By Brian Park –
Since the Dec. 17 death of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, news outlets have continued to cover the world’s reaction, but the reverberations of his passing have yet to reach its full effect.
Across the 38th Parallel, South Korean’s daily life appears to have gone unaffected, and the same can be said of many Koreans spread across the globe. Certainly many might have taken a moment to reflect on the matter, but have since about with their lives.
In 2011, the deaths of Osama bin Laden and former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi were met with celebration. But reaction to Kim’s death has been relatively tempered, as Koreans and non-Koreans alike have adopted a wait-and-see approach to the transition of power.
Unlike Gaddafi’s death, Kim’s is not a dramatic conclusion to a long period of oppression nor provides a sense of closure like bin Laden’s. Instead, Kim’s death is a middle-point—an end to one chapter and the start of another. If anything, Kim’s death has only sparked more uncertainty on the Korean Peninsula, and it simply serves as the newest, tragic reminder of a people divided.
For my family, it is a reminder of what was lost forever.
My grandfather, Yang-Kwon Park, was born on January 6, 1926, in Yangduk, a city in the Pyeong-an namdo Province of North Korea. My great-grandfather founded an elementary school in addition to owning a successful farm, and the family was considered part of the Korean upper class.
At 15, my grandfather was sent to Seoul, now the South Korean capital, to attend high school, and later, Seoul University. But in 1950, he returned home to be with his family during the early stages of the Korean War.
It is around that time his older brother was shot and killed for speaking out against the Communist Party. Fearing for their children’s lives, my great-grandparents sent my grandfather and his two younger brothers back to Seoul. My great-grandparents’ plan was to secure their home and livelihoods before reuniting with their children.
My grandfather and his younger brothers boarded a raft, leaving behind their parents and an older sister, and eventually made it safely to the south.
That would be the last time my grandfather and his brothers would see their family. They have not heard of their whereabouts since.
***
My family, like many Korean families, moved from Los Angeles to Orange County after the 1992 riots. We settled in Fullerton in 1994, and I attended Laguna Road Elementary School. Koreans make up 11.5% of Fullerton’s population, the second-largest minority demographic in the city, according to 2010 Census figures.
Like the other Korean American kids at Laguna Road Elementary, I was often asked in the schoolyard if I was North Korean or South Korean. My response was always quick. “South,” I’d say. “My family is from South Korea.” At the time, there was no way I could comprehend the broader implications of my answer because it was simply beyond the scope of a fourth-grader. Since the establishment of the 38th Parallel as a boundary in 1945 and the Korean War Armistice Agreement in 1953, the Korean Peninsula has been seen through Western eyes as the too-close-for-comfort existence of good and evil.
The South had long been a dependent of the United States’ military backing and authority, and is now one of our country’s greatest allies and one of the pillars of the East. Meanwhile, North Korea, shrouded in secrecy, is seen as a paradigm of evil.
It is with this rudimentary knowledge that I would align myself with the South as a youth, but like many other first-generation Korean Americans, that division has blurred with age.
***
In 1976, my grandfather and his family left Seoul and settled in Los Angeles. Four years earlier, his youngest brother had settled in Arizona.
He made his home here and has watched his family grow. I was the first of his grandchildren, followed by seven others.
I first learned my grandfather was from North Korea while I was a student at Parks Junior High. Over the years, I have gained a better understanding of his story, and in the days since Kim’s death, the tragedy of my grandfather’s life has gained greater significance in my own.
At 25 and with no established ties in the South, my grandfather raised his brothers supported them through college. He gave up a degree in history to obtain his teaching credentials—a faster process that allowed him to quickly work and support his siblings.
In his later years, my grandfather became an accomplished poet, even publishing a book before he died in 2006. In it, he writes of his family in America and the joy of watching his children and grandchildren grow. But there is a tinge of sadness in his words, as many of the poems hint of the family he lost in North Korea.
Both of my grandfather’s surviving brothers have also written books. The youngest, in Arizona, published an encyclopedia of cacti and succulents for Korean readers. The other brother, who still lives in Seoul, published an extensive memoir in 2003 that recounts his life in the North, the pain he and his brothers have endured since 1951 and also features a comprehensive family tree. The poetry book and memoir are the only evidence of my great-grandparents’ existence and an enduring reminder for future generations of my family.
After he and his brothers started families of their own, they purchased a plot of land as close to the Demilitarization Zone as possible. Their reasoning was simple and heartfelt: Should they die before the reunification of the two Koreas, they wanted to be buried as close to the North as possible—as close to their family as they could be.
My grandfather’s final request before he died of complications from pneumonia was that his progeny take his ashes back to North Korea, if and when the border opens, to be buried in his hometown.
***
Pundits say that while Kim Jong-Un will serve as North Korea’s new leader, his close circle of generals and other political figureheads will have more clout than during his father’s reign. As generations pass, the power that was once centralized in Kim Il-Sung, then passed to Jong-Il and now to Jong-Un, will weaken. It gives reason to hope, as slight as it may be, that reunification of the two Koreas is possible, but the political climate on the peninsula is unlikely to change enough in my lifetime that I may personally carry out my grandfather’s wishes.
As generations pass in my own family, we remain connected to my grandfather and his family by his poetry and his brothers’ books. It will be a family guide I will pass on to my children, should I be so fortunate. Then one day, perhaps they will bring closure to my grandfather’s long overdue reunion.
Story by Brian Park/FullertonStories.com
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