Hyeonseo Lee @ Edinburgh Book Festival, 30 Aug

Her memoir The Girl With Seven Names tells of her life on the run after fleeing from North Korea - Hyeonseo Lee discusses the book and adjusting to her new life at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

Feature by Alan Bett | 31 Aug 2015

It's the second last night of Edinburgh International Book Festival, but it refuses to go gentle into that good night. Instead they present the smiling, jovial and radiant sufferer of unimaginable hardship; Hyeonseo Lee. The Girl With Seven Names is the title of her affecting memoir, and also simply the reality of a pseudonymous life on the run after defection from North Korea and the oppressive Kim Regime. Her TED talk had already amassed three million views when The Skinny published our interview with Hyeonseo last month, but when she is welcomed to the EIBF stage this has expanded to somewhere in the region of five million.

Lee subverts tradition – in place of opening proceedings by reading from her book, she makes a speech in line, one must imagine, with the testimony she made to the UN Security Council. She seems less intent – as most authors are – on selling the pages of her memoir as she is highlighting the plight of those upon them: North Korean defectors in limbo around the world. She talks eloquently of prohibition (of K-Pop, Chinese TV, any outsider culture, banned under threat of imprisonment), bearing witness (public executions – her first at age 7), escape (at age 17 from North Korea, later from a life of forced marriage, still later from an attempt at forced prostitution). It’s such a tale and such a truth, delivered with such sincerity and a smile that the Q&A takes on a demonstrably emotive edge – one woman’s voice seems close to cracking.

Some questions prove unintentionally unfair, such as: 'What do you think of those in capitalist societies who disparage their own system?' 'They should try North Korea,' she finally suggests, circumventing the intricacies of the political landscape – can North Korea truly be described as socialist? Yet she fully admits a lack of understanding of the global political scene. She has had only 4 years of true mental freedom after escape from the hermit kingdom, then 10 off-radar years in China. Her mind is still adjusting to the concepts of freedom and human rights we take for granted. She champions oppressed people rather than railing against any system. 'How do you feel about Americans now?' she is asked towards the end, after admitting that even her kindergarten indoctrinated hatred through crude but effective brainwashing. She’s now married to one, we are told, as a concise answer. She finally recounts a hilarious tale with dark undertones; of introducing her unreconstructed mother to this man soon after her own escape. The shock; the polite silence; then after, once he had left mother and daughter alone together – 'I never believed I would ever share a meal with an American bastard.'


Hyeonseo Lee was talking at Edinburgh International Book Festival on 30 August

http://www.edbookfest.co.uk