The Korean president's foreign wife

Former President Rhee Syngman and first lady Francesca Donner-Rhee / Korea Times file

Who gets to be called Korean was the subject of one of my recent pieces. And it feels like a powerfully modern topic, with globalization, multicultural families, returning adoptees, visible North Korean defectors, and many more people from all walks of life making a claim for being part of the collective Korean identity known as “woori.”

We saw the German-born Jens Castrop representing the Korean national football team at the World Cup this year, though his inclusion was largely overshadowed by the fallout that has followed the rather disastrous campaign and investigations into former coach Hong Myung-bo. But go back to the start of the Republic of Korea, 78 years ago, and the country’s first first lady was a white woman from Austria who claimed Korean citizenship and wore hanbok.

It’s outrageous to think that a Korean president today might have a “foreign” wife. It simply wouldn’t be allowed, I don’t think. Even the idea of a president spending an extended time abroad might be too much for people to take. Maybe that’s why so little is known about Francesca Donner-Rhee today despite her being a witness to key events in Korean contemporary history.

Part of it is the lack of formal status afforded to the first lady in the ROK in genreal. But mostly it’s about the shadow of Syngman Rhee. Korean society remains painfully fractured, still arguing over how to process the authoritarian baggage of the Rhee and Park Chung-hee eras. For many, Rhee is remembered as the quintessential autocrat, a man who stoked division and left the festering wounds of colonial collaboration largely unaddressed. A ghost that still haunts much of public discourse and street-side banners today. His wife’s memory, however, is seemingly not as dear to the modern neoconservatives as is her husband’s.

Francesca Henrica Donner was born in 1900 near Vienna, Austria. She also later took the name Yi Pu-ran, a phonetic nod to her husband’s family name and then her own rendered in Chinese characters. They first met in Geneva while Rhee was desperately lobbying the League of Nations for Korean independence. Rhee was 58, she was 33, and they bridged that Macron-esque gap by bonding over the trials of statelessness and the pursuit of sovereignty. They married against her parents' wishes, and it was a second marriage for both of them. For Rhee, a member of the Jeonju Yi clan and a direct descendant of King Sejong’s lineage, taking a non-Korean bride was a radical, unprecedented departure from tradition. Given the country’s stubborn adherence to racial homogeneity, it’s likely it will be the only time a Korean president will cross that particular line.

They spent the first years of their marriage in America, Rhee’s home while Korea was under Japanese colonization. Francesca was the ultimate support system for her older husband: nurse, secretary and confidante. They were a political unit, sharing an uncompromising, fervent anticommunism and a mutual disdain for coalition politics. When Korean liberation finally arrived in 1945 after the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Rhees returned to Korea. However, postliberation the country was ravaged by poverty and disease. There was not enough rice and too much cholera.

One can only imagine the isolation Francesca must have felt as a European woman in such a fiercely nationalistic climate. Yet, she was omnipresent. You’ll find her in the archives, glued to Rhee’s side, draped in a hanbok; a sartorial choice that predated the digital-age and knowing that Americans hadn’t yet invented Instagram on which they could accuse her of cultural appropriation. The Korean public gaze softened toward her once she began to polish her appearance and adopt traditional dress. So the beauty standards were still a thing back then, too.

Childless, the Rhees adopted Yi Kang-suk, the son of Yi Ki-pong and Park Maria, on Rhee’s 83rd birthday in 1957. However, just three years later, in the dying, desperate hours of the First Republic, just before the president announced his resignation, the young man turned his weapon on his birth parents, his brother and finally himself, staging a gruesome murder-suicide within the walls of Kyungmudae darker than any K-drama one can recall.

The misogyny of the Korean political machine was also as brutal then as it is now. After the 1960 student protests in Masan and Busan forced Rhee from power and ultimately into exile, the Kyunghyang sinmun wasted no time painting Francesca as a Marie Antoinette figure. A foreign puppeteer pulling the strings at court and responsible for all the corruption of the First Republic. It was a vicious indictment to level at a woman who had, by all accounts, been trying to navigate an incredibly alien environment. It also made an easy scapegoat for some Koreans to heap the blame on a powerless outsider rather than one of their own who had been previously heralded as a hero.

When Rhee finally died in exile in 1965, he was 90 years old. Following his passing, Francesca Donner-Rhee was left in a state of suspended animation. Would she be permitted to return to the land she had adopted? Would she even want to? How would a society built on such rigid ethnonationalism reconcile itself with a "Westerner" who technically held the rights of a citizen and was wife of the first president?

The local press was particularly cold on the matter. An editorial in the Kyunghyang sinmun cynically asserted that she had no real friends left in Korea and if she were to return at all, it would only be for another of her adopted sons, Yi In-su. Yet, even that possibility was swiftly dismissed by the writers; they claimed it was inherently impossible for her to cultivate "jeong" for a son who was, in their estimation, nothing more than a legal technicality.

By the mid-1960s, the dust had begun to settle, and Francesca eventually made the journey back to Korea. It was ostensibly to untangle the complexities of Rhee’s estate for which she was the sole beneficiary. A meeting with President Park Chung-hee followed, and, perhaps in a rare moment of begrudging recognition or political pragmatism, he granted her leave to remain in the country for the duration of her life.

In 1970, at the age of 70, Francesca Donner-Rhee returned to Seoul for good. She settled into the Ihwajang, living out her final decades as a Korean citizen alongside her adopted son, Yi In-su, and his family. She passed away in 1992 at the age of 92, and was laid to rest at the Seoul National Cemetery, lying in the presidential honorary grave right beside her husband.

In her final testament, she had made her allegiances clear: She requested that the Korean flag and the Bible her husband had clutched during his long years of independence activism be placed within her coffin. Her last, parting request was that she be covered with a scroll of her husband’s calligraphy depicting the characters for “nambuk t’ong’il,” or “Korean reunification.”

All of this reveals that Korean identity has never been as fixed as modern discourse suggests. Francesca’s story is a peculiar, often uncomfortable, footnote in the national narrative, particularly when it comes to conservatives, ethnicity and identity. Francesca navigated the highest echelons of a fiercely insular society, and did so as a woman. Why she is so forgotten today and Korea’s foreign first first lady seemingly a forgotten footnote one can only speculate. But if you spend some time poring over the many pictures of her, standing tall at postliberation events for 15 years, dressed in a hanbok, you’ll realize the Korean story is even more complex than you initially imagined.