Oak-hee Character Analysis

Oak-hee is Mrs. Song’s eldest daughter. Rebellious from a young age and contemptuous of the regime since her school years, Oak-hee deigned to take a job with her local propaganda department after graduating high school and agreed to marry a young Korean People’s Army upstart, Choi Yong-su. When Yong-su turned abusive and the famine took hold of North Korea, making Oak-hee’s job irrelevant, Oak-hee became angrier than ever. Though she had two children to care for, Oak-hee fled home in the dark of night after enduring a particularly brutal beating from Yong-su and crossed the Tumen River into China, where she offered herself to a broker who arranged “marriages” between wealthy Chinese men and North Korean women desperate for escape. When Oak-hee returned to North Korea in hopes of bringing her children back over the border, she was arrested multiple times and sent to a labor camp. With the help of her mother, Mrs. Song, who had learned a lot about bribery over the course of the famine, Oak-hee again fled to China. She eventually sent for her mother, convincing her to cross the border into China and then to fly to South Korea to defect for good. Oak-hee’s bitterness toward the regime, her rebellious nature, and her prizing of freedom above all else—even her own children—makes her one of Barbara Demick’s most compelling and controversial interviewees.