Tides of the Times Divide, Then Unite Korean Family

Kyu-hyun Wang was a teenager when war broke out in Korea on June 25, 1950, tanks rumbling through his central Korean village and gunfire rattling the morning calm.

One by one, his four older brothers went off to fight for the communists of North Korea.

“I lost four sons to the mother country, and I’m not about to lose my last one,” he recalls his father saying a year into the war. Wang was sent to a relative near Seoul, South Korea’s capital.

“I won’t be gone long--maybe a month,” he consoled his wailing mother as she packed him a bundle of rice cakes.

Wang, then 16, never saw his parents again. Two years later, North and South Korea signed a cease-fire, stranding Wang and millions of others with relatives on the other side.

It was 41 years before Wang, as an American citizen, would learn whether his parents, four brothers and sister were even alive.

For more than three decades, Wang, a 64-year-old cardiologist, and his wife, Jane, have lived comfortably outside Minneapolis, having left behind the ruins of postwar Seoul for suburban America.

For years, Wang described himself as an orphan. Privately, to his wife, he spoke often of the 13-year-old sister he left behind, the sweet girl who went sledding with him over frozen rice fields.

“She was the only girl in the family--she was everybody’s princess, especially mine,” says Wang, seated in the kitchen of his Eden Prairie home. “But I had no way of knowing if she was still alive.”

Then, in the late 1980s, he learned of a Korean preacher in Canada who had persuaded North Korea to allow reunions between Korean Americans and their North Korean kin.

Wang sent what little he knew: his home address in 1951 and the names of his parents, brothers and sister.

Nine months later he received a reply: “We have found your family. You are free to write to them directly.”

Wang’s homeland, known as the “Hermit Kingdom,” had been annexed in 1910 by the Japanese, who sought to incorporate Korea into its empire. But after Japan’s surrender in 1945 at the end of World War II, the United States and Russia divided the rabbit-shaped Korean peninsula, choosing the 38th parallel as a halfway point.

“The line was drawn arbitrarily, and even dear, loving brothers can be made enemies so easily,” Wang says.

His hometown, Kaesong, the ancient capital that was home to the Koryo Dynasty kings of the 10th to 14th centuries, lies 40 miles northwest of Seoul. At the time, it was on the southern side, but it ended up north of the armistice line at the war’s end.

When the communists came charging through Kaesong, one brother joined them. Another left his wife and three sons for the north, and when the communists retreated, a third brother went back with them. Then the fourth headed north.

Hoping to shield his youngest son from the lure of communism, Wang’s father sent him to the port city of Inchon.

Wang, with not even a toothbrush or a single coin, walked for three days, spending nights in abandoned houses. He found work in Inchon as a houseboy for American soldiers.

“If I had known it was going to be a permanent separation, I would never have left home,” Wang says. “I was 16. Even if my father whipped me and asked me to leave, I wouldn’t have left.”

His family was less than a half-hour car ride away, but completely out of reach.

“There was no way of communicating. They had no way of knowing whether I made it to Inchon, and I had no way of knowing what happened to them,” Wang recalls.

He put himself through school, paying his way by working the graveyard shift at a hospital telephone switchboard. There he fell in love with a nurse who came by to admonish him for falling asleep on the job.

In 1964 the young couple chose to carve out a new life in the United States. Three months after arriving in Minneapolis, they married.

“The next day, the local newspaper had an article saying ‘Buddhist couple married in Christian church,’ assuming that all Asians are Buddhist,” he recalls with a chuckle. “It was very amusing.”

Within five years, they had three children and had become U.S. citizens. Thoughts of his family in North Korea were never far off, but “I thought maybe I’ll never find out and maybe I’ll never be able to see them again.”

The day he received a letter saying “I am the sister you are so desperately seeking,” with photos of them as children, was one of elation, Wang recalls, a smile breaking across his face. “It’s indescribable. I was so happy and excited.”

Wang learned then that his mother had died of a stroke two years after he left. Wang understands it differently: “She died of a broken heart.”

His brothers, Wang learned, returned one by one, except the eldest, who died in combat. His father died seven years after his wife, never knowing what had happened to the cherished youngest son who had been so sickly as an infant.

Wang, acknowledging that others suffered far worse during the war, calls his tale just one of the many among Korea’s divided families. While Koreans overseas have had some luck in tracing their kin, tens of thousands of others in South Korea still have no idea whether their aging brothers and sisters are still alive.

“This is a human tragedy. There is no reason why we should have to go through this tragedy,” Wang says, his voice breaking.

In 1992, Wang and his wife secured rare permission to visit Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. They flew in via China and were taken to a hotel.

That afternoon, returning from sightseeing, Wang spotted a gray-haired woman lingering in the lobby. It was his sister.

“We approached together, and we just hugged,” he recalls.

She was no longer his baby sister but the mother of three sons, a grandmother. “I might not have recognized her if I passed her on the street,” Wang says.

The Wangs were allowed to stay for two nights at the three-bedroom Pyongyang apartment his sister and her husband share with two sons and their families.

The family is well off by North Korean standards. Before retiring, Wang’s sister was a teacher, her husband a director at the government news agency. One of their sons became a newspaper reporter, another an architect. North Koreans cannot travel abroad freely, but several relatives studied in Moscow.

They own a television, although it receives only government stations. A portrait of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s leader, hangs in the living room, and they all wear pins with his picture on their lapels.

The self-described orphan found himself surrounded by in-laws, cousins, nieces, nephews wanting to know how the boy who left home had managed to survive. “They thought I was the one who was struggling,” Wang says.

“I can still remember that dinner table--it was like a feast. In Korean, we say the table was so heavy that the legs would break,” Wang recalls fondly. “That was before the famine struck” in the late 1990s.

Later he went to his parents’ grave in Kaesong, bowing before them and laying out the traditional Confucian offerings of wine and fruit. “That was when I wept,” Wang recalls.

He has since been back twice, once in 1995 to help equip a Christian hospital and last month for a medical convention.

The doctors’ symposium and the mid-June summit between the two foes gave Wang hope that the two Koreas--and the thousands of families divided by ideology--will be reunited in his lifetime.

“I’d just like to shout: ‘Forget about politics! The Cold War is over. Let bygones be bygones.’

“Let’s put our heads together so that our people--this small peninsula people--will get reunited and live more happily and more joyfully, the way life is meant to be.”

Meanwhile, they share their lives through photographs and letters. When U.S. sanctions are eased later this year, Wang will be able to send them money.

“I would like for my family to have the chance to come visit us,” he says. “But for now, it’s enough just knowing they’re alive.”