The inauguration of South Korea’s first female president, Park Geun-hye, on Monday is a trip down memory lane for most South Koreans — especially those in their 50s and 60s, whose support at the polls ensured her election victory last December.
For this “5060 generation,” as Koreans call it, Ms. Park has always been an emotional touchstone. She was the nation’s first daughter when her father, the dictator Park Chung-hee, ruled from 1961 until he was assassinated in 1979. For the last five of those years, she was also South Korea’s first lady — replacing her mother, who was killed in 1974 in a botched attack on Mr. Park by a North Korean sympathizer.
Now she is returning to her childhood home, South Korea’s Blue House. I was a young child in South Korea in 1979, and I vividly recall the day Mr. Park was assassinated. My parents, in whispers, warned me not to breathe a word outside about it. Speaking about the government in public could get you arrested. So I went to school, weighed down with my secret until I saw students crying. It turned out that they knew too, and soon just about everyone in school was in tears.
People did not explain their anguish — whether it was sorrow or fright. But Park Chung-hee was the only leader we children had known, and I remember someone whispering that with him gone, North Korea would attack us.
Interestingly, that level of fear was not so different from what I witnessed last year in Pyongyang, North Korea, where I was researching a book. When their leader Kim Jong-il died, young North Koreans fell into despair. Their faces went dark, as though the sky had fallen, or as if they had lost a parent. The government rushed out an antidote: broadcasts of their new 20-something leader, Kim Jong-un, who resembled his grandfather Kim Il-sung so much that it seemed the genes had skipped a generation from the Great Leader to his grandson.
Similarly, Park Geun-hye looks eerily reminiscent of her mother, whom South Korean history books have cast as the nation’s ultimate first lady — a martyr. During the campaign, Ms. Park borrowed a page from that script by reminding voters that she herself, having never married or had children, had nobody to mother except the people.
Consider her roles: daughter, first lady, mother. Emotional symbols to lean on in a nation that the World Economic Forum ranks 108th out of 135 in gender equality. This woman, widely lauded as her country’s first female president, is no symbol of latent feminism but of something far more traditional — a girl who grew up before the nation’s eyes, only to lose both parents violently, and then become the mother for whom they had carried a torch since her own mother’s martyrdom.
My own parents supported her election, and they expressed the collective sentiment of the 5060 generation when they explained to me why: they feel sorry for her and indebted to her, because she has been all alone.
I find that strange — nostalgia whitewashing the past. Park Geun-hye has never rated pity; she is a modern-day princess born to privilege inherited from a ruthless dictator. Yes, her father elevated South Korea’s economy. But he also tortured dissidents and changed the constitution to keep himself in power. He left South Koreans thirsting for democracy, and while they were building it in the 1980s and ’90s, they largely dismissed him as an oppressor — until his daughter returned, pulling on their heartstrings.
North and South Koreans share a soft spot for what we call “jung,” a vague term that might best be translated as a collective sentiment of common humanity and warmth that binds people. Among my parents’ generation, the 18 years under Park Chung-hee seem to have instilled a complex loyalty to him that is oddly parallel to the feeling that North Koreans had after Kim Il-sung’s 46-year-long rule (with the caveat, of course, that North Koreans never had democracy, before or since).
In any case, on either side of the 38th Parallel, we now have at the helm a daughter and a grandson of the two men who kept the halves of our nation pitted against each other through much of the cold war.
We can only hope the dynamic will be different now. But despite her condemnation of the latest nuclear bomb test, Ms. Park’s policy toward North Korea remains vague. South Koreans say her first duty is to rescue their slowing economy. But she cannot avoid for long the question of how she deals with North Korea. So we need to hear much more about how she proposes to reorder the relationship with the North so that Korean souls on both sides of the 38th Parallel at long last can move beyond the fears and misguided attachments left by a war that stopped, but did not end, in 1953.
Suki Kim is the author of the novel The Interpreter.