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In Commemoration of Lee So-seon, the "Mother of the S. Korean Working Class"

  
Kyunghyang Shinmun wrote the following:

The Debt We Owe Lee So-seon

Lee So-seon, mother of labor activist and martyr Chun Tae-il, died on Sep. 3. Mourners are now queuing up to pay their respects to her.

The story of Lee's intense life of justice, intensity and hardship is a highly moving one. If her son, Chun, was a patriot and comrade of our era, Lee was like a mother to Korea's labor, democracy and human liberation movements.
 

Lee devoted half her life converting the light that her son turned on into hope for the future. She pushed ceaselessly at the small hole her son had pierced in the pitch-black skies above Korea's workers, gradually making it wider.

She devoted herself entirely to realizing her strong desire that even the poorest of lives be lived with human dignity. Her life was one of love itself.

Chun Tae-il, who set fire to himself on November 13, 1970, left a note to his mother asking her to be sure to achieve that which he had not yet managed to do. Lee promised him, "As long as I remain alive, I will do what you intended to do."

She did not even have time to grieve over the loss of her son. Chun's will was just, and his will became that of his mother. The unjust world that had enraged her worker son enraged his mother, too.

But although Lee was determined and resolute when it came to injustice, the path she took was always a reassuring climb to the comrades that accompanied her. This is why everybody referred to her as a mother figure.

Lee was a symbol of solidarity. She would be present wherever there was a struggle for human dignity. Even recently, she would drag her aching body to the sites of sit-in protests.

At the beginning of this year, she visited Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction workers fighting against redundancy firings and stayed up all night in a tent beneath the crane of Korean Confederation of Trade Unions activist Kim Jin-suk.

In the harsh era of the 1970s and 1980s, too, Lee's virtues of solidarity and sympathy lent great strength to the survival of the democratic labor movement.

In the face of adversity greater than that of death itself, she never lost hope or became discouraged. Her life was one in which life through death cultivated hope.

Even in the midst of hardship, Lee never gave up her dream of a world without discrimination. "Workers have fallen into the river and there is nobody to hold out a hand to them," she said last year. "Part-time workers can do nothing. What are politicians doing? I really hope I see a good world before I die."

Lee, who spent 41 years as a fighter and mother to all, bearing in her heart the memory of her burned son, died in the fervent hope that labor discrimination would disappear.

Lee proved as founded the hope that the world can be changed by fighting against injustice and banding together with justice. Now it is our turn to inherit the promise that she made.

http://english.khan.co.kr/khan_art_view.html?artid=201109051320167&code=790101

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