A Life Pursuit: Lee Jae-myung's Journey From Factory Worker To Presidential Front-runner

 
Lee Jae-myung, 61, the liberal Democratic Party’s (DP) presidential candidate, is currently leading in approval ratings for the June 3 election. He has lived a tumultuous life — starting from humble beginnings as an underage factory worker to becoming a former governor of Gyeonggi, Korea's most populated province. 
   
His unwavering passion for education eventually gave him the platform to become an established lawyer representing marginalized people, a civic activist and later a two-time Seongnam mayor.    
 
Emerging from a life of poverty, Lee, currently a second-term lawmaker, has long had his eyes set on the highest office.
 
Impoverished beginnings
 
 
Lee was born in a small farming village in Andong, North Gyeongsang, in October 1963, according to the lunar calendar — though his legal birthday is marked as December 1964.
 
His mother was a diligent farmer. In contrast, Lee’s father was a gambler and became broke. The farmland owned by Lee’s family was sold to a third party, and his father ran away.
 
Lee barely had any school supplies during his elementary years, and as a result, was hit by schoolteachers and forced to clean toilets as punishment. The school library became a shelter for Lee, as he indulged himself in literary imagination.
 
Eventually, Lee's runaway father made his family move to Seongnam, Gyeonggi — about 220 kilometers (136 miles) northwest of Andong. However, nothing much changed in Seongnam.
 
His father, still debt-ridden, brought the family to a shantytown in the city and told a young Lee to earn a living by working full-time. Lee quit his studies in February 1976, right after he had graduated from elementary school. Lee and his brothers began working at nearby factories.
 
It was while working there that his interest in academic studies began to grow.
 
In 1977, while working at a factory that manufactured commercial refrigerators, he realized he did not want to live as a factory worker permanently. However, his father did not allow him to study at night school.
 
“Don’t you dare think about that,” his father told him. Young Lee sobbed the whole night.
 
 
 
In another factory, Lee's left arm was injured after a press crushed his elbow. This left him with a permanent disability, but that didn't bother him.
 
While working, Lee grew to dread the toxic work culture, where senior laborers pushed younger workers to fight each other.
 
Lee believed power stemmed from education after seeing Hong, a high school graduate and white-collar employee at the factory, reprimand the senior workers — most of whom had not completed middle school. 
 
Since then, Lee searched for ways to obtain a high school diploma. His passion grew bigger, as he deemed earning a general equivalency diploma (GED) the only path to go from being a factory worker to higher positions in society. 
 
However, Lee's father still did not support him. Whenever Lee tried to study at night, his father scolded him for using electricity, saying it was a “waste of money.” His father cut the tuition for the cram school where Lee studied for his GED exam.
 
Despite this being a difficult time, the entire world did not turn against Lee. Kim Chang-gu, head of the cram school Lee attended, allowed him to take classes for free. He encouraged Lee by saying, “You are someone who's born to learn." 
  
In May 1980, Lee passed the GED exam. In his journal, he wrote, “Today is the best day of my life.” 
 
Never giving up on his dream
 
 
However, Lee’s father, after seeing his son’s GED diploma, told Lee to find a job instead of entering a four-year university. Lee felt his father was blocking his chance to go to college.
 
“I'm unsure whether his objection originated from a belief that my future would not change by studying or from a guilty conscience over not supporting my studies. But one thing was clear: my father was deeply filled with misery down to his bones,” Lee wrote in his journal.


While working in factories, Lee had three goals: not being beaten up by others, escaping from poverty, and living freely. To do so, a college education was necessary.
 
Lee worked in the factory during the day and would rush to a cram school to study for the college entrance exam at night. He'd finish class at 11 p.m., head to a reading room for self-study and return home at 4 a.m. 
 
His sleep-deprived efforts did not betray him. In the state-run exam, he earned a score high enough for him to be accepted in nearly all academic majors in Korea.  
 
 
In 1982, he entered Chung-Ang University’s College of Law, which offered scholarships. 
 
About a month after Lee’s college graduation in 1986, his father fell ill. Lee saw his father’s tears for the first time in his life.
 
“The tears of my father […] did not come from regret about leaving his life nor resentment over all the hardships he went through," he wrote in his journal. "They were an expression of grief and pain," which, Lee said, was due to his father not seeing his success. 
 
In 1986, Lee passed the state bar exam. Lee’s father sobbed once again.
 
Sharing knowledge
 
 
Lee’s career started at YMCA's Seongnam branch as a volunteer offering legal advice to the public. He was a trainee at the Judicial Research & Training Institute at the time.
 
That was the first footprint that Lee left as a human rights activist in his neighborhood, Seongnam.
 
Although Lee was an aspiring legal expert at the time, he took his mission seriously. He sat with temporary workers who did not receive their proper wages and wives who were at risk of domestic violence.
 
During his college years, Lee refused to become a student protester despite his friends’ calls to join. He decided to make democratic changes while staying within the system.
 
Lee felt some distance from the student protesters and activists who appeared to give meaning to theoretical words without experiencing the cruel reality that laborers faced.
 
Yet, his friend Lee Young-jin, a student activist from a working-class family, changed Lee’s perspective.
 
When Lee Young-jin said activism was “not a big deal” despite his poor everyday life and that “a lot of people had died while protesting,” Lee was shocked and felt a sense of guilt.
 
Lee’s backbone: Seongnam
 
 
In the second year of his judicial training, Lee decided to open his office in Seongnam as a lawyer.
 
“My brothers are still working in Seongnam,” Lee said, noting that the city's workers and poor people need a lawyer like him.
 
In a 1988 diary entry, Lee wrote that Seongnam was his “second hometown,” where he had spent half of his life. He also wrote that he “cannot depart from Seongnam.”
 
In 1989, Lee hung up a frame holding a phrase embodying his will to “dedicate himself to defending the public in civil cases to bring peace to people.”
 
Lee’s debut was in the limelight. Lee claimed he was the only “human rights attorney” in the city.
 
When Hwang Chang-hwa, the policy director at a coalition of labor unions in Seongnam, was arrested, Lee provided legal defense for free.
 
Hwang founded a research organization to educate factory workers about labor-related laws and helped establish labor unions. Labor activism grew bolder, which prompted state authorities to apprehend the behind-the-scenes forces — including Hwang.
 
A local court handed down a one-year prison term to Hwang. Due to Lee’s appeal, an appellate court reduced the sentence to eight months.
 
 
Lee took those labor-related lawsuits personally.
 
Lee ran a consultation center for factory workers in Icheon, Gyeonggi. He supported forming a labor union, joined labor-related rallies frequently and defended activists when they were arrested.
 
Lee’s voice and actions went beyond labor activism. He later targeted the establishment and corruption.
 
In 2002, Lee traced land development corruption involving then-Seongnam Mayor Kim Byung-ryang, who received bribes from land developers in return for land use change — from a commercial zone to a residential zone. 
 
Lee impersonated a Suwon District prosecutor to obtain a confession from the mayor. After revealing the recording, Lee was sentenced to pay a fine of 1.5 million won ($1,056) on charges of impersonation.
 
 
In 2003, Lee also obtained 18,595 public signatures to build a city-run hospital after two general hospitals went out of business. However, the Seongnam city council decided to put the agenda on definite suspension in 2004.
 
The city’s decision triggered a group of activists to illegally occupy the main chamber of the city council. Lee, a group commissioner, was accused of obstructing public duties and was ordered to pay 5 million won.
 
After facing multiple criminal charges, Lee became a politician as a member of the liberal Uri Party in 2005.
 
“Now, I have turned 40," Lee wrote on his online blog in January 2006. "Instead of insisting on my faith and will, it is time to embrace public voices.” 
 
Lee ran for a mayoral seat in Seongnam the same year without success. He failed again to win a seat to represent Seongnam’s Bundang-A district in the 2008 general election. 
 
However, he ultimately served as Seongnam mayor twice from 2010 to 2018 and Gyeonggi governor from 2018 to 2021. He has served as a lawmaker representing Incheon's Gyeyang-B district since the 2022 by-election. He was elected once again in the general election last year. 
 
His fate for the upcoming five years will be decided at the June 3 presidential election.  

BY HA JUN-HO, PARK JIN-SEOK, LEE SOO-JUNG [lee.soojung1@joongang.co.kr]