After Disgrace, Penance for Son of S. Korean Candidate

Son Kum Ja developed her first frightening symptom at the age of 20, when her eyelashes fell out. It was leprosy. By the time she was 27, she had lost all her fingers and was deported to a leper colony here off the southern coast of the Korean Peninsula.

Now Son, 50, has a new neighbor on Sorok Island: volunteer Lee Chung Yon, the 34-year-old son of Lee Hoi Chang, the man who was expected to be South Korea’s next president.

A former Supreme Court justice with a reputation as “Mr. Clean,” Lee Hoi Chang won the ruling party’s presidential nomination in July, only to see his popularity plummet after the revelation that both his sons had won exemptions from South Korea’s compulsory military service. Lee insisted that his sons had done nothing illegal and were excused because they were underweight. But public speculation that the sons might have dieted or pulled strings to avoid the draft has proved politically devastating.

In September, setting a Confucian example of filial loyalty, Lee’s eldest son, an American-educated economist, came to Sorok Island to do penance by volunteering to care for the worst-afflicted, geriatric leprosy patients.

“When he arrived, we assigned him to the hardest job, which is the room where the senile patients are,” said Dr. Kim Yoon Il, director general of what is now called Sorok Island National Hospital. “For ordinary volunteers, it is shocking to see. . . . Many are disfigured, some have Alzheimer’s disease and they cannot control themselves.”

Lee Chung Yon works from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Kim said, feeding and bathing patients, changing and washing bedpans, trimming hair and cutting fingernails of those who still have fingers.

“He is not a very healthy-looking guy or a well-built guy, so it must have been hard for him,” Kim said. “When he first arrived, his face was tense. Now his face is lit up. I think he’s beginning to understand the meaning of volunteerism.”

Lee Chung Yon is not giving interviews, Kim said, and he did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Other than a delegation of politicians from the ruling New Korea Party, he has received no visitors, islanders said.

He is so reclusive that even within the confines of the island, few of the healthy patients have seen him. He has talked with a fellow staffer over a cup of soju, the Korean national liquor. But Kim said the young man spends most of his free time reading.

“We haven’t seen his face yet,” said Park Hun Joon, 54, who roamed the country as a beggar until he was brought to Sorok Island in 1962. “He’s serving in an area that’s off-limits even for other patients. . . . It’s like a prison. We have no opinion [of him], it’s the authorities who must deal with that sort of thing.

“But it’s nice that someone has come here to provide service,” Park added brightly. “It’s not that easy.”

By Southern California standards, exiling one’s first-born to a leper colony may seem an extreme response to bad press. But such gestures are not unprecedented in South Korea. After leaving office in 1988, former President Chun Doo Hwan, now in jail on corruption and treason charges, spent more than a year in exile at a Buddhist monastery after apologizing to the nation for abuses of power during his reign.

Lee Chung Yon reportedly has a master’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and worked in a South Korean think tank. His younger brother is said to be a graduate student at Boston University. But former employers and ruling party spokesmen have declined to release personal details.

So far, the older son’s service on Sorok Island has done nothing to improve his father’s popularity. Lee Hoi Chang continues to run third in the polls, trailing 17 points behind the front-runner, opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, and 10 points behind independent candidate Rhee In Je.

If the trend holds--and South Korean politics are famously volatile--the Dec. 18 elections could throw the ruling party out of power for the first time since 1961.

Earlier this week, Lee publicly broke with President Kim Young Sam in an effort to differentiate his reformist policies from the dirty-money politics of the past, a move that has splintered the ruling party.

Will Lee’s latest gambles--allowing his son to toil on Sorok Island and attacking the president--bring him victory? “I wouldn’t bet on it,” said Yonsei University political scientist Hahm Chaibong.

Win or lose, Lee and his sons will have to live with the public suspicion of draft-dodging, considered a serious moral lapse in a nation menaced by more than 1 million North Korean soldiers on the other side of a tense border. So sending Lee Chung Yon to Sorok Island or letting him go--even while insisting on his innocence--was not a political mistake, analysts said.

“It doesn’t matter if the Korean public forgives him or not,” said Park Jai Chang of Sook Myung Women’s University in Seoul. “He will at least succeed in not deepening the public animosity.”

Roh Man Re, 51, a patient, said she approved of Lee Chung Yon’s service. “Because of his fault, his father has been disgraced, so it’s right for him to repay,” she said.

Whatever the motives for the sojourn, residents of the island believe that Lee Chung Yon, whose family is Roman Catholic, will grow spiritually from the experience.

The Sorok Island leper colony was founded in 1910 by Western missionaries. But in 1916, the Japanese colonial government used forced labor by the lepers to build a hospital and began forcibly relocating all victims there. Although leprosy is not particularly contagious, children were taken from parents and allowed to meet only once a month, at a distance of three yards, with the wind at the visitors’ backs.

During the World War II, patients were involuntarily sterilized and subjected to gruesome medical experiments and acute food shortages under a brutal Japanese hospital director, who was later assassinated by a patient, said Park, who now gives tours of the island’s museum.

After the war, however, South Korean authorities continued the Japanese policy of confinement, and it was not until 1963, after all the patients had been treated with drugs that arrested the disease and eliminated the threat of contagion, that those who were cured were allowed to leave.

Many had nowhere to go, having abandoned or been rejected by their families. “They don’t have to push you out. You learn that you can’t live with them, so you leave,” said Park, who developed the disease at age 10 and left home to spare his family.

Others were too disabled to make a living outside. “If I had enough money I would live independently, but I don’t, so I have to stay here,” Son said. She married a fellow sufferer and bore three healthy children who all now live on the mainland. Life on the island has improved so dramatically, however, that several patients said they would not consider leaving now.

South Korea has about 20,000 leprosy sufferers, of whom 1,096 were classified as in need of multi-drug therapy treatment at the end of 1996, according to the World Health Organization. Last year there were 39 new cases--mostly people who contracted the ailment years ago but whose illness is only now being diagnosed.

Hospital director Kim said he hoped the scourge--which spreads only amid poverty, malnutrition and poor hygiene--would be eliminated by 2020, and faster if South Korea’s economic juggernaut continues.

The average age of the 1,000 patients on Sorok Island is nearly 69, and many of the patients have written wills directing that their savings be used to buy all their comrades two bottles of alcohol and new clothes, with the rest to be given to charity, Kim said. “Because these people have experienced maltreatment all their lives, they are not afraid of dying,” he said. “They believe the next world cannot be this bad.”

Recently, volunteer work has gained popularity among young South Koreans. Students and even several politicians have quietly come to join the Austrian nuns who work on Sorok Island, Kim said. A former neurosurgeon, Kim came to the island a year ago as a volunteer and already counts several of the patients as friends. He wouldn’t say why he had come--just that he has no regrets.

“I only wish I had come earlier,” he said.

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.