Undivided Heart: A Korean Family’s Legacy

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Master Manuscript











Undivided Heart:


A Korean Family’s Legacy








Vana Kim Hansen


(55,000 words)














vanakim777@gmail.com


(818) 651-5338





CONTENTS





Foreword:


Prologue: Vana


Timeline


Chapter One: Mother Ilsun


Chapter Two: Lee Jong-man 1939/ Chronology


Chapter Three: Capitalist for Collective Well-Being


Chapter Four: Reunion in Pyongyang 1975


Chapter Five: Mother by Ok-kyung


Chapter Six: Mother by Sejin


Chapter Seven: Mother by Yujin


Chapter Eight:





Epilogue


Appendix





Foreword








Prologue





I came to write this book to complete my life’s mission that I inherited from my mother and grandfather. As a practitioner of ‘Daedong’ philosophy, my grandfather, Lee Jong-man, dedicated his life to serve Korea: as a visionary gold mine owner and philanthropist in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation and after the country was divided as a chairman of the Reunification Committee of DPRK (North Korea). He is known as the only capitalist buried in the North Korean Patriots Cemetery. He had a burning desire to ensure the wellbeing of the poor and especially the farmers of Korea, and he set an inspired socialist standard for a capitalist to accomplish that goal. Daedong Il-lam, a little manifesto that he wrote in 1948, just before going to the North, reveals his vision of Korea becoming a moral nation that can be a role model to the surrounding nations and the whole world.


Because Grandfather did not return to the South after attending the convention held by Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang, in June 25, 1949, we became a divided family and my mother and father eventually left South Korea with their four children in 1964. We emigrated to a democratic world for the freedom and safety it could provide. After twenty-six years of separation without any contact, we found out that our grandfather was still alive in North Korea. In 1975, Mother, despite many obstacles, was able to travel to Pyongyang to reunify with her father. He passed away two years later.


During a half century as immigrants, through bold integrative right-brain work, our family developed a unique approach to dissolve the metaphorical 38th parallel on which the divisions began in our interpersonal lives and beyond. The interpersonal psycho-spiritual work between Mother, myself and my three siblings, combined with the legacy of the Daedong spirit of our grandfather brought about the demolition of the fences and landmines in our hearts. As a family we discovered that the DMZ resided not only along the 38th parallel in Korea but was also embedded within each of us and in our relationships with one another. Until the physical as well as the psycho-somatic walls could be taken down, and the memories and behaviors established by the divisions were healed, our reunification could not be complete.


My experience of awakening in my childhood with Mother while we were refugees during the Korean War later led me to set out to heal our mother-daughter relationship that was damaged by the shadows of the Korean culture and history. This journey brought us out of an old, painful hierarchy and into positions of equality and openness. Through my new healthy relationship with Mother, I eventually discovered a new relationship with the divided Korea and led me to reclaim my grandfather’s vision of a permanently peaceful Korea.


It took ten long, arduous years for Mother and I to reformat our consciousness from the standard dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship into eventually a co-creative relationship. The work began with healing our own wounded hearts in order to enable a new reality of peace from inside of each of us. Because of our healing journey, we were able to clear many patterns of belief and behavior that had held us hostage in our roles with each other, and in the process, we discovered a unified purpose in the direction of spiritual peace activism. At that level, there was no ideological debate but simply a tenacity to uphold the highest principle of life, that we are love incarnate on this planet and are here to bring light to the divisive world.


In this spirit, I accepted the invitation and started to co-organize the 2015 Women Cross DMZ while I was in South Korea, a risky thing to do at that time. Overcoming many obstacles, our team brought it to fruition by having the thirty international women peace makers, including two Nobel Peace laureates, Mairead Maguire and Leymah Gbowee, cross the DMZ, in May 25, 2015, making headlines around the world. Three years later, in April 2018, President Moon Jae-in and the North Korea’s leader Kim Jung-un crossed the DMZ, holding hands and embracing one another.


Likewise, when I got a spark in my spirit-soul to publish this book in the U.S., I accepted it, fully trusting The Way of the creative process of the Spirit. I have a strong sensing that this book will open up a new horizon for world peace, by touching the hearts and minds of the Western readers and calling their attention to become more aware of the Korean issues beyond what they hear from the mass media. That will certainly help to bring peace in the Korean peninsula, which is pre-requisite to the peace in the northeast Asia, which is foundational for world peace.

















Introduction





This book is for readers who are interested in transforming their human relationships in order to deconstruct the walls that cause division and disharmony.


In this book, you will:


Learn about the far-reaching impact of the healing of the hearts of the mother-daughter relationship.


Realize how spirituality and politics can meet to bring evolution in human consciousness.


See a new perspective on capitalist and socialist thought.


See a close-up look at the very human side of the divided Korea through the lens of one family.


Gain an insight into the strategic place of the Korean peninsula for the world peace and hear about the tool necessary to achieve the desired goal – peace in the North-East Asia, and thereby peace in the world.


Hear about a visionary business man who took the Korean society by a storm with his bold practice of Daedong spiritual philosophy.





A few words about the style of this book:


The content of this book is taken from my mother’s autobiographical book Thus I Became Peace, based on forty years of diary entries, that I produced in Korea in 2010. That Korean book was written as a result of the documentary SACRED MISSION KOREA (available on youtube.com) that I made as a travelogue of our trip to Pyongyang in 2007. It portrays a spiritual journey of the three generations of our family spread around the world: North and South Korea and several other countries.


Chapter 1, Mother Ilsun, contains an overview. In it I included highlights from my mother’s final years (2011-2013), which illuminates the core messages of this book:


“100 % positive thinking produces miracles.”


“What is right is the starting point; what is wrong is beside the point.”


“The invincible spirit of reverence for life will bring permanent peace in the Korean peninsula.”





Most of the material in this book is my “free translation” of our Korean book Thus I became Peace (2010).


Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 consists of three articles about my grandfather. The first was written by a newspaper reporter during the Japanese occupation (1939). The others were written by a present-day scholar, Jun Bong-gwan, who is an expert on the life of my grandfather, Lee Jong-man. These articles have been in the public domain in Korean language only, until now. (A lot is written about LJM and can be found online in Korean.)


Chapter 4 is largely based on Mother Ilsun’s Korean autobiography, that I rewritten in biographical form in this English version..


Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are writings of my sister and brothers about our mother. The Korean readers of Thus I Became Peace found these sections most touching and inspiring, as they reveal deeply examined lives of the four contemporary Korean siblings, children of a divided family who are spread throughout the world.


















































Acknowledgement





I am very thankful to Luanne Somers, my editor, longtime friend and former Emissary companion, for helping me to bring this book into its present form.












































Chapter One





Mother Ilsun





Early memory of mother


I have a vivid memory of my childhood when I was four. When the Korean war broke out, mother led the of four of us and our paternal-grandparents on foot and train to a remote area called Hodang-ri, in the province of Choong-book, in the inland of South Korea. As war refugees, we were lucky to find a safe place away from the bombings and gunshot noises. Our family was alone in the quiet of that deep mountain. We had found an abandoned hut with a clay floor, a roof and walls to protect us. There was a tiny creek in the front and open fields in the back, with high mountains in the distance. We would wake up hearing the birds, and the edges of the creek were frozen solid so we would chip the ice with a rock to wash our faces. Often we saw a roe deer peeking at us from between the trees. Mother whom we didn’t get to see much before the war was now cooking for us, burning branches that smelled good. We played in the fields during the day, and at night we were showered with twinkling stars pouring out of the dark blue sky. Mother brought a sack of rice on her back from town down below, and she scavenged to get kimchi and bean paste to feed us.


Our father was absent the whole time during the war because he had gone to the U.S. on a government mission. I was happy and did not miss father since mother was around. Unlike the time when she had a job as a teacher, I came alive feeling wholesome playing in the fields overlooking the mountain; it was like a religious experience. I only have a few snapshot memories of that time, yet they are permanently etched in my soul and became an eternal marker, a standard of measure for all subsequent events in my life.


Later I found out that mother also had an ecstatic childhood experience living in the rustic seaside of her birthplace. (Her village used to be a part of Ulsan city that was later demolished and turned into an industrial zone by Hyundai as part of its heavy metal production site.) Thus mother and I shared something essential, a matching reference point in our childhood. We were two souls touched by the magic of the pristine nature early in our lives, and this fact explained a lot my mysterious soulful connection with mother.


I remember another magical moment that happened because of mother during my high school time. I was a sensitive and shy girl in a highly repressed culture that did not allow teenage girls and boys to date. I had a crush on a boy, who frequently contributed his illustration to our school newspaper called “Mirror.” He attended Seoul Arts high school that shared our school campus for a year or two. One day I asked mother to come and meet with him because I desperately wanted to connect with him but I didn’t know how to approach him. She instantly agreed and came to school, met with him and invited him to our home and we had dinner together. It was just a one-time thing and soon after our family left Korea so nothing more happened and that story ended there. But I left Korea with this ecstatic memory associated with Mother who had the magical power to create that sort of sublime experience, so much so that it set me up for a lifetime of yearning for Mother to do things like that again with me.


During that time, on the surface, our family looked well put together and it seemed like we were doing fine, but the atmosphere at home was often tense and we lived like hermits, devoid of fun and pleasure. I don’t remember our family ever laughing loud together about silly things. We were usually serious and bound by a sense of duty, a duty to live properly. I guess we were simply striving to be a good family in the Confucian tradition. Everyone around us was equally stoic, enduring hardships, working hard without complaint, and with a goal to help reconstruct the war-torn motherland.





Mother’s relationship with Father


However, in this tradition, men were allowed to deviate, for example by having extra-marital relationships. Our father had affairs, too, breaking mother’s heart, and causing her tender heart to close down and to lose her trust in him. She did consider a divorce but ended up following the suit of all other good Korean wives. She stuffed her pain and carried it to her husband’s deathbed, whence he confessed his love for her for the first and last time.


The dissonance between my parents deepened when we moved to Canada, in 1968, which was our second immigration after Brazil. Mother continued fulfilling her duties to the best of her ability until her whole body flared up with arthritic inflammation. Initially it was hard to see the logic for her choosing to live her life the way she did, sacrificing herself so utterly, to the point of destroying her whole being, not only her physical health but also her innocent heart. She was following a Confucian script that she carried in her head, and that was handed down from her mother. I knew that Mother was duty-bound and was always thinking of the children first, but her choice to hang in there in such an unhappy marriage was sometimes bewildering to me. She was trapped in an irresolvable self-contradiction.


Not once in my life did I ever I see my parents being affectionate with each other. They were cordial but they were not in love, as far as I could tell. Mother enjoyed going to movies with us and going out to eat with us regularly, but I never saw them going out on a romantic date. Nonetheless, our parents continued with their fierce teamwork and made a concerted effort to ensure that we get a good education. They managed without a car during the first five years of their life in Toronto (1968-1973), and instead they bought a house in walking distance from the University of Toronto. They had a five-year plan to buy a house and get all four children enter the university. And we made their dream come true one year sooner than they anticipated. Four years after we landed in Canada, they had a house and the four of us had entered university. Even with our imperfect English, except with Yujin who surprised his high school English teacher with his mastery of English, we met our parents’ goal for us.


During those four years mother went to Kensington market every weekend to buy vegetables, fruit, meat and cheese at a lower price. She also went to a regular supermarket and also Korean grocery stores once or twice a week. Kensington market, also called the Jewish market, was twenty minutes away by trolley. She went there to shop for six adults, which meant a full cartload that was very heavy for her. She would put that heavy cart on the trolley with a stranger’s help to get back home inexpensively, instead of taking a taxi. We helped occasionally but she took most of the burden. Eventually her shoulders became chronically painful from overuse. Father occasionally helped but he didn’t consider it part of his duty. He did not go out of his way to help the family grocery shopping, or to clean the rental property. His mother raised him that way, because he was her only son.


Although we did not talk much, I had a relatively warm relationship with my father. He was always there for me when I needed something. When I asked him for information regarding a college entrance process, he spent hours researching it for me. So unbeknownst to myself, I was taking his side when my parents quarreled and mother complained about him. Much later I realized that being a victim of gender discrimination makes a woman bitter and puts her in an unfavorable light. I am so sorry, Mother.


Despite his weaknesses, Father did have a special place in Mother’s heart. She wrote as follows in her autobiography, published in 2010.


'A married life with love and trust'. Where is the couple that does not dream of this? But it will not be given from the beginning. Rather, it is right to say that this is the ultimate purpose of marriage. I was deeply troubled and pained because of the difference between myself and my husband, even though he was oblivious. Maybe this was a sign that I was not on the path toward this dream.


I hadn’t realized in my early years that the love of heaven was nested in my emotional pain and agony about my marriage. I had to be awakened so that I could be a being that emits the light of love. The reason why marriage is sacred is that it contains the will of heaven, the providence of the universe, and the path of human perfection. My husband was a messenger of heaven that made me realize how much I was growing throughout our forty years together and drove me unwittingly to keep moving forward for my self-fulfillment. The disappointment I felt for my husband had to be changed to hope, and the insurrection had to be changed into love. The way of hope, trust and love brought me to be one with him, my ultimate destination. When the couple walked this way, their children would walk the same way, and the world would become paradise.


Before my husband left this world, it was his sincere heart that made him say "I love you" for the first time, but that WAS in his heart from the beginning. How long have I lived waiting to hear these words!


If I return to the past with the enlightenment and the heart I have attained now, would I be able to realize the dream of "marriage united by love and trust"? It may have been that this dream was in the midst of my husband’s confessing, "I want to marry you again if and when I am born again" before he left the world. I hear his voice in the deepest part of my soul. "I've always loved you. I still love you. I will love you forever”. I respond to him in the same words. “Park Sung-cheol, my predestined relation, you will be with me forever as a companion of wisdom and happiness.”





Mother’s disagreements about my marriage and divorce


In 1973, ten years after our family left Korea, I graduated from the University of Toronto and I returned to Korea to find a husband. I found a man that had a cheerful nature (unlike my father). YH was an orthopedic surgeon in training who was not only athletic and outgoing, but he also enjoyed singing. The following summer I went back to Seoul to get married. I declined my parents’ advice not to hurry. I was taking a bold step to assert my independence.


YH came to Toronto the following year and received a position at Western Hospital, associated with the University of Toronto. He came with a plan to return to Korea after getting more training under good orthopedic surgeons. The following year we had a baby girl and as years passed our marriage started getting rocky. He was the first son of a Korean family, and therefore had a strong sense of entitlement. He also had a drinking problem. Our marriage started sliding as his drinking accompanied emotional violence that was deeply hurtful to me.


Around that time I turned my attention to spirituality and connected with a group called the Emissaries of Divine Light (EDL) and signed up for their International Spiritual Education Program. YH had no interest in the spiritual way of life. When I tried to share my discoveries, he said, “Go your way alone. I cannot catch up with you even if I make the biggest stride.” (In Korean this translates to “even if I do the splits and tear my crotch”.)


Our marriage gradually crumbled as our ways parted due to his materialistic bent and my inherent spiritual orientation. When Mother visited us at our home in Lubbock, Texas, she witnessed his explosive rage and sensed the seriousness of the condition of our marriage. She said, "If you want to divorce, I will not object." But she changed her mind when she returned to Toronto. She called me and said, "Try to make it work; don’t get a divorce." This meant that she wanted me to continue in the path that she was on. The snare of the tradition was persisting. I snapped. After two decades as an immigrant, escaping the ills of an old establishment, the patriarchy’s way of ​​clipping the woman's wings and stuffing her heart with resentment was stubbornly stuck in her.


I waited for my daughter to finish high school and then took steps to get a divorce. I reached this conclusion after much deliberation, taking several years. I had to protect the children and myself from the consequences of his on-going rage. Mother sustained forty years of following the patriarchal Confucian tradition by serving the husband who seemed to be incapable of loving her. (But for the record, our father was never emotionally violent.) Regardless, she made it work because she saw the virtue in sustaining the marriage at all cost, and she was rewarded in the end when father confessed his love for her in her arms when he fell down with a heart attack. He said, “I would like to marry you again in the next life time.” Her unspoken response, recorded in her diary was, ”It’s not up to you. Ha ha! “. That was her way of revenge for the pain she felt all her life because of his inability to express his love for her. Every time I read this, I cannot but laugh.


My case was different. I grew up in the repressed Korean society for eighteen long years, but I left Korea and was transplanted in the democratic soil of North America. I studied hard and observed the world, allowing me to make a paradigm shift. I was bathed in the feminist movement and had several decades to ponder my parent’s unhappy marriage. I knew that a woman’s heroic effort to sustain a dysfunctional, destructive, patriarchal family at any cost, giving up her health and happiness, is not a virtue. The far-reaching negative impact of that traditional marriage landed on the children they both cared about. This the undeniable truth, I concluded.


I finally freed myself after sixteen years of marriage when I left the traditional Korean-style marriage and everything else that went with it. I discarded everything that was centered around false idols, such as the superiority of men and the upper class ‘Yangban’ consciousness that had imprisoned my little psyche my whole life. I realized how deep my own judgmental attitudes towards myself and others were due to my early class-conscious upbringing, drilled into me sometimes with a long lecture from my aunt who was the matriarch of the family. I was misled into thinking that I was born superior because of the class I was born into and the level of education of my parents had. Finally, I broke out of the cocoon, unsupported by most of the people around me, and followed my new path - my calling. Once I made a firm decision and moved in that direction, to my great surprise, mother did not object at all but started showing interest.





My deep emotional healing work with mother


In 1991, I entered a new path called ’Deep Emotional Healing’ which took me beyond the spiritual path that focuses on light. The spiritual path I was on with the Emissaries was enormously transformative for me by awakening my angelic identity, my dormant inner light. The Emissaries played a critical role in my becoming aware of the Light as my true identity. I spent twelve years closely associating with people in the Emissary communities around the world in the1980’s. They were my spiritual family.


But I needed different tools to get myself out of my unhappy marriage. Being a beacon of light was not enough for me. It required a fundamentally different approach to deal with my relationship with a dysfunctional culture that I grew up in and all of its emotional impact on me. I had many repressed emotions stored inside that debilitated me. Thus, I carved out two years to journey into my deep emotional healing to rediscover myself, including the shadow side that was hereto hidden from me, and then I approached mother to join me. It was a logical next step because she was an integral part of my psycho-spiritual world. In a nine-day Miracle of Love workshop in 1990, in San Diego, I shouted “Mother, wake up!”


Then I set out to transform my interpersonal relationship with Mother. I saw the behaviors and beliefs she had absorbed during the four decades growing up and living in the Korean patriarchal tradition. She could have been a CEO of a large company with all of her education and talents, as well as with the training she got from her father. She could have been a perfect role model for me. It was in this context that I composed a declaration of emotional independence. I was forty-six and she was seventy.





Transforming our traditional mother daughter relationship





Declaration of Emotional Independence


"We are beings of pure consciousness, born of heaven and earth. We have the universe within us and a mission to unveil it in order to bring our light to the world. To this date, our immature relationship has been stuck in the old-fashioned mother-daughter hierarchal relationship, generating painful discordance and disharmony. This declaration is to finish all of that. It is a wakeup call to cut the umbilical cord of emotions that has tied us down, like a shackle to each other.


There are two ways to do this: (1) I stop calling you ‘mom’. Please give yourself a new name, a spiritual name, which I can call you by. (2) From this moment on, we speak UP to each other using honorifics (denoting a form of address showing politeness/ a form of honoring) to express more respect for each other.





I knew that changing another person’s old habit is impossible, especially if it is your parent whom you have been locking horns with. If you dare to get into a debate with your parent to change her manner of relating to you, you will for sure end up in a noisy battle and the situation will most likely get worse rather than better. So I carefully devised a special tool to ‘hit the bull’s-eye.’ Where was the right spot to hit and what kind of tool could do the job? I wanted a tool like the horns of Joshua that could cause the sturdy ideological tower built by the Korean tradition to tumble down under its own weight, saving what I considered sacred, our love and care for each other. (I really loved my mother.)


The 'Declaration of Emotional Independence” was a tool aimed at severing the emotional/psychological umbilical cord between mother and my inner child. I sought to draw the “power from the universe” because that was the kind of language Mother spoke. The goal was to let the child be free of the entanglement with mother. I mailed the Declaration of Emotional Independence shortly after I wrote it on December 30, 1991. I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and she was in Toronto. Six months later I got a call from her saying that she found a new name: 'ILSUN' (Il-sun). It meant ‘a spiritual being.’ (She picked that name because she was aware of her spiritual identity since her childhood playing in nature, like an unleashed colt.) Since then, I started calling her ‘Ilsun-nim,’ instead of ‘mother.’


We then embarked on an unusual adventure. As the usual mother-daughter relationship framework dropped, the old spell broke and we were thrown into quite a bit of confusion. At first, we didn’t know how to relate to each other in a new way. We had thrown out the old captain, the mother,’ and let the ship loose in an uncharted ocean. It was not easy to operate outside the familiar hierarchal system that we were used to. We could not come up with a new order overnight. Below is an entry in mother’s diary.





In 1992, I had another major event in my life, acquiring a new name ILSUN. This was the beginning of a new life opened by heaven through my second daughter. Eun-myung separated from her husband in 1990, after sixteen years of marriage and was pioneering her future in a unique field that sharpens "healing sensibility". It seemed that interpersonal conflicts were the most difficult thing to bear for Eun-myung with a sensitive, honest and artistic mind. She was sensitive to the conflicts with her husband as well as my conflicts with her father. Above all, she was very sensitive to the patriarchal authority of Korean men. From living in the Western world and studying in Canada and the United States, it was unacceptable to her standard of values for gender equality values ​​and human rights.


She sent me a letter containing her Emotional Declaration of Independence, in December 30, 1991, suggesting that we open a new relationship. At first I felt awkward about it, but I decided to accept the proposal because it was a fair statement. Especially, I resonated with her words that human beings have a mission to unveil the universe. This was also the ultimate purpose of my life. Heaven was transmitting its message to me through my daughter. I was seventy years old but it is never too late.





Our relationship became an unusual case of a spiritual training. After taking ten long years, this new relationship became our second nature. Our task was that of noticing, revealing and removing the glitches in our dysfunctional relationship. Our work was a revolution in consciousness with self-determination to heal and transform ourselves in order to become ‘spiritual collaborators’.


The method we used involved changing the language that we used with each other, since all problems start in the manner of speech that provokes the other. The Korean language we used was hierarchical, with parents speaking down (having a power over) to the child and the child speaking up to the parents.


It became clear to us that healthy love between mother and the grown child requires relating to each other adult-to-adult, with due respect, without a power trip, and holding one another accountable for things we agreed to do. This is how we approached building our new relationship from scratch like a child learning to walk.


When children learn to walk, they stumble and fall numerous times. This is the journey of life. We make mistakes, we fall, we learn, we get up, and we try again. However, when we are on a spiritual path, we may fall, but we fall a little less each time. With this insight, I summoned courage and forged ahead toward my goal, and I succeeded in acquiring what I was after: bonding with mother and creating a healthy, healed loving relationship between us. I had missed bonding with my mother as a child, because she didn’t have in her what it takes to naturally bond with me (since my grandmother, abandoned by her husband, was unable to be there emotionally for her daughter). Not so surprisingly, once the bonding was formed it served as the foundation for sustaining inner peace, the kind that we yearned for all our lives. This was so important for Ilsun that she chose the title of her Korean autobiography: “Thus I Became Peace.”


When our family gathered during those first experimental years, Ilsun’s confusion got more intense as she spoke to me in a new way (calling me Vana-nim or “Honorable Vana”) while continuing to use old styles of communication with my three siblings. She had to use honorifics with me but no honorifics with the other three. Poor mother! How she struggled. She felt awkward… self-conscious, serious and comedic, all these expressions crisscrossing her face and being exhibited in her posture. My change was less drastic since all I had to do was raise my bar a little, as I had already started using honorifics in my letters to her. Calling her 'Ilsun-nim’ (Honorable Spirit Being) instead of 'Omma (mom).' Nonetheless, the process was emotionally challenging and tedious, and, it took me several years to completely feel at ease with our new way of relating to each other.


Throughout our valiant determination, the force was with us and our commitment to this process worked. After a decade of conscious work on upgrading our communication skills and reconciling our deeper layers of emotions with each other, we were finally able to meet each other anew on a unified spiritual path. Initially, the course was charged with uncommon discomforts, with unpleasant feelings popping up here and there whenever our conversation made sudden turns. However, once she accepted my proposal to transform our relationship, she never derailed; she stayed loyal to our cause to the very end of her life. I have a very special place for her in my heart for her because of that. I admired her warrior spirit that persevered, which eventually transformed her face into a lotus flower-like countenance in the later stage of her life. The gain was huge. What used to be 'my own emotional problems' had now turned into ‘our common issues.’ I no longer had to struggle alone feeling frustrated about recurring relationship issues with her. Solving my and her problems from then on became our shared task.





Our relationship transformation: my longing to recover a sense of union


There were three things I needed from Mother when I was a child. First, I needed her to listen to me when I’m trying to say something; second, I needed her to pay attention to how I felt. Thirdly, I needed her to respect my thoughts and preferences. All three were lacking in our relationship. No wonder, up until I was 40, I did not have a clear sense of who I was because I did not know what my preferences were about a whole range of things since personal preferences were not deemed important in the Korean culture when I was growing up. Not that I did not have personal preferences but they were suppressed and were not right at the tip of my tongue when someone asked me about them. Often my preferences were covered over by a belief that one should not think about one’s own preferences in deference to the given circumstances and the collective needs.


Eventually my thinking found a detour regarding my preferences: I studied other people’s preferences. Growing up in the wake of the Korean war, preferences were a luxury item when life was all about securing minimum necessities. I didn’t have a whole lot of choices. Instead I became “an observer, a transcended person,” of a sort, from an early age. My primary interest was about understanding and making sense of everything that was going on around me.


Ilsun, who was born in a very remote countryside adjacent to the sea, grew up with mountains, rice fields and the sea, an idyllic environment to nurture her. Eventually she grew up to have a definite taste in fashion, which became a connecting link for me since I loved art and fashion. When I was growing up in the aftermath of the war, I admired Mother’s Korean dresses that she had designed for herself. When there was very little in the market and all she could find was plain fabric, she got gray and black fabric and hand-embroidered the edges of the neck, sleeves and the bottom of the jogori (short like a bolero). Later, she found a red and ivory-colored fabric that had a multi-colored texture in it and made a long Korean skirt and jogori. She wore those with a red vest that had rabbit fur on the inside which kept her warm in the winter. She looked gorgeous in those dresses. When we left Korea for Brazil, and she had to discard all those Korean dresses in order to take bare essentials for life in Brazil, in our limited luggage space, I kept the fabric from her red skirt and I still have it, a souvenir from Mother’s early life in Korea.





Ilsun’s relationship with her mother


After a long study of myself and Mother Ilsun, I tried to find out what the relationship between Ilsun and her mother was like when she was growing up. Ilsun was an unplanned baby. My grandmother conceived her when her husband visited her unexpectedly. He had a second family in Seoul, with a woman that was assisting him in his burgeoning business. Ilsun’s mother felt abandoned by her husband. But the Korean culture at that time was like that. Many men had a second wife. The culture did not allow my grandmother, as the first wife, any other option but to take care of her husband’s parents. Thus Ilsun grew up surrounded by the nebulous cloud of her mother’s loneliness and grief. She had never seen her mother and father happy together.


In a survival mode, Ilsun downplayed her mother in her memories, which is not a mystery to me. It was only when she was writing her autobiography that she recounted something about her mother, on my prompting. Her mother had a superior ability in many areas although she never had a formal education. There was no school for women in her time in the small village where she grew up. Everything she learned she got from her life experience. I remember how masterful my grandmother was with her house management. I admired her food science that she meticulously practiced even when she was floor-bound. She had severe arthritis in both legs and used a small floor cushion to sit and slide around the house. (There were no cure for her at that time right after the war.) The hardwood floor of her house including the bathroom floor was kept sparkling clean, as she would hold a wet rag in her hand and clean all the time as she moved round. Whenever we went to spend the summer vacation in her home, in Yongjam (in the city of Ulsan, in Kyungnam Province), she was giving all her meal-planning instructions while her helper, usually one of my cousins who lived nearby, stood in the old-fashioned clay floored kitchen in the lower tier and did the cooking. Grandma sat on the floor on the upper tier, tasting the food making sure it came out to her standard. The kitchen was designed in such a way that while the cooking was going on, the room was heated, so the kitchen was built slightly lower than the main room.


I fondly remember a sea diver’s family who lived in a separate unit on one side of my grandmother’s house. She would bring for us all sorts of a fresh catch from the ocean, such as sea urchins, sea squirts, clams, various kinds of fish, several times a week whenever she went to the sea and dived. She even brought pink coral, to our delight, but there was no money exchange. I never saw her paying rent either. I guess it was all life exchange. My grandmother lived frugally in an old but rather large house back in the 1950’s, when we went to spend our summer vacations with her. My mother would take all four of us kids on an all day trips by bus, train and another bus. When we finally arrived in the village of Yongjam, everybody gathered at the bus stop to greet us and someone would run ahead notifying my grandmother of our arrival. When we arrived at her front gate, we could see grandma sitting at the edge of her villa front that was about 200 meters away, waiting for us.


Mother spent only a few days catching up with her mother about her sisters and relatives and village members, after which she would return to her job back in Seoul. (She was the business manager of a motor pump manufacturing company, along with my father, a trained hydraulic engineer, who managed the technical side of the business.) Grandma fed us with vegetables and fruits from her backyard and rice from her small rice patch that villagers managed for her. Fresh seafood was a delightful daily treat, which she served with ‘cho-gochoojang,’ the Korean style hot pepper paste mixed with her home-made rice vinegar. Her specialty homemade rice vinegar was kept in a long-mouthed earthenware jar which she shook once a day as part of the fermentation process.


My grandmother decided early on not to get Ilsun touch the domestic work, so as not to follow in her grief-ridden footsteps. She did not want her to become a housewife, so, to my chagrin, she did not teach Mother her culinary art and her sacred recipes, so I sadly did not inherit the family cooking tradition.





Ilsun’s later life


After Ilsun graduated from Japan Women’s University (Nihon Josi Dai), she continued on her personal development path all her life training and retraining her body, mind and heart, and kept that going to the end of her life. When she reached 80, her warrior-spirit disappeared and the fragrance of her ripened spiritual energy impressed people around her. She had a continuous stream of people coming to visit her even while she was bed-ridden at the hospital, unable to carry on a conversation. Her goal throughout her life was to lift herself up from the struggles of her small-self and she had mastered it, moving through the most challenging period of her life, losing a portion of her brain.


Somebody once asked me, “How was Ilsun able to attain such a peaceful state?” The answer is, she attained peace by working through and removing all interpersonal conflicts beginning with her family and forming a new, purified bond with us. For her, that bond was ultimately a bond with God. What was unique with Ilsun was that she attained her ultimate union with God by way of healing and reconciling with her immediate family members. For her, home was her spiritual training ground since early on, but she started this work, officially, so to speak, after she turned age seventy and continued to the last moment of her life when she passed away at 91. The long and arduous psycho-spiritual work we initiated, side-by-side with the Emissary work that my brother Yujin did, bore fruit and brought a miracle as it set a healing cycle in motion for the whole family. The impact was powerful and brought an amazing result, rare indeed in the history of human families.





The first word following her brain surgery: “World Peace, how exciting!”



If someone in your family fell victim to a stroke at the age of 87 and was found on the kitchen floor six hours later, and the doctor said, “There will be no full recovery; she needs massive brain surgery,” what would the family say? If she would survive brain surgery, most likely she and the family would suffer from her severe handicap that would require 24/7 care. This was exactly what happened and people around her advised us that it would be better to let her go. But our family thought differently. We felt that our mother/grandmother should stay on with us a little longer because there was something more for us to do together.


For our family who left Korea in 1964, when Ilsun moved back to Korea and settled in Jeju Island, off the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula, in 2006, it felt like we finally came home after 50 years of wandering around the globe. It was an incredibly meaningful event for all of us to come to Jeju where Ilsun made a home for us to return to. Her home in Seogwipo, Jeju Island had her old oak desk that she had brought from her Toronto home. Jeju thus became a center of function that fused our family members as we visited her from Canada, Australia, the United States and other parts of Korea. This was such a big turn of events that no one had foreseen. Ilsun had once again made a huge decision for all of us, just as she did when she made a decision to move the family to the West fifty years ago. When she had her stroke in 2011, it came as a great weight to each one of us, and because of that, we could not think of letting go of her. We were not prepared for that. She had lived alone in Toronto for twenty-two years after Father passed away in 1984. Visiting Ilsun in Korea from Adelaide, Los Angeles and Montreal was quite different from visiting her in Toronto. It meant re-experiencing our roots, homeland and mother in one package. It was like experiencing a cosmic womb.
Without a debate, we reached a unanimous decision and Ilsun was wheeled into the operating room. Several hours later the doctor came out and said that the surgery went well. When she was wheeled out, her head was heavily bandaged, giving her the appearance of a mummy. She was awake from the anesthesia but her face was so swollen as to be unrecognizable and she could not open her eyes. However, we could see that she was conscious, so I raised my thumb and shouted, “You are the best!” and everyone shouted together. Right at that moment, Ilsun raised her right thumb and shouted, "We are all best!" Then she clenched her fist and lifted into the air, shouting, "World peace, how exciting!". When we heard these words bursting out of the mouth of a person who just had one-third of her right brain removed, we all broke down and sobbed. This was the power that took us around the world and now back to where we started. It gave us a whole new understanding of ourselves and feelings for one another in connection with our motherland. I was very thankful and proud. What a way to experience one’s sense of identity! There was no intellectual theorizing about it. This was all happening after our joint visit to North Korea in 2007 and mother’s reunification with her father before that, in 1975. I simply felt deeply connected and very stable, surrounded by the whole family on the land where we were born, with our children who were born in the West… In that moment, North and South and East and West were organically represented in such a life-giving way.





What we have in common under Ilsun’s leadership


Everyone, beginning with Mother Ilsun, in our family was somewhat of an introvert. As first generation immigrants, we were all intent on living meaningful lives and leaving a good legacy behind for posterity. Living a moral life, being a good citizen and remaining loyal was important to us. Most of my memories about our family gatherings had no big moments of laughter and no overflowing joy. We were serious about learning and living a principled life with a sense of mission, sometimes a bit too concerned about living upright. Our minds did not include jokes or making money, so much so that my daughter said “mom’s siblings all had a high education but nobody is making money; so I will go make money.” She went to Harvard Business School and worked for Solomon investment company in the Wall Street, but later she changed her mind and changed her course of life.


Throughout our lives as immigrants, it never occurred to me that we had a spiritual nucleus in our family. Generally speaking, we each had a pure heart and did the best to live a faithful life. As I was working on this book and reflected on the shared essences of our family members, it dawned on me that there is at the core a strong spine of integrity, a determination to live by ‘the truth,’ refusing to be swayed by what is ignoble. We have disagreements and different viewpoints about everything, but within each us we are bound by a sense of what is right and noble and sacred. Even our father who had an extra-marital affair and broke mother’s heart, was in the end called “a good man” from no other than Mother. I think in the end she forgave him, because she genuinely loved him and wanted to be loved by him.


We all pursued the path of truth, with ongoing work on our consciousness. particularly on the issue of integrity (emotional-social-intellectual 'honesty'). That was the common denominator which threaded the core of our family members. Our high level of self-monitoring, on our attitudes toward life caused us to make constant self-adjustments in order to harmonize with others who had different opinions. This was our ’spiritual life,’ that requires ongoing ‘spiritual work.’ At the center of this was the presence of Ilsun and behind her was her father, Lee Jong-man, who was a practitioner of the Daedong principle. It is in this way that my account of Ilsun takes us back to the story of our grandfather.





My encounter with the Daedong Spirit


The first time I learned about Grandfather was in 1952, when our family arrived in Busan as war refugees, and we were visiting our uncle's house. A large portrait of Grandfather was hanging in the hallway. He was wearing a striped suit, round glasses and an authoritative look. On the portrait was written “Lee Jong-man, Chairman of Daedong Mining Company.” It was impressive. I was only six, but I still remember the sensation I had. I sensed a great power in his portrait and the story I heard about him sounded magical. ‘Magic’ was the common denominator of all my peak experience since childhood, and my grandfather who went north and was respected on both sides of the DMZ became an epitome of how heart connection surpasses political boundaries.


Fundamentally, what intrigued me the most about Grandfather was the fact that he had a driving force and moral fiber with which he navigated through the most tough times under the Japanese during the colonial period. He accomplished much as a patriotic businessman and contributed to the Korean society by way of helping the farmers to become self-reliant. He also built technical schools, and operated a publishing house with which he tried to educate the public. I deduced that Ilsun’s value system that she imparted to us went back to her father. In the core of that was his philosophy of Daedong* (“a big unity”), a life of reflection, and a dedication to the betterment of the world.





[Footnote]: *Daedong (“a big unity”) thought is about an ideal society, not a reality. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, when the feudal system was shaken and the modern fascination appeared, Kang Yue-I wrote about Utopia in his Book of Daedong . He painted a paradise of equality between men and women, the abolition of family system, the disappearance of racial discrimination, the elimination of class, the public service of agriculture and commerce, and the unified, warless equality of world governments. This systemized what the common Chinese believed to be an ideal society, taking into consideration Western nationalism, socialist thought, and Buddhist influence. Daedong envisioned the ideal of a Chinese national ideal society. Since then for eight centuries, many thinkers wrote about Daedong, including my grandfather Lee Jong Man. Most recently a new book came out, entitled 동아시아의 대동사상과 평화공동체 (박광수, etc) “Daedong thought of East Asia and Peace Community, by a group of Korean and Japanese scholars. They believed that the controversy and conflict between the humans, humans and nature, nation and nation, religion and religion, which are the structural problems of modern human society, stem from the failure to achieve 'a big unity'. It is because of the aggressive war against the weak countries by the great powers, and the inevitable subordinate relationship caused by this power differential that they cannot escape the pursuit of a profit centered world that defies the universal consciousness of the 'human community'.





























Chapter Two





Lee Jong-man 1939





(The following interview appeared in Mining Chosun, a magazine published in July, 1939. It was written by a reporter named Changwon. This was during the Japanese occupation of Korea, before the division of Korea.)





Title: Lee Jong-man’s Philosophy of Life and Business





Lee Jong-man is CEO of Daedong Mining Corporation, CEO of Daedong Rural Enterprise, President of Daedong Technical School


Q: How much is your estimated wealth? Can you tell me in your own words?


Lee Jong-man: The output of Jangjin mine last year was about 2 million won, among which the actual amount of money from the sale of the ore is about 1054,000 won. We were unable to sell the remaining about 900,000 won worth of ore, due to the delay in the construction of the telephone line, and it is piled up locally.


Q: What is the planned amount for this year and what does the future look like?


Lee Jong-man: This year's production amount is already calculated by scientific and accurate calculation from the (Japanese) Government General (of Korea) Affairs Department, and it will be around 2 million won. After many years when the mining facility is completed, I am confident that we can produce 10 million won worth every year.


Q: How much debt do you have?


Lee Jong-man: I have borrowed about 1 million won to build mining facilities, a school project, and a rural project. The biggest portion of the debt among them is 700,000 won that we borrowed from Gold Mining Company.


Q: You have other gold mines, special light mines, and iron ore mines elsewhere besides Jangjin mine?


Lee Jong-man: There are dozens of gold mines around the country, and iron mines in Pyongbook (north of Pyongyang) with reserves of 100 million tons.


Q: If the production of Jangjin Mine is estimated at 10 million won a year, it’s value will be rated at about 300 million won, taking a conservative estimation.


Lee Jong-man: There is no way to accurately estimate it at 300 million won or 500 million won, but I guess it will reach a large amount that I had never heard of before.


Q: Would you sell it if you could sell it to companies like Mitsubishi and Mitsui for 100 million won?


Lee Jong-man: I will not them leave my hands no matter what happens. This is a great gift from heaven to us. How could I sell it?


Q: There is a sardine fishery with an annual production of 40 million won, and a wood industry with a similar annual production. Do you not want to invest in them?


Lee Jong-man: I will never. I had a fishing business in my home town, in Gyeongsang, for about 3 years. But with my character, I can never be in a fishing industry.


Q: Is that because of less profit?


Lee Jong-man: No, it was not for a matter of a profit. I can make a fortune overnight with fishing. But it kills thousands of lives before my eyes. It is because the fishery business takes away the life of the fish that is trying to live, I get sick in my chest, so I decided to get out of it. So I sold everything and left the fishery business. I worked in agriculture, I also worked as a school teacher. It’ll be a long list to name all the different kinds of work I did in my life.


Q: So you chose the mining business to be your best?


Lee Jong-man: Yes. Mining means digging the treasures buried in the underground, that is God's treasures kept for us. If the system is well established, it is possible to work with miners without exploiting them. It is best for my ideals and personality because it can be devoted to the happiness of all of the mankind , putting God’s treasure to good use.


Q: Wealthy people wants to amass greater wealth. Millionaires strive to become billionaires. Are you not thinking of getting richer?


Lee Jong-man: No. I am not doing any of this for money. My wish is not to be another Rothschild or a Carnegie.


Q: Excuse me, but it's common for wealthy people to build a luxurious mansion and eat the best food of the season and have concubines, but only in your case I do not hear any such a rumor and you live in a modest house. So where is the happiness of your life?


Lee Jong-man: (silence)


Q: Unlike those who keep their fat bank accounts and find a pleasure in opening and closing their golden chest, you have already given away most of your fortune to build Daedong Technical College, Daedong Rural Enterprise, and Daedong Mining Company...


Lee Jong-man: Thank you for asking. My rapture is in cultivating my mind pursing The Way.


Q: What way is that?


Lee Jong-man: As I read and meditate on the sacred writings of the great masters hundreds and thousands of times, I get greater clarity in the teachings of the old masters. Then I try to emulate the way they have shown us.


Q: Please tell me more ...


Lee Jong-man: My shelf has an array of sacred books. They are my treasures that I enjoy spending time with every day. I try to live my life following the words of wisdom and illumination contained in those books.


Q: Are they Buddhist scriptures?


Lee Jong-man: Some are. Buddha left the royal castle and his position as a noble prince in order to rescue the common people from the life of anguish. I too chose the path hoping that I could contribute even a little bit to the cause of lessening the sorrow and bitterness of this world.


Q: Any other scriptures?


Lee Jong-man: I worship all saints. Christ said on the cross that he would forgive those who betrayed and crucified him. I also constantly think about my low position and being an apostle to forgive others and find a way to live well together.


Q: What about Confucius? I heard that you have a deep knowledge about the teaching of Confucius.


Lee Jong-man: Yeah. I also read the Analects. I try to imitate the spirit and effort of the master Confucius, who has endeavored to till the old age and try to open the world to the Way.


Q: What are you interested in other than spiritual training?


Lee Jong-man: There is nothing else I am interested in besides studying and learning from the sacred teachings of the great masters in order to find the way for all to live well together.


Q: Then, if your goal is not to pursue the accumulation of gold and you do not look for the pleasures of the human world more than the minimum you need, and because you follow the saints… What happens to the relationship between the present business and those hundreds of millions of dollars?


Lee Jong-man: I am waiting for the right people to appear, who can take care of many companies and the schools we have now.


Q: Are you looking for one person, or two, or multiple people?


Lee Jong-man: I am thinking of an organized body that can be responsible and efficiently run various entities I have created, without me.


Q: What would you do when that kind of organization is formed?


Lee Jong-man: I would leave the current work of money management and making money. I would like to devote my whole life to the business of education to raise the gifted and talented people through education.


Q: Do you already have a plan for that?


Lee Jong-man: I did not want to talk about it yet, but if you promise that you will not publish it widely…I want to make a university with my own hands. This university is going to be composed of several colleges that will be suitable for the realities and the current needs of Joseon: engineering university, university of agriculture, and mining university. I would like to make three universities to make a comprehensive university.


Q: How are you going to fund that scale of project?


Lee Jong-man: JangJin mine has a capacity of generating ten million won a year and that will continue for a long time.


Q: Is the Daedong Technical School in Pyongyang a prototype in preparation for that grand project?


Lee Jong-man: …so you may interpret it.





When he ended with those words, I sobbed inside. I wanted to hold on to his wrist and cry for a long time. The rays of the setting sun brightened the excited faces of the host and the guest. (Changwon, 1939)



















Chapter Three





Capitalist for Collective Wellbeing





(The following article from the Korea Times, South Korea [Life and Culture Section], on October 24, 2006, was written by Prof. Jun Bong-gwan, who teaches Korean Literature, at Humanities and Social Sciences, KAIST University, near Seoul. He is a specialist on notable people during the Japanese occupation.)





A Beautiful Wealthy Man


After 27 Failures, Another Attempt Leads to


a Successful Social Business Venture





Lee Jong-man was born in 1885 in a poor family in Ulsan and his life was failure after failure leading to eventual success. In 1904, when the Russo-Japanese War broke out, after stalling the seaweed used as a raw material for the iodine tincture, he tried various things like fishing, forestry mining, etc. He built a school in his hometown with his bare hands. In 1937, at the age of fifty, Lee Jong - man failed twenty-seven times in 33 years until he became king of gold mines.


Lee Jong-man established Daedong Mining Co., Ltd., the largest mining company in Korea and then started social business in earnest. He poured the profits that he made from the Daedong Mining by millions of won each year, and developed education business, cultural business, and self-help farming business.


In order to nurture self-help farmers, Lee Jong-man set up a foundation named "Daedong Rural Village Company" and let the farmers have 70% of the crops while the foundation received only 30%. Thirty years later, the farmers profited from all the harvests, and the foundation kept only the land ownership. The reason for not transferring the ownership to the farmers was to prevent the farmers from impulsively mortgaging or selling the land and falling back to the status of tenant farmers. The 30% share that the foundation collected was invested to expand land.


Lee Jong - man had an aspiration to buy all the land of Chosun and make all farmers of Chosun into self-managed farmers. During such a vigorous social project, the media praised him, saying that "it is a great misfortune of Chosun that Lee Jong-man was not able to own a larger property."


After the liberation from Japan, Lee Jong-man went to the North. He gave up his comfortable life as a capitalist and chose a land where his aspirations could be realized. Kim Il-sung regarded Lee Jong-man, a capitalist who voluntarily came to north, as a "patriotic entrepreneur." He served as a representative of the Supreme People's Assembly of the First and Second Plenipotentiaries and served as advisor to the Ministry of Mining. He died in 1977 at the age of ninety-three. Lee Jong - man is the only capitalist who is buried in the North Korean Patriots Cemetery.


"Anti-corporate" sentiments of the Koreans


Whenever I hear the complaints of the capitalists in our country, that the anti-business sentiment is serious in Korea, I have a feeling that the Korean people’s anti-feelings about large companies and their owners would not have been so severe if we had two more capitalists like Lee Jong-man.





























(This article came out in the monthly magazine Shin-Dong-A, dated September 14, 2006. It was written by the same author as the article above, Prof. Jeon Bong-gwan of KAIST University.)





Lee Jong-man’s Beautiful Failure





The Only Capitalist Buried in the North Korean Patriot’s Cemetery


Land to the farmers!


May 12, 1937. A press conference was held to announce the founding of Daedong Mining Co., Ltd. at Cheonjinloo Inn in Kyungsung [Seoul] . The reporters heading to Cheonjinloo were bewildered at the fact that this press conference is held at such a shabby Japanese style inn, instead of fancy hotels like Chosun Hotel or Railway Hotel. After all, this was the founding press conference of a large gold mine company with a capital of 3 million won (current worth 300 billion won). Moreover, the representative of the newly launched Daedong Mining company was the king of gold mines, Lee Jong-man, who sold the Yeongpyeong gold mine to Dong-Joseon Mining Co., Ltd. for 1.55 million won the day before. Such an act of a man of great wealth calling them come into a shabby inn felt like a lack of respect and was displeasing to the reporters.


At the scheduled time, a middle-aged gentleman in his early 50s showed up. There were signs of a hard life on his face, but he did not exhibit the arrogant and wicked attitude of those who are newly rich. He had more of a look of an intellectual who could have spent his life sitting at the desk. When the meeting started, Mr. Lee Jong-man, who appeared as a comet in the Korean gold industry in 1937, opened his mouth.


“I am sorry to bring you to a humble place like this. I stay here every time I come to Kyungsung [Seoul) because I do not have a home in Kyungsung. Even if your seat is uncomfortable, please try to understand.. As you all know well, yesterday, the Youngpyeong gold mine was sold to Dong-Joseon Mining Co., Ltd. for 1.55 million won. I am in a hurry to tell you about Daedong Rural Company, a non-profit corporation, which we are going to incorporate with 500,000 won from that money.”


As soon as he uttered those words, the whole room stirred. None of the reporters gathered at the press conference expected to hear such a huge plan. Most of the reporters unwillingly came to this press conference to see what kind of person Lee Jong-man was since he was almost unknown to the Korean business community until recently. They anticipated that this guy would be boasting about how much money he had made, but they never expected to hear an astonishing declaration that he will give away a third of the money he made to the peasants who were unrelated to him.


First, the Daedong Rural Company will purchase 500,000 won worth of farmland in five locations, in the east, west, south, north of Joseon [Korea] and in the central area. Second, the collective farmland owned by the Foundation will select growers and distribute them evenly, allowing them to cultivate permanently. Third, the Foundation will collect 30% of the annual harvest for the grower as "dues" and use it to purchase additional farmland. The dues will be collected within a 30-year limit after which time the growers will have one hundred per cent ownership of all crops they grow.


However, the title of ownership of the cultivated land will be permanently retained by the foundation to prevent the farmers from selling the land or defaulting on the land. If we do so, we will be able to guarantee the stability of our farmers permanently. Fourth, we will organize the local autonomous organization of the villagers in the farmland so that cultivators can collectively make decisions about all kinds of problems such as education, hygiene and culture. Fifth, we will educate young people who will become the backbone of the Daedong rural village by establishing agricultural education facilities in the collective farmland. (In the Mining Age, July 1937 issue)


It was a huge plan indeed. At that time it was illegal to collect more than 50% of the rent, but there were vicious landowners who collected 60 - 70%. In such a situation, the declaration of Lee Jong-man that he would receive only 30% of the rent, and 30 years later he would not receive one penny was a shock. And, it was not that he is going to collect the 30% rent as the landowners' natural right to collect rents, but the foundation was going to collect the dues for a limited period of 30 years for the benefit of expanding the collective farmland.


Lee Jong-man's self-help program was surprisingly sophisticated. It was not a remark that was released as impromptu after a day or two of thinking. He was not a rural activist, nor was he a socialist. Why was Lee Jong-man, putting such a large amount of money into society without conditions? What was the hidden agenda of Lee Jong-man, who had wandered from the sea to the mountains to the fields, for announcing such a grand plan? When the reporters' questions were poured out, he replied:


“As more than 80% of the population in Korea is engaged in agriculture, the standard of living in rural areas means the living standard of Koreans. We have been thinking for a long time that peasants' poverty is a problem that we must focus on most. I have been engaged in mining for over 20 years, and now I have touched a certain amount of money. So I have planned to do my best from now on to make for the rehabilitation of rural areas in Joseon [Korea]. From the moment I started the mine my intention was to implement a socialized farm project for the benefit of the farmers. (Rural relief project with 10.45 million won Foundation, "Joseon Daily News" dated May 13, 1937)


Some less honorable businessmen who have been highly successful in business donate to charities in order to ease their hearts. Others use laws as a tool of taxation or inheritance. However, Lee Jong-man was different. Because of the amount that appeared in his foundation, we were able to read the truth in his attitude toward his fledgling self-managed farming business. Four months after he announced his self-help plan, Lee Jong-man declared that he would collect the same amount (30%) of the rent on his privately-owned farmland, in accordance with the Daedong Rural Company.


Lee Jong-man, who founded Daedong Rural Company by donating 500,000 won for the purpose of constructing a farm village over the past spring, is well known for his accomplishment in rural business. The plan to collect 30% of the harvest amount from the self-managed farmers, the land-owners of Daedong Rural Village, as the dues for farm construction, caused a great shock to Joseon society. On September 14, Lee Jong-man declared, at the Daedong Rural Community 's board of directors' meeting, that he would also collect only 30 percent of the rent beginning this year on his personal land of 1.57 million pyeong. And then he relayed this message to the tenant farmers. In this regard, he said,


 “Receiving 30% of the rent is not a loss to the landlord even from the viewpoint of business management. On average a landlord collects 50% of the rent in the rural area of the country. Compared to this, I lowered my rent by 20%. If this act would bring about an improvement in the relationship between the landlord and the tenants, wouldn’t you be pleased for the rural area of the country?


 Although Koreans are not able to live like other people in the material aspect of their lives, is there a reason not to help each other in spirit and in life? I decided to collect 30 percent of the rent for 30 years, and after that to hand all of the land over to the tenants. I would like to take this as an honor if my actions help to make the rural farming village cheerful.” (Dong-A Daily News, September 16, 1937)


The ideal relationship model between the capitalist and the laborer, that could be found in a socialist book, poured out of the mouth of a capitalist, not out of the mouth of workers. Moreover, Lee Jong-man tried to diminish the scale of his part in this. He did not only reduce the rent for the farmers. He was convinced that cuts in rents would bring greater benefits to the landlord, and he explained the reasons for this on two grounds.


 “The root cause of the recent worsening of rural areas in Korea is the heavy burden of rent. Because the cost of farming is prohibitively high, the tenant does not have attachment to the cultivated land, and as a result, the productivity and land quality of the land declined. The deprivation of land is not only the loss of the tenant and the landlord, but it is also a significant loss to society. Therefore, it is necessary to lower the rent in order to improve soil quality.


Also, since the capital invested in the land is permanent, there is no need to raise the capital in a short period of time. Urgent recovery of the capital invested by the landlord would create a conflict between the tenant and the landlord, and the result will lead to the ruin of the countryside. Therefore, if we take the proposed way, landowners and tenants cannot but agree with each other and work cooperatively. "


The Dong-A Daily News (Dong-A daily newspaper) profusely praised, in the editorial dated September 17, 1937, this philanthropist and said it is highly regrettable that the land he owned was only 1.57 million pyeong, and that the beneficiary was only 153 farmers in the three counties of Yeoncheon, Pyeonggang and Yeongheung. Probably it was the first time in the entire Joseon history that the richest person in the society heard compliments that he could not own more wealth. Lee Jong-man's series of philanthropic acts was so powerful that it gave a birth to a new expression “people’s wealthy man” (a wealthy man dedicated to the public good). At the age of fifty-three, Lee Jong-man, who appeared like a comet in the Korean business world, was doing exactly what he had set out to do with any wealth that he earned.





A ridiculously unlucky man


Lee Jong-man was born in 1885 as the second son of seven siblings. He studied Korean classical studies in his childhood but had to stop studying when he fell ill at sixteen and spent three years sick in bed. He had such a character that when he started to do anything, he would see it through to completion. He therefore forced himself to return to school, but fell ill again.


In 1905, at age twenty, Lee Jong-man, who spent his childhood wrestling with illness, decided to leave his hometown to explore a wider world. Thirty-five years later, Lee recalled his twenties as follows.


“Thirty-five years ago when I was twenty, it was a dark age because we were so behind in culture, industry and in awareness. In my small hometown farming village the people were living a primitive life. It was a village where people lived generation after generation with no hope, barely surviving. There was a soldier-chief in my hometown that had power over my villagers, who had been living as inferior human beings. When I would see the soldier’s rude behavior and words every day, how could I find a way to live as a decent human being as I had been taught in studying the teachings of Confucius? My anger and ideal caused my blood to tingle.


I thought I should go to Seoul so I could be a somebody. A vague longing began to sprout. It was winter when I spent a couple of months thinking about this alone and then I sold a part of our family’s belongings. I was reckless and courageous. For the first time in Seoul, my heart from the countryside was instantly excited. Then I looked more clearly as the novelty wore off. So I returned to my hometown with a determination that I should make my hometown stronger. I was immature. When I think back, I have to laugh.” (My 20 years old youth age, "Donga New News (daily news) " April 3, 1940)


After having failed in the seaweed business and a fishing business, at twenty-four, in 1908, Lee returned to his hometown and spent his time plowing the field during the day and reading books at night. However, he knew that he could not be a farmer for the rest of his life. After three or four years, he started thinking again about doing something worthwhile for his hometown.


In 1912, at twenty-eight, Lee established Daeheung School by integrating Seodang (a village school for the study of Chinese classics). Although he had never received modern education, he taught himself enough to teach his hometown juniors. He studied modern thought and the new culture at night and taught during the day, but he was scorned by the elderly people in the neighborhood who were soaked in the feudal tradition. The number of students gradually decreased and in less than a year, there were none left.


 


From tungsten mine to school for the poor


In 1914, when Lee Jong-man was about to close the Daeheung School, the First World War broke out. Although the war was happening on the other side of the globe, it also had a considerable influence on Joseon society. As Japan participated in the Allied Powers and supplied military supplies, the prices of minerals, which are essential for weapons production, skyrocketed.


Lee Jong-man had been failing for 10 years until he reached the age of thirty. One day he was in Gangwon province to help the relief of the flood victims when he heard about a tungsten mine. That was after a hard learning about the need for enormous capital to manage a small school in the country through the failure of the Daeheung School. He had concluded that the easiest way to pull that off is make the money himself, instead of relying on the borrowed money.


After completing the relief work, Lee went straight to Yanggu in Gangwon Province without returning to his hometown and started a tungsten mine. He hired a few hands and as a result of hammering until the palm of his hands split, he earned nearly 50,000 won (currently worth 5 billion won) in two years. He thought that if he stayed with it a little longer, he could do big things for society.


But this time again, heaven was not on his side. When World War I ended in 1918, the price of tungsten fell drastically. 50,000 won was barely enough to pay off his debts from purchasing the mining equipments. He sold the expensive equipments for scrap metal and left Yanggu and moved to a village right below Mt.Geumgang, to start a lumber business. He steadily recovered. But this time, heavy rain took away all of his possessions.


At the age of thirty-five, after becoming destitute again, Lee came up with a plan to establish a large-scale agriculture and forestry company with a capital of 10 million won (currently worth 1 trillion won), but no one was willing to invest in it. The plan for the founding of Joseon Agriculture and Forestry company also failed.


In 1920, a thirty six-year-old Lee returned to his hometown without any success, with only debts and wrinkles on his forehead. When he returned to his hometown, no matter how hard he tried for rural improvement and to promote agriculture, no one believed in Lee who was empty pocketed after failing ten times in his business.


In 1923, Choi Chang-hak, who has been wandering around the country for a decade in search of gold veins, discovered a gold nuggets mine in Pyongbuk Province, and since then he was known as the Golden ghost of the Joseon Dynasty. Lee, who had been back in his home town disappointed with his continuous failure, picked himself up again and decided to take his family and move to Kyungsung [Seoul). Lee was thirty-nine and thought that it was too late to earn money so he changed his life plan and went straight into social work.


Then he founded Kyungsung School for the Poor, outside Dongdaemun with Lee Joon-ryul, a socialist enthusiast who graduated from Kyungsung High School of Technology [now Seoul National University, Engineering Dept.). He was nine years younger than Lee Jong-man. Lee Joon-ryul served as the principal and Lee Jong-man worked to raise money for the expenses. The school gave a middle school education to the children of the poor families who could not otherwise think of education. Ordinary people could not attempt such an endeavor even if they had financial means to do so. Lee poured everything that he had into the school while his own family was falling into ruin. He often went hungry and often could not afford to pay for his own children’s tuition fees. Dozens of times he could not pay his rent, which was only 5 - 6 won a month, and the family was kicked out of the house frequently.


Even when his family was homeless, Lee Jong-man was fixated on the survival of the school. His heart ached with a need to take action when he discovered that there were no desks in the classroom for students to learn on. The economic difficulties of his family did not deter him. Lee pulled coal carts to earn the school rent, and even when he was hungry, he denied himself his meals and put his money to work at the school. (Lee Jong-man, "Mining success stories" 1938)


In order to raise funds to run the school, Lee Jong-man sold dumplings in the streets, pulled rickshaws, and followed the street cleaners to scavenge. While he was moving his family from a place to place, one day Lee Jong-man met Huh Hon), who was the same age as himself and was already a prominent figure in the Joseon society. He graduated from Boseong Technical College and Meiji University Law School and became the eleventh lawyer in Korea in 1908, when he was only twenty-four. He served as the vice-president of the North-West Society and took the lead in the free debate of the national representatives to defend the freedom fighters of the 3.1. movement.


When Lee Jong-man moved into a room in Huh Heon’s backyard, Huh was already an established lawyer and Boseong technical school principal. Even when the rent was pushed for five or six months, Huh did not ask him to move out, or feel uncomfortable. On the contrary, he supported Lee Jong-man continually. Huh was imprisoned in 1929 for participating in a large civilian protest, and when he was released, in 1932, invested in the gold mines but failed. Around that time, in 1937, Lee Jong-man created Daedong-Konzern (conglomerate) with the income generating entity, Daedong Mining Company as the foundation, and he recruited Huh Hon as the managing director of Daedong Publishing Co. and Daedong Mining Co.


Lee Jong-man placed all his passion and determination into caring for the education of his students, with the determination that this was his life’s mission and the last business of his life. However, his school for the poor closed their doors five years later, for financial reasons. 





Success on the 28th attempt


While Lee Jong-man was struggling in Seoul, another king of gold was born at the northern end of the country (current North Korea). In 1923, forty-one-year-old Bahng Eung-mo, who had been working for a newspaper, in Jengjoo, in Pyongbuk, searched for gold. He poured all the money he had into it, and even borrowed some from poor neighbors. In three years, he found a gold vein that had three-finger size gold nuggets at Darigol in Pyongbuk. He was one year older than Lee. Bahng then sold his Kyodong gold mine for 1 million won (currently worth 100 billion won) and bought the Joseon Daily newspaper, which had been suffering from economic difficulties. In 1927, Lee Jong-man, inspired by Bahng’s success story, decided to give it another try, overcoming the shock of the failure of the high school. No matter how old and how often you fail, life is worth living as long as there is hope.


Lee went to Hamgyong (next to Pyongbuk) Province and got into reclamation work of Yeongpyeong Plain, but it failed again. He attempted to develop land in Bukchon, but that also failed. He then managed Dongchang mine in Youngheung County, and that failed, too. Failing over twenty times, he got used to failing and was no longer sad or remorseful when he failed again.


In 1928, Lee made another gold mine development with Kim Mo, Shinheung County, South Hamgyong Province. The capital was pledged by Kim Mo and the prospecting and mining were taken over by Lee Jong-man, and the profit was halved. Lee had a plan in mind to start a construction of another rural project, an ideal village, as soon as he had a profit from the gold mine. In 1931, a gold vein was found, after working non-stop day and night for three years. 


“Now I can create the (education) business of my dream! "


When he hit upon the gold vein, Lee Jong-man could not bear the joy. But the joy was too short; everything went to hell. It was because Kim Mo who he trusted did not honor their agreement of partnership. On December 27, 1931, Lee Jong-man, who was forty-seven now, was expelled from the gold mine that he had just discovered. All he had in his pocket was 27 coins. "It's okay," he said to himself, "You want to be rich by letting the other shed tears in their eyes... I shall succeed on my own terms!”


Lee Jong-man walked the snow-covered road and went over to Shinheung-gun. From there he set up a Kirin mine. The Kirin mine did not make a huge income for Lee, but earned enough to live on. When the gold mine wind blew across the Joseon dynasty, the fact that one owned a gold mine, whether it had a lot of gold or a little gold, became an object of envy itself. Lee Jong-man, who had searched for a gold mine of good quality on the basis of the Kirin mine, purchased the certificate of the Yeongpyeong gold mine filed by a Japanese man, Kitashima, in 1932. It was his twenty-ninth project.





King of gold mine at age fifty-three


The Yeongpyeong Gold Mine was a well-known gold mine from the time of the Korean Empire (Emperor Gojong was the twenty-sixth king of the Joseon dynasty, who died a suspicious death, maybe poisoned by the Japanese), but it had been left in abandonment. Lee Jong-man judged that a famous gold mine could have in its vicinity rocks with gold buried in it and bought the certificate from its Japanese owner at a price of 450 won (current value: 45 million won). In 1934, after obtaining a small amount of gold, it was officially licensed and Lee Jong-man poured enormous amounts of money into its development. Ten drill rigs were mobilized to mass-mine the gold vein. During the year 1936, gold was produced worth 400,000 won (currently worth 40,000,000,000, 40 billion, won). Lee did not spend the money from the gold mine for personal use, but instead reinvested it in mining facilities or buying promising gold mines in other areas. As a result, in 1936, he was able to secure the right to develop Jangjin Mine, the best gold mine of Joseon.


The Jangjin Mine was originally a state mine operated by a private individual, Yi Yong-ik, for 60-70 years previously. Now Lee Jong-man owns the development rights and he owns the registered mine of Jangjin which has 9 mines as well as about 400 application mines. It is a huge mine that covers a vast area of ​​400 million pyeong (about 510 square miles]. When the former owner, Lee Yi-wik, was operating the mine, he was a novice in the industry and he did not recognize the true value of alluvial gold (gold dust). When Lee Jong-man managed the mine, his active investment and special management method showed remarkable achievements in the whole of Joseon, within a short time. The development period of Jangjin Mine is short, but it has already been proven that the quantity of gold is more than expected. In addition, the quality of gold (the ratio of gold in the stone) is also the best in Korea. (The great king of the mountain king Mr. Jong Man, "Mining Age" July, 1937) After the huge amount of funds needed to develop Jangjin Mine, Lee Jong-man sold the Yeongpyeong Gold Mine, which gave him his first success, to Dong-Joseon Mining Co. As a result, the nameless owner of the mine, Lee Jong-man, became the Joseon’s King of gold mines. It was only fifteen years since Choi Chang-hak became the king of the gold mine, and it was only five years since Bang Eung-mo took over the Joseon Daily News.


What startled the world about Lee Jong-man was not only his tremendous success after 28 failures in 30 years. In the 1930’s, it was common to see ten people every year who found a gold mine and climbed to the rank of millionaire overnight. What the people really admired was how he spent his hard-earned money. None of the kings of gold mines used the fortune they made as beautifully as Lee Jong-man did.


Lee Jong-man sold the Yeongpyeong Gold Mine at 1.55 million won and donated a sum of 500,000 won to a rural rescue business, an additional sum of 120,000 won for the miners and other employees, and for the schools and for the relief of the poor in the neighborhood. This was heartening news, in deed, at the time when there was an inflation and demands for wage increases in the whole country.


On September 14, Lee Jong-man arrived at Youngpyeong Gold Mine and handed over mine affairs to Dong-Joseon Mine Co., Ltd. There was a ceremony at 9 a.m. remembering those who died underground. After the ceremony, Lee Jong- man delivered 100,000 won each to the Youngpyeong Mine employees and 1,000 miners. He paid 10,000 won for the relief of the poor in the villages of Yeongpyeong gold mine. He donated 2,000 won to Yeongpyeong Academy, which educates the miners' children, and donated 1,000 won to Wangjang Public Normal School. He gave an enclosure of money to each of the four miners who died in the mine. Lee left the Wangjang station at 2:00 p.m. on the same day. More than 1,000 people - miners, their families, and villagers, who were filled with thanksgiving and joy, came to the train station to show their appreciation for him. To the reporter who visited him in Chonjinlu Inn and asked his impression, Lee Jong-man said,


“How did I earn money? Did they not share their blood and sweat with me to make that happen? Therefore, giving them money is simply my obligation. I would like to thank you for everything that has brought me to this end. I will continue to work for society with all my might. (Lee Jong-man's re-enactment, "Joseon Daily News" dated May 16, 1937)


After selling Yeongpyeong gold mining at 1.55 million won, Lee Jong-man returned 800,000 won to society including money for the Daedong Rural Company. He thought that it was nothing but an obligation to return half of the proceeds to society. Furthermore, Lee Jong-man promised that his family would get 10,000 won to 20,000 won, and that the rest of his property would be returned to society before he died.





Tragedy of Daedong Konzern


In 1935, the (Japanese) governor-general required that a Christian school, formerly exempt from such things, set up a special trip for students to visit a [(a Japanese) pagan] shrine.. Missionaries of the Presbyterian Church in the United States who were operating the Soongsil Junior High School in Pyongyang strongly rejected saying that they could not attend the [pagan] shrine even if it meant that the school would be forced to close.


Due to the issue of visiting the shrine, the (Japanese) governor-general and Soongsil Technical College faced off with each other. In 1937, Soongsil Technical College decided not to recruit new students. When the only private school in Pyongyang decided to close its doors, teachers, students, and alumni associations could not stand by and watch that happen. The school had a forty-year history in Joseon where schools were scarce, so they gathered to fight for the continuance of the school. The survival of Soongsil Junior College has become a matter of concern to the all Koreans beyond the Pyongyang citizens. They tried to prevent closing down of the school somehow, but the problem was the acquisition cost of 1 million won (currently worth 100 billion won).


In May 1937, Lee Jong-man had declared that he would establish the Daedong Rural Company and surprised the world. In September, Lee Jong-man once more surprised the world because he was willing to charge a rent of 30% on his privately-owned land. He then announced that he would acquire Pyongyang Soongsil Technical College, which was forced into crisis, for 1.2 million won, and once again impressed the world.


As a result of the refusal by the Presbyterian Church in the United States to transfer the school to Lee Jong-man, Soongsil Technical College was finally closed down. Instead, Lee Jong Man established the Daedong Technical College in Pyongyang, which concentrates on the education of science and engineering professionals. When Lee Jong-man announced his plan to establish Daedong Technical School, the alumni and teachers of Soongsil College who were forced into a crisis by having to close down their school sent him a thank you telegram and even sent a delegation all the way to Kyungsung [Seoul) to thank him.


Daedong Technical College was officially opened in June 1938, shortly after the Soongsil Technical College was closed. At the opening ceremony held at the Pyongyang Basilica, Lee Jong-man expressed his desire to raise Daedong Technical College with 80 students to become a world-class science and engineering university. And when it was difficult to equip the school with 1.2 million won (current ), Lee added an additional 300,000 won (current )out of his own pocket.


With the opening of Daedong Technical College, Daedong Konzern led by Lee Jong-man increased to five subsidiaries: Daedong Mining Company, Daedong Mine Cooperative, Daedong Rural Company and Daedong Publishing Co., besides Daedong Technical College. Daedong Mining Co., Ltd., which was the largest mining company run by a Joseon (Korean) man, grew riding on the (Japanese) governor's promotion policy of gold production at that time. Daedong Mining Co., Ltd. had more than 1,000 mines in the country including Jangjin Gold Mine, Hamhung Mine and Jiseong Mine. Jangjin gold mine alone produced two million won (current ) worth of gold in a year. The number of employees, which was 650 at the time of launch, doubled in three years.


Daedong Rural Company, which was established for the construction of rural areas, also progressed according to the plan. Starting from Youngheung Rural Village in South Hamgyong Province, four collective farms were built nationwide from Munsan Rural Village in Gyeonggi Province, Pyongwon Rural Village in Pyeongan Province to Hadong Rural Village in Gyeongsangnamdo Province. The farmland owned by the company reached 2.2 million pyeong (4,519 square miles).


Daedong Publishing magazine published two monthly magazines, "Mining Joseon" and "Agriculture Joseon", and published various books on mining and science. Based on the profits from Daedong Mining Co., Ltd., Lee Jong-man actualized the dreams that he had when he started his business at the age of twenty, including the cultivation of self-managed farmers, the dissemination of a new culture, and the training of science and technology experts.


Workers live well together. With this simple management philosophy, Lee maximized the productivity of the business and showed that he was a selfless executive by distributing the additional profits to the workers. But the beautiful experiment of Lee Jong-man did not last long. Of the five businesses in Daedong Konzern, Daedong Mining Co., Ltd. was the only company that generated profit. The profits earned by Daedong Mining Co., Ltd. were poured into the rest of the business year after year, and the foundation of the Daedong Business Group became poorer as the year went on.


After the Pacific War broke out in 1941, Daedong Mining Co. abruptly crumbled, as the production of gold was abolished. The debt of Daedong Mining Co., Ltd., which was 5 million won in 1940, increased to 8 million won in 1942. Daedong technical college had spent a great deal of money for construction and had taken out high interest loans for this purpose. In the meantime, Lee Jong Man, who was caught up in huge debt, was invited (by the Japanese) to a rally to promote the legitimacy of the Pacific War, and became a participant in the Hwang Minhwa Movement [a systematic approach to assimilate Koreans into Japanese culture]. In the midst of the debt and changes brought by the war, it was not possible to revive Daedong Konzern businesses.. Huh Heon and Lee Jun-ryul, who also assisted in the operation of the Daedong businesses, left one after the other.


In 1943, toward the end of the Pacific War, the Daedong businesses collapsed. Daedong Publishing House was sold in order to assist with the operational expenses for Daedong Technical College, and Daedong Mining Co., which in turn went into bankruptcy, and had to be dismantled.. Daedong Rural Company was no longer able to fulfill the dream in which farmers would eventually receive ownership of the land they worked on. Daedong Technical College was acquired by the provincial government of Pyongnam Province in 1944 and converted to a public institution named Pyongyang Technical College. Lee Jong-man was sixty years old at the time of his twenty-ninth failure.


Until they closed the doors five years later, Daedong Technical College had 332 graduates . By comparison, the number of Korean graduates of Kyungsung High School, in 29 years, was only 421. After changing the sign to Pyongyang Technical College, it later grew into Pyongyang Institute of Technology. After the liberation it became Kim Il Sung University College of Engineering and became Kimchek Technical University. (Upon a direct inquiry during my 2017 visit, the North Korean authorities denied a direct relationship between Daedong Technical College and Kim Il sung University/Kimchek Technical University.)





A capitalist who went North


After the liberation, Lee Jong-man started his 30th business with Samcheok coal mining company (currently in South Korea). He actively participated in political activities and served as chairman of the Joseon Industry Construction Council, as a Central Committee member of the Democratic National Front. Lee’s lifelong comrade, Huh Heon went North immediately after the division and was deeply involved in establishing the North Korean government.


In June 1949, the year following the division, Lee Jong-man attended, as a chairman of the Joseon (Korea) Industry Construction Association, the formation of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland in Pyongyang. Kim Il Sung looked around the representatives in the head table and asked for Lee Jong-man and then shouted down the hall to find Lee Jong-man among the participants from South Korea. At the nudge of the people sitting around him, Lee Jong-man stood up doubting his ears and walked up to the head table. Kim Il-sung grabbed Lee 's two hands and said,


It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lee Jong-man, a man high in public esteem in South Joseon (Korean) business world. You came a long and hard way crossing over the 38th line at your age. I am very pleased that you have come to Pyongyang as a representative of the Industry Construction Council of South Joseon and participated in the National Unification Democracy Frontline. It is a great patriotic opportunity for you to defeat all the obstacles of the U.S. and Rhee puppet bases and to participate in the National Unification Democracy Frontline Conference.


I am meeting you for the first time today, but I heard a lot about you through Mr. Huh Heon. You were an entrepreneur with a lot of wealth, but you kept a clear distance with the Japanese imperialists and kept national conscience and patriotism. You tried to protect the underground resources of our country without being troubled by the Japanese imperialism and intimidation. You have invested a lot of money to contribute to the future education and enlightenment projects. After the liberation you fought well for the reunification of the country against South Korea 's policy of securing colonization of the U.S., and against the anti-patriotic activities of the Rhee' s puppet government.


Today, in the northern part of the Republic, many patriotic entrepreneurs are actively engaged in our constitutional struggle and struggle for the development of the national industry and the complete independence of the country.


We hope that you will participate actively in the formation of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Democracy in your country and hope that you will take charge of the responsibilities in the democratic front of the country. I believe that you can contribute to the business of reviving and developing the national economy. After the liberation, you tried to establish a plan to repair industrial facilities destroyed by the Japanese imperialism in South Korea and to build a national industry, but you received only persecution and oppression by the US and Rhee puppets. The South Korean society has fallen into the colony of the imperialists, and it therefore cannot develop the national industry.


You have deep knowledge of underground resources in Korea and experience with operating mines, so you can contribute to the development of our nation’s industry. You will have to work hard to find new veins and develop mines. (On June 25, 1949, quoted from "The Complete Works of Kim Il Sung", Volume 9)


Lee Jong Man was elected as a member of the Central Committee of the National Unification Democracy Front and a member of the executive committee and settled in North Korea without returning to South Korea where family members were waiting. He served twice as a delegate to the Supreme People's Assembly, as chairman of the Central Committee of the National Unification Democracy Front, and as minister of mining. He passed away in January 1977. Lee Jong-man's burial was carried out as a social leader. Lee Jong-man is the only capitalist who is buried in the North Korean Patriots Cemetery.





A beautiful failure


Considering the abject economic reality of North Korea, Lee Jong-man's 32nd project, North Korea's resource development project, also seems to have failed. Living 93 years in this world, Lee Jong-man has never succeeded in business once. However, the failure of Lee Jong-man was beautiful and sublime every time. He fell 28 times and ran 29 times, trying to return the land to the tenant, the mine to the miner, and a good life to the working class people.


Lee Jong-man was not following money to enjoy wealth, but persistently pursued it to give it to the working people. Because money was nothing but a tool to realize the ideals, Lee Jong-man, a capitalist, voluntarily went to North Korea, which was a nation of laborers. If he had given up his dream of building an ideal society early on, Lee Jong - man 's failure may have stopped at the 29th.


It is rare that the mind is the same before and after one accumulates wealth. A man usually forgets once he becomes wealthy, forgets the dream that he had in his poor days. But Lee Jong-man was always the same before and after being wealthy. That is why the failure of Lee Jong-man seems to be so beautiful.























Chapter Four





Reunion in Pyongyang 1975





Grandfather is alive in Pyongyang


As soon as we moved to Canada in 1968, Mother submitted a request to the Canadian Red Cross to discover through their North Korean contacts whether her father was still alive.


She was in a great hurry as her aging mother desperately longed to know of if he was alive or not. One year later, the Red Cross notified sent a letter saying that they never received an answer from North Korea. Despite this Mother kept paying attention to any news she could get about North Korea. It was something she could not give up on.


One day in 1973 we started getting an unsolicited newspaper called "Tongil Shinbo (Unification Newspaper)" which was delivered to our house occasionally. We could not tell where it was coming from or where it was published. Soon the Korean consulate in Ottawa warned the Korean community not to read Tongil Shinbo, but mother went through every page each time the newspaper was delivered.





Mother wrote in her autobiography:
November 15, 1974. The mysterious newspaper arrived again, and I saw a special article covering most of the second and the third pages. The title of the article was, “A New Life in the Bosom of the Great Leader”. Soon my gaze moved to the picture of a family surrounding an elderly man. I quickly scanned through the article and spotted my father's name, Lee Jong-an. My heart stopped beating and I felt like fainting. Although that was my father’s name, it could also be someone else with the same name.


My breathing was rough and my heart was just about to burst. At that moment I caught the word "Daedong Mining Co. Ltd." Tears streamed down my face and I exploded with surprise, joy and gratitude. After calming myself down, I read the article to the end. It explained how my father ended up in North Korea and what his life was like there. He left us twenty-six years earlier when, in 1948, he had come to our house, stood in the front yard and told us “I am going on a long trip.” Then he was gone. My mother, who had no way of knowing about father's whereabouts, decided that the day he left our house was the day of he died. Every year on that day thereafter she commemorated his death with a simple ritual. She did not explain why she was doing that, but I guessed she wanted to put an end to her misery…


It felt like the heavens were moved by the longing of my mother’s heart from the other side of the world. It was overwhelming to get so much information about my father all at once after all those years I had been waiting… It took a long time to recover my senses as I wondered whether it was a dream. It was by far the most profound moment of my life.





What was in the newspaper article


Mother said, although the article had Lee Jong-man as the author and it was written in an autobiographical narrative, it was not her father’s writing style. Below are some of the key points of the article, in the original autobiographical style.


The first time I met General Kim Il-sung was in Pyongyang on June 25, 1949, at the National Unification Democracy Front meeting. This was a nationwide (north-south) unification front organization… Immediately after Korea was liberated from Japan, some of my colleagues in Seoul, including Huh Huhn, asked me to join them on their trip to north, but I could not join them. Again I was invited to attend the 1948 inter-Korean summit, but again I could not go. When I finally started my journey (some time in 1948, date unspecified) to the north, I was detained by the police in Gaeseong. But I arrived in time for the June the 25th 1949 convention that started at three o’clock… Someone sitting next to me grabbed my arm and shook it saying that the general is calling me. Then I heard the general’s voice saying “If Lee Jong Man is here, please come up to the stage and join us at the head table.” The next day, the code and declaration of the Democracy Front for the Unification of the Country was adopted and members for the Central Committee and the Executive Committee were elected. We had the honor of serving the nation by electing the Great Leader General Kim Il Sung as the head of the central executive committee. On this day, I was elected as one of the central committee members... On August 15, our country was liberated from Japan. A long night passed and the dawn was breaking, but the sky of the South had dark clouds covering the previously bright rays of the sun. Turbid waters swept over the chaotic land. As our nation passed through many difficult trials, I felt increasing frustration that turned our joy of liberation into a curse and wrath for the reality of humility. I had high hopes of improving commerce and industry since the country was liberated. I had hoped to re-open the publishing business and develop media. I was planning to promote the education enterprises and to grow sturdy pillars to build the nation ... However, my dreams and ideals disappeared like a mirage. I wandered for a long time in agony and despair. Right around this time, General Kim Il Sung extended his hand of salvation… When the war broke out, I went abroad and returned again in 1954. How could I express the grief of my aching heart at the horrible sight of the torn land of our nation that was completely destroyed?... I had done nothing in underground resources development to repay the great trust of the Great Leader. I also had done nothing toward the fulfillment of my duties for the deputies of the Supreme People's Assembly or as managing director of the national unification democratic front. I do not know how many times I thought about myself eating and doing nothing… My youngest son who was left in Seoul joined the militia of the last national liberation war, but after a long solo journey we were finally reunited in Pyongyang, and now I have the joy of being with my grandchildren.”


Mother was determined to go see her father


Mother read this newspaper article numerous times. She learned a lot about what happened to her father, but she had many questions. “How truthful is the content of this article?” “What was his life really like during the twenty-six years that were not contained in this writing? “, “Was it worth leaving his first family and relatives behind?” “What should I do with my life, with his spirit in my soul?”


She decided that she had to go see her father no matter what. “Wasn’t that the reason the heavens opened and brought this opportunity for me?” she pondered. She wanted to hold her father’s hands and cry and tell him about her mother who missed him so much.
She knew that her fate had never been the fate of an ordinary woman bound by family, and her father always knew that she was destined to live a public life contributing to the well-being of our people and the national community. And now he was no longer young. He could pass at any time. She yearned to rush to see him. From that moment on her attention was consumed with finding a way to go to Pyongyang.





The road to Pyongyang


Around this time, the Great Spirit intercepted once again and stirred things up, playing a magic card. It was too mysterious to just call it a simple “co-incidence.”


One day early December, in 1974, my husband and I went to a Chinese restaurant in Toronto Korea town, a walking distance from mother’s house. Seeing us sit down, the owner walked over to our table and asked if we were Koreans. I said ‘yes.’ And then she turned to my husband and asked if he was a surgeon. He said “yes, but how did you guess?” As if she expected that question, she said, “I was a nurse before, so I can recognize a surgeon from a distance.” And then she said, “My name is Mr. Jang. I am going to Pyongyang next month.” I could not believe my ears. I jumped at the news and told her about my mother who have been searching for her father and we recently found out that he is still alive in Pyongyang. I urgently asked her, “Can you help us to get in touch with my grandfather?” Mrs. Jang said, “Sure, I’ll help.” I ran home to give this incredible news to mother.


Mother met with Mrs. Jang and told her about her father in Pyongyang whom we recently found out about and her wish to contact him. And she told mother that she was organizing a Canadian trade delegation to take to Pyongyang via Beijing, and this time she is going alone on a preliminary trip to set things up.


Mother wrote in her autobiography:


Mrs. Jang reminded me of a soldier who saved us during the Korean war when we were trying to escape Seoul during the bombing. This man was like an angel from heaven. He was a soldier minding a military cargo train, which was the only train going out of Seoul toward the south. Without him I don’t know how we would have survived the war. At times like that and this time again, I see my destiny in heaven. I know that I am guided.


Mother gave Mrs. Jang her letter along with photos of our family to take along on her to Pyongyang. Mrs. Jang left with mother’s letter that only had my father’s name on the envelope, and no address, since we had no knowledge of his address. But mother had a confidence that the letter would reach him and patiently waited for her return. Finally, Mrs. Jang returned to Toronto with a reply from Grandfather. She said, she had dropped the letter off with the hotel receptionist and was able to pick up Grandfather’s letter in time for her departure.


Mother opened the envelope. It was not his hand-writing, but she was thankful that a channel had opened for direct communication with her father. The letter simply stated that he had received mother’s letter and hoped she was doing well. The reality of the letter made things less surreal, yet all the while mother wondered why father did not write it himself. Mother wrote another letter and this time asked him to send his hand-written reply.


Mrs. Jang said she would be willing to meet him in person if possible during her next preparatory trip. Mother was immensely thankful. This time Mrs. Jang returned with Grandfather's handwritten letter. It was early 1975. Things were moving lightning-fast. This time Mother could see that it was her father’s handwriting. He said that when he received Mother’s first letter, he had just undergone cataract surgery on both eyes, so he had to rely on Hyong-woo, Mother’s half-brother, to read and write for him. Mother read and re-read her father's letter. She then asked Mrs. Jang to help arrange a Pyongyang trip for her, as soon as possible. Mrs. Jang said she will try her best.


Mother’s health condition concerned me. She was only fifty-three years old but she suffered from an extreme menopausal disorder. During her years of living as an immigrant, she worked long hours in a variety of jobs to support the family. Her doctor gave her a prescription drug, but her body rejected it. She went to see a Chinese doctor and got herbal medicine but it made her condition even worse. Nevertheless, nothing stopped her determination to go see her father.
She sent a letter to the Canadian Foreign Ministry and the Korean Embassy in Ottawa notifying them of her visit to North Korea. The Canadian Foreign Ministry sent her a short reply saying that they received her letter. The Korean Embassy, on the other hand, sent a man to meet with her, in person, who attempted to persuade her not go to Pyongyang. At that time the South Korean government under President Park Chung-hee was fiercely enforcing an anti-communist policy. (In 2018, under President Moon Jae-in, who has an open arm policy, South Korea still has a long way to go to change its relationship with North Korea.)





Visit South Korea First


After all of the twists and turns, mother’s travel plans came together and she was to go with the Canadian Trade Delegation as an interpreter, departing for Beijing on September 23, 1975. Mrs. Jang had arranged this for mother. After all these years I am deeply indebted to her, yet never had the chance to show her my gratitude.


At that time, mother was going to leave without notifying anyone other than the immediate family so as to avoid any controversy about her trip because many Koreans in Toronto had strong antagonistic views about North Korea. Just as it is today, many people viewed North Korea as a highly dangerous place to go and warned her that the South Korean government might cause her trouble for going there. Even my father, who usually keeps his feelings and opinions on most issues to himself, objected to mother’s Pyongyang trip, as he was anxious about her going to that unknown territory. Our four siblings kept a neutral position because we knew what this trip meant to mother.


With much contemplation, mother decided to visit South Korea before going to North Korea. If she went to Pyongyang first, then she could get into trouble when she enters South Korea later. Mother also wanted to gather recent news about her relatives so that she could share it with her father. She had not seen them for eleven years since we left South Korea in 1964. She also realized how precious this opportunity would be to visit South and North Korea one after another in order to more deeply reflect on the issues of inter-Korean relations.


In April of 1975, she landed in Kimpo Airport near Seoul, South Korea. She wrote the following in her Korean autobiography.


I felt intensely nostalgic as my foot touched the ground with tears filling my eyes. I had left my homeland a decade previously and now I was back in its bosom. The first task was to visit my mother’s grave in her hometown, Ilsan, north of Seoul. I prayed wept in front of my mother’s grave. She missed my father so much and died never seeing him again. When I met my sisters and nieces and talked about my plans to go to Pyongyang, every one of them was against it. They primarily worried about the adverse effect it may have on them. In particular, my older sister, Namsun, who has a son-in-law in the military, was strongly against my going to the enemy country and tried to stop me from going, but it was too important for me to go meet our father. It was not something I would argue with her about. Conflicts related to the division of our nation were happening within our family right before my eyes. As I was leaving Seoul to return to Toronto, my heart was heavily burdened by the responsibility of this complicated but necessary groundwork to break through the barriers that divided us from one another. What could I do to solve this problem that weighing me down?





Finally, to Pyongyang


In June 19, 1975, as mother was preparing to go to Pyongyang, I delivered my first child, a baby girl. We named her ‘Una.” (Una is now forty-three years old and mother of two children.) To Grandfather, she was a great-grandchild. Now four generations of our family were living in one era. It was a good sign to have this child born just before mother journeyed to see her 91 years old father. What would the future for this child hold? What would the existence of the great-grandfather in North Korea mean to her? Mother prayed that she would one day see a peaceful reunification of North and South Korea.


Mother wrote:


Finally, on September 23, 1975, twelve members of the Canadian trade delegation traveled from Toronto to San Francisco, to Beijing, and on to Pyongyang. I was one among them. At the Beijing airport, we were greeted by three employees of the North Korean Embassy Trade Department and three interpreters. We stayed three nights and four days in Beijing and toured Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall and the Royal Tombs. We also visited the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. The embassy staff urged us to give up visiting Pyongyang because they could not assure us of our safety. But our schedule went according to plan. Our group finally left the Beijing Airport and we arrived at Pyongyang Suncheon Airfield. The flight took only an hour and a half. I could not see the Yalu River from the airplane because of cloud cover. At the time, Pyongyang had a population of 850,000. 1.5 million including the outskirts.


There were several cars and guides waiting for us. A guide rode with us in each car. I rode alone in one car with a guide, traveling in front of the delegation. I asked my guide where we were going and he said we are going to the hotel. As our cars passed, children greeted us with waving hands. The dresses of the people in the Pyongyang street were different from what I saw in Beijing. They appeared cleaner and nicer.
I was given a single room at the Botonggang Hotel where we were dropped off. It was clean and big and had a single bed and bathroom and a separate lounge area. The guide said everything in the hotel from the elevator was made by their own hands. The elevator was good, although a bit coarse by Canadian standards. This hotel is designed for overseas guests. Most of the hotel attendants were young women in their twenties, all beautiful with a countenance of purity that I took note of.



Mother reunified with grandfather after 27 years


The first day passed quietly, giving the chance to get adjusted to the new environment. The next morning, my guide came and said that he would take me to visit my father that afternoon. He sat with me and told me about my father’s current life, He was living in an official residence that was built when Pyongyang was being restored and had a caretaker. In the morning I had to go out with our delegation to see Pyongyang downtown but I was impatient and anxious. When the lunch hour approached, the guide took me to my father's house. He was living in a single-story building similar to an official residence Japanese people used during the Japanese occupation. My heart went into a whirlwind of excitement. There he was in that house!
As I stepped into the front yard, he was standing outside the door waiting to greet me. He was no longer the energetic man that I remembered; he had turned into an old man with thick glasses. This was indeed a reunion of father and daughter after 27 years of separation. It was the moment when the years we were separated passed like a revolving lantern, like a kaleidoscopic change. I looked at him, he looked at me, and there was a moment of silence between the two of us. Time seemed to stop and it felt like my soul left my body. Father first broke the stillness, "How come your hair turned so white?" As he uttered those words, I ran and grabbed his hands and burst into tears. My father also cried. I could not speak for a long time. My excitement had reached breaking point. Without a word, I knelt down and bowed at him, the Korean way, with full traditional formality.


As I went inside the house, my father introduced a woman. She was the one who had been taking care of my father all these years. She was South Korean, born in Daegu, and she was two years younger than me. They had a nineteen year old daughter who was currently serving in the army. Then he introduced a young man to me, saying that he was his son. He was a war orphan adopted into the family. Four of us sat around the table with good food. Emotionally wrapped up, I was unable to eat much. Father asked why I ate so little, but all he ate was a medium bowl of rice. We feasted on our stories, and on one another’s presence.





Three nights and Four days in a room with my father


On the fourth day I visited my father once again. On the seventh day, everyone left, except the delegation leader and me. On the eighth day my guide told me that I would be moving to another place and spend a few days there with my father. The place was called the Royal Inn but it was not so big and the building was older. The room had two single beds and a bathroom. The guide asked me if I wanted to use a room alone or share it with my father. I could not answer promptly. I wanted to stay in the same room so that my father and I could talk indefinitely, but I hesitated and then said I would use a separate room. I left my luggage in the room and followed the guide to the room where my father was staying.
There my father was waiting for me. This was the third time I was seeing him. He asked me where I left my baggage, and then he asked why we needed to use two rooms. So he wanted to share the room with me. I was so happy my heart jumped.


We were allowed to be together for three nights and four days. This was truly a divine arrangement. I could have this time just with my father without anyone else present! How mysterious! And we did. We spent every minute of this time talking with each other. We ate in that room and did not take a step out so that we could catch up with what had happened during the past twenty-seven years. We were reluctant even to go to sleep past midnight. I was worried about his health but he wanted to talk as much as I did. We were both mobilizing our super powers. My father seemed to have felt this was our last meeting. He tried to do his utmost to give as much as possible to me, his comrade of Daedong spirit, this most valuable gift. It seemed like he was trying to pour his mind and soul into me in order to make me into his other self. He had tears when I told him about my mother, his wife that he had left behind. She loved him and resented his absence.


My father’s life’s goal had been to help reduce the pain and suffering of the Korean people during the Japanese colonial period and after the division. But now he was old and powerless. I was destined to inherit my father’s calling that he was unable to accomplish. His unfinished business, the ultimate meaning of our reunion, was for me to take the baton from his hand. Forty years ago when I was a teenager, I had the taste of Daedong spirit that my father implanted in me through his daily table talk. During this reunion I experienced his intense spiritual energy soaking my soul once again. I rose from those few days and from those talks like a phoenix.


As I listened to my father's words again at this time. My spirit was elevated and my heart leaped. For our people to overcome the pain of the division and reunite and lead the world peace, we should have a Peaceful Reunification of the South and North through Permanent Neutrality*. Peaceful reunification via permanent neutrality is the way to permanently transcend the battle grounds of all ideological differences. This is the way of grand unification, by taking the golden middle way to establish a national homogeneity, not being swayed by clever selfish political interests. As my father had earlier written in the preface of his Daedong Illam, the world of Daedong Peace can unfold if we touch our hearts of Self, that goes beyond all of the differences and discernments of small selves. This message was emerging in my mind as a brilliant light.


At last, this was the reason for our meeting, to blend our minds, spirits, and souls once again after twenty-seven years of separation. This was the purpose heaven had for leading back to each other, for making the impossible possible. The goal of my life had become crystal clear now. Since that day, the focus of my attention has been all about upholding this goal. So today, thirty-five years after our reunion, I continue my daily prayers for the ‘Peaceful Re-unification of North and South Korea through Permanent Neutrality’.*


In the morning of the final day of our visit, my father said he would like to take a bath, and he asked me to scrub his back. As he could not hold onto his daughter who has to return to a faraway country, he tried to soothe the feeling of sadness this way. As I rolled up my sleeves and scrubbed his back, tears kept rolling down my face. My father, sitting on a little stool facing the wall, was silently sobbing, his back ever gently shuddering. On my way back to Canada, as I looked out the airplane window, I whispered, “Father, now that your will has become my will, please cast aside all your worries. I will carry on with your mission.


[*Footnote: Historically, the Korean Peninsula experienced about 940 times of foreign aggressions from its neighboring countries such as China, Japan and Russia including the United States because its national strength was weak compared to their armed forces. The conventional definition of permanent neutrality reads that a permanent neutral state is where the political independence and territorial integrity are guaranteed by the great powers. A peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula means that it is accomplished neither by the collapse of North Korea's regime, nor by war between South and North Korea. Therefore, the Korean Peninsula should be united through the means of permanent neutrality. The permanent neutrality for the Korean peninsula was first proclaimed by Emperor Kojong of Joseon on February 20, 1904. When a small country that is broken up by super powers is reunified via permanent neutrality it can ensure peace for all surrounding countries as well as for the divided nation itself. A good example of a neutralized state is Switzerland, which has been enjoying its current state of neutralization for 203 years(since 1815). The United States government considered neutralizing South Korea on several occasions since 1953. China and Russia are in favor of the permanent neutrality reunification of the Korean peninsula.]





Grandfather’s passing





When Mother came back to Toronto after her reunion with Grandfather, Mother exchanged a few letters with him.





From grandfather to mother July 2, 1976:


Dear Nam-soon! I received your letter dated April 26th. I am so relieved to know that your health improved since your visit to our homeland. Namsoon, the country that gave birth to you and raised you is such an important thing. The wise and brilliant Joseon people fought against the Japanese imperialists and the US and protected their country with their blood. I am very happy to hear that all your family members are doing well. (The letter was from my father but it was my half-brother’s handwriting.) It is because we have our home country that we can exchange our correspondence like this while you are living abroad. I lived more than 92 years without a major illness and am waiting for the day of reunification of our country, and I owe this blessing to the great leader Kim Il-sung. I cannot express how happy I am to hear that you are contributing to the unification of our country upon your return to Canada.


Nam-soon, I want to see you one more time. I also want to see your children. How sad that you are living on the opposite side of the world and we cannot live nearby in our own homeland. That’s why we should continue to fight for the independence and peaceful reunification of our nation. This is a heavenly mandate for our people.


Nam-soon, I cannot close my eyes before seeing the reunification of our country. Please do not forsake your national conscience. You must live and work and fight until our nation is reunited; only then you will feel proud and genuinely happy.


Please give warm welcome to the DPR Korea athletes who will be coming to play at the Olympic Games there on July 15th (1976). And please help them. Please reply immediately when you receive this letter. Fight well until the day of reunification. And be healthy.





Mother wanted to run to her father right away when she read this letter, but heaven did not allow her to see him again. One meeting was all that was allowed. One day on the Canadian edition of the Hankook Ilbo, mother spotted a news article about my father's death in a box called “Short news about North Korea”: Lee Jong-man died in January 17, 1997.


Mother hurriedly sent a letter to her half-brother and prepared for another trip to Pyongyang. The confirmation reply from him came soon, but it took a long time to get her papers ready and it wasn’t until three months later when she was finally able to get there. It has been eighteen months since she last visited Pyongyang. This time her visit was filled with sadness. She wrote thus:


My father's cemetery was on a secluded mountain near Pyongyang. I stood there and sobbed. A panoramic scenery of my father‘s life replayed on the screen of my mind. Before the country was divided, he dedicated his life as a social thinker and philanthropic businessman to help improve the poor and powerless compatriots during the Japanese Colonial period. After the division, he dedicated his life to achieve the reunification of the nation. He was an unyielding visionary and a dreamer.


My brother showed me a photo taken at the funeral and his grave covered with thick white snow. In front of his grave there was a wreath with a long black ribbon hanging down. One side said “Kim Il-sung,” the other side said “In memory of the comrade Lee Jong-man. What kind of relationship did he have with Kim Il-sung who was 27 years younger than himself? They first met in June 25, 1949, and the next day Father was elected to the position a member of the central executive committee and a member of the standing committee in the National Democratic Front for Reunification. What did Father really do in North Korea? And how did he manage himself with his vision of Daedong?





Mother’s mission handed down to me


Mother passed away without getting satisfactory answers to these questions that haunted her. I inherited the questions together with her mission* that she had inherited from her father.


[*Footnote: The mission was help bring peace in the Korean peninsula, and more specifically to bring Peaceful Reunification of South and North Korea through Neutrality. I started a systematic study on the topic of neutralization of Korea, by joining Center for Korean Peninsula Neutralization, based in Seoul, headed by Dr. Jong-il Kang.]





I returned to Pyongyang in June 2017, with my brother, Sejin, in search of the North Korean material to write a critical biography of Lee Jong-man. I had gathered a lot of material in South Korea about his life and work before he went to the north (in 1948, at the age of 63), but we knew very little about his life since then. Initially, collecting information from North Korea was unthinkable, although he lived and held prominent positions there for twenty-nine years. On the third day of our stay in Pyongyang, our request, three men came to meet with us at Pyongyang Hotel. They were from the same bureau where our grandfather was a chairman in the early 1950s. But what they told us was nothing more than the little we already knew. No records were available other than what was in the little booklet my uncle authored, Joseon Encyclopedia, and what is in Volume 9 of the Complete Work of Kim Il-sung. North Korea apparently did not keep biographical accounts of its citizens. But we did get something. What we got was a valuable impression of the ordinary Pyongyang citizens regarding our grandfather. We asked numerous people in many different places if they knew who Lee Jong-man was, and most of the people above age forty knew who he was. They knew him as a great man, who helped in the construction of the nation and who was now buried in the Patriots Cemetery. They said they learned about him at school. So what I brought back with me from Pyongyang was my renewed conviction that Lee Jong-man was a man worth bringing out onto the global stage.


This Pyongyang trip was meaningful to me for another reason, namely that it was a team effort of our four siblings, which means they share what our mother stood for and what her and her father’s mission was. In the following, you can read their account of our mother, which can attest to the level of their appreciation of Mother Ilsun.*





[*Footnote: The three of us called our mother Ilsun-nim. Sejin continued addressing her as “mother.”}






































Chapter Five





Mother by Okkyung





Prayer with 100 bows


Mother prayed with 100 bows for reunification of Korea and world peace as well as for the wellbeing of her children and grandchildren. She did her prayer kneeling down and standing up one hundred times in the form of traditional Korean bowing – a form of respect to the other. Making this movement one hundred times every day was an intensive exercise. Her wisdom lied in combining prayer and exercising the body. Furthermore, her prayers were extended to the world, going beyond a small prayer for her own family. If our prayers and well wishes were limited to our own people, how could we expect a safe and peaceful world for us to live in? Many people, even religious institutions and political leaders do not seem to address this simple fact. I believe that this ignorance has been the causes of conflict and war throughout history. All religious teachings tell us that we should love others as we do ourselves. How many of us practice that teaching in our daily life?





Which religion, which god?


You might ask to which god mother prayed. I think mother tried all possible gods in all religions. She used to go to Catholic Church, Buddhist temple, Dahn center and others. After having tried to understand different religions, mother’s prayer took the form of directing herself to be in alignment with the universe, the energy in the universe and nature. Prayer is effective when the praying person is focused with a clear mind to enter into the realm of the universal energy, in communion with the energy field. The first and essential “sine-qua-non” condition to be in alignment with the universe is to clear one’s mind from fear, hatred, greed, as all books of wisdom have told us. This is the teaching of religion as understood by my mother. There are many contemporary authors in religion and philosophy who have written about this perspective (e.g. “Holiness" by Donald Nicholl; “An Existentialist Philosophy” by J. Macquarrie, “The Power of Now” by E. Tolle). We know that indigenous people of all continents hold an equal spiritual vision of the world. Spinoza (around 1650) was one of the earlier western philosophers who developed this perspective and was excommunicated by the Catholic Church at that time for the position he took. I do not think mother has read any of these books; however, she reached the same conclusion as these philosophers, as the result of her search for the right way for a better world. Not only did she find the way, but she also put it into practice, which is not a simple matter. This is very commendable in her difficult circumstances as an immigrant, having to work as a laborer, without language facility to read and listen to the mainstream media and books. Yet she kept on reading in the language that she could (Korean and Japanese) under whatever circumstances.


This is an illustration of her wisdom, tenacity, and commitment to fulfill her responsibility as a fellow human being for a better world. Donald Nicholl (cited above) has the following to say on the responsibility of each human being: “...in all our actions there is both personal and representative. ...Each one of us, whether we like it or not, is a teacher in all our actions, each one of which is implicitly proposing itself as a norm for the whole of mankind.” Mother lived this basic truth every day. Her life is an example of what Nicholl calls “daily life as a spiritual exercise” and “there is no unbridgeable gulf between the Holy one and anyone, in fact, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves”. Mother had the wisdom of understanding that she is the Holy one. This “may seem an arrogant statement, but a sober formulation of basic truth” (p.79).





Mother’s influence


As I am reflecting on mother’s influence on my life, four areas come to my mind. They are my preoccupation with social justice, my notion on family and practice, my choice of the doctoral thesis topic, and finally the decision on my career choice and life directions. This is to say that my whole life has been shaped by mother’s influence, some following her path, others in reaction against her. This is surprising, as I think of it, since I left home early (at the age of 25) and my adult life has been formed without close communication with mother nor with my brothers and sister. I used to tell my friends that all my life decisions have been made absolutely by myself, and this statement seems to contradict what I just said above.





Social position of women – My thesis topic


Mother always worked (for a paid job) throughout her life. In that sense, she is a “modern” woman for the period when she was born (1920s). She had a university degree from Japan and she became a high school teacher in Korea. Then she worked as a manager in her husband’s factory. When we left Korea, she worked as a seamstress in Brazil, and as a dishwasher in a hospital when we first arrived in Canada. It was a very difficult time for all of us both in Brazil and in Canada. I believe our family migration was mother’s initiative. She believed it was best for the family and children’s education/future. She did not know what was awaiting out there, for her and the family. We could say it was her courage and innocence. We had to start all over, from scratch, at the bottom of the new society where we arrived. We had to learn the language, had to work to support ourselves. We brought absolutely nothing from Korea other than ourselves. I still remember the ration of small tiny block of butter (which was so good with the Brazilian bread) distributed to each member of the family. Compared to the relatively comfortable life of a middle class family in Korea, the life in Brazil and then Canada was a true descent in social scale. In Brazil (Sao Paulo), we lived in a district of the poor and prostitutes in the center of the city. Who could have imagined that a graduate of the Japan Women’s University would have to work as a dishwasher at her middle age of forties. Migration was a true “rebirth”, erasing the past status and privileges.


Mother did not mind working as a laborer, but I remember her suffering from rheumatism as the result of overburdening her shoulders carrying heavy dish trays. She was exhausted when she came home in the evening and her shoulders were aching terribly. I did not understand why her husband did not ask her to stop working. Of course, I understood we needed money, but seeing mother suffering was more than I could bear. I felt “humiliated” to watch another woman suffering and her husband not doing anything to alleviate her suffering. We all worked at least for the first year, except my youngest brother, but I guess what each of the family member was making was not enough. There were quarrels and tension in the house. I saw the situation as the wife being under control of her husband and the woman could not escape from suffering. I did not understand why mother would not just leave the house and go somewhere else. As I think of it now, where could she have gone?


Thus the social position of women in Indonesia (Sumatra) became the topic of my thesis. I wanted to understand what choice women have when they are in a situation as mother, why women continue to stay in the relationship when the husband does not seem to care about their suffering, how women are socialized to keep the family and why so. Having written the thesis and as I look back now, things are much more complex than what I had imagined. In the West Sumatra where I did my fieldwork, it is women who own land (rice field), although not all women own land. 1\3 of the village population (women) did not own land. Are women freer because they own land, which is a principal economic means in a rural society? Owning land gives women a certain degree of autonomy. Both women and men are bounded by social norms and rules. Men are not freer than women. Nobody is free from the social bond. I realized much later that the only way one can be free is “freeing one from oneself”. I think mother took that road.





Notion of family


After I completed my first year of university, I decided to move out from home to the university residence, since it took me more than two hours to travel back and forth every day. In addition, I found a summer job, which was close to the university, but rather far from home. What I did not say to my parents when I moved out (and could not possibly say to them) was that I wanted to be liberated from tension and conflict in the house and see the outside world. I swore to myself I would never marry and have a family. I was twenty five. Mother told me much later that she cried when I left home. Gradually I came back home less and less.


In the end, I did get married and had two children. Throughout many experimentations and exploration of life, I gradually learned that it is not healthy to live alone, at least for me. I tasted loneliness and experimented how far I could go. I spent two Christmas holidays by myself at the residence. Other than understanding what loneliness is, I did not see the purpose and meaning of it. I came to a conclusion that dealing with conflict living with a partner and family is better and more meaningful than dealing with loneliness. In the latter part of my life, this conclusion became the motto of my life, i.e., “we came to this world to live together” on which I will talk more below.


It is possible that mother felt the same and stayed with her family. I do not think we discussed this point, but I remember mother saying that children were the main factor why she continued her family setup. It is ironical to think that mother’s situation and struggle to keep the family together made her child (me) revolt against the institution of family. I revolted at that time against the tyranny of the (family) institution that forced an individual to adhere to it despite of her suffering. I swore to myself I would never adhere to any institution.





Practice of family


At the time of mother’s youth in Korea, one did not have the luxury of contemplating and deciding if one is going to have a family or not. At my time in Canada, I had options, I weighed them and a decision was taken. In spite of my own decision, it was not easy to carry on the family life with its ups and downs.


In my case, the challenge was compounded with the fact that I was carrying on my doctoral study, which required an extended period of fieldwork (18 months), but learning Indonesian language before going to the field. I will talk later about why I chose to study anthropology. When I returned to Canada after the fieldwork, I had to carry on the analysis of the field data and write the thesis, in parallel to raising two children. The social context of the Quebec Province where I came back from Indonesia was in the middle of a virulent independence movement, called “Quiet Revolution”, of Quebec from the rest of Canada. One of the strategies of the Quebec Independence Movement was the language bill 101, which obliged all the business, schools and individuals to speak French in their social transactions. Everywhere on the wall in street was written “Yankee, go home”. “Yankee refers to “non- Quebec origin and non-English speaking”. This is not a space to describe in detail the social context then. Simply summarizing it “yankee go home” was a slogan to remind those born in Quebec and French speaking, of their origin and identity, and those who do not speak French that they did not belong there. While I understood what they were doing as an anthropologist, my daily life (as a new arrival) was a hell.


The above description of my individual and social turmoil was weighing heavily on my family life and me. I could not take any more the burdens and stress of daily life. I tried several times to leave Quebec and my family. I undertook this separation step by step. First, I found a job in Montreal and moved there (which is a more cosmopolitan city) with my daughter, leaving my husband and son behind, in the City of Quebec. Living alone with my daughter in Montreal was not any easier. It was as stressful as before for different reasons. It seemed my own child became a burden, adding to my stress. Then I suddenly woke up and asked myself: “Will you be really happier if you were all by yourself? Did you come to this world to live by yourself? My answer to these questions was “NO”. I realized one can avoid difficult situations, but avoiding those difficulties does not provide a definite solution. I asked myself: What is it that you are looking for in life?” I did not have an answer for a long time, but I continued my search. I think this systematic search for an answer until one is satisfied is something in our family, immediately coming from mother and before that from her father.





Concern with social justice – my anthropological fieldwork


Since we moved to Canada, Mother often talked about her father who opted to go to North Korea and her adoration of him and his principles, which remained in my memory as “social justice”. Her father, Lee Jong-man made money to educate and share with the less fortunate. Mother also used to talk about a young woman she met in a prison during the Korean War, when she was herself imprisoned. The food distributed to prisoners was not enough and everybody was trying to get some more food or steal other’s. This young woman who claimed to be a communist offered her food to the next person. Mother was very impressed by this person’s gesture.


Mother repeated these stories, but they did not register in my mind when I was young. It was in an Indonesian village where I did my anthropological fieldwork that I discovered the true nature of injustice and my quest for “social justice” began. To an outsider’s eyes, everybody looked equally modest, but with time I could see the distinction and began to witness the discrimination practiced against this specific group of people.


The village where I lived and worked had a population of 1000 (56 lineages – clans). I learned gradually that 30% of the 56 lineages (about 40% in terms of the number of people out of 1000) did not own land and worked as tenants doing sharecropping or wage labor, and they were also classified as ”untouchables”, and therefore not allowed to marry the rest of the village people. Juxtaposed to these workers were the families of “aristocracy” (7% in terms of lineage, but far smaller in terms of the number of people) who enjoyed ascribed privileges – superior social status. These people owned more than 20% of the rice-fields, along with a large space of dry fields, mountains and water sources. This social stratification and accompanying conflict of interest marks the history of this society as much as many other societies. The conflict of interest lies in the desire of the affluent minority to keep their centuries-old privilege (which seems “natural”) and the desire of the other side to break the walls of “injustice”. I learned that the status was coded in genealogies of the village population. Furthermore, it was the first time I became aware of my own social origin and its meaning.


I was shocked, but very sad and disappointed. I asked myself if this was what life was all about. I did not wish to be part of that kind of world I had just discovered for the first time in my life. Then what is the alternative? Since that time, I have become obsessed with “social justice”. I wanted to know what is required to build a just society where people do not step over the other because they have less, do not look down upon those who are weaker. My thesis was a careful analysis of a systematic stratification of the village. Once I clearly identified the pattern, I could see it played out elsewhere.


Without my immigrant experience and fieldwork in Indonesia, it is possible that I could have missed the opportunity to become aware of my social origin – land holding class (although my father, whose grandfather was the second son, did not have any land, since the family land was in the hands of the first son’s house). My cousin I met in Canada showed me several (published) volumes of his father’s genealogy (which is my father’s) that he brought from Korea with him. His genealogy (my father’s genealogy) reminded me of genealogies I saw in Indonesia and the social conflicts around them.


Then I realized that our family’s migration out of Korea, my choice of anthropology, and my anthropological fieldwork in Indonesia, as well as being born as a child of Ilsun, were all part of my destiny. Those were elements of the fabric woven into my life. By the time I finished my study and completed the doctoral thesis I was over forty years old. Then I embarked on a quest to learn about how to live together with others, with the knowledge I gained through my experiences and education. My awakening to the need of social justice led me to question how we could live together peacefully. How can we have social justice? And my questions caused me to join in Mother’s search for peace on earth. Everybody agrees that we need peace, but how do we get there? Her answer was leading “daily life as a spiritual exercise.” This was the way in which mother lived her life and attained her inner peace.


I asked mother once a long time ago if the preoccupation with social justice is genetic in our family, since I saw her preoccupation with justice in many entries of her diary, and I see it in my children, too. I do not remember how she answered my question, but I know we are all working at it in different ways. The bottom line is that one’s daily spiritual exercise should be accompanied by a sharing of the material wealth. One cannot live peacefully with others when one has to build a wall to protect one’s wealth. Our grandfather was an example for us on this path.





We came to this world to live together


As my age advanced, I became more and more convinced that living peacefully together with the family is the first essential step towards the peace of my mind, humanity and the world. This is easier said than done, but I believe it is an absolute truth. One’s approach to human relationship would be radically different depending on which way one takes: avoid conflicts and choose to live alone, or find common ground to live together and allow space for each other. The focus in the first approach is “self” alone, while in the second, it is self and the other(s). This living together ought to start with the family, the primary unit of human being’s collective existence. When one takes the first approach, there is no space for others. On the other hand, when one takes the second approach, one tries to make a space for the other(s) at whatever cost.


When “the other(s)” are friends and somebody one likes, it is simple. But when we are dealing with an individual, a group of people, or a nation which one dislikes, or hates, the task appears to be impossible. When one holds a belief that ”I am right, I have the right to occupy this space”, we often forget that the other side thinks the same. Who will judge who is right? Who has more right? No one can make this judgement, not even god. Therefore, we are obliged to take the second approach of making space and living together with “the other(s)”. My awareness on this point was awakened with my struggle with my family of origin and then my family of creation.





Recognition of “the other”


My obsession for understanding “the other” came very early when we left Korea. With the cultural and language difference, communication with other people was very difficult. How does one communicate that one’s good intention when one does not speak the same language and the pattern of communication is different. To answer these questions, I chose to study anthropology to make sense of immigration experience and “the other”. I never had an opportunity to explain to mother and my brothers and sister why I studied anthropology and how this choice impacted my life. This – understanding and recognizing the other – is a major problem in the current global world. My migration experience leaving Korea at a young age is at the bottom of my search for understanding the other(s) and including them in my map. In result, my world has become much larger and has got a space for “the other(s)”. My anthropological study opened up my eyes to complexities of human life, issues of inequalities and need of social justice. This was my response to mother’s question to us: “Was it the right thing that we migrated out of Korea?”





Meaning of life - actions


To find a meaningful solution, one has to understand what problem one is trying to solve. So what was my problem? Was it finishing my doctoral thesis, my husband and family set up, finding a job? As I think of this period much later, when I had finished my thesis, kept my family together and found a job, none of these was the problem, although they were real problems and pressure on my daily life then. I realized my problem was inside me, not knowing how to deal with myself and relate to the world outside and to give meaning that made sense to me”. To put it in another way, I used to not make sense to myself and to my life. I have done many things in life: learned many languages, studied and obtained a degree, created a family and gave birth to children and raised them, working and earning enough money which allowed a fairly comfortable life. They are all novel actions on their own and many of them gave me joy and happiness. However, what do they add up to? Is a life a collection of actions, is this all there is?


Actions are important part of human life. We think and express in words, and act to materialize those. However, actions – doing things for good reasons- alone did not give me a full satisfaction. At that point of my life, I came to a conclusion that what matters is “how” one does the action that is in alignment with what I say.





Action - Doing it well


Mother told us repeatedly when we were young: “It is not important what kind of work you do, but it is important to do it well. For instance, when you clean a room, you should visit every corner of the room and clean thoroughly every single dust. She said she learned this when she was at university. I drew a lesson from this teaching that doing well what we do every moment of our life with full care and effort whatever one does is a way of attributing meaning to life. I discovered this approach gave me much more satisfaction than doing many things with less care because there is no time to do it all. Different teachings and approaches appeal to different people. I drew this lesson from mother.





Meaning of life – inner void


In spite of chain of actions I have completed, I was not happy in my inner self. There was a void somewhere inside me bothering me. For a long time I thought this void was due to lack of affection from my mother that I felt I did not receive


Mother always worked and she was not home during daytime as far as I remember since my adolescence. I missed mother’s touch, small affections such as braiding my long hair before going to school, which my friend’s mother used to do. I spoke about this to mother many times and her response was always she loved me very much. However, those words did not fill the void in my heart. Until I was fifty-five years old (I think), I tried different ways of getting “small affection” (Janjeong) from mother to fill the hole in my heart. Then I realized whatever I was looking for would not come from outside and decided to generate it myself to fill the void. I decided to give what I longed for to my children. The hole in my heart was gradually filled with my own action of “giving” and intimacy developed through giving. I do not know exactly what it did to my children, but I know it did not do harm to them. They just asked me why I was always around them all the time. I realize now that what I was searching for was touching my inner self, but I could not get there by myself. It had to be through other beings, in this case it happened to be my children.


One example of my “giving” – an approach I developed to express my love and care was preparing Sunday family meals. There were periods when it was difficult to talk to my children during their adolescence. Family meals were an easier way of getting together and talk about happenings in their life. I put all my efforts and affection in buying fresh material and preparing the meal. It gave me a great pleasure touching the fresh ingredients and cooking them, then serving and eating together on a nicely laid out table. It gave a pleasure to my family as well and my children could see, through these meals, mother’s affection and care. Through cooking I was able to relieve my creative urge, in addition to a pleasant anticipation of giving joy to those who will eat them. Cooking is a spiritual experience. While preparing a meal, one starts a communion with the nature (fresh ingredients one is touching) and the people who will eat them. Since then, cooking has become one of my communication tools, spiritual exercise and therapy.


I blamed mother for a long time (for almost all of my life) for not giving me what I wanted (intimacy with myself). Mother gave me many things (material and moral guidance, care and affection), but those are not the things I wanted. But she could not have given it to me because she did not know what I was looking for and nor did I. Eventually, I had to find out myself, reaching out to others to reach me and be liberated from self, i.e., no longer focused on self. Although the process I went through was my own choices and devices, I think I learned the wisdom from mother in finding practical solutions when facing problems and difficulties in life. Mother showed me the way.


from Montreal









































Chapter Six





Mother by Sejin





The mother that I knew, the mother that I did not know


I began slowly realizing how little I knew my own mother. It is perhaps true that mother didn’t know me either. We had not understood each other fully. That was my realization from reading her diary entries.


Mother had been a very contradictory figure for me, conjuring up complex emotions, both positive and negative. It was as if I could not live without her, but neither could I live with her. When I was living with her, I used to say to myself, “I must get out of here.” (Mother basically says the same about me in her diary, so we are even on this score.) She was one of the most irritating people. She would say in absolute terms that she knew what was right. To her it was not simply a personal opinion but the emphatic truth.


Looking back, I can relate all of this to mother’s idealism. At each stage of her life she set up big goals to achieve and her daily life was oriented toward achieving those goals rather than enjoying the moments each day. (So much for Eckhart Tolle’s “Living in the Present.”) Underlying each of her goals were big and noble ideals. I do identify with this aspect of mother’s character.





My Childhood: Working mother, lack of affection and source of pride


Having been born in 1948, the experience of the Korean War (1950-53) should have been an important part of the first years of my life and certainly regarding my mother. However, I remember very little of the experience of being a war refugee at age two, neither of the dramatic escape from Seoul to Busan, nor of the beginning of the primary schooling in war barracks. For this reason my story starts from my primary school years in Seoul from the middle of the 1950s after the war ended.


My childhood memory of mother is that of a working mother. Mother was not home during the day, so cooking was done by a de facto maid who was often a young female relative. And I shared a room with my paternal grandmother growing up in Korea. As the first son in the family, I was especially loved by grandmother in a very Korean way. Therefore, grandmother played the role of mother to me in terms of affection. Even if mother would have been home in the evenings, I remember little about mother’s affection at a physical level. To me, this was provided by grandmother. But grandmother’s affection was rather partial, being mainly directed to me as her grandson. Grandmother’s affection was not available to my sisters. so the lack of personal affection from mother must have left a permanent mark in their psyche.


However, to describe mother’s relationship with us at this period simply as lacking in affection would be only half true. The fact that mother was working full time, especially working as a manager of a factory, was a source of pride to us as we became teenagers. People often were in awe when they talked about our parents who graduated from top Japanese universities during the colonial period. Father was considered a genius by our relatives for skipping a grade in his Gwangjoo middle school, in Korea, and going to study at Yamaguchi high school in Japan and then entering Tokyo Imperial University. We were repeated reminded how lucky we are to have such smart and educated parents.


There is a particular image that symbolized our pride for mother that was captured in a photo of mother, in an equestrian suit, mounted on a horse in urban Seoul. This image was striking in early 1960’s South Korea. Even today it would be unthinkable to visualize one woman among a dozen men riding on horseback in the city of Seoul. I remember when our siblings were dividing the pictures in the family album, everyone wanted to get that picture of mother on the horseback. The picture, I think, went to Vana. In order to get this picture, she must have yielded other important pictures. I had not seen the picture for many decades, but later it appeared in mother’s apartment in Korea.


Mother wrote in her autobiography that neither her mother nor her father, and not even her husband encouraged her to stay home and manage the household. All key figures in her life wanted her to be a career woman, instead of being a mere housewife. In this sense she symbolized a new generation of the modern married woman in Korea during the 1940s to 60s.


However, mother’s privileged status disappeared as our family left Korea to migrate to Brazil and to Canada. So did our pride in mother that was based on her social status. She became a housewife in our new settlements even though she continued working in various capacities. In Brazil, she was a working class housewife without a husband. (Father arrived two years later.) She began to cook for the first time in her life. She was working out of home, doing what they called “piece work,” making fine pleats for the frontal pieces for women’s blouse. Because she trained herself to become so good at it, she bought an industrial sewing machine and the factory delivered the bundles to our house and picked up the finished work. In our immigrant life in Brazil all of us except Yujin, who was nine years old at that time, worked full time in our teens. Although mother was home all of the time, we were not able to appreciate her presence enough because by then we were very busy trying to adapt in the new environment of a new country.





Mother on education


Considering the fact that mother was among the most educated for her generation of married women, she was not an “education mama” such as was becoming common in Korea. Like most Korean middle-class mothers, she had a deep interest and concern for her children’s education, but she did not push her children to study nor did she attend to the small details in the educational rat race developing in Korea. She tried to provide the big picture but was not closely involved in our daily study life. This distant approach to education became even more pronounced after we left Korea. The main reason for this was the language and cultural barrier in the new countries. By this time we were learning the new language faster than she was and as teenagers we relied less on our parents (mother) for guidance.


In my case, when I was in middle school in Korea, I was not especially interested in studying, and my academic standing in middle school was average. Had I continued living in Korea, my chance of going to a top-ranking university would have been very slim. However, the experience of immigrant life as a teenager changed me, in fact all of us, greatly. I was working full time as a teenager, but I also began to study hard. Our experience of working full time as teenagers had a great impact on us, making us far stronger than anything else our parents could have provided. Okkyung, Vana and I, felt strongly that we did not want to stay in the working class social position that we had been experiencing in Brazil. This experience in teenage years seemed to have provided us a strong motivation for achieving something academically and professionally in life. At least that was the case with me.


In 1981, mother was awarded a prize for Great Mother by the Korean Community in Toronto. It was widely reported in the Korean newspapers at the time and many people congratulated her for “her” achievement. Mother’s diary reveals that her feeling at the time was rather ambivalent about this award and she felt no special pride for the big fuss that other people were making at the time. However, the fact that she was awarded the Great Mother prize remained a permanent record in her life since then, and mother gradually grew to feel pride about it. The prize was for the role she played in her children’s educational achievement: Yujin getting a Rhodes Scholarship and the three of us pursuing our Ph.D. course.


I do not know how Okkyung, Vana or Yujin felt at the time, but I, for one, could not see how the fact that I was pursuing a PhD had anything to do with mother. As far as I was concerned, mother had little influence on my life, especially after we left Korea. It is probable that Okkyung and I shared the same thought that we determined our own lives, and that mother or father played no role in our attainment of our doctoral degrees. Starting from the life in Brazil, there was hardly any consultation with our parents, and there was no parental advice that played a key role in our career decision-making.


When I began to reflect on this matter, an image of mother emerged, not of the career woman, the female manager, or the woman on horseback in the middle of Seoul, but of an immigrant mother of four in Brazil, without her husband, working on the sewing industrial machine at home. Why did she fall in her social position so much? For what purpose? The answer was clear. It was for her children’s future. How could I not have known and appreciated this fact sooner?


Then, I recalled our lives in Toronto in the 70s during my university years. Although mother looked like a plain housewife, she was in fact running a business, that of a rooming house. She managed the rental of five rooms on the second and third floors of the Albany house that she bought with a help of father. Six of our family members lived crammed on the first floor and in the basement. It was from the income from rooms they rented out upstairs that they were paying the house mortgage and providing our family’s living expenses. Father’s income from his employment played no role here since that fund went into buying the second and the third income houses. Mother was not simply managing a rental house, she was also managing various tenants over many years.


I also recall her intellectual life during this period. Although mother could not read books in English with sufficient proficiency, she was continuously reading one book after another. In the early 1970s, most of books were from Japan. During this period, the number of Koreans in Toronto was still small, being at most several thousand. She not only ordered books from Japan, but also subscribed to two monthly intellectual magazines from Japan: Sekai and Bungeshunju. By the late 1970s the size of the Korean immigrant community grew considerably and there had appeared many local ethnic Korean newspapers, both in Toronto and other parts of North America. This was a political period of my mother’s life. She was busy monitoring the political opinions of Korean communities in North America. In her May 11, 1980, diary entry, mother listed the names of all publications that she was subscribing to at the time. There were four monthly magazines, two from Japan, one from Korea, and one from the U.S.A., six weekly newspapers, and one daily: Sekai (Japanese Monthly), Bungeshunju (Japanese Monthly), Shindonga (Korean Monthly), Hanyang (ethnic Korean monthly in USA), New Korea Times (Toronto Korean Weekly), Minjung Shinmun (Toronto Korean Weekly), Korea Times (Toronto Korean Weekly), Canada News (Toronto Korean Weekly), Hanguk Ilbo (Korean daily), Haewoe HanMinbo (New York Korean Weekly), Dokripshinmun (Philadelphia Korean Weekly). It was clear that mother was no ordinary housewife.


I also recall how watching the world news on TV was an important part of her daily life. Dinner was exactly at 6 p.m. so she could watch the 6:30 evening news every day. Normally, when I was living with mother, I would watch it with her. Watching the news on world politics was as exciting to her as it was to me. My son, Yongsoo, would have noticed that at our home in Australia dinner time was news time all his life. It is dinner time, turn the TV news on!


When I returned to Toronto in 1989 after four years in Japan, I found that the books mother was reading changed largely from politics to spirituality. This was an area that I was not familiar with at the time and she had advanced in this field so much that I could no longer catch up with her, especially since I was too busy with my own academic career. Mother’s diary recorded, with a commentary, all the books she was reading at each point of her life. Since father’s death in 1984, her reading seemed to have reached a rate of two or three books per month for most of the months that she was not travelling. That would be more than twenty a year every year. They were not novels; they were almost entirely non-fiction books, only with some exceptions. Mother would often send her children books she recommended. Sometimes she bought several copies of the books she would like her children to read, sending one for each of us. This happened throughout last twenty years of her life. In a way, she was an incorrigible teacher and missionary. She could not stop being that way. We may sometimes, or often, get tired of mother, but it was difficult not to be affected by her energy for life. That must have been her educational role not only toward her children, but also to all who came in contact with her.





Mother’s relationship with father


I had always known that the relationship between mother and father did not involve much affection, but I regard this as a common character of the marital relationship of that generation of Koreans, not something specific to our parents. Most Korean couples of that generation were like that. As I learned more about Japan, it was the same in Japan. It was thus partly an East Asian cultural norm and partly a generational thing. In general, Korean marriages in my parent’s generation did not start from love, nor were they based on love. An ideal marriage was one in which a couple grew into an affectionate relationship after marriage, their mutual appreciation growing in time. Practically speaking, the marriage of this kind was first of all for the purpose of procreation and raising the children together. Children held the couple together. Both partners in the relationship played their role as guardians of the children. That was more important than any affectionate relationship between the couple. It was no different in the case of my parents.


However, mother’s 1998 autography revealed to me for the first time in my life that mother was greatly affected by the lack of affection from father throughout her marriage. She devoted a considerable number of pages of her Korean autobiography to this subject. She told how she fell in love with father soon after marriage, but also how her love was not returned and how she was hurt. But she carried on by devoting her energy to help father’s business by working as a manager of a small factory that they started together. Father could have been simply a man of his generation who did not and could not express affection either to wife or to his children.


She wrote again and again in her diaries, especially during the 1970s, but also in the 1980s, that she would have liked to be freed from her husband. In April 1979, she wrote in her diary, “I will be destroyed if I continue living with him,” and several days later, “I am in in peace when I am alone, but my peace is broken when I am with him.” On the basis of this situation, she would go on writing articles about women’s education and ideal society.





My relationship with father (Sejin, would you write something on this subject?)








Mother Finding a mission (1): Political activism for Reunification of Korea (1974-1982)


The eight years between 1974 and 1982 constitute the “political period” of mother’s life, the details about which I am very familiar. We have been together in many places, though not in all. I knew most of the organizations mother belonged to as well as the key figures, either directly or indirectly. The entries in mother’s diaries filled details. Nonetheless, I found it difficult to write about this period because it is still a sensitive issue.


There was a period in American history, the McCarthy Era, when an individual is branded as a communist, and not only his life, but his family members lives could be ruined. In the case of South Korea, such a period lasted quite long, covering the whole of modern Korean history before democracy, but particularly through the 1970s during which time mother began to be particularly politically active. Although Korea was supposed to have moved into democracy since 1987, the issue regarding communism was still a sensitive one in South Korea, though the atmosphere had changed a lot since the 1970’s. The strong opposition even today to abolishing the Anti-Communism Law provides the context for this understanding. Centrally important, however, is the fact that the issue regarding the decades-long negative mind-set of the Korean people regarding communism and North Korea is not mainly a political matter, but is a matter of the heart, for anyone concerned with peace and spirituality. (Recently in South Korea, there is a movement to abolish the National Security Law.)


My philosophical interest had started fairly early in my life, in Brazil during my high school years, and throughout my study in physics, philosophy had been my retreat. On the other hand, I never had been exposed to politics so directly until mother’s visit to North Korea. Although I always had an interest in the issue of suffering in the world, in general, and had identified with the black people and native Indians in North America, this interest was at an intellectual level rather than political. Mother’s activities brought politics right to the surface of our daily social life. Out of concern for mother, I was lead to study communism and Marxism, which turned out to be related to my philosophic interest. On reading mother’s diaries, I learned that mother was also studying Marxism and communism, though not as systematically as I did. Her readings were mostly from the Japanese magazine Sekai as well as from publications from South Korea and North Korea. However, as she began to link with the progressive political groups among overseas Koreans, her self-education expanded along with the organizational activities.


It happened that the idea of “unification first” was fairly widespread among the politically progressive Koreans overseas at that time though they were numerically a minority. An international organization that linked the concerned Koreans in this regard in many countries emerged in 1978, holding its first meeting in Tokyo, Japan. It had a long name, Overseas Koreans United for Democracy, Korean People, and Unification [민주민족통일 해외한국인연합 (해외한민련)]. Its shortened name, Hanminryeon (Democratic Koreans United) was commonly used. It also happened that the political line of this organization was philosophically close to that of North Korea. Hanminryeon was against division as well as being against anti-communisim, and it tried to cooperate with North Korea to hold common unity goals. This group was seen by other democracy group as being pro-North and pro-communist. Philosophically, mother’s political mindset was found in this organization, and mother had associated with the North American branch of this organization, attending many of their meetings that were held in different American cities over the years.


The movement for democracy in Korea among the overseas Koreans was therefore divided into two groups according to their political line, sometimes simply called as the “democracy first” group versus the “unification first” group. There was a common goal for democracy in South Korea, but they were divided by their attitude toward North Korea. In many ways, the “democracy first” line was more intuitive since it was against dictatorship anywhere, both South and North. It was also more popular because most Koreans were brought up with anti-communist doctrines. The only good communists were thought to be dead ones. Talking about unification had been prohibited by the government. Thus, to talk about unification meant being pro-North. They did not appreciate the philosophic underlining of the unification group and regarded talking with the North as being soft on the communist dictatorship. Thus to them, this was not a matter of supporting a different sport team, or even having a different religion. Commies were sick people, they were morally repulsive, and they contaminated others. Conclusion: do not associate with them. And that is what happened in Toronto, first with mother, then with our whole family and to individual members, by association. This was not only happening among lay people, but also among the supporters of the democracy movement in South Korea too. As one can easily imagine, the situation was rather more complex since Yujin became a Rhodes scholar and mother was awarded the Great Mother prize. There was thus a complex mish mash of admiration and avoidance among people surrounding our family.


Out of concern for mother, I tried to be her fiercest critic before her ideas, speeches, and writings reached the public. However, unfortunately, this gave her an impression that I was always opposing her even though we kept attending many meetings together, and she always shared all of her readings with me. Mother’s diary revealed that she was often hurt by my acting as the critic within the family. In numerous places in her diaries mothers stated that “Sejin is criticizing me again.”


When I perceived that mother would continue her political activities without being bothered by others’ opinions, I gave up physics and started to study sociology, and I also gave up the idea of returning to Korea.


The role of Yujin in mother’s life should be mentioned at this point. Yujin began to appear in mother’s diary from the point he received the Rhodes Scholarship. Given mother’s relationship of tension both with father as well as with me, she began to find consolation in Yujin. This was significantly based on the fact that that Yujin had grown intellectually over the four years of university and had bridged the age gap with other siblings, particularly with me. He was no long a little brother that I used to care for. After Yujin went to Oxford, the letters from Yujin were a major source of joy to mother. In fact, Yujin was rapidly developing spiritually during his years in Oxford, and his letters conveyed the progress he was making and mother found freshness in it.





Mother Finding a mission #2: Spiritual Search (1984-1997)


1984 was the year father died and, for a long time, I understood this to be the turning point in mother’s life from a political phase to a spiritual one. However, on reading the diaries of the period before 1984, I realized that the beginning of her spiritual phase started much earlier, and in fact she had multiple strands of her budding spiritual awakening rather than just one.


One of the instances of her taking a serious account of spiritual matters was when she met people in the reunification network, who clashed with each other while devoting their time to the cause. They were revealing their personality defects, showing a failure as human beings. Through this kind of experience, mother came to conclude that character building by elevating one’s spiritual maturity is a prerequisite to building of a better, more peaceful society. At that time, I was putting an emphasis on the importance of integrity as an ingredient of one’s life as worth living. Thus Mother and I had reached similar conclusions independently through our shared involvements in the political movements. Both of us eventually moved away from all of that. Mother entered her spiritual path, while I turned towards an academic life. I also decided not to return to Korea to stay free from any potential harassment and struggles due to mother’s political involvement, albeit it was short lived and out of innocent heart. I made a plan to study socio-political issues related to Korea from a distance.





Toward building an ideal society (religion-communism-a spiritual path)


Mother’s diary revealed another aspect of her in the 1970s. Namely, the importance of religion and spiritual self-training that played a role in her life throughout her politically active period.


Had the article about grandfather not appeared in that North Korean Newspaper delivered to our house in Toronto in November 1974 and had mother’s visit to North Korea in 1975 not taken place, it is most likely that our house would have turned into a center of Won-Buddhist activities, and our whole family might have been involved in them. That would have been so, mainly because mother wanted it that way, and most of us would have accepted it.


Before November 1974, there were already many indications that showed that this was coming. The most obvious signs were the notes in mother’s diaries in 1974. There was an entry in July with a title “Why I became a Buddhist,” with an enclosed a newspaper advertisement announcing a meeting for anyone interested in Won-Buddhism. The advertisement explained how Won-Buddhism was different: that in it… religious life and daily life are not separated, and it is suited for the modern age.


There was a Won Buddhist publication that stated the following points: human beings are born with the potential to become both good and bad; we can become either good or bad depending on how we live; heaven and hell are not in the next life but in this life; we make our lives heaven or hell. It also said that we can become Buddha by continuous spiritual self-training and achieving enlightenment. And there was an invitation to join: Won’t you join us in building a heaven on earth?


The preparation for this Won Buddhist gathering went on for many months as shown by a long series of correspondences between mother and our aunt, wife of father’s cousin, who was an important member of the Won Buddhist Order in Korea. There were ten letters from the aunt in 1974, and 8 in 1975. There must have been about equal number of letters from mother to her. However, this correspondence suddenly ended after mother’s North Korea visit in August 1975, and restarted in 1983 after mother stopped her political activities. Had she given up her interest Buddhism, self-training, and building heaven on earth that she mentioned in the advertisement she prepared?


Her 1975 visit to North Korea tapped her an interest in the notion of utopia in the communist sense, meaning that material conditions had to be satisfied before spiritual ones, though the two would have to be combined eventually. Therefore, she came to a conclusion that the heaven on earth that she talked about in the advertisement for the Won Buddhism meeting should be achieved by combining communism with Buddhism. The sole focus on the material world was insufficient; there has to be spirit (정신). This spirit put men over material. Soon after her visit to North Korea, this meant the acceptance of the idea of juche (주체사상).


In the 1979 diary, she made frequent references to religion among political commentaries:


“Communism to reform capitalism. Religion to reform Communism. (자본주의를 수정하기위한 공산주의. 공산주의를 수정하기위한 종교.)” (March 3) “ I believe only a society where communism and religion can co-exist can be one that can develop for true happiness of mankind. [공산주의와 종교가 건전하게 공존할수있는 사회라야만이 진정한 인간행복을 위해 발전할수 있는 사회라고 생각한다.]” (April 14) “I am a religious person. Political but religious. [나는 종교적인 사람이다. 정치적인 사람이나 종교적이다.]” (April 20)


I was surprised and pleased to find the last expression “religious person” because that was the term I have been using over last thirty years to describe myself. I would say, “I do not have a religion, but I am a religious person.” Now I understand that what I really meant was “spiritual” but I did not have the term at that time. It may have been the same with mother in 1979.


What she saw among the people who were involved in the democracy movement in North America, whether they were in the “democracy first” line or in the “unification first” line, often the level of spiritual maturity in participants was much to be desired, often even lower than the people who were not interested in politics. In April 1980, on return from a New York conference, mother wrote that what happened in the conference was such a shock to her, and she would like to take time to consider this. But she did not write any further on the subject beyond a short note that said, “glory and shame. Jealousy and envy.” [영광과 치욕. 시기와 질투.”] These must have been the key words for what she observed. The individuals participating in political movements were meant to be key players for building a utopia where spiritual maturity was a requirement, but most people were bogged down in smaller local games of emotions which were counterproductive to spiritual development. It was this realization that mother arrived at by the end of the 1970s that lead her to resign from further involvement in political activities. In February 1982, mother recorded that she decided to keep relationships only with people who are “good, truthful and wise” [“인간적으로 선량하고, 진실하고, 지혜로운 사람들”] and let all others go.


Eventually mother was lead to the conclusion that the liberation of women and the birth of a matriarchal society was a precondition to the construction of utopia in this world. (It is recorded that I would turn her off as usual by asking her, “On what basis, do you say so?”) If my role was to challenge mother, it was grandfather’s role to fuel her sense of mission for unification work.


























Chapter Seven





Mother by Yujin





Ilsun-nim – Mother, Teacher, Inspirer





Ilsun-nim was the greatest spiritual influence in my early life. Through her love for what is higher, she inspired me as a child to love and pursue what is higher. Through her I learned of the true spirit of Mother God.


Early on, she taught me about aligning with higher power and serving humanity. These were her two great teachings to me through my youth and childhood. She did this through stories, sayings and the example of her own living.


As I was growing up, she told me many stories—stories that she loved, stories of greatness, of mastery, of love of truth, stories of aligning with higher power and of service to humanity. These stories were wondrous to me and filled me with a passion to follow after the people in the stories. Thus began my own spiritual quest and journey as a young boy, inspired by her love and by her stories. The story of that quest as it unfolded in my life, I will tell another time perhaps.


What are some qualities about her that stand out to me? She had a deep and unshakeable trust in life. She was fearless and optimistic about life while being practical and astute in small things. She loved her father, her country, humanity. She herself served in simple ways—in simple actions of generosity, courage, trust and selflessness, in the constancy of her thoughts and prayers, in her love of learning. She has kept her faith in the great potential of humanity.


As a child, I felt very close to her and proud of her. She was my champion, my mother and teacher. She was a great friend and companion to me. It has been a privilege to walk this life with Ilsun-nim—a life of shared purpose and service.








Influence of Family Positioning and History in the Telling of this Story





Before speaking more of my story of Ilsun-nim, it seems important to say something about the nature of my relationship with her in the context of the family history. I realize that my experience of her and thus my story of her is significantly affected by a privileged experience I had in the family. As the last and late baby, arriving in a time of long awaited stability and prosperity in the family after the ending of the Korean War, I was particularly showered with love from the whole family. Also, by the time I was born, family circumstances had changed in such a way that Ilsun-nim had more time to mother and mentor me than she had with her other children. This was particularly so during our immigrant years in Brazil, which were key formative years of pre-adolescence for me, between nine and thirteen. She was in a new country without friends, as all of us in the family were. Her other children had to work to help out the family. In the meantime, she and I were company to each other and she had opportunity to commune with me and mentor me. It’s apparent that these and other factors allowed a depth of communion and mentoring to take place between her and me that did not have a chance to occur in the same way for the others. Thus, my story of her is unique to both the special gift of love that I received from the whole family, as well as the particular mentoring that I received from her.





Yes, you can





One of my brightest memories of Ilsun-nim and her greatest personal gift to me is captured in the following story. It is a story of her trust in me and her trust in life.


One day when I was eight years old, I was to go hiking with a school friend and his father up Baegoondae, a mountain at the outskirts of Seoul. When I arrived there by bus, my friend and his father weren’t there. In a quandary, I wondered what I should do. I thought maybe I should go back home, but I had come all the way out here and the mountain looked inviting. I decided to go up the mountain and found that people were very friendly, encouraging and willing to share their lunch with me. Having hiked to the top of the mountain, and on the way back home on the bus, I began to realize that mother might not be happy that I did this by myself. When she asked me how it went, I worried that I might get scolded but told the story. She looked at me for a moment and then with a smile of pride praised me for being brave. I still carry with me the feeling and spirit of that moment. The feeling of pride, of being deeply trusted and loved. This memory has stayed with me since, as a memory of heaven’s trust and love of me. Thank you, Ilsun-nim, for this gift.


This memory is linked in my consciousness with another memory later, when I began university and started to do whitewater canoeing. Whitewater canoeing is considered a potentially dangerous sport. When I told her of it, she showed no concern and seemed pleased about it. Being trusting of life and of herself, she trusted me. Being adventurous herself, she welcomed adventurous spirit in me. A few years later, when I was on a two week whitewater kayaking adventure with friends, canoeing many of the rivers in Pennsylvania, I stopped at a kayak store by a river. The store was selling a postcard of a capsized kayak with the bottom above water. On the kayak bottom were the words, written large, “I’M OK MOM.” I bought the postcard and sent it to Ilsun-nim, thinking it would make her smile.


This spirit of trust and adventure led me to a life long love of outdoor exploration, wilderness canoeing, rafting, climbing, snorkeling. It also led to my work, in my twenties, with the famous outdoor leadership training program, the Outward Bound schools, and on to winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University. Since Rhodes Scholars were chosen for leadership abilities plus academic abilities, my experience with outdoor leadership and teaching in Outward Bound schools was an important part of qualifying for the scholarship. In my memory, Ilsun-nim’s pride in me as the eight year boy returning from Baegoondae mountain was the strength, the wind beneath my wings, that led me to wilderness exploration, Outward Bound, Rhodes Scholarship, and onwards.





Be an Eager Learner Responsive to the Truth





There are many life lessons that I learned from Ilsun-nim. One of the most important and fundamental life lessons she taught me was about being an eager learner responsive to the truth. This meant revering and learning from the wisdom, mastery, and wholeness of character of others. She taught me this, as well as many other things, through her own example as well as through her words.


Ilsun-nim had a eager learner’s heart. A willing heart. A responsive heart. She had a reverence for wisdom and mastery wherever she found it and was an eager student. This began for her while she was a young teenager sitting with her father at meal times. Her father was a man of character, wisdom and vision. She loved and revered him and eagerly listened to all he had to say. She spent time with her father in this way from age 13 to 18. This formed in her an attitude of reverence towards all people of wisdom, and an eager readiness to learn.


This readiness to learn showed itself in many ways in her adult life. One of them was in her attitude towards immigrant life. Before immigrating to Brazil she read a Japanese novel, “Wave,” about immigrating to a new country. She read in the novel about the fact that life in the new country would begin at the very bottom. She internalized this lesson and left on the ship to Brazil with an attitude of ease and welcome for the hardship that her new life would bring. How much harder would her, and our, lives have been had she not willingly learned and prepared herself in this way. Being ready, she had an attitude of adventure and pioneering.


Later, her readiness to learn showed itself in her eager learning from many important sources of wisdom that she came across. She was often adventurous and daring in learning, as well as humble. She learned from many people, books as well as an amazing range of seminars and workshops. Some of these, in the form of spiritual and personal development seminars, included the Emissaries, Avatar, Emotional Healing, Dahn, Won Buddhism, Dongsasup, Unification Church, Jehova’s Witness, Ki Healing, and many more.


She spoke to me about being an eager, and open student wherever one is. The first part of this was about revering and learning from people of genuine mastery and wisdom. I will speak of this more later. The second part was about being without pre-judgment or prejudice. Such lessons instilled in me an openness to wisdom no matter through whom such might come. Prejudice kills learning and keeps people stupid. Her teaching of unprejudiced openness and humility before the truth was one of the greatest gifts that she gave me as a youth. Such attitude to learning allowed the rest of my learning to take place.


She spoke of one other thing, in conjunction with having a willing and eager heart. She spoke also of being astute about things and people. A heart gentle as the dove, and a mind wise as the serpent. What wise teaching this was to the young and eagerly growing boy.


I recall her telling me the following as a child: “There are those who hear one thing and learn ten things. And there are those who hear ten things and learn nothing.” The unspoken question was “Which do you wish to be?” To the eager boy, there was no question which he wished to be!


Another lesson about a willing and eager heart came in the form of a Judo movie that she took me to when I was around 11 years old in Brazil. In this time period, she often took me to movies that had a spiritual message and shared with me afterwards about the meaning of them. I absorbed these movies and what we shared about them, eagerly. This particular movie was about the spiritual and physical training of Sugata Sanshiro under Judo founder and master, Yano. In the movie, young Sanshiro, along with other village boys, comes to the Judo master asking to be taught Judo. The master tells them to sweep the fallen leaves and the yard. The boys excitedly do the chores and ask the master, “Will you teach us now?” The master tells them to return the next day. They are a bit disappointed but eagerly return the next day only to do the same chores again. This goes on day after day, until only Sanshiro remains, continuing to do the chores until he has proven his deep desire to learn. The lesson of this movie scene was deeply imprinted in my young mind and formed a thrilling preparation of heart to accept rigorous training in order to learn.








Express Excellence Where You Are





Another important lesson she taught me was about excellence. Express excellence, express your best wherever you are, as you are. Four stories come to mind that she told me as I was growing up that imprinted this philosophy deeply in me.


The first two stories are from her time working as an immigrant laborer in Brazil and in Canada. They are stories of expressing excellence in all circumstances. In Korea, she had worked as a teacher and as a company manager and had not worked as a physical laborer before. Having immigrated, it was necessary for her to work as a laborer. Her first such work was as a seamstress in Brazil. She had never done seamstress work before but learned quickly and excelled in it. For two years, before her husband arrived from Korea, she was able to keep the family going on this basis and continued until we left Brazil to immigrate to Canada. Then, once in Canada, she soon found work in a hospital kitchen as a laborer and food deliverer. While, again, she was not used to such physical work, she had the philosophy of giving her best in all circumstances and strove to bring excellence in her work. These two stories from her life, of expressing the best in all circumstances, stirred in me my own desire to do my best in all circumstances.


The two other stories also left an indelible impression on me. One was about personal clothing. She told me in our early immigrant time, that when in modest circumstance and lacking money, one’s clothing didn’t need to be fancy or many. That, an item of clothing plain and well-worn but mended with love and taken care of can express true dignity and being. This left in me a deep imprint about the true genesis of fineness and excellence—that they lay not in outer appearance but in the quality of true character and care expressed through the form or appearance.


Another story about true character and excellence that she told me was about a famous writer in Korean history whose mother’s mastery in her modest work humbled her young and already accomplished son to greater excellence and mastery. This too left a deep impression in me. Ilsun-nim told me that this mother had sent her son to Seoul to study and he achieved great success after a few years and came back to visit her. She had sold rice cakes to support him to study in Seoul. When he came back proud of his achievement in calligraphy, she sat him down and proposed a test. She would turn the candle light out in the house and each would do their task—she would cut rice cake as was her job, and he would write calligraphy. When they did and the light was turned on, her cake was cut perfectly but his calligraphy was poor. She had achieved mastery in her task; he had only achieved superficial excellence. She sent him back to Seoul. Humbled, he studied more deeply and achieved true mastery. This was the story about Han Seok Bong. The story left in me the awareness that there is such a thing as true mastery, beyond superficial accomplishment; also that it can be attained even in ordinary stations in life and that they carry great value. Upon my departure to Oxford at 25, she reminded me of the story and to do well there.








Prayer of Mother God





Around my first Christmas at Oxford, in 1979, Ilsun-nim wrote me the following in a letter: “It is your mother’s deep prayer that at the same time that you learn much in a good environment, you train your body also and become a worthy leader of sound spirit and body and become a light to searching humanity.” As I kept the words and the spirit of her prayer in my heart, I felt in them such deep longing and compassion for paining humanity and recognized in them the longing and prayer of Mother God for the plight of her children. This brought such deep and continued flow of tears in my heart, and repentance also, for having been so unaware heretofore. Even as I write now, decades later, I hear the longing and prayer of Mother God, to all who can hear: “Awake, arise. Be strong. Be true. Be a light. Be a true answer to paining humanity.”


While Ilsun-nim’s prayer was of one mother to her son, I heard in it the deeper prayer of Mother God to her awakening sons and daughters, and in that deeper prayer, also the hidden countless prayer of the heart of humanity: “Awake, rise, be strong, be true. Be a light unto humanity.” In May 1980, I wrote a poem in answer to this prayer, titled “I Heard Your Secret Prayer, I Heard.” In it I wrote: “Great Woman so passionate, loving and true. How could I to your wish be untrue?” My life since has been lived as an answer to that prayer. How could I indeed, to your wish be untrue? As I write this, I also ask those who shall read this: “How could you—you, true son, true daughter—to your Mother’s prayer be untrue? Come join with me in answering her prayer. Be the light.








I Heard your Secret Prayer, I Heard





I heard your secret prayer, I heard,


my passionate mother, so loving and true.





In your gentle eyes


in whose depths I learned to cast away


the doubts and fears of a childish heart,


I heard,


your silent prayer, your eternal prayer,


that your one longing should come true.





Through all those years


I longed to fill your heart with my love,


and listened to your prayer as best as I could.


I won you trophies and prizes, and honors


as all mothers should have been proud.





But, your secret prayer went on, steadfast, and singular,


that your one longing should come true.





What longing should be so deep


that no earthly honor could fulfill?


What promise so, so precious


that you would die in waiting,


than to it be untrue?





Mother, so passionate, loving and true.





What will should be so strong


that you would bear the longing of all mankind?


What compassion so deep


that your one wish should be,


for all men to be set free?





Great Woman, so passionate, loving and true.


How could I, to your wish, be untrue?





****************





That the promise is so precious, never, never doubt.


Believe that destiny was in your prayer,


and your prayer in destiny,


for in the hours of fulfillment you will know


that your prayer was held, inscribed in eternity.





****************





Woman, so passionate, loving and true.





Do you remember that day when I was little,


when you told me the story of the little boy,


who in believing and waiting for a legend to come true,


grew into its fulfillment?





What design moved you to tell such stories?





He went up to the village hill everyday, you told me,


from where he could see the prophecy’s remains


carved on a lonely cliff face, waiting, waiting...


He, too, waited,


hearing the sighs in the hearts of villagers poor,


his uncles, grandmothers and medicine men, too,


waiting, waiting, on a lonely vigil for hope.





Destiny is in prayer, and prayer in destiny.





He too prayed, watched, and waited,


steadfastly as the years went by.


People changed, seasons passed,


yet his faith held,


his understanding growing deeper


as his compassion transmuted into stillest center.


One day, in sitting by the pond, by the lonely cliff,


as he looked, emptied of desire, of hope, into mirror water,


in that moment held inscribed in eternity, he saw


that the prophesied man of wisdom, had already come.





Woman of great faith.


Do you remember now of the prayer within that story,


within your secret prayer,


within the prayer in the hearts of all good men?





Invocations, within invocations, within invocations.





Woman of great faith,


recognize in me the harvest of your devotional sowing,


for I Am your faith’s incarnation


grown by the power of your invocations.





***********************





All good men and women, hear:


That the promise is so precious, never, never doubt.


Neither pray, nor wish lightly,


for in your prayers and wishes is inscribed, destiny.


Hear the prayers in hearts of other good men,


for by the power of their invocations


your will is cleansed


to be at one with God’s will. May 12, 1980








Reverence for Greatness of Character—Upward Orientation





If Ilsun-nim’s greatest personal gift to me as a child was her trust in me, her greatest spiritual gift to me was her example of upward orientation—orientation in higher character and spirit. I cannot think of her separately from her orientation in greatness of character, in Spirit. This was conveyed to me from early on through her stories about her father and the reverence that she had for him as well as for others that were of true character. Seeing the Japanese, spiritually based martial arts movies with her in my childhood, was one way that her love and reverence for spirit was conveyed to me.


I loved her and looked up to her and naturally absorbed her upward orientation. The practical effect of this in my teens and twenties was that I was naturally open and responsive to people of greater experience and wisdom. Thus, I naturally came to have a progression of mentors from whom I learned through those years. My reverence for my grandfather, learned through Ilsun-nim, was the cornerstone of this early upward orientation. This prepared me for other key mentors that would come into my life.


Another story she told me when I was little that left a lasting imprint in my consciousness was the story of the Great Stone Face. I learned later that the story was not Korean but written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famous American writer. While writing this article, I asked Ilsun-nim how she knew all the many wonderful stories she had told me as a child. She said because she loved reading all her life. Obviously, I was greatly blessed by her love of reading. Even now she is an avid reader. When I called her today, she was reading the autobiography of Moon Sun Myung. She called it very fine.


As for the Great Stone Face, hearing the story of the little boy who in loving and waiting for the prophesized wise man to come grew into him, left a sense of wonder in me as a young boy. Maybe I will pray and grow into a wonderful wise man like the man in mother’s story.








Mastery & Aligning with Universal Power





I absorbed from Ilsun-nim many stories about developing mastery and aligning with universal power. Obviously, these were stories that she loved and filled her with interest. So they came to fill me with a sense of wonder and awe also. The time period when she told me these stories would have been between 1964 and 1969, particularly, when I was between 9 to 14. She would have been 37 to 42. These stories had an impact on my attitude towards discipline, training, personal competence and the ultimate goal of such. These stories spoke of rigorous discipline that leads to mastery, which leads to oneness with universal power. It seems some of her awareness of such a process of mastery and alignment came with her conversations with her father. In other ways, perhaps, this was an innate inclination in her from her youth.








Stories





Seeing with spiritual sight


One story was about her father and his gift for finding gold and other minerals as a miner. Upon being asked by a disciple about his gift for finding gold, he said “People see with their physical eyes. I see with my spirit.” Ilsun-nim was aware of her father’s practice of daily meditation at home and of his visit to Buddhist temples to rest and meditate. This story stayed with me always. “It is possible to have not only physical sight but spiritual sight.” This was an important early seed towards my own spiritual awakening. Later, as my interest turned to finding, not physical gold in the land, but the spiritual gold in people, this story came to have yet more meaning. We see the gold, the inmost angel in people, through the purity of our spiritual sight.





A Cat and Perfect Flow


One other early story about mastery and mastership that came to me was from a movie that Ilsun-nim took me to about the founder of Judo. This would have been around 1966 when I was about 11. In the story, the founder gains one of his inspiration for judo from watching a cat fall from the ceiling rafters, spin in the air and land gently on all four legs. From this he derived insight about alignment with life flow and the inner state of relaxation that allows it. In my adult life, I came to increasingly understand the full meaning of this, and of aligning consciously with the universal creative flow. I became increasingly aware that there is providence, intelligence and hidden design to the unfolding of life for those who care to become aware of it and align with it. Ilsun-nim became increasingly conscious of this invisible and intelligent design of life and has sought to live in alignment with it. Her coming to Korea at 84 was in obedience to her inner sensing of life’s flow and aligning with it.





The Swordsman and Satori


Another story was the story of Miyamoto Musashi, a legendary Japanese samurai, as told in a movie that Ilsun-nim took me to and later had me read as a book. This story had a lasting impact on me as well. I too wanted to train in mastery and attain universal alignment, satori. After the movie or the reading of the book, she would talk to me about the themes of the story and these conversations too set a direction and course for my life.


These stories were unspeakably wondrous stories to a precocious and responsive young boy! They led to him to love mastery and pursue the development of mastery in a number of arenas. The first of such was in table tennis. An inspired twelve year old boy wanted to learn swordsmanship and become a zen swordsman. But they didn’t teach swordsmanship in Brazil. So instead, he trained in table tennis for several years.





The Butcher and the Tao


One of the stories she told also was the story of a butcher who was a master. (I learned recently that this is the well-known story by ZhuangZi). He used his knife in such a way that he cut the space between the bone and the meat; his knife never dulled, and his work of perfect skill was enlightened art, an expression of the Tao, an expression of the Way. In telling me this story, she spoke to me that one can attain universal alignment, the Tao, through any skill that is useful to master and that once attained it is transferrable to other skills and uses. She stressed this a number of times and this became deeply imprinted for me. For a boy who couldn’t find anyone to teach him swordsmanship this was a welcome notion. He could take up a different practice and attain perfect skill and the Tao through that.





My Experiment with Table Tennis and other practices


The field that the young boy had available as an immigrant in Brazil and Canada was table tennis, something that he gave all his devotion to for four years and reached a high level of mastery. This training led him to a key peak-experience. The experience was in a tournament where, against all odds, he beat the US Junior table tennis champion. More important than the victory was his experience of perfect inner alignment during the match. In moments during the match, he felt as though he was playing in slow motion, in perfect flow, as though the power of life itself was playing through him and he was a channel. This experience of alignment and perfect flow stayed with him as he went on beyond table tennis to other fields of mastery. Ilsun-nim was right. The knowing of perfect flow was transferrable, even in the limited range he had come to know at the age of seventeen. Later I applied this knowing and essence to, whitewater canoeing, fencing, philosophy, emotional healing, and other fields that came to me to master. Her gift to me in the form of this early teaching and preparation was so significant to my unfolding life. I came into each field of skill or endeavor with the attitude of developing mastery and expressing the highest flow. Ultimately, this cumulative experience and knowing of flow led to my spiritual awakening at age 25 and the further refining of that awakening and inner alignment afterwards.


There are many practical sayings about mastery that she communicated to me when I was young, which became a part of my young consciousness. Some of these were:





“A master captain docks his ship so it’s aligned to easily exit the harbor.”





“A boy going to school without a pencil is like a soldier going to war without a gun.”





“When the rice stalk is young it’s proud and straight. When it is mature and full


of experience, it bows and is humble.”





“In all work, there is a knack and essence. They allow you to do the most with least effort. Learn that.”





These are wonderful sayings for a young mind. For years, I have taken people out on outdoor outings and have taken extra clothing and items for them that often turn out to be essential for their experience. People have appreciated and marveled at this. It comes straight from Ilsun-nim’s lessons!








One with the Great Universal Sea





One of Ilsun-nim’s most notable and life long experience is that of oneness and communion with nature and with universal life. She grew up as one with nature and the sea in the small fishing village of Yongjam near Ulsan. In her backyard in Toronto in her later life she built a garden sanctuary that expressed her communion with universal life and attracted both countless neighborhood birds as well as neighbors that were inspired to imitate her. This love of nature, ocean and water, she also passed on to me. My lifelong love of outdoor exploration, canoeing in the wildest northern wilderness of Canada, exploring by kayak deserted islands in Mexico and the Caribbean, rafting the rivers of Colorado, started with her passing on her love of life and of nature. When Ilsun-nim was 82 years old and before she became older, my wife Marsha and I took her to one of the most pristine, beautiful and unpopulated islands in the Caribbean Sea so that she could enjoy the sea that she loved so much. On this tiny island with the most beautiful underwater coral imaginable, she snorkeled with us among the countless colorful fishes. She felt completely at home in that water as we swam together amidst the underwater garden. This was a small way for me to give back to her the gift of love of nature and the spirit of adventure that she had given me. Living together on Jeju island, we often went out on ocean side outings. Many times she went to kayaking with us although her age was catching up with her then. It was amazing that, at age 85, she climbed to the top of Halla Mountain with us! And then, she kayaked with a group of us to a small island (one kilometer offshore) near Hamduk, on Jeju Island. She was still so adventurous!








A Phone Call of Love – Selfless Giving





One day, around 1995?, while I was living in Colorado, USA, Ilsun-nim phoned me and said she wanted to share something. She said that she had considered carefully and had decided to give us a part of our inheritance early. She explained that all she had to give us upon her death was her house. But, this might not happen for a long time since she was so healthy and might live a long time. She added that each of us had gotten a very late financial start because of immigrating twice and beginning each time with so little support. And she realized that now was the time when each of us could use the inheritance the most as we were struggling to get established and started in our paths. She said she had made the decision to take out a loan from the bank by mortgaging her house. She would divide the 200,000 Canadian Dollar loan so that she could give a portion to each of us. She believed that this would give us courage and help us move forward and would be a more effective use of the money than after her death. Hearing this, I felt the depth of her care and wisdom and wept. How great a love this was. Far more than the money, I felt the greatness of her love and her sacrifice. I thanked her and vowed to myself that I would use this golden substance of her love to an end worthy of the greatness of it. To this day, tears roll down my cheeks in remembering her phone call and her act of love.


How wise, giving and powerful a use of her financial substance this was. Ilsun-nim is a daughter worthy of her father, Lee Jong-man, who too, gave so wisely, selflessly and with such greatness of vision so that Korea and her people might live. Because of the great way he used his wealth for the blessing of others, it was said of him that people were sorry that he was not more wealthy than he was. Limited by her immigrant circumstances, Ilsun-nim, like her father, still found ways to give that were of the maximum use of her resources.





A Pool of Sadness in Her Heart





Sometime when I was little, I saw Ilsun-nim crying quietly in her room. I don’t remember now the exact incident, except that when I was in my twenties, I remembered it vividly enough to write of it in a poem. Some of her tears were likely from the pain of her marriage, some of it may have been the hardship of the immigrant life, some of it her compassion for the sorrow of the Korean people. Perhaps, in this pain she also felt the pain of the heart of this world. I felt the sadness in her and wrote the following words.





“My only mother, selfless mother


If you could only sing, my joy would know no bounds.


But caged birds do not sing.





O mother dear you would not sing


Because your beloved father knew the truth.


A people without a nation do not sing,


like caged birds they do not sing.”





While Korea was without nationhood under Japanese domination, so was it not yet a full nation while torn and divided.








Prayer for Korea’s Gift to the World – Gift Born of Sorrow Overcome with Love





Ilsun-nim felt deeply the sorrow of Korea—a people and nation enslaved by colonization, broken by war, torn by division, silenced by dictatorship, and healing only now from the scars of so much sorrow. While South Korea has progressed with blinding speed economically into the ranks of the first world, Ilsun-nim has had the prophetic vision that Korea has another yet more extraordinary gift to give the world which is a greater miracle than its economic achievement. That gift is the gift of the birthing of a new nation, a nation not only unifying itself economically and politically but daring to give birth to a new kind of model and moral nation—one befitting the evolution and aspiration of humanity in the 21st century, a moral nation based on principles of co-prosperity and compassion.























Epilogue





Our emotional healing work dissolved the thick layers of the shell that kept my mother captive and isolated from us regarding her feelings about her father and his vision for a peaceful Korea. In result of our new relationship as comrades, mother and I went to Pyongyang together in 2007 and visited grandfather’s graveyard at the Patriots Cemetery. That occasion opened my spiritual eyes and I reclaimed my personal as well as my ethnic heritage, as a Korean-American who has a grandfather considered a hero on both sides of the 38th Parallel. I learned that his story, when told, captures everybody’s attention and heart. Although he is called “the only capitalist buried in the Patriots Cemetery in North Korea”, in fact he was neither capitalist nor socialist, in the usual sense of the words; he was an enlightened man with undivided heart, with a burning desire to help construct the Korean society by reaching out to the workers and the farmers to self-manage their lives.


The story of my maternal-grandfather, Lee Jong-man, is even today a forbidden subject among my mother’s side of the family because he went North and also because he was placed on the Japan-Sympathizer List, which is compiled by Our People’s Issues (Min-jok-moon-je) Research Center. Our relatives in South Korea out of self-preservation over the years have felt crushed and ashamed about that stigma which they must try to hide.


I, fortunately, am in a stronger position, thanks to my years of psycho-spiritual work, and a broader spiritual perspective. I can now come out and speak openly about what our relatives try to hide as “the ghost in the family” since I know what my grandfather stood for and what his message to the world was and still is. His message was and is, “Wake up, Everyone! Shake off the yoke of your small self, and soar into the spacious Mother Nature!”




















Appendix





Chronology of Lee Jong-man's Life


(revised version, by Kang Jong-il, President of Center for Korean Peninsula Neutralization)






Lee Jong-man was born in Ulsan-si, Korea in January 14, 1885, as the second son of 7 sons. 



- In 1902, his classical education was reluctantly stopped due to his illness.






- In 1904, he resumed his classical studies, got married, and fell ill again. Then, he abandoned his studies and joined family business. 






- In1905, he opened his own business in growing and selling brown seaweed (raw material for the tincture of iodine) in the Busan fishery market. However, he had to closed it because the price of the item declined rapidly as the Russo-Japanese War ended in September 1905. 






- In 1907, he engaged in fisheries but gave it up because he could not bear to watch the tens of thousands of fish being killed in an overnight fishing right before his eyes.






- In 1912, he found a private Daeheung School at his hometown in combination with the seven classical studies places, but he could not operate its management due to the opposition of the Confucian elders who did not understand the modern school system. 



- In 1914, he made some profits from the Yang-gu Tungsten Ore Mine in Gangwon Province. 






- In 1918, he wasted all the money (50,000 won) that he had earned from the Yang-gu Tungsten Ore Mine as the World War I ended.


  



- In 1919, his lumber factory in Mt. Geumgang was swept away by a heavy rain, and his efforts for constructing an ideal village with projects such as land reclamations in Yeonpyeong, Bookchong, and Myongtaedong in Hamnam province also failed at the same time.






- In 1920, he attempted to set up a nominal agricultural and forestry company with 10 million won, but the interference of the Japanese government made it impossible to succeed. 






- In 1921, he returned to his home town and put his efforts on improving the rural reformation and promotion projects. 






- In 1923, he recruited a socialist Lee Jun-yeol and managed the school of Kyungsung Gohakdang (free school for the poor) with him. 



- In 1928, he managed a mine at Myongtaedong in Sinheung-gun for 3 years and attempted again to construct an ideal farming village. 






- In 1931, all of his business - Myongtaedong Mine, Mining Development Company in Shinheung County, and Girin Mine Company - failed. 






- In 1932, he purchased Yeongpyeong gold mine with a total of 450 won. 






- In 1934, he found a rich gold vein at Yeongpyeong gold mine. He hit a jack pot.





- In 1936, Yeongpyeong gold mine made a profit of 40 million won. 






- In 1936, he secured gold mining rights for Jangjin Mine and developed it. He sold the Yeongpyeong gold mine to the East Chosun mining industry for 1.55 million won. He became a millionaire. 






- In May 1937, he invested 500,000 won in Daedong Rural Company, and dedicated 120,000 won for the miners, employees, school, and the poor relief. In the name of Daedong Rural Company he purchased 500,000 won worth of farm lands, and made sure that the ownership of the cultivated land permanently belonged to Daedong Rural Company, lest the farmlands were squandered in the hands of the farmers.  






- In July 1937, when the second Sino-Japanese war broke out, he donated 1,000 won to the Japanese army. 






- In September 1937, he announced an epoch-making rental plan that he will share his privately owned 1.67 million ‘pyeong’ for the tenant farmers who would be able to pay only 30 percent to him. At the moment it was a common practice for the tenant farmers to pay 50 or 70 percent of their total amount of the harvest quantity. 






- In 1938, he became the official head of the five affiliate companies of the Daedong Konzern in consisting of Daedong Mining Co. Ltd., Daedong Mines Labor Union, Daedong Rural Company, Daedong Publishing Co., and Daedong Technical College. 






- In 1939, he was invited to attend a conference held at the Chosun hotel, sponsored by the Japanese military headquarters and the (Japanese) Chosun Governor General, in order to discuss on the issues of military draft, compulsory education, and total mobilization order. 






- In January 1939, he participated in the public advertisement of the Maeil Sinbo newspaper for the new year congratulation and praying for military personnel in war. 






- In April 1939, he was nominated to a member of the association of Chosun Industry and gold mine.






- In July 1939, he donated 1,000 won to the Japanese military. 






- In July 1940, an article came out on the Samchully magazine, with his name, encouraging young men to volunteer in the Japanese army. (Because of this, his name was enlisted on the Japan-sympathizer list.) 






- In December 1940, he became a member of the revamped Daisaijuk, which was consolidated with the aim of promoting the Japanese original spirit, protecting the people involved, and implementing the united ideological events between Japan and Korea. 






- In 1941, the Daedong Konzern crumbled down as the Pacific War erupted. 






- In September 1941, he participated in the association of promoting the war attitude, and became one of the directors for the organization of Chosun people's consolidation towards a hot war. 






- In 1943, Daedong mining Co. was dismantled by the Japanese Government General's decision. 






- In 1944, he founded Daedong Industrial School in Pyongyang ( lt changed later to Pyongyang Industrial College, which turned into the department of technology of the Kim Il sung's University). 






- In August 1945, he purchased the Samchuk Coal Mine that belongs to the Japanese asset (his 30th business attempt). 









In North Korea…





- In June 25, 1949, he attended the convention of the Homeland Reunification Democratic Front Formation, held in Pyongyang, as a representative of the Association of National Industries of South Korea. 






- In 1949-1950, he served as a delegate to the Supreme People's Assembly in North Korea. 






- In January 20, 1951, he became a factory manager for recovering the construction work in Pyongyang just after the Korean war. 






- In 1954, he served as an advisor to the Ministry of Mining, and contributed to the development of North Korea's resources.






- In October 1955, he became the chairman of the Homeland Reunification Democratic Front Formation. 






- In December 1st, 1969, he served as a manager of Mining company.






- In August 15, 1975, he served as a man in charge of Geographical Investigation Corp.





- In January 17, 1977, he passed away at age of 93 and had a public funeral. 






- Since 1986, he is buried in the DPRK Patriot's Cemetery








****














Highlights of life and thought of Lee Jong-man





1. National capital accumulation


   - Lee Jong-man became a king of gold mine on his 30th business attempts. He sold a successful gold mine for 1.55 million won, and invested 500,000 won to set up Daedong Rural Enterprise to create an ideal farm village.





2. Ideal rural construction spirit


   - Daedong Rural enterprise bought farmland, farmers keep 70% of the harvest, the company receives 30%, ownership of farmland is with Daedong Rural Enterprise, farmers have only farming rights, but farmers are exempted from paying rent after 30 years of farming (to prevent selling or mortgaging)


   


3. Lee Jong-man’s Daedong Spirit


   - He said, all peasants have equal rights. To equalize ownership and distribution, Lee's private lands and farmland purchased by Daedong Rural Enterprise are distributed to the farmers, and all farmers collectively paid the farm expenses.





4. Exemplary entrepreneurship


   - Lee Jong-Man demonstrated a model entrepreneurial spirit of returning all his property to society. After 30 years of farming, farmers were to be exempt from paying rent, and all his private land and farmland purchased by Daedong Rural Enterprise would be their’s to freely use.





5. North Korean Residency (Sep 1948)


   - Most of Joseon intellectuals in the Japanese colonial period had socialist ideology and it was a general tendency to have a socialist spirit.


   - Most of the mines owned by Lee Jong-Man were in North Korea, so the first job he had under Kim Il-sung government was a mining advisor to directly manage the mines he had previously owned.





6. South-North unification plan


   - Lee Jong-man was inaugurated as the first chairman of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of Democracy (= the front of the country) in North Korea.   


- It can be assumed that Lee Jong-man's permanent neutrality is transferred to his daughter Ilsun.











END