Hoping to Open the Door to My Ancestral House

To me, the death of North Korean President Kim Il Sung is not like the demise of any other world leader.

I feel his passing keenly even though I’ve never met him. How can I help it? This man has so profoundly affected my life and that of my family. My reaction to his death is intense; I haven’t been able to think of much else except Korea since I heard the news Friday night.

Countless times over the last four decades, I had cursed the evil man and sometimes even wished him dead because of the suffering he was inflicting on his own people. But now that he is gone, I wish he had lived just a little longer--long enough to have met with South Korean President Kim Young Sam for an unprecedented summit meeting July 25 in Pyongyang. I’m also fearful of a power struggle that is expected to ensue in North Korea and the potential confusion his exit could create. I pray that there will be no bloodshed.

In a trick of fate, Kim Il Sung was the most influential stranger in my life. He is, in part, why I live today in California, and not in North Korea, on our country estate in Tanchon by the East Sea, where tigers, leopards and wolves roamed at night even in this century. For centuries my ancestors had lived and died there. My great-great-grandfather, Soo-Il Kang, an exceptionally strong man, once tangled with a leopard that tried to attack him as he was returning home after an evening with friends. My parents, who live in San Francisco, remember going to sleep at night hearing wolves howling near their home.

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I left my native land on my mother’s back, when my parents crossed the 38th Parallel and sought freedom from Communism in 1946, less than a year after Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule after World War II. My family, fourth-generation Christians, feared we would be persecuted by the Communists had we remained.

Since then, there hasn’t been a single day when members of my family have not prayed for a miracle: A miracle that would enable a peaceful reunification of the divided Korea--the last remaining legacy of the Cold War. But as long as Kim Il Sung was in power, my parents’ wish and hope of returning to their home seemed just a dream. Still, through half a century, we have carried the old keys to our house everywhere we moved--just in case. Now, as the oldest member of my generation of the Kang clan, I’ve been given the keys. Will the keys open the doors to my ancestral house with slate-colored tiles and upturned eaves?

Like 75 million ethnic Koreans around the world, I have wished and prayed for reunification of my ancestral land. We Koreans are among the earth’s most homogenous people, yet we’ve been caught up in geopolitics because of the Korean peninsula’s strategic location.

The Korean longing for reunification-- tong il-- has eluded us because it was never the priority of Kim Il Sung or South Korean leaders, who have used the division and “the threat” of armed invasion from the other side as a way to maintain and perpetuate their power.

But for members of the more than 10 million separated families like mine, nothing is more urgent than reunification.

“We’d have to live to be more than 100 years old, if we must wait for politicians to reunite our motherland,” my father said Saturday. “South Korean politicians keep talking about the high cost of reuniting like Germany. But I’m saying no price is too high to make our people whole.”

Until the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which ushered in an era of freedom for South Korea, reunification was a forbidden subject. The government controlled its monopoly on the debate. South Koreans didn’t talk about it because they feared the government could invoke the sweeping national security laws to get them on trumped-up charges.

But as South Korea became more open and confident, two Germanys were reunited and North Korea’s nuclear program attracted renewed interest on the Korean peninsula, the talk of reunification became more real.

With Kim Il Sung gone, I’m more hopeful that my parents may be able to visit their home before they’re 100, and that I’ll be able to visit the graves of my ancestors and perform a progeny’s duty--even if belatedly.

My generation of Koreans grew up singing “Our Wish Is Reunification” and “Go Away, the 38th Parallel!” instead of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Even in Los Angeles, we Korean Americans sing those old songs because that’s what we believe.

We have brought to America memories of our ancestral land, memories of the clear rivers and breathtaking mountains, memories of poverty, the indelible scars on our psyche of the brutal Japanese occupation, the Korean War and the three decades of South Korean military rule during which we have not been able to speak our minds even from here for fear of retribution to relatives back home.

Kim Il Sung’s death has made me retrace my steps from beneath the upturned eaves of my ancestral home to Los Angeles, and how my dislocation has made me become part of that group called Asian Americans: People from across the Pacific who have not one but several places to call home.