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A former North Korean academic recollects North Korean leader Kim Jong-il's boyhood based on his experience as a private tutor for the late Kim Il-sung's children in the 1970s, in an article in the September-October issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Kim Hyun-sik (76) is now a research professor at George Mason University in Virginia. He fled North Korea, where he taught Russian at Pyongyang University of Education, in 1992 and arrived in the U.S. later. Titled "The Secret History of Kim Jong-il," Kim Hyun-sik remembers Kim Jong-il as a "blushing and shy student" when he saw him first in October 1959.
The dictator-to-be was a 17-year-old senior in high school at the time. Anxious about his son's proficiency in Russian, Kim Il-sung sent Kim Hyun-sik to the elite Namsan Senior High School to evaluate his son¡¯s proficiency. Kim Hyun-sik recollects that despite his proficiency in Russian grammar, Kim Jong-il performed poorly in an oral Russian exam, silently taking the exam without advertising himself as a son of the "great leader."
Especially during the oral exam, he blushed and perspired. Kim says he still remembers what he asked the student and what answer he gave 50 years ago. "I love and respect my father most,¡± the putative dear leader said. "I enjoy films more than sports."
Kim Hyun-sik says he was told that after he fled North Korea, his family in North Korea were sent to a labor camp and executed afterwards. He confesses to such great pain when he thinks of what Kim Jong-il did to his family that he frequently imagines killing him and then committing suicide.
Kim Hyun-sik's memoir about Kim Jong-il and his own story was published in South Korea as a book titled "A 21st Century Ideological Nomad" in 2007.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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