The Girl with Seven Names: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

When Hyeonseo turns 15, she is forced to take special classes, in which girls are taught knitting and housekeeping skills. They are taught nothing about sex, however, and Hyeonseo thinks one becomes pregnant by kissing and holding hands. She finally learns about sex from an illegal South Korean video, and during her very first menstrual cycle, Hyeonseo finds a dead baby in a plastic bag in a public bathroom, the placenta and umbilical cord still attached. Hyeonseo briefly dates her first boyfriend not long after—a local “hoodlum” and petty thief of the kind common to all North Korean cities—but she doesn’t tell Mother. 

That same year, the Socialist Youth League is given more responsibilities, and they must plant extra rice saplings and dig tunnels around the schools. America and South Korea are planning a nuclear strike, Hyeonseo and the other students are told. After one long day of digging, Hyeonseo goes to a friend’s house . Hyeonseo is hungry after so much digging, so she asks her friend for a snack. Her friend says there aren’t any snacks, and offers her corn stalks from a boiling pot on the stove instead. Hyeonseo refuses, irritated. She can’t understand why her friend’s family is eating corn and not rice.