Early life Park Chung Hee and Kim Ho-nam had an arranged marriage in 1936. On November 24, 1937, Park Jae-ok was born to the couple in the
Park family home in
Gumi,
Keishōhoku Province (
North Gyeongsang Province),
Korea, Empire of Japan. Her parents' marriage was unhappy. She got along well with her cousin, and wrote that she was happier living with her. Yuk Young-soo reportedly did not know that her new husband had a daughter at the time of their marriage, and Park remained unsure until her death of when Yuk had learned of her. One day, Yuk made a surprise visit to Park's house in Seoul. Yuk invited her to come live with them, which Park accepted, because she professed to longing to be in a family. Her father made a number of efforts to apologize to her, and to integrate her into his new family. He reportedly avoided saying anything unpleasant to her, and on multiple occasions tried to apologize when they saw each other at home. She reportedly met these apologies with coldness. Her interactions with Yuk were reportedly mostly positive, and while she liked Yuk as a person, she found it difficult to call her "mother". She noted that Yuk often seemed unhappy; she later heard from one of her father's employees that her father had been seeing other women. After high school, she reportedly otherwise avoided interacting closely with her father and his family. She went on to attend
Dongduk Women's University. During her freshman year in 1958, motivated by a desire to leave the Park household and be independent, she married , a politician and one of her father's allies, whom she would have two sons with. After her marriage, she learned that her mother had been living in a Buddhist temple in
Busan. She had a tearful reunion with her mother, whom she asked to come to Seoul. Her mother refused, and claimed to have found peace by being in the temple. Coincidentally, her father and mother had overlapped in Busan for some time, as he had worked as a commander of a military base within eyesight of the temple. However, Park felt it was unlikely they had known about each other being there.
During Park Chung Hee's presidency In 1961, her father launched the
May 16 coup, during which he seized control over the country. Fearing the new attention on her and how she could affect her father's reputation, she left for the United States. When she tried to contact her father or Yuk afterwards, she felt they brushed her off. She was rarely allowed to speak to her father. She tried to encourage her husband into entering politics, but her father and Yuk warned her against it. She never ended up living in the South Korean presidential residence, the
Blue House. Yuk was assassinated in 1974, and her father did not remarry. The last time she saw her father was in 1978. In 1979,
her father was assassinated. The night before the assassination, she reportedly saw him in a dream. In the dream, she saw someone inform her father that she was nearby, but he ignored her and walked away. == Later life and death ==