In nearly 90 years, Rhee Kun Hoo has learned a lot about surviving and thriving. The South Korean psychiatrist turned writer lived through typhoid, war, family bankruptcy and poverty before he was into his teens. In his 20s he was jailed for his role in pro-democracy protests. Throughout his medical career, he helped transform South Korea’s treatment of mental health, while raising four children. He and his wife now live among their children and grandchildren in a communal building in Seoul.
He is at home there when we talk over Zoom, with the help of a translator and an aide who repeats every question to him because his hearing is not what it was. Every so often a cat walks past the window in the garden behind him.
In his 70s, Rhee became a successful writer. His 2013 essay collection, I Want to Have Fun Till the Day I Die, became a bestseller, and Rhee became known for his gentle humour and wisdom. Now, at the age of 89, his 10th book and first English translation has another compelling title – If You Live to 100, You Might As Well Be Happy – which implies quite a lot of choice in the matter.
Rhee believes in choice, and especially accepting the choices you’ve made throughout your life. One way of finding happiness, he writes, is to choose to forgive and to let go of resentment.
Take the 10 months he spent in jail in the early 1960s. “I swore that once I was released, I would never treat any patients who were police officers, prosecutors, military personnel or prison guards, because these people put me, and people I deeply cared about, through so much suffering. I couldn’t really think beyond that hatred because I was in so much pain.” Later, he says, he realised how simplistic he had been. “I wasn’t born with an optimistic mindset,” he says, “but I worked on myself very hard to become more optimistic and see value in people. The world can never be perfect, but it’s good to be hopeful and believe that the world will change for the better.” Everyone “can learn to be more optimistic”.
The Korea that Rhee was born into in 1935 was in the last decade of Japanese colonial rule. He grew up thinking of himself as Japanese, and was a schoolboy during the second world war fought in eastern Asia. He says he received “an extreme wartime education. My life was full of propaganda and I was taught to harbour great hatred for the opponents, without really understanding what was going on.” Rhee was about 10 when Korea was liberated in 1945, and he “went through an identity crisis. I came to learn all the truth behind these years and I had to try very hard to overcome my biases.”
Life was about to get harder – Korea had been divided after the defeat of Japan, and, when Rhee was 14, hostilities broke out between the communist North and the US-backed South. The Korean war was “life-altering,” he says. “After all those years under Japanese colonial rule, South Korea didn’t really enjoy freedom for long.” His father ran a successful food business, and the family were comfortable, but the war bankrupted them and they lost their home, moving from one small run-down apartment to another. His father became ill and died at the age of 49.
Rhee lived in Daegu, one of two major cities that weren’t captured by North Korean soldiers. It became home to many refugees fleeing other provinces, and there was heavy fighting along the nearby Nakdong river, as UN and South Korean forces tried to hold off the Korean People’s Army. Injured soldiers would be taken to Rhee’s school to be treated. “A lot of South Korean soldiers’ corpses were laid out in the square and I would sometimes volunteer to move these bodies,” says Rhee. One uncle was abducted by the North Korean army and other relatives died fighting. In 1951, one of Rhee’s cousins was murdered in the Geochang massacre in which more than 700 unarmed civilians, including children, were accused of being communist sympathisers, rounded up and shot. “A lot of tragedies were going on all around me.”
Almost a decade later, Rhee was a student leader in the pro-democracy movement, protesting against the autocratic rule of Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first president. “The whole country was going through a lot of political corruption and all the anger people had been feeling about this corruption really exploded at the [1960] April Revolution.” Protests broke out at his university and around the country. “Students were infuriated about the fraud that happened with the election and with the government in general. There were a lot of clashes across the country, and there were armed police officers and military personnel, so the risks were really great. I was aware of these risks at the time but what I felt was anger.”
Newly married and working as a doctor, 24-year-old Rhee was later jailed for his part in the April Revolution. “It was as if the sky folded in on me,” he writes. On his release he discovered that because of his record he wouldn’t be able to study abroad, as he had hoped, or easily find a job. His life was overturned once again a few years later, when people’s political convictions were quashed. With a clean criminal record, Rhee suddenly became eligible for mandatory military service and had to spend three years as an army doctor.
After his time in prison, one place he thought might employ him was a psychiatric hospital – known as an asylum, where treatment was often harsh – that struggled to recruit doctors. It felt like his last resort, he says, but it turned out to be exactly the right place for him. It stretched him as a doctor, and he was able to have a bigger impact, working on large projects and helping to change South Korea’s treatment of mental health. He has learned, looking back over his long life, that whenever he tried to do things he thought he wanted to do, “I met a hurdle or had my wings clipped.” But the paths he was instead forced to take turned out to be even better. “Life is a story you should read till the very last page,” he writes. “No one ever knows what the world has in store for you.”
That said, he has to live with the fact that some of the decisions he made on behalf of his patients turned out to be disastrous, even though he always had their best interests at heart. One patient, a woman whom he believed was safe to be released from psychiatric hospital, took her own life. In older age, he advises repentance: “You should really look back and survey your life for all the unintentional harm you could have caused, all the people you could have unknowingly hurt, and even the sins you glossed over without thinking much of it.” A life without regret or mistakes is not possible, he says.
Rhee knows the value of gratitude but, for all its extreme hardships, his life has also had a fair amount of luck. He met his wife, Lee, as a teenager and they have had a long and happy marriage. As a child, he says boys not much older than him were being drafted into Japan’s junior air force, and many went on to be kamikaze pilots. When Rhee was 14, as the Nakdong river came under attack, local men and boys were conscripted to fight but he was again just too young. Being a pro-democracy activist and dissenter was dangerous, but he survived. Then, as a renowned doctor and professor, Rhee was financially comfortable in later life.
How much of happiness is down to luck? He doesn’t really believe in “the superstitious interpretation” he says. “There is changeable luck, which you can try to improve. I think it’s your ability to adapt to and learn from each situation in life. If you learn from your experience and be better, that means you’re bringing good luck into your life.”
You also need to work out what you actually enjoy and want from life. “If you’re to cross this long river of old age, you need something better than a lifeboat made of other people’s values,” he writes. “You need a sturdy, reliable one made of your own. What do you like, what inspires you, and what gives meaning to your life? Why don’t you find these out first?”
Still, he never expected to become a bestselling writer in his 70s. When he was a young doctor, busy professors would ask him to write medical articles in their place and he was happy to do it. “South Korea still had a lot of bias about mental health patients and there was a lot of stigma,” he says. “I wanted to change that mentality, to educate people, and help them understand mental health patients better.”
Opportunities and experiences often come from connections with other people, he says. “I’ve had a lot of good people in my life who have helped me, everyone who made me who I am today, so that’s what I really believe to be luck – the forces around me that helped shape my life.” None of us stands alone, he says. It’s why being part of a community, volunteering and helping others makes life meaningful, and why social isolation is to be avoided at all costs, especially as we age.
He has had to work at his rich social life, he says. People assume he has “some great magnet-like personality that just attracts people left and right without much effort on my part,” he writes. “The truth is, I’m usually the first one to reach out to people. My secret is to keep it simple and humble. When you overthink and try too hard, you hesitate to take action.”
Rhee believes the older generations, who grew up in a time when we were more socially connected, have a “crucial role” in encouraging this among younger generations. “I don’t think younger generations specifically lack empathy,” he says. “I just think, because the world is so fast-changing, and people have to adapt all the time, they don’t have as much room for expressing empathy as before. And especially because of the pandemic, many things have moved to virtual spaces. There aren’t as many personal and interactive human relationships and I think the younger generation is suffering from that lack. Humans are social animals: we need to avoid emotional isolation at all times and we need to communicate and connect with people.”
Related to that is his other principle: to share. It could be time, help, kindness, money or any number of things. “You can share even if you don’t have much,” he says. “You can just be kind to people you come across in your life. It can be small things.”
We would all find life easier, he thinks, if we had the ability to see things as they are. “Your mind is sometimes very complex, so it tends to simplify things, or blow things out of proportion. But understanding your life for what it is, as well as understanding what you’re going through emotionally, is the first step to living a happy, healthy life.”
For him, this means coming to terms with ageing and uncertainty about the future. When he was younger, it also meant developing a deeper understanding, and acceptance, of his parents. “You should put the words and actions of your parents in context,” he writes, “by lowering your expectations and seeing them for who they are: human. Only then can we finally escape the long shadow cast by our parents.”
We have become too fixated on happiness, he says, when I ask him about the mistakes people make when trying to find it. “The pursuit of happiness is a grand idea but essentially, happiness itself is an illusion. It’s an abstract, subjective notion so we shouldn’t really obsess over what constitutes happiness all the time. Often, people don’t realise the happy moments in their lives and only recognise that happiness in hindsight. We just go about our lives, unaware that we are happy in that moment.”
Rhee says that instead of thinking of happiness as something big, hopefully to achieve at some undetermined point in the future, “you should find joy in your everyday life”. In his book, he underlines living in the moment, and he points out that most lives are made up “in large part, of ordinary days rather than memorable delights or extreme sorrows. If you continue to find fault with ordinary days, you’ll end up spending most of your life discontented and bored. But if you seek out whatever joy and fun you can in those mundane days, your life, as the total sum, will be a lot of fun.”
If You Live To 100, You Might As Well Be Happy by Rhee Kun Hoo (Ebury Publishing, £16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
