Il Sung, whom she called Commander or Premier. In a 1999 interview, her contemporary Lee Min called Jong Suk “quite a beauty….Her face was that of a princess but her complexion was dark on account of her many years in the field. Her eyebrows were black and her eyelashes were long, making her truly attractive.” Lee added that Jong Suk was “quick, generous and had many talents” and contributed to morale by cooking, sewing, and acting and singing in shows that Kim Il Sung produced while he was in Siberia. Less flattering accounts of her claim she was “an illiterate with a dogged character.”
Kim Jong Il’s early childhood was disrupted by the Korean War and marked by twin tragedies: His brother, nicknamed Shura, died in 1947 at the age of three, and just two years later his mother succumbed to complications of childbirth—she was only thirty-one. Eight-year-old Jong Il was devastated; his younger sister, Kyong Hui, was still a toddler. A year or so later, when the war made the country too dangerous for the Kim family, Jong Il and his sister had to move out of their home in Pyongyang, ultimately settling in China. It didn’t help these two small children who had just lost their mother and the comforts of home when their father quickly married Kim Song Ae, more than a decade his junior, with whom he had been having an affair while Jong Suk was alive. They had two sons who competed with Jong Il for their father’s attention. Jong Il reportedly complained later in life that he had had a lonely childhood because his father was so busy. He initially refused to call his father’s new wife “mother” and spent more time at his paternal uncle’s house. The situation was frustrating for the Great Leader, who reportedly grumbled, “My whole attention is given to playing mediator between my wife and my son….He bursts in fury at his stepmother and even at me.”
Nevertheless, Kim 2.0 enjoyed all of the privileges and deference that came with being the first son of the country’s top leader. By every account, the Kims lived in luxury. Despite the wholesomeness that the regime attributed to Kim Il Sung, lauding his sacrifices and suffering for the people, he quickly settled into a life of comfort and ease more typical of an authoritarian who had absolute power and all of his country’s resources at his disposal. By the 1960s, North Korea had benefited from a decade of generous economic aid from the Soviet Union, China, and the Eastern European countries, and members of the Kim family undoubtedly appropriated large sums to satisfy their avarice. The most prominent member of the regime’s inner circle to defect in the 1990s, Hwang Jang Yop, reported that Kim and his family had “special royal villas”—possibly a hundred of them between Kim and his son by the middle of the decade. “Any place deemed to boast the slightest scenic beauty is designated as a site for one of these royal villas,” said Hwang. Secured by small armies of bodyguards, sentries, and servants, “these were elaborate palaces, with swimming pools, tennis courts, crystal chandeliers, and ballrooms, surrounded by moats and man-made lakes.” Ensconced in these lavish mansions with toys and servants at his disposal, and without a mother—the only person besides his father who could have imposed any semblance of discipline—Jong Il became a mini tyrant. Hwang recalled that he was “a conceited child who flaunted his status as the son of the highest ruler among his friends. This tendency to do whatever he liked worsened as he grew and turned into the overvaulting ambition to make his father’s power his own.”
As an adolescent in the 1950s, Jong Il hated authority and talked back to teachers, yet he could be charming; he threw over-the-top parties for his friends, zipped around Pyongyang on a motorcycle, and wore fashionable clothing none of his peers could afford or acquire. His schoolmates said the Great Leader’s son was “artistic, passionate, and social,” while Hwang said that his first impression of Kim was that of a “smart, curious, and ambitious youth.” (In fact, a senior South Korean official who met Kim Jong Il in 2000 at the first inter-Korean summit also concluded that Kim was “emotional and intuitive, rather than rational or logical.”) Jong Il and his friends were known to drive cars at fast speeds through the empty roads late at night, according to Helen-Louise Hunter, who mused, “One can imagine