Pool photo by Kim Hong-Ji
Park Geun-hye waved to crowds after her inauguration in Seoul in February, becoming the country's first female president. More Photos »
SEOUL, South Korea — Her mother was shot by an assassin. Her father, a staunchly anti-Communist dictator, was similarly killed. And she survived a vicious razor attack to the face.
Do You Live Near the Korean Peninsula?
With the escalating provocation by North Korea, The New York Times is interested in hearing from residents of the Korean peninsula, Japan, China and the region.
Nobody doubts the toughness of South Korea's new president, Park Geun-hye, whose upbringing has made her as steely a leader as they come. Now at the center of an escalating crisis with North Korea, Ms. Park, 61, is her country's first-ever female leader, a fact that her rivals in the North have raised to taunt her.
Stories of her mental toughness are legend — on learning that her father had died, her first concern was whether North Korea was preparing to invade. Her first question after awakening from an operation after the razor attack in 2006, which left a scar across her jaw, was how her party's campaign was going.
Ms. Park is so tough-minded that even in South Korea, still one of Asia's most patriarchal societies, her gender has mainly been a nonissue after some initial jitters.
"In the past, during the election campaigning, there was some doubt on whether a female president would do well at a time of crisis," said Choi Jin, head of the Institute for Presidential Leadership in Seoul.
"But through this current standoff with North Korea, she dispelled whatever doubt there had been about a female president by showing that she was a strong-minded leader."
However, now that South Korea's prized economy appears to be rattled by months of crisis, critics and supporters alike wonder if Ms. Park may have gone too far in presenting herself as an ultratough leader and what some now call the "neuter president." Just as some critics accused Hillary Rodham Clinton of becoming more hawkish to win over skeptics, Ms. Park took office seemingly ready to do battle.
She filled the top security posts in her cabinet and presidential staff with former generals and decided to offer no real concessions until the North backs down, a change from some past administrations.
Even officials in the Obama administration, which has also taken a hard line against the North, have privately expressed fears that she might go too far if North Korea made a limited but deadly assault. To try to prevent an overreaction, the administration recently sent two stealth bombers to fly a practice run over South Korea to prove to the country's leaders that they would not be left to face the North alone.
Although Ms. Park does not highlight her history-making role as the South's first female president, her gender has been raised by leaders in Pyongyang, the North's capital, where society clings to traditional Confucian notions of women's roles even as South Korea has begun to shed them. Last month, the North said her "venomous swish of skirt" was to blame for the tensions besetting the peninsula, a reference to an old Korean expression for women who forget their place.
The verbal tongue-lashing, which Ms. Park did not respond to directly, led some analysts to speculate that the North may have been underestimating her resolve, or at least testing her. If that was the point, it did not work.
Ms. Park and her military have parried the North's over-the-top threats of nuclear holocaust with vitriol of their own; the military recently threatened to wipe the Communist dynasty "off the face of the earth" if it dared to launch a nuclear attack. And, breaking with the tone of her archconservative predecessor, Ms. Park told her generals that if the North staged even a limited attack, they should strike back "without political consideration" and without waiting for her approval.
She has something of a personal stake in taming North Korea. North Korean commandos came within striking distance of her father's office in 1968 before they were repelled. And the assassin who killed her mother was believed to have been sent by the North to kill her father. (Her father was later killed by his own disgruntled spy chief.)
Ms. Park's ability to set any worries about her gender to rest has everything to do with her personal history.
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