Why a Booktrail?
1990s, 2000s: An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships
The Girl with Seven Names
What you need to know before your trail
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.
Travel Guide
Experience life in one of the most secretive regimes in the world
Hyeonseo Lee gives a fascinating account of life in a secretive regime and how she, like everyone else was indoctrinated by the regime, made to endure enforced communal activities and how the entire country was brought to its knees with the famine of 1996.
Moving to China:
“I’d come from a world of black and white into one of Technicolor”
Community in North Korea:
“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 Leader of North Korea
“North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice”
BookTrail Boarding Pass: The Girl with Seven Names
Destination:North Korea Author/guide: Hyeonseo Lee Departure: 1990s onwards
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