Meeting Im Su-kyung: A Heroine from Our Student Days

When I was living in Hong Kong and working for IYCS in the late 1980s, I had the opportunity to interact and collaborate with many of the regional NGOs, student movements and activist networks that were then based in the city. Hong Kong was quite a remarkable meeting place in those days. People from across Asia involved in student movements, democracy, human rights, development, peace and social justice regularly crossed paths there.

One organization I came to know particularly well was the Asian Students Association (ASA). I remember Boonthan from Thailand and Mani from the Philippines working from ASA’s rather modest basement office somewhere around the Yau Ma Tei area, along Nathan Road. I used to attend many of their meetings and discussions whenever I could. Those gatherings brought together young people from very different parts of Asia. The discussions ranged from student rights and democracy to social justice, international solidarity, peace and the political changes then taking place around the world.

It was in this environment that I first heard discussions about the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students, which was going to be held in Pyongyang, in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or North Korea. The festival eventually took place in Pyongyang from 1 to 8 July 1989. It was a huge international event, bringing together thousands of young people and representatives of student, youth and political organizations from around the world. It was one of the largest international gatherings North Korea had ever hosted.

What I remember is that talking about North Korea did not feel particularly sensitive within these circles at the time. Of course, everyone knew that Korea was divided and that there was deep hostility between the governments of North and South. But among many progressive and left-leaning student movements, the discussion was often framed less in terms of military confrontation and more around peace, dialogue and the reunification of the Korean peninsula.

Some student organizations were planning to attend the Pyongyang festival, and, as I remember it, there was interest among people associated with ASA as well. There was a certain excitement surrounding the gathering. For most of us, North Korea was a distant and largely inaccessible country, a seemingly forbidden land. Suddenly thousands of young people from around the world were travelling there.

It is important to remember the historical atmosphere of 1989. The Cold War was still very much alive. The Berlin Wall was still standing when the Pyongyang festival took place in July. Germany remained divided. Korea remained divided (and still is!). Yet extraordinary political movements were already unfolding across Eastern Europe. Within months the Berlin Wall would fall, communist governments across Eastern Europe would begin collapsing, and divisions that had seemed permanent for decades suddenly appeared less permanent.

There was a feeling, particularly among young people, that the political map of the world might actually be changing.

And then, during the Pyongyang festival, one young South Korean woman suddenly captured international attention.

Her name was Im Su-kyung (also written in English as Lim Su-kyung or Lim Soo-kyung). She was just 21 years old, a student at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. She travelled to Pyongyang as a representative of Jeondaehyop, the National Council of Student Representatives, without authorization from the South Korean government. Her journey therefore directly challenged the restrictions imposed by South Korea’s National Security Law and the broader political barriers separating the two Koreas.

And her arrival in Pyongyang created a sensation.She participated in the World Festival and became one of its most visible personalities. She met North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, appeared before large gatherings and attracted enormous attention from the North Korean media. The North Korean authorities celebrated her as a symbol of Korean reunification and famously described her as the “Flower of Reunification.”

For North Korea, of course, her presence also had enormous propaganda value. But there was another dimension to her visit. Im was young, confident, articulate and very different from the images of South Koreans that North Koreans had been accustomed to seeing through official propaganda. Her very presence therefore carried meanings that neither government could entirely control.

What transformed the episode from a controversial visit into something truly dramatic, however, was her decision about how she would return home. She could have left North Korea through another country, essentially reversing the route through which she had entered. Instead, she insisted that she would return directly across the divided Korean peninsula through Panmunjom.

That was an extraordinary decision. Panmunjom was not simply a border crossing. It was, and remains, one of the most symbolically charged points of the entire Cold War: the place where the two Koreas faced each other across the Military Demarcation Line inside the Demilitarized Zone.

She was eventually accompanied by the South Korean Catholic priest Father Moon Kyu-hyun, who had travelled to the North and joined her for the journey home.

Then came the image that many of us remember. On 15 August 1989, Korea’s Liberation Day, after 46 days in North Korea, Im Su-kyung and Father Moon walked across the Military Demarcation Line at Panmunjom into South Korea.

She knew very well what was waiting for her on the other side. She was immediately arrested.

For us young students and activists watching these events from Hong Kong, however, the complicated legal and geopolitical arguments surrounding her actions were almost secondary to the extraordinary image before us.

Here was a young woman, roughly the same age as many of the people in the student movements around us, walking across one of the most heavily guarded and politically charged boundaries in the world.

She knew that she would be detained. And she crossed anyway.

Her photograph seemed to be everywhere. Newspapers carried her picture, and television showed footage of her travelling through North Korea and appearing before huge crowds. Then came those unforgettable pictures from Panmunjom.

For many young activists of our generation, she represented something quite simple and powerful: a young person prepared to challenge the authority of the state in the name of peace and Korean reunification. At the time, we did not necessarily understand all the complexities surrounding North Korea, the character of its political system, or the extent to which the North Korean authorities themselves were using her presence for their own political and propaganda purposes. Looking back more than three decades later, those dimensions are much clearer.

In 1989, from our perspective as young student activists in Hong Kong, Im Su-kyung appeared extraordinarily courageous. She had crossed a boundary that everyone had been told could not be crossed.

The consequences for her were severe. She was prosecuted under South Korea’s National Security Law, sentenced to imprisonment, and spent several years in prison before eventually being released. Her journey had made her famous, but it had also required a very real personal sacrifice.

Nearly nine years later, this happened.

In May 1998, I was in Gwangju (then still commonly written in English as Kwangj) in South Korea, helping to organize a major gathering of social and human rights activists from across Asia and Korea. More than 200 people participated in what became the International Conference to Declare the Asian Human Rights Charter—A People’s Charter. It was a large and, in many ways, unique gathering that extended over about a week. Activists from many parts of Asia came together in Gwangju to discuss human dignity, democracy, justice and the protection of human rights. The location itself carried enormous significance. Gwangju was the city of the May 1980 democratic uprising, a place associated with immense sacrifice but also with the long struggle for democracy and human rights in South Korea.

One evening during the conference, my good friend Lee Jae-eui asked me to accompany him to a hotel bar, where a number of his friends, journalists, activists and other people from Gwangju, were meeting. Lee wanted to introduce me to some of the significant personalities of the city, people who had played roles, directly or indirectly, during the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980 and in its aftermath.

At some point during the evening, Lee suddenly grabbed me by the arm and pulled me towards someone. “I want to introduce you to someone special,” he told me. Standing there was a Korean woman, smiling and friendly.

Then Lee said: “This is Im Su-kyung.”

For a moment, I was genuinely shocked. Here, completely unexpectedly, I was standing face to face with one of the heroes of my student days. Almost nine years earlier, I had watched her on television from Hong Kong and seen her photograph in newspapers as she travelled through North Korea and then crossed back through Panmunjom. To us, she had been almost an iconic figure, a young student who had taken an enormous personal risk in the name of peace and reunification.

And suddenly she was standing in front of me.

I told her how much we had admired what she had done in 1989. I told her that many of us had appreciated the courage it must have taken to make that journey, to cross back through Panmunjom knowing that she would be arrested, and then to endure the years of imprisonment that followed. What struck me was how humble and kind she was. She was simply warm, friendly and gracious.

Lee then helped us take a photograph together. It is one of those photographs that, with the passing of time, has become much more valuable to me than I could have imagined when it was taken. Then I lost it for many years! Recently, while going through some old photographs, I came across that picture again. And it was finding that photograph again that made me want to write this reflection about the remarkable Im Su-kyung.

Im’s own story did not end with imprisonment.

Years later, the former student activist who had once been arrested for illegally travelling to North Korea would enter the political establishment of South Korea itself. In the April 2012 parliamentary election, Im Su-kyung was elected to the 19th National Assembly of the Republic of Korea as a proportional-representation member of the Democratic United Party, then the country’s principal opposition party. She served in the National Assembly from 2012 to 2016.

When I think back to those discussions in the ASA basement office in Hong Kong, that is perhaps what strikes me most. We were living through the final months of a world whose divisions had seemed almost immovable. The Korean peninsula was divided. Germany was divided. Europe itself was divided between East and West. Yet only a few months after the Pyongyang festival, the Berlin Wall came down.

The Korean division, of course, proved far more enduring.

But for a brief moment in the summer of 1989, the sight of a 21-year-old South Korean student walking across Panmunjom seemed to suggest that perhaps even this division did not have to be permanent. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, one can debate Im Su-kyung’s politics, the wisdom of her actions, the North Korean regime’s exploitation of her visit, and the much wider political struggle surrounding the Korean peninsula. Those are legitimate historical questions.

For us in 1989, Im Su-kyung was a brave young student activist who had defied power in the name of peace and reunification. And when I finally met her in 1998, I discovered someone who was not only courageous, but also remarkably humble and kind.

That old photograph of the two of us is therefore much more than a photograph for me. It connects two very different moments in my own life and two remarkable periods in modern Asian history. Perhaps that is why, after finding it again all these years later, I felt compelled to write about the amazing Im Su-kyung.