POW’s Daughter Comes Home at Last

Lee Yeong-hee (49) was teary-eyed as she walked into the Mortuary Tablet Room at the National Cemetery in Dongjak-dong, Seoul with her father’s picture in her arms yesterday morning.

There are about 10,000 names engraved in small letters on the room’s half-circle shaped marble wall. Yeong-hee, blinded by her own tears, wandered for a while in front of her father’s name. She touched each name one by one, and when she found her father’s name, she let out a sob and fell to her knees.

Yeong-hee recalled her last memory of her father, Lt. Lee Heon-woo, who passed away while trying to escape from North Korea at the age of 75. Lee enlisted in the army as a cadet in January 1951 when he was a university student, and was taken prisoner in July that same year. He was forced to work in mines until after he was 60. He passed away August last year from a stroke, a side effect of his long forced labor.

Lee’s last words to Yeong-hee were, “Go home for me.” Yeong-hee kept her promise and crossed the Duman River last September, but it was a long, hard road to South Korea. Her relatives in South Korea, who had urged her to flee North Korea, cut off communications with her because with her father dead, they could not verify her identity.

Plagued by stomach pains, she eventually visited a Chinese hospital. Doctors there told her that her life would be in danger if she did not get an operation immediately. She tried to take her life after that diagnosis.

But Choi Seong-yong, the representative of Families of the Abducted and Detained in North Korea, heard of Yeong-hee’s predicament and helped her. Yeong-hee arrived in South Korea on December 19 last year, and underwent myoma removal surgery on January 11.

After she was released from the hospital in early February, the still-recovering Yeong-hee visited the National Cemetery. She wanted to commemorate the first anniversary of her father’s death in front of her father’s mortuary tablet.

Yeong-hee brought some fruit for her father. But she sat crying for an hour, forgetting everything else.

Yeong-hee pulled herself together with the help of other people. She said, “I remember my father saying ‘I may be here physically, but my heart’s already in the South.’ I am a bad daughter, I couldn’t help my father be in his homeland.”

Currently Yeong-hee is staying at Hanawon, a facility for North Korean defectors. She plans to leave on April 13 and move to Daejeon, which is close to her father’s hometown, Seocheon, in South Chungcheong Province.

Han Mahn-taek is the POW who escaped from North Korea in 2004 but was captured by the Chinese police and sent back to North Korea. His nephew’s wife, Shim Jeong-ok offered to help her in Korea. Yeong-hee’s relatives plan to meet in Daejeon on April 13 to ask Yeong-hee for her forgiveness.

Yeong-hee did not seem happy returning to Hanawon. She said, “My father still visits me in dreams and still asks to see his hometown. I don’t think I will be at peace until I bring my father’s remains to Korea.”

Choi Seong-yong, who was at the commemorative ceremony said, “The issue of POWs and abductees in North Korea should be resolved on the government level.

weappon@donga.com