Defector returns to North Korea for the sake of her son

A North Korean defector who returned to the Stalinist country and held a news conference Pyongyang Thursday was found to have returned to North Korea to save her son and daughter-in-law, who were forced to move to a mountainous village.

According to the essays, diary and photos of Park In-suk exclusively obtained by The Dong-A Ilbo on Friday, Park was upset over her son`s fate and considered returning to North Korea from 2010. She showed feelings of guilt toward her son in her essays and diary.

“Please forgive my life in which I have sinned against you (her son). I intended to resolve financial matters by meeting my father in China, but I ended up losing my reason and came to (the South)...abandoning my family,” Park said.

“I have ruined my son. I feel sorry for the parents of my daughter-in-law for committing a sin against her and Bun-i (assumed to be Park’s granddaughter). Tears turn into the sea.”

Dong-A found no circumstantial evidence from her writings that North Korea’s State Security Department had pressured Park. Her acquaintances also said she did not return to the North due to threats from the communist country’s security agency.

In the end, Park risked her life by pinning her hopes on the slim possibility that her return will change the life of her son amid uncertainty over his fate.

Park was tortured by North Korean security authorities in 2005 after her arrest in China while attempting to flee the North. She was sent to Pyongyang but escaped from the North again. After her son, then a promising musician, was expelled to a remote area North Hwanghae Province in 2008, she said she could no longer endure her life in the South.

Her personal background is known to have influenced her decision to return to the North. As the daughter of a defector, Park suffered many hardships in the North.

She wrote essays whenever time allowed and expressed the tragedy of national division caused by the Korean War, the pain felt by separated Korean families, and the portrait of the Korean Peninsula with more than 24,000 defectors from North Korea.

According to the essays, Park fled the North to support her son, a graduate of Pyongyang University of Music and Dance, by asking for help from her father, who had defected to the South in the Korean War. Her relatives who remained in the North are known to have suffered persecution and discrimination due to her father`s escape. Park was a top student for eight years and won a military math contest, but was not even allowed to go to college at night.

Wanting to study music in college, she unsuccessfully sought help from a dean of Pyongyang Medical College. Her friends, who grieved when Park moved elsewhere, were summoned by a government-sponsored youth organization and blasted for committing an anti-revolutionary act.

While working at a pharmaceutical company in Chongjin, North Hamgyong Province, Park met her husband in 1964 and gave birth to her son. After her husband died in 2001 and her son entered the music university that he had so wanted to attend, Park looked for her father in China to get financial support and eventually fled the Stalinist country.

According to Park’s friends, her half-sisters and brothers gave her the cold shoulder. She never joined family gatherings or received financial help from her relatives. Park had planned to sue her family for division of her father’s property, but nixed the plan for fear of hurting her half-brother, who was a South Korean lawmaker.

Park is also known to have written answers to questions she was expected to be asked by North Korean interrogators after returning to the Stalinist country on a notepad. The first question she mulled was if she was the sibling of a South Korean brother.

In South Korea, Park lived in a rented home in Seoul’s Songpa district and eked out a living as a subway cleaning lady and a caretaker for the elderly. In February last year, she hurt her leg after falling from subway steps and developed a limp. She continued to care for a 90-year-old to make money, however.

Pyongyang apparently seeks to exploit Park’s return as an opportunity to promote supreme leader Kim Jong Un’s “politics of favor” and break the spirit of North Koreans who wish to defect. The North’s state-run Korean Central TV, which normally airs just for six hours on a typical weekday, aired Park’s interview for one hour and 13 minutes on Thursday.

Uriminjokkiri, a North Korean propaganda organization, called Park “the prodigal daughter returning home,” adding, “Who on earth can criticize our country for human rights abuses in the face of a scene that strikes a chord with everybody along with her dramatic life?”

Park’s son and daughter-in-law also attended the news conference. With her return being exploited by Pyongyang for propaganda purposes, her action seemed to have been ostensibly successful.

South Korea that Park described in her diary was not a country where nobody could live as explained in the news conference. For a mother who left her son in hell, no place was heaven. In the end, she risked her life again to look for her own heaven, which was wherever her son lived.

*In the hope that Park enjoys happiness in her later years with her son, the Dong-A reporter opted not to disclose contents that could cause harm to her.