Read Online The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story by Hyeonseo Lee - Free Book Online

kept breaking down or failing to provide people with sufficient essentials. Occasionally, during some crackdown ordered by Pyongyang, the markets would be closed without notice, only to sprout up again within days, like sturdy and fertile weeds. The rules for market traders changed as often as the wind. For many years it was illegal to sell rice because rice was sacred and in the gift of the Great Leader. But when I went to the markets, quite regularly with my mother, rice was for sale, along with meat, vegetables, kitchenware, and also Chinese fashions, cosmetics and – concealed beneath mats at enormous personal risk to vendor and buyer alike – cassette tapes of foreign pop music. Goods from Japan were considered the best quality. Next were South Korean products (with the archenemy’s labels and trademarks carefully removed), and lastly Chinese.
    My mother wasted no time. Soon she had made contacts among the Chinese traders just across the river in Changbai and was arranging for goods to be sent over, which she would sell on, and make a nice profit. Her chief trading partners were a Mr Ahn and a Mr Chang, both Korean-Chinese, who had houses on the Chinese side of the riverbank.
    It was in connection with my mother’s thriving business activities that she took me to a fortune-teller in the second year after we arrived back in Hyesan.
    We woke extremely early, while it was still dark. My father and Min-ho were asleep. It was spring, and vivid green shoots were starting to sprout along the empty dirt streets. We hurried to the station to catch the first commuter train for Daeoh-cheon, the village where the fortune-teller woman lived.
    My mother knew a number of these mystics and spent a lot of money on them. I was irritable about being woken so early, but she told me that the channel to the spirits is clearest at dawn. ‘She’ll be more accurate.’
    My mother also wanted to beat the queue. Sometimes she’d arrive to find the fortune-teller out. A neighbour would say she’d been driven away in a Mercedes-Benz with tinted windows, for a discreet session with a high-ranking Party cadre. 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.
    The fortune-teller’s house was very old. Single-storey, and wood-framed with walls of mud and a thatched roof. I hadn’t known that such houses still existed. It was at a tilt and smelled damp. The lady was elderly, with thick, dishevelled hair. She was raising a granddaughter on her own.
    ‘I have a question about trade,’ my mother said in a whisper. ‘My Chinese partner has goods. I wish to know when to receive them.’
    In other words, she wanted to know the best day to smuggle and not get into trouble. Sometimes, if the date was already fixed, my mother would pay for a ceremony to ward off bad luck.
    The lady spilled a fistful of rice on the tabletop and used her fingernails to separate individual grains into portions. She examined this little pile intensely, then she started to speak in a rapid patter. I couldn’t tell if she was addressing us, or the spirits. She spoke of the day on which it was most propitious to receive the goods.
    ‘When you leave the house that morning, you must step out with your left foot first. Then spread some salt around and pray to the mountain spirit for good fortune.’
    My mother nodded. She was satisfied.
    ‘This is my daughter,’ she said, and told her the time and date of my birth. The fortune-teller looked straight at me in a way that unnerved me. Then she closed her eyes theatrically.
    ‘Your daughter is clever,’ she said. ‘She has a future connected with music. She will eat foreign rice.’
    As we walked back to the station the sun was coming up and the