A Lifeline of Love and Money

The letter arrived like a voice from the grave in 1992, along with a faded black-and-white photo of the family Shim Young Soo thought had died, possibly in a concentration camp, under the forbidding Communist regime of his native North Korea.

The letter, smeared with the tears of his brother and sister, informed Shim that they had managed to graduate from college and that their mother had died a natural death.

“Just before our mother passed away, she called out your name,” his siblings wrote to Shim, a 64-year-old South Korean businessman who escaped from the North in 1947 to join his father. He asked that his first name be changed to protect his relatives from official harassment.

One year after the letter arrived, Shim and his brother, an inventor of aluminum products, finally met in a Chinese town at the North Korean border, thanks to a private underground network dedicated to helping families reunite. It took bribes, a forged letter and a complex chain of contacts in four countries for the Shim brothers to realize their dream.

Nearly half a century of separation between capitalist South and Communist North melted away as Shim’s brother, who looked thin and old beyond his 61 years, ran to him at the airport.

They exchanged no words. They simply embraced and cried.

“Blood is much stronger than ideology and belief, so we were able to overcome differences and become family again,” Shim said. “No matter how many years pass, that will not change.”

Despite official restrictions on contact between the North and South, many families are taking extraordinary measures to meet in what many say is the only wish left in the last days of their lives. Some South Koreans are pouring small fortunes into frequent trips to China and elsewhere to rendezvous with siblings or supply them with a lifeline of medicine, clothes and money to help them survive the North’s widespread food shortages and worsening economic trauma.

North Koreans risk their personal safety by bribing officials or using forged documents to cross the border to reunite with relatives. Sohn Chul Ho, a South Korean businessman who found his older sister in 1992, is so worried about such risks that he does not write her directly but through a relative in China.

One man, Kim Jung Sung of Los Angeles, is even in the process of becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen at age 72 because he believes that citizenship will increase his ability to persuade North Korean authorities to allow him to visit his family once before he dies. He began corresponding with them in 1990 after more than 40 years of silence.

More than 5 million Korean families were wrenched apart during the tumultuous years after World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union split the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel in the infancy of the Cold War. Millions fled the Soviets’ rule by foot over the mountains or took to the seas in secret voyages south until the border was sealed in 1948, when the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung established a Communist regime. War deepened the divide in 1950.

Accounts of dramatic family ruptures and dogged quests to reunite underscore the tragic toll that war, politics and fate have taken on the lives of so many Koreans. But they also offer a glimpse into North Korea’s secretive society, now said to be hemorrhaging under a food shortage that experts believe will erupt into a full-blown famine of Ethiopian proportions by the spring.

Foraging for Food

From their reunions, South Koreans are bringing back tales of people dying from starvation in rail stations as they wait for trains to take them to the border to forage for food. But the trains rarely come these days; severe fuel shortages have slashed the number of runs, knowledgeable sources say.

Government food distribution, generally amounting to two cups of rice a day, has been stopped for as long as five months in some areas, said one well-connected South Korean businessman who frequents the border area. He also said the severity of shortages is prompting North Korean authorities to allow more people to travel to China for food, and they are expected to open the door even wider this year so people can scrounge for vinyl, pesticides, fertilizer and other needed items.

Others say the North is increasingly cooperating with efforts to locate relatives in its territory--or at least looking the other way. Such family members are now viewed as one of the best channels of money and materials needed to help the strapped populace survive. In the past, few North Koreans dared admit that their relatives lived in the “capitalist South” for fear of punishment, said Chon Am, a South Korean businessman who began corresponding with his sister in 1989.

“North Korean authorities can no longer control this,” Chon said. “They turn a blind eye to this activity and say, ‘You can go out and solve your own poverty problems.’ ”

But just as North Koreans extend their hands in growing desperation, younger generations of South Koreans are losing interest in the whole business of family reunification, many here say. Unlike their parents, who fled the North and left behind immediate family, younger South Koreans have never met their northern relatives and feel little personal connection, the elders say.

The recent defection of Hwang Jang Yop--a top North Korean ideologue who remains in Beijing, still awaiting resolution of his fate--renewed public interest in family reunification because a now-dead South Korean minister had claimed kinship with Hwang. But the minister’s widow, Shin Ok Sun, said their children are uninterested in pursuing contacts, if any actually exist, despite her husband’s deathbed request to keep the family ties strong.

The number of South Koreans who were born in the North had dwindled to 400,000 as of 1990, and many are now in their 60s and 70s, said a Unification Ministry official in Seoul.

“When an old guy stops coming to our office, we presume he’s died,” the official said. “It’s sad to see them go, one by one, and their children don’t care much about this issue. In 10 or 20 years, this issue is going to disappear.”

Interest in family reunification peaked in 1993--when 743 South Koreans applied for official permission to contact their northern relatives--but declined to 231 last year. All told, 860 of 2,580 applicants have located their families since 1989, when South Korea’s then-president, Roh Tae Woo, liberalized the law to allow the contacts.

Once Seoul gives official permission--which can be withheld, for instance when the applicant is considered a Communist sympathizer--people must use private channels to find their relatives.

From L.A. to Asia

That has spawned an international network of intermediaries that includes everyone from Korean clergymen in Los Angeles to pro-North groups in Japan to Korean Chinese living in border areas who can freely travel into North Korea to deliver packages, letters and cash. Some do the work as a favor to friends, others as a humanitarian service and others as lucrative side businesses fetching them $1,500 for each job--”enough for a house” in some remote areas of China, said Chon.

Members of the Korean American community once were the most frequent intermediaries and still figure in nearly a third of all cases. But China has become the preferred choice since it established diplomatic ties with South Korea in 1992, and it now provides the contact points for 58% of successful cases, according to Unification Ministry statistics.

An estimated 6,000 Japanese families are separated from their relatives who married Korean spouses and moved to the North. Through assistance from the International Committee of the Red Cross and the pro-North General Assn. of Korean Residents in Japan, an estimated 1,200 letters are exchanged each year.

In 1966, Keiko Nakasuji’s mother, who had remarried a Korean man, immigrated to North Korea with him and five of their children to escape pervasive discrimination against Koreans in Japan.

For many years, the homemaker in the western Japanese city of Himeji sent as much as $10,000 annually, along with clothing, blankets and even a stethoscope, to her family. Finally, in 1991, Nakasuji was reunited with her family members during a visit to North Korea arranged through the General Assn. of Korean Residents in Japan.

“When I met my mother again after 25 years, I hugged her and almost started to cry. Then she whispered in my ear, ‘Just imitate what I do.’ So I stopped crying and forced myself to keep talking. But it was so strange--I withdrew emotionally,” said Nakasuji, now 53.

Later that night, as they slept together, her mother put her face on Nakasuji’s chest and finally released her long-suppressed emotions. She started sobbing, and mother and daughter cried until the morning.

“She just kept apologizing to me, saying, ‘I’m sorry.’ Later, she told me she thought of committing suicide many times but couldn’t because she was worried about her children,” Nakasuji said.

Shim, the businessman who received the tear-stained letter from his siblings, fled to the South to follow his father, a journalist accused of leading an underground anti-Communist movement who escaped in 1946 after signing a phony statement of conversion to win release from jail.

The border was sealed before Shim’s mother and siblings could join them. But in 1992, contact was restored within the family through a complex chain of acquaintances: His brother in North Korea asked a neighbor to request help from his uncle in the United States, an acquaintance of a relative of Shim’s in South Korea who in turn contacted Shim.

The reunion in China was arranged by a Korean Chinese professor who helped forge a phony document to allow the brother to visit under the pretense of being a relative of his.

Tears and Reticence

For three days, the brothers ate, shopped, drank, cried and delicately danced around their differences in ideology and circumstances. But the differences were instantly apparent when both men, after the initial rush of emotion, warily checked each other for hidden microphones or trailing security agents, Shim said.

Shim’s brother, clad in a borrowed suit, could offer little more than a present of four dried fish and a few bottles of spirits--a lavish gift by North Korean standards. Shim had brought over two huge boxes of gifts, 88 pounds of excess baggage, filled with 10 sets of everything: underwear, socks, shoes, coats, calculators. He also brought gold rings from their father, still living near Seoul, who had tape-recorded a message to his long-lost son:

“My days are numbered. I hope unification will come so I can see your face before I die. Be honest, and patient.”

His brother had never used a shower and was incredulous at his brother’s South Korean-made goods, ranging from an electric shaver to even toothpaste, because he had been indoctrinated to believe that the South was a land of beggars.

The two tried to avoid talk of politics. But Shim said his brother was convinced that the United States intended to invade the North and that its routine “Team Spirit” military exercises with South Korea were signs of preparation.

“We are paranoid and are prepared to defend our country,” Shim quoted his brother as saying.

When the time came to part, Shim told his younger brother: “Forget everything you did, heard and saw in China; otherwise it will be very difficult for you to bear life in North Korea when you return.”

“He said, ‘Yes,’ ” Shim recalled, “and cried.”

Chon, the man who has been corresponding with his sister since 1989, doesn’t want to subject her to similar pain and disillusionment with her life and has refrained from trying to meet her in China. Instead, he travels to the border, and, at prearranged times, they wave handkerchiefs at each other from opposite sides of a river. He faithfully sends whatever his siblings request, and their demands have grown, “reflecting human desire.”

Initially, he said, they wanted medicine, and money to enable them to “eat to their hearts’ content.” Then they moved on to TVs, refrigerators and other electronic gadgets. Now they ask for such luxuries as Burberry raincoats and sunglasses.

Aid Without End

“One reason some separated families don’t want to reconnect is that you have to keep helping them,” Chon said. “If you help them a few times and stop, you’ll hurt them.”

But another reason some South Koreans don’t pursue prolonged contact is the shocking pain they feel on seeing their loved ones again.

Former South Korean Prime Minister Kang Young Hoon met his sister in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, during a high-level conference on North-South relations in 1990. North Korean authorities arranged the meeting over his objections that it was inappropriate because the two nations had not yet set up an official process to reunify families.

“On the last night, they brought this old lady to me and told me, ‘This is your sister.’ After almost 50 years, it was almost impossible to recognize her,” Kang said. “It was heartbreaking--she looked so old and miserable.”

But his sister, apparently well-programmed, repeatedly told her brother how happy she was under the Great Leader Kim. She rejected his gifts of candy and cigarettes, telling him to “give it to those miserable people in South Korea.”

Since then, they have had no contact.

Kang, however, still holds deep in his heart a dream to visit his home region near the Yalu River and, with the filial piety instilled by his Confucian upbringing, pay respects to the family grave site where 15 generations of his ancestors are entombed.

“The continuation of separated families for half a century is a national tragedy,” Kang said. “They are a symbol of the division of our country.”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau, Chiaki Kitada of the Tokyo Bureau and Times photo editor Hyungwon Kang in Los Angeles contributed to this report.