“Living a life as a president’s son was too tough,” said Chun Jae-kook, the eldest son of the former president Chun Doo-hwan, in an interview with the local newspaper, JoongAng Ilbo, Saturday.

“I wish my father didn’t become a president,” he added.

Unlike the common public perception, the junior Chun, who now runs a publishing company, recalls that the actual life at the Cheong Wa Dae was no privilege at all.

“I was a college student. And my life was very stressful because bodyguards always followed me. At one time, I succeeded in hiding from them. The number of bodyguards increased,” he said.

As the only family living in the big residence, Chun said, he and his family members even had to rely on inter-phones to contact each other inside the Cheong Wa Dae.

“I was lonely, without friends,” he said.

At one time, he wanted to have an instant noodle. “But the kitchen area was closed during the night. I wondered why people wanted to live in this residence when one couldn’t even have a noodle,” he said.

Chun Doo-hwan, his father, was a president during the early 1980s who was widely blamed by the public after he took power through a military coup.