Documenting the “Flower of Reunification”: Lim Su-gyeong and the memories of Korean border crossing

Abstract

In 1989, 20-year-old South Korean college student Lim Su-gyeong crossed the Military Demarcation Line between the two Koreas while thousands of spectators around the world witnessed this controversial act. To this day, citizens of both Koreas cannot cross the border freely without both Korean governments’ permission, which is nearly impossible to obtain. Hence, when Lim visited North Korea, unbeknownst to the South Korean government, to participate in the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students as a one-person delegation representing the League of South Korean University Students, she shocked many with her daring act, which eventually resulted in her imprisonment in South Korea. She was vilified for breaching the National Security Law, therefore causing a huge embarrassment to the South Korean intelligence community, but enjoyed a completely opposite reception in the North. Dubbed the “Flower of Reunification,” Lim was hailed by the North Korean government as a heroic martyr who sacrificed herself at the altar of Korean reunification. Every step of the journey of this unusual South Korean visitor was memorialized in the North Korean documentary film Praise to Lim Su-gyeong, the Flower of Unification (Janghada, Tongilui kkot Lim Su-gyeong, Naenara Video Jejakso, Pyongyang, 1989), which challenges viewers accustomed to equating the North Korean brand of heroism almost entirely with the canonization of Kim leadership. How does this young South Korean female citizen figure in the long-standing North Korean tradition of identifying male leaders as the legitimate agents of national heroism? What can be gleaned from this North Korean documentary film about how the state remembers the trauma of partition? This article traces the journey of Lim Su-gyeong, one of the most controversial South Korean sojourners to have visited North Korea, as a way of exploring the politics of memory in North Korean documentary film. This article also poses challenges to the overwhelming tendency in scholarship concerning North Korea, which has focused on the figure of the founding father, Kim Il-sung, as the centripetal force of the national personality cult. In the process, the way the North Korean state envisions gender politics and the utopian notion of inter-Korean citizenship will be explored in tandem.