A Plea for Reunions

Korean American pastor Hee-Min Park of Young Nak Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles was conducting the funeral service for a 95-year-old member of his congregation Monday, when the tragedy of his divided homeland stabbed him in the heart once again.

“Here he was, dying in America after being separated from his wife for 50 years,” said Park, senior pastor of the 8,000-member church. “He had lived alone all these years, hoping someday to reunite with his wife” from whom he was separated during the Korean War.

Park lamented that Koreans remain the only people on Earth who cannot visit their loved ones or even write to them--more than a decade after the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union tumbled.

Men and women who were in their 20s and 30s when Korea was partitioned by the United States and the former Soviet Union after World War II, are now in their 70s and 80s, and their ranks are diminishing, the minister said.

In 10 years, most of them will be gone, carrying their disappointment to their graves, he said.

Today Park and leaders of a coalition of Korean American organizations are set to announce at a news conference in Koreatown a nationwide petition drive seeking the help of the U.S. government in reuniting Korean families.

Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes Koreatown, is scheduled to meet with the organizers to lend support.

Becerra said he wants to make sure that when Korean Americans have a chance for reunion with their loved ones in the North, the federal government will spring into action quickly to assist them.

Becerra, who met with South Korean officials in Seoul earlier this year, said Korean Americans are smart to take the initiative by calling on the federal government to be a catalyst in the effort, rather than wait.

“The last thing you want is for bureaucracy to get in the way or delay the opportunity for family reunification.”

The drive, which seeks at least 100,000 signatures, is directed at President Bill Clinton, Congress, leaders of North and South Korea and the United Nations. It will urge inclusion of the separated Korean families on the agenda of future meetings and negotiations involving the two Koreas.

Nearly one-third of the 1 million people of Korean ancestry who live in the United States have relatives in the North; most have not seen them for half a century.

Korean Americans’ reunions with their relatives in the North has not been part of discussions between North and South Korean officials.

Petition organizers say they are encouraged by the recent summit of the leaders of the two Koreas and by the historic visit of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to North Korea.

At the same time, they were concerned that the plight of the families would get lost in political expediency.

“There are many Koreans who say that [South Korean] President Kim Dae-Jung’s summit meeting with [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-Il was motivated by his desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize,” said Park.

Many Korean Americans are concerned about the haste with which the secretary of state’s visit to Pyongyang was undertaken, he said.

The important thing, Park and other organizers stressed, is that Koreans are not shortchanged by the ambitions of politicians.

Historically, that has been the fate of their homeland.

Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945, as a result of a secret deal President Theodore Roosevelt made with Japan, in which the United States agreed to give Japan control over Korea and Manchuria in exchange for Japan’s promise not to interfere with the U.S. presence in the Philippines.

No sooner was Korea liberated from Japan in 1945 than it became a pawn in geopolitics, partitioned at the 38th parallel.

Janny Kim, a senior at UC Riverside and president of the Southern California Korean College Students Assn., grew up in Los Angeles hearing her grandmother talk about how much she wanted to see her siblings in the North.

In just four days, Kim’s group gathered more than 700 signatures, she said.

“This is our way of expressing our concern,” she said.

Dr. Young-Seok Suh, president of the Korean American Federation of South West States, said he hoped that Clinton would bring up the issue of family reunification should he visit Pyongyang before leaving office.

“Even if he doesn’t, we hope the State Department and [his successor] will,” he said.

Hyepin Im, a steering committee member of the Korean American Family Reunion Council, said her the coalition is also reaching out to other communities for support. As a first step, they have had talks with African American civil rights groups.

“The issue touches the heart of a lot of people,” she said. Her conversations with leaders of the Urban League and NAACP have been encouraging, she said.