The girl with seven names is finding it hard these days to contact relatives in Stalinist North Korea on the underground mobile phone link defectors like her have used for years.
Hyeonseo Lee is also increasingly worried about her personal security since the July publication of the best-selling memoir about her escape from North Korea, "The Girl with Seven Names."
Defectors living in South Korea contact relatives in the North through Chinese mobile phones that are smuggled across the border. The clandestine communications travel through transmission towers on the Chinese side of the border, all arranged through brokers there who also help smuggle money from the defectors to their relatives.