Lee Hyeon-seo
Korean activist
Lee Hyeon-seo (Korean: 이현서, born January 1980), best known for her book, The Girl with Seven Names, is a North Korean defector and activist who lives in Seoul, South Korea. She escaped from North Korea and later guided her family out of North Korea through China and Laos.
Early life in North Korea
Lee Hyeon-seo grew up in Hyesan, North Korea. Lee explained in her TED talk in February 2013 that "When I was young, I thought my country was the best on the planet ... I grew up singing a song called 'Nothing to Envy'. I felt very proud. I thought my life in North Korea was normal, even though when I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution." Her family was not poor, but after the North Korean famine struck in the 1990s, she witnessed much suffering and death.
Escape
China
In 1997, Lee crossed the frozen Yalu River alone in collusion with a friendly border guard to fulfill a dream she had, only planning to stay a short while before returning. However, due to complications with the North Korean security police, she had to live with relatives in China as an illegal immigrant. She managed to buy the identity of a mentally challenged girl from Heilongjiang, and with it, obtained a passport and driver's license.
“Lee Hyeon-seo” enters the record as korean activist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hyeon-seo, Korean and activist can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17306046. VIAF identifies the subject as 316534711. The Library of Congress control number is no2015119937. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 2013 and 1997.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lee Hyeon-seo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.