Korean-American’s Facebook post scuttles dad’s political career
A week before the June 4 election, lawyer and TV personality Koh Seung-duk was a sure bet for Seoul’s superintendent of education — a powerful post in a nation obsessed with schooling. The polls had him winning by double-digit margins, far ahead of his fellow conservative rival Moon Yong-rin and the liberal underdog Cho Hee-yeon. But Koh had not foreseen the social media bomb lobbed from New York City that would quickly destroy his campaign and lead to a surprise victory for the little-known Cho.
On May 31, his estranged daughter, 27-year-old Candy Koh, posted a long letter on Facebook imploring “the Citizens of Seoul” to vote for anyone but her father, a man who never “acknowledge[d] his own children’s existence” or “supported our education in any way.” By choosing to remain in Korea when his wife, daughter and son moved to the U.S. in 1998, she wrote, candidate Koh had cast aside his family while going on to “give lectures to children on how to study or how to ‘succeed’” and speaking to parents “on how best to educate their children.”
Candy Koh’s post went viral in Korean American circles and across the Pacific, provoking fiery indictments of her father. The next day, June 1, he convened a press conference to refute his daughter’s charges of neglect. Koh Seung-duk went on the offensive, accusing her of being a political tool of his opponent, Moon Yong-rin, and casting himself as a humble self-made man who’d been oppressed by Candy’s maternal grandfather, one of the founders of Korean steel giant POSCO. Koh’s supporters criticized Candy for airing petty familial resentments.
This strategy did candidate Koh no favors. Korean “netizens” continued to attack his reputation, bolstered by a mood of insubordination following the Sewol ferry disaster, in which the captain and crew abandoned ship, resulting in the drowning deaths of 300 high school students. Koh Seung-duk issued an overdramatic public apology, screaming a high-pitched “I’m sorry!” into a mike while raising his left hand and bowing from the waist. This image became an instant Internet meme, photo-stitched into pictures of rock stars and superhero comics.
“It had come down to the last few hours of campaigning for him to say an apology to me, but it’s just really bad acting,” Candy Koh told Al Jazeera. “People thanked me from Korea, saying, ‘I would have voted otherwise if I hadn’t seen your letter.’ It caught on in my favor.”
She believes the furor over the Sewol deaths strongly influenced voters. “A lot of people thought, ‘This was the stuff I’d have liked to say, but I’m not brave enough to say it.’ [Before the ferry disaster], people would just do things without questioning what they actually mean,” she said. Now, cognizant of a world where “you have the captain running off,” more Koreans are willing to take their elders and leaders to task.
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