The Korean Unification Generation Gap

President Clinton visited South Korea this week for talks with President Kim Young Sam and made front-page news with a proposal for talks among North Korea, South Korea, the United States and China. How important are these and other Korean issues to Korean-Americans? JIM BLAIR spoke with members of three generations--the first, the so-called 1.5 and the second--about how large Korea looms in their lives.

JAMES RYU

Editor and general manager, The

KoreAm Journal, Gardena

*

I am in the 1.5 generation, kind of caught in between, where you were born in Korea and grew up to 5, 10, 15 years and [then] came to the United States. You’re caught between the first generation who sees themselves as completely Korean but living here and second generation who were born here and have lived as Americans.

Some people say this is the lost generation, that there’s no identity. And some people say [we] get the better of both worlds. I feel this is my home. I would never go back to Korea to live, but I have this attachment to the country that I came from.

In this reunification we are caught in a damned if we do and damned if we don’t type of situation. If there is a reunification, obviously South Korea has to deal with the North Korean economy and they’re definitely going to lose a lot; the economy in Korea is going to go down temporarily. I think that’s in the minds of a lot of the politicians so they’re not really pushing it as fast as people would like.

But then people want reunification and a lot of the people want to see it happen in their lifetimes--especially my parents’ generation, who are in their 60s and who have gone through the war and who still have families that they love up there. They want to be able to see these people before they die.

STEVE BONG YUB CHO

Grocer, past commander of the Korean Veteran’s Assn., vice president of the Advisory Council on Democratic and Peaceful Reunification of Korea, Los Angeles chapter

*

Hopefully before our first generation passes away we will see South and North Korea unified. They had a bloody war and we lost over 3 million lives back in 1950 through 1953. There still isn’t peace, only an armistice treaty.

All Koreans, either first or second generation, want to see democratic and peaceful unification of South and North Korea. That’s our goal. We do not want to see any bloodshed. All we want is our Korean people united.

What should be done? First of all, President Kim and President Clinton talked about four nations being involved but it has in fact, as President Clinton indicated, got to be handled between the North and the South. Anything that has to do with the unification, it’s got to be generated from our people south and north.

This is the only country still divided by north and south. All the other countries are unified. The north Korean and South Korean people are the same--brothers and sisters.

You probably heard the news the other day that the North Koreans wanted to break the armistice treaty. Right now the North Korean government is telling its high school and middle school kids to join the army to invade the south to unify the country. This obviously cannot be done, but this is how North Koreans see things. Do you know how much human rights [have suffered] in North Korea? They only have only one television channel, one paper, one radio channel. They don’t know what’s going on in the outside world and the people are starving to death.

MINAH PARK

Senior English literature major, UC Irvine, and executive director, Korean-American Leadership Conference.

*

To tell you honestly, reunification is not very important. As a matter of fact, within our conference we and actually went out and surveyed college students from various campuses all over California [about reunification] and the input we’re getting from them is not very good. It’s not that they’re not interested, but it’s very low on their priority list. It’s like it doesn’t affect second-generation Korean Americans because we’ve been brought up here in America so our lives are here.

There isn’t friction between the generations on this point, however. I think our parents understand why we don’t have this total interest in it that they do. They understand that we’ve grown up here.

What’s important to the second generation? It’s more of a concern of unity within the Korean American population here in America. In previous generations there was strong unity because they were coming to a foreign land where there weren’t a lot of Korean Americans. Now, as the generations are going by, people are just dispersing and doing their own thing.

Let me give one example [at] UC Irvine. In previous years there have only been a few Korean college groups. Now there are more than 30. They have separate interests and that’s perfectly fine, but they have never all come together to do one activity. And that seems to be a problem that Korean college students are having on the other campuses as well.