Previous
Mother
Mother’s husband, and Hyeonseo and Min-ho’s father. Father first meets Mother on a train to Pyongyang in 1977, and they immediately fall in love. He is a member of the North Korean air force, and his family secured a good songbun with their bravery during World War II. Grandmother, however, initially refuses to let Mother and Father marry and forces Mother to marry the man from Pyongyang instead. After Hyeonseo is born, Mother divorces the man from Pyongyang and Father immediately takes her back and accepts Hyeonseo as his own. Father is kind and hardworking, and along with Mother, ensures that his family has everything they need despite their meager rations from the North Korean government. When Grandmother tells Hyeonseo the truth about her biological father, Hyeonseo distances herself from Father, and by the time he quits his military job, she is hardly talking to him anymore. When their house tragically burns down, Father risks his life to save the family’s portraits of the Great Leaders—a display of heroics that should gain the favor of the regime. However, Father is already under surveillance, and is accused by the North Korean government of bribery and abuse of position at his new civilian job, and he is detained when he crosses back into North Korea after a business trip to China. Father is held for weeks before he is finally released to the hospital, but he is depressed and distant after he returns home. Father is soon hospitalized again because of depression, and he commits suicide with an overdose of Valium. Mother bribes the hospital to switch his cause of death to heart attack to protect the family’s songbun, as suicide is viewed as the ultimate form of defection by the North Korean government. Hyeonseo never mends her relationship with Father before he dies, which is a major source of sadness and regret for her. Father reflects the importance of family within North Korean culture, and from him and Mother, Hyeonseo learns that what really matters in life is family and togetherness, not one’s country or material possessions.
Father Quotes in The Girl with Seven Names
The The Girl with Seven Names quotes below are all either spoken by Father or refer to Father. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Prologue
Quotes
Yet what struck me most was that neither of my parents seemed that upset. Our home was just a low, two-room house with state-issue furniture, common in North Korea. It’s hard to imagine now how anyone would have missed it. But my parents’ reaction made a strong impression on me. The four of us were together and safe - that was all that mattered to them.
This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything - our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1
Quotes
No one was ever told their precise ranking in the songbun system, and yet I think most people knew by intuition, in the same way that in a flock of fifty-one sheep every individual will know precisely which sheep ranks above it and below it in the pecking order. The insidious beauty of it was that it was very easy to sink, but almost impossible to rise in the system, even through marriage, except by some special indulgence of the Great Leader himself. The elite, about 10 or 15 per cent of the population, had to be careful never to make mistakes.
At the time my parents met, a family’s songbun was of great importance. It determined a person’s life, and the lives of their children.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Girl with Seven Names LitChart as a printable PDF.
Father Quotes in The Girl with Seven Names
The The Girl with Seven Names quotes below are all either spoken by Father or refer to Father. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Prologue
Quotes
Yet what struck me most was that neither of my parents seemed that upset. Our home was just a low, two-room house with state-issue furniture, common in North Korea. It’s hard to imagine now how anyone would have missed it. But my parents’ reaction made a strong impression on me. The four of us were together and safe - that was all that mattered to them.
This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything - our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1
Quotes
No one was ever told their precise ranking in the songbun system, and yet I think most people knew by intuition, in the same way that in a flock of fifty-one sheep every individual will know precisely which sheep ranks above it and below it in the pecking order. The insidious beauty of it was that it was very easy to sink, but almost impossible to rise in the system, even through marriage, except by some special indulgence of the Great Leader himself. The elite, about 10 or 15 per cent of the population, had to be careful never to make mistakes.
At the time my parents met, a family’s songbun was of great importance. It determined a person’s life, and the lives of their children.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
