans approached were later to fall under suspicion. Some were purged violently and sent to the gulag.

They reported to the provincial bureau of the Ministry of State Security, the Bowibu.This was the secret police. The translation doesn’t convey the power the word Bowibuhas to send a chill through a North Korean. Its very mention, as the poet Jang Jin-sung put it, was enough to silence a crying child

We ate out quite often at restaurants that served naengmyeon, for which Hamhung is famous. These are noodles served in an ice-cold beef broth with a tangy sauce, although there are many variations. My mother would eat naengmyeon with her eyes closed in pure pleasure. She loved it to the point of addiction

Schooling in North Korea is free, though in reality parents are perpetually being given quotas for donations of goods, which the school sells to pay for facilities.

In North Korea, suicide is taboo. Not only is it considered gravely humiliating to the surviving family members, it also guarantees that any children left behind will be reclassified as ‘hostile’ in the songbunsystem and denied university entrance and the chance of a good job.

In the villages children had to bring a quota of their own excrement to school for use as fertilizer.

The woman asked to be helped down.
The policeman reached up to her. As she took his hand, her free arm shot up and her fist closed over the electrified wire above the train. Both were killed instantly. She must have thought, If I’m going, I’m taking this bastard with me

What were na chos, pop corn, and co la? Of course I knew these snacks, from China. But English transliterated into Korean words baffled me. And, as I soon found, there were many more. When people mentioned that they were in the elebaytoh,leaving their apateu to catch a tekshi to a meeting, I felt embarrassed. I had no idea what they were talking about

My name is Hyeonseo Lee.
It is not the name I was born with, nor one of the names forced on me, at different times, by circumstance. But it is the one I gave myself, once I’d reached freedom. Hyeon means sunshine. Seo means good fortune. I chose it so that I would live my life in light and warmth, and not return to the shadow.

I hear my voice trembling. I’m telling them about the girl who grew up believing her nation to be the greatest on earth, and who witnessed her first public execution at the age of seven. I’m telling them about the night she fled across a frozen river, and how she realized, too late, that she could never go home to her family. I describe the consequences of that night and the terrible events that followed, years later.