Dear Lee Du Gyun,
I’m Choi Hong Jae, someone who sometimes dropped by the oriental medical clinic, “Minjung Tangjewon” (People’s Medical Clinic), which you managed with other former prisoners after your time in jail. I am writing this useless letter to you after I saw you in video footage reciting a poem praising Kim Jong Il and couldn’t hold back my grief.
You have always existed in my mind.
When I had a baby in 1996, didn’t you provide her with traditional medicines, calling her the third generation of the revolution? You picked everything for her, saying that I should feed her with this one; that I should clean her gums with that one so her teeth would be strong and healthy and so on. After that, my financial situation did not get better, so my baby’s growth is all down to your goodwill. Now, she is taller than me and stronger than her peers. As long as I live, I will never forget you and your kindness.
Not only that, but through your own life you showed me how great a faith in nation and humanity a person can bear. That impression I got from you will always be with me, linked to my fate.
The dream you and your friends dreamed of in your youth has been realized in South Korea rather than in North Korea.
Ironically, the thing which made me decide to fight against Kim Jong Il in 1999 was lessons and impressions I got from your attitude to life. I believed that all the possible loneness or criticism that I might get in response to my decision to advocate the human rights and freedom of humanity could not be as serious as your torment and the things you endured.
It was eternally regretful that I couldn’t see you before you headed for North Korea in September, 2000. If I could have, I would have liked to stop you by lying down on your way to the North. This was because of my concern about the trauma that you would suffer if you saw the situation and the values you had kept your whole life crumble away, and watch yourself being turned into a tool of propaganda for the dictatorship.
Seeing you, Kim Sung Myung and another 20 former prisoners in that video footage and finding my concerns had already become your reality, I couldn’t stand my broken heart. I saw you recited a poem at the performance for Kim Jong Il.
Your face when you read, “I will take the Great General Kim Jong Il as my eternal mother” was not the face I had seen and known before. Your eyes when you were in Seoul were just those of an innocent boy. I deluded myself that you had kept those eyes during your time in prison by stopping time as a kid. Your eyes, endlessly warm and sometimes working off strong passion alone, couldn’t be found at all. Where have they gone? Where is your dream; that dream of a people’s paradise?
Seeing the absence of your strong eyes and lies read by Kim Jung Jong, I was able to read of your despair. I saw you telling an obvious lie; that your home town, Andong, was much less developed than a village in the 1950s.
I understand that you couldn’t maintain those eyes while lying that you would accept Kim Jong Il, who habitually abducts, commits terrorist acts, sells drugs, counterfeits and kills infants, acts which mere pathetic gangsters might commit, as “an eternal father and mother”. I realize you couldn’t emit that passionate aura while pretending to praise Kim Jong Il, who is entirely in opposition to your lifelong dream. I completely understand how you felt embarrassed to tell that blunt lie about South Korea…
