by KAI MA
photos by MARK EDWARD HARRIS
ONE of the few memories I have of my father has to do, strangely, with North Korea. We were on an airplane together; I was a child, much too young to know where we were going or where we’d gone. But I do remember what he’d told me: “You are lucky to be able to fly like this, and go wherever you wish.” His Korean was peppered with heavily-accented English, and when he glanced down at me he smiled.
“In North Korea,” he said, as he pointed out our tiny window, “this is impossible.”
Growing up in the United States, this was all I knew—or cared to know—about North Korea. That it was a place, like East Germany or the Soviet Union, where the people could not leave. But during the 1990s, that began to change. I was in my teens, and aware of the shocking, bold headlines: the 1994 death of Kim Il Sung, a famine that was spiraling out of control. Then in 2000, the momentous summit that brought leaders from the North and South, Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae Jung, face-to-face for the very first time.
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The now iconic image of the two Korean leaders shaking hands was disseminated throughout the globe as the most promising sign of peace on the divided peninsula in 50 years. “One small step for reconciliation, one giant leap for reunification,” stated the Korea Times, an English-language daily. That summer, 200 families reunited with relatives in the Korean capitals of Seoul and Pyongyang. With a group of Korean American friends, I watched these highly-publicized, emotional reunions from a television in a noodle bar in Seoul. It was impossible to peel my eyes from the screen, as Korean people—some very old, in hanboksor in wheelchairs—clutched relatives they’d not seen in decades.
I was a 23-year-old Baltimore-born Korean American visiting Seoul for the first time on my own. But despite never having lived on Korean soil, like many other Korean Americans, I felt more than just sympathy for these reunited family members. My reaction was visceral. During these televised reunions, the Koreans bowing to their parents recalled memories of aunts and uncles paying their respects to my grandparents on New Year’s Day. The faces, even the words in Korean that I could only partly understand, felt familiar. The only aspect more devastating than their initial separation was how an aging Cold War embroilment would force entire families to break apart once again.
Fast forward to 2009. Korea, still separated at the 38th parallel with some 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in the South, is dominating the headlines once more. Yet the news is not as hopeful as it once was. North Korea, after launching what it called a satellite into orbit, is again deemed a threat by the United States, South Korea, Japan and other nations. At the time of this writing, an American Navy destroyer was shadowing a 2,000 ton North Korean freighter that Pentagon officials believed contained missile components. News had also broke that some 100,000 North Koreans packed Pyongyang’s main square for an anti-U.S. rally, denouncing expanded international sanctions the United Nations implemented to punish the regime for its recent missile launches.
Meanwhile, two American journalists, including one Korean American, were found guilty of “hostile acts” and illegal entry into North Korea and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor.
With North Korea seemingly in the news almost daily, I am reminded of my younger self in 2000, trying to make sense of what’s happening with this troubled peninsula. And I am shaken by these recent developments, not just as a person of the world who is alarmed by the threat of war, but as an ethnic Korean who feels linked somehow to the events unfolding an ocean away. North Korea—a distant, mysterious place I mainly know through books, often-sensational news reports about its dictator Kim Jong Il, and personal family tales—matters to me.
I am not alone.
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“The pain is still fresh for many Koreans because the division of our ancestral land only occurred two generations ago,” says Sean Chung, who emigrated from South Korea to the United States at age 4.
The 39-year-old physician adds, “North Korea’s bellicosity is a destabilizing force in a place where I still have relatives. Plus, I’m concerned about any country that acquires nuclear weapons and has a stated desire to use them.”
For John Choi, 28, a recent law school graduate in Los Angeles, there’s a worry that the communist state’s behavior could influence how Koreans are treated in the United States. “Perceptions about North Korea as a terrorist state and part of the ‘axis of evil’ (a designation coined by former President George W. Bush) can directly lead to discrimination and questioning of [Korean Americans’] patriotism and loyalty,” he says. Furthermore, “we’re citizens of a country that had a direct role in dividing the country.”
In highlighting the human rights crises surrounding famine and refugees, others note that North Korea isn’t just an issue that pertains to ethnic Koreans. “North Korea should matter to all of us as human beings,” says Carolyn Scholl, 39, of San Diego. “There is so much suffering, injustice and unfathomable atrocities occurring there…that we should all be appalled.”
After living as a Korean American expatriate in Seoul the last four years, Charse Yun says he was surprised by the apathy of many South Koreans regarding their northern brethren. “Realizing this, I feel it’s urgent for Korean Americans to care [about North Korea],” the 37-year-old copy editor says. “If we don’t, who will?”
And some Korea experts say this is a responsibility that we must accept, especially now, as tensions rise between the United States and the North. “Korean Americans have to know and understand North Korean issues,” says professor Suh Bok Hyuk of the Center for Peace Studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, “[so they can act] as a mediator between Washington and Pyongyang.”
But more than a matter of responsibility, this issue is deeply personal.
***
I did not learn that my family hailed from the north until I was an adult. In 1952, a year before Korea was split into two permanently armed camps, my grandparents left what is now known as North Korea. With my infant mother and then-7-year old uncle, they fled Kaesong for the southern capital of Seoul. For the next 20 years, they lived a mere 37 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, not knowing if their relatives who’d remained in the north—including my grandmother’s own mother—were dead or alive.
My family crossed borders again in the 1970s—this time, to the United States, where I, along with my brother and more than a dozen cousins, was born.
I embraced the discovery of my family’s northern roots and even romanticized it.
I was told only these stories: How my grandmother’s uncle risked his life to illegally cross back into North Korea to find his wife and children. How my grandmother spent the remainder of her life, in Seoul and Los Angeles, crying for her own mother and obsessively dreaming about her. How my Korean American grandfather, who after being diagnosed with cancer and choosing against chemotherapy, returned to South Korea and ventured as north as possible to bow to his parents’ graves for the last time.
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The pain and anguish that Korea’s division has caused is something that I will never truly understand; yet, these politics have shaped my own life in significant ways. As a young adult, I became curious about grassroots activism in modern South Korea—and this was years before I’d learned I had blood ties in the famine-stricken North. But after my mother discovered some Korean-language literature in my bedroom on unification politics, she accused me of affiliating with communist and North Korean sympathizers.
I was floored by her accusations. She even threatened to disown me for traveling to Seoul in 2000 to learn about the reunification movement, at one point, taking down the framed photos of me in the house and saying, “I no longer have a daughter.”
Fortunately, her words had no literal meaning. My trip, however, did come with costs. It created, to my shock and confusion, a subtle rift with my mom. And to this day, reunification is an off-limits topic in our home.
The trip also changed my life. I felt personally and politically invested in the politics of Korea’s division; exposure to this history brought me closer to understanding my now-American family.
And in many respects, the mystique surrounding North Korea is what eventually influenced me to become a reporter. I was forced to remain outside, peering in. And that wasn’t close enough.
So, I traveled as close as my guts (and funding) would allow: to the home of a North Korean family living in Seoul. It was the winter of 2006, and with the aid of a translator, I reported on North Korean defectors and their adjustment into capitalist South Korea. Together, we shared meals and conversations.
I remember in particular sharing a laugh with one defector, a former geologist in the North, about being “Korean foreigners” in Seoul; for example, we commonly found that our accents—my American one and his North Korean one—turned heads on the streets and subway.
When I asked the geologist to describe what he missed about home, he said, “North Koreans share everything. If we had only one slice of apple, we would cut it, however small, until everyone had a piece. [My son] still comes home with his snacks in his pocket. He knows he cannot share it with all his classmates, so he chooses to not eat it at all.” He glanced at his son, then 9, who was connecting a cord to the family computer. “I don’t want him to lose that part of North Korea,” the geologist lamented. “But, he will.”
This is a conversation that I’ve kept hidden from my mother, even though my desire to learn her history, and therefore mine, is the reason I knocked on this defector’s door to begin with. Sometimes, the more Korean immigrants try to protect us from Korea, the more we want to go back.
Surely, not all Korean Americans feel the urge to converse with North Koreans, or even identify as Korean, but it is not uncommon for the peninsula’s division to actively shape and inform the experience of ethnic Koreans born or reared in the United States, whether we acknowledge it or not. From being labeled a “North Korean spy” for criticizing Washington’s policies toward Pyongyang, to growing up with family members traumatized by civil war, Korean Americans continue to feel the reverberations of a decades-long clash that literally sliced their motherland in half.
Indeed, the conflict, from 1950 to 1953, produced more than two million civilian casualties and separated 10 million family members, not to mention, resulted in the physical devastation of the country. We cannot deny that the war, with the resulting poverty of Korea as well as the U.S. image in the South largely as a heroic savior, influenced many to immigrate to the perceived nation of plenty, the source of the delectable chewing gum, chocolate bars and oranges that American soldiers often handed out to Korean children.
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And, yet, while scholars have studied and written articles and books about the politics of the Korean War, little attention has been paid to the event’s personal meanings for Korean Americans—an omission that led Ramsay Liem, a Boston College psychology professor, to embark on an oral history project delving into this legacy.
“My own sense is that for a lot of second-generation Korean Americans, there is a big gap in knowledge about their family histories, and part of that gap is the period of the Korean War,” says Liem, who has so far interviewed about three dozen people for the project, which was also adapted for a multimedia exhibit titled Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the Forgotten War. “I had always been concerned about how political repression and other historical traumas influence [what] people feel comfortable talking about and how silence can be a harmful burden. Those kinds of experiences made me feel that at some point, Korean Americans should have the option to explore our history of war and bring it much more into the public eye, both for our own sakes, and also for the larger agenda of achieving peace and unity on the Korean peninsula.”
In fact, Liem’s work in this regard also represents a legacy inherited from his own immigrant parents. “They came to the United States in the 1930s before Korea was divided, but devoted their lives to Korea’s struggle for independence, an end to military dictatorships and reunification,” says the second-generation Korean American. “The most profound legacy they passed on to me and other members of my family is the conviction that Korea must be reunified and its Cold War divisions healed.” Technically, the North and South are still at war because only an armistice was signed to stop the conflict, but not a peace treaty to end the war. Liem notes that the United States and China were the actual signatories of that armistice with North Korea, meaning, “The U.S., as much as South Korea, is still at war with the D.P.R.K.”
And recent statements by Washington and Seoul seem to highlight the lingering hostilities. In June, during Obama’s meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, the U.S. president called North Korea’s nuclear ambitions a “grave threat” to the world, and criticized the statements the Pyongyang government has made in retaliation to sanctions from the United Nations. He vowed that “under no circumstance are we going to allow North Korea to possess nuclear weapons.”
During a White House press conference with the two leaders, a reporter asked Lee whether he believed his country was under threat of attack from the North. Lee responded, “They will think twice about taking any measures that they will regret. North Korea may wish to do so, but of course they will not be able to.”
As the U.S. military tracks a North Korean cargo freighter that is reportedly heading towards Myanmar with prohibited materials, the global community is becoming increasingly anxious over what may happen if the ship is intercepted. North Korea, according to new reports, has already announced that such an encounter would be interpreted as “an act of war.”
The delicate dance between Seoul, Pyongyang and Washington has been inherited and passed on, from generation to generation, from Korea to the States. Now that an increasingly-frail-looking Kim Jong Il, who suffered a stroke last year, is 68, and power maybe transferred to his son, North Korea will not only matter. It may radically transform the lives of the millions of Koreans who live on the peninsula and beyond—especially if the regime does collapse or if the states do reunify.
The prospect of an unstable North Korea, or an outbreak of war between the two states or with the United States, is disturbing to many, but a source of anxiety that Koreans and Korean Americans have harbored for more than five decades. And though the generation that lived through the war is getting older and dying off, many Korean Americans of a new generation—distant from the actual historical event but armed with this inherited legacy—can play a unique role.
“We have an opportunity to help Americans understand the Korean side of the issue, and to help our Korean families understand the American side of the issue in a way that an arms control wonk from D.C. can never do,” says David Kang, professor of international relations and business, and director of the Korean Studies Institute, at the University of Southern California. Kang, born in the United States but whose father lived through the Korean War, was a frequent interview guest last month when U.S. media outlets sought expert opinions on North Korea.
He says, “As Korean Americans, we really do have the ability to help change, shape and form this very important issue.”
Let’s hope we live up to our inheritance.
Additional reporting by Kathleen Richards
