For nearly two decades, Ko Yong Suk and her husband, Ri Gang, have lived a modest, middle class existence in the United States, working long hours at their dry cleaning business to provide a comfortable life and opportunities for their three children.
But before embarking on their pursuit of the American Dream, Ko and Ri lived a life of luxury inside one of the world’s most reclusive and repressive regimes. Ko’s sister, the late Ko Yong Hui, was married to former North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Her nephew is Kim Jong Un, the country’s current leader, who is known for his penchant for threatening nuclear war.
For the first time since defecting to the United States with the help of the CIA 18 years ago, the couple broke their silence in a series of interviews with the Washington Post that offer a fascinating look at life inside the mysterious Kim regime and insight into the childhood of the man who would become one of the United States’ most hostile adversaries. To protect their identities here in the U.S., the Post story uses the names by which they were each known back in North Korea.
Keeping up with the Kims
The Washington Post writes that Ko was “catapulted” from a modest upbringing to the “top echelons of North Korean society” when her sister became Kim Jong Il’s third wife, in 1975.
Soon after, Ko was married to Ri — a husband chosen for her by the future supreme leader himself — and taking care of her own children as well as her sister’s at the Pyongyang compound, where they all lived together.
“We lived the good life,” Ko told the Post, which included dining on caviar and cognac and taking joyrides in Kim Jong Il’s Mercedes-Benz.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kim-jong-uns-aunt-speaks-up-after-18-years-of-silence-in-the-u-s-202250887.html
