The first lady Korea watched die

Courtesy of Monthly Chosun

Attitudes and conversations about Korean politics are dominated by the presidents. The generals. The dictators. The democratically elected leaders. But last week, I introduced you to Francesca Rhee. Korea's first first lady. A foreigner who wore hanboks in a nation still licking its wounds from war and colonial rule.

Today, I want to continue that journey. To humanize another woman who, like Francesca, existed in the shadow of a powerful man. But while Francesca’s story is often omitted from national narratives, Yuk Young-soo is remembered positively by most in society. And her death on live television, in front of a nation watching its Liberation Day celebrations, is something unlike anything you’ll see or hear in many other countries.

The woman behind the president

Park Chung-hee is a complicated figure. His rule was repressive. He stifled democracy. He jailed dissidents. His economic achievements came at a steep price in human rights. And yet he helped set the country on course to where it is today. He got people building. He gave the country confidence. He promised the people they would no longer be poor. Today, he tops charts ranking the most popular presidents and, at the same time, is spoken of as someone who committed outrageous crimes by instilling a fascist regime.

But his wife? Or rather, his second wife.

Yuk was born into a land-owning family in 1925, Okcheon, North Chungcheong Province. When she moved to Seoul to attend Ewha Girls' High School, it seemed her path was set for a life of comfort and intellectual pursuit. Then came the 1950-53 Korean War. Having escaped to Busan, it was there she met a military officer who was already married. Park Chung-hee. Her father opposed the match but Yuk saw an "upright, reliable and very simple person." On December 12, 1950, against her father's wishes, they married.

When Park seized power in the 1961 coup, Yuk supported him. She immersed herself in politics and diplomacy, arranging private lectures from university professors while sending aides to investigate citizens' complaints. Back then, a rumor circulated that if you faced difficulties, you should write to the first lady rather than the president. Letters sent to the president were screened by the Office of the Senior Secretary for Civil Affairs, but the first lady would read them personally and provide practical assistance. There are countless photos of her, clad in hanbok, clasping the hands of grandmothers in the countryside, comforting weeping mothers, sewing support bags with her peers to provide to people.

Of all her deeds, perhaps the most striking was her outreach to patients with leprosy. In Korea, as in many countries, leprosy patients were segregated. They lived in isolated colonies, shunned by society. Yuk was one of the first public figures to try and correct this. She visited a leprosy village in Naju, South Jeolla Province in 1971, accompanied by the famous leprosy poet Han Ha-un. She shook hands with patients without gloves. She held their hands. She treated them with the dignity they'd been denied previously.

As rough as Park was, his image was smoothed out by his wife’s deeds. She was for many the “mother of the nation” if such a label could be used. The nascent Korean republic needed a female figure to look up and Yuk was everything they imagined.

The incident

And then came Liberation Day in 1974, a celebration of Korea's liberation from the Japanese colonial rule. The government held a ceremony at the National Theater of Korea. Park and Yuk attended. Television cameras were broadcasting the event live across the nation.

At 10 a.m., the president began his speech. "On this meaningful occasion," he declared, "I would like to emphasize that the unification of Korea must be achieved through peaceful means..." There was a loud bang. In the last row, a young man had apparently accidently shot himself in the thigh while aiming for the president. Park continued speaking. The young man, Mun Se-gwang, rose and charged down the aisle toward the podium. There was a second shot. The bullet struck the podium in front of Park. The president ducked behind the lectern. Then a third shot. Yuk, seated to her husband's right, was hit. She slumped backward. Her head down. You can still go online and watch it if you are so inclined. The first lady was pronounced dead a few hours later. She was 48 years old. Those with television sets, which admittedly was not everyone back then, watched their first lady of the last 13-odd years die.

An 18-year-old high school choir member named Jang Bong-hwa was also fatally shot that day by a security officer in the panicked response, though her death was officially attributed to Mun. One particularly famous photo of the event look like a renaissance painting in how much it captures all this. And yet it was painfully real for those involved.

Mun was a Korean resident of Japan with ties to the pro-Pyongyang organization Chongryon. He had been sent to assassinate the president. He killed the first lady instead. For a nation already terrified of its northern neighbor, this was confirmation that Pyongyang posed a grave threat. The anticommunist sentiment that already permeated Korean society intensified. Relations between Korea and Japan also rapidly deteriorated. The Joint Investigation Headquarters announced that Mun had entered the country illegally using a forged passport and committed the crime using a pistol stolen from a Japanese police station. The situation was only brought under control after then Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka sent a personal letter to Park expressing deep regret and condolences over the incident.

The funeral was unlike anything the country had really seen up to that point. Over one million people lined the streets of Seoul for her funeral procession, watching her body being carried to her final resting place at the National Cemetery, arriving 18 years before Francesca. They had incidentally already met a few times, with Yuk hosting a birthday party for Francesca on her return to the country.

Her eldest daughter, Park Geun-hye, returned home a day after the funeral. She would go on to become Korea's president, the first woman to hold the office, and the daughter of the man whose dictatorship had shaped the nation. Many attribute the younger Park's rise to power as being solely because she was the daughter of the former president. Such analysis, I fear, misses the importance of her mother’s influence and reputation among people of that generation. Nevertheless, the daughter would never achieve the approval ratings her mother commanded.

In the aftermath of Yuk's death, her husband's command began to crumble. Many believed Yuk had served as one of the few moderating influences around Park. She was the opposition in the Blue House. In the years following her death, his rule became increasingly repressive, culminating in his assassination by Kim Jae-gyu in 1979.

Human, not heroine

I want to be careful here. I'm not writing a hagiography. I'm not suggesting Yuk was a perfect saint while her husband was a demon — though many would obviously agree with the latter. She was a human being, complicated like the rest of us. The context is also important. Most of these women belong to a generation that was marginalized and sacrificed during the process of industrialization and democratization.

But by most accounts, she was kind and compassionate. At 170 centimeters tall, she was taller than her husband, mirroring how she stood above him morally in the eyes of the people. When we think about Korea's first ladies, we often remember them as appendages to their husbands. Yet in a nation today still grappling with its legacy of dictatorship and democratization, Yuk serves as a reminder that history is more than politics and coups and economic growth statistics. It's also the people who lived and loved and lost in the shadows of power. Many would have loved and lost under her husband, too.

Her husband is remembered with ambivalence. Her daughter was impeached. But Yuk remains largely untouched by the political controversies that defined her family. In 1964, as her husband officially became president, Yuk wrote: “Until the day my term ends, I will bear in mind, at the very least, the fact that I have become the First Lady of Korea, a poor country that cannot survive without aid from others. I have now presented my abilities, my sincerity, and my integrity before everyone, asking them to make full use of them.” Whatever else might be said, no first lady or first gentleman of Korea today would have to promise to serve a nation that cannot survive without aid. That alone is a measure of how far the country has come, and a testament to a woman who, in her own way, helped it get there.