A Journey of the Heart and Soul

With her sweep of dark hair and effervescent personality, Helie Lee greets a visitor to her home with a warm embrace. As she bounds into the kitchen to make tea, it is hard to imagine this Topanga Canyon bohemian, casually clad in a white cotton shirt and bluejeans, is the same woman who risked her life smuggling relatives out of North Korea.

The 37-year-old has chronicled that adventure in the book “In the Absence of Sun,” recently published by Harmony Books. The title refers as much to the literal dark and cold of her journey to smuggle her uncle and his eight family members out of the oppressive communist regime as to the loss her grandmother endured when she fled North Korea at the beginning of the Korean War in 1950 with only four of her five children. Her eldest son, then 16, had gone off to fight, his location unknown, and Lee’s grandmother, Baek Hong Yong, had to leave while she had the opportunity to ensure the safety of her other children.

That lost boy, Lee’s uncle Lee Yong Woon, came crashing back into Lee’s life in 1991 after a 41-year search by her family to locate him. Another uncle had tentatively located his brother in a small village, but he couldn’t confirm it was his older brother, until the day a letter arrived from Yong Woon’s daughter, Ae Ran, who wrote of her family’s desire to reconnect with their long-lost American relatives. After 41 years of not knowing if her oldest child was dead or alive, Lee’s grandmother had been given her answer. “The next step,” said Lee, “was to reunite them, but the question was how.”

Lee’s first book, 1996’s “Still Life With Rice,” was a fictionalized account of her grandmother’s life that included the story of her anguished abandonment of Yong Woon. When a translation was published in South Korea later that year, Lee was informed that her cousins’ lives were now in danger because the book was critical of the North Korean government. “To be invisible is safer in North Korea,” said Lee. The need to get Yong Woon out became even more pressing when her grandmother’s health began declining.

A Perilous Journey

The rescue attempt was launched the following year through a series of false leads, smugglers, bribery, threats and occasional appearances by the FBI and the South Korean CIA. Yong Woon and his family--the youngest of whom was a month old, the oldest, 62--were soon to climb their way through the forests and mountain passes of Vietnam and Mongolia.

Lee’s family retained the services of a guide, whom Lee never names in her book. “It’s to protect him. The work he does is extremely dangerous. His life is already in enough danger, and I wouldn’t want to put him at risk further.” Lee does say she shared a tumultuous and vaguely romantic relationship with the man during their ordeal.

The passage at last brought them to the Yalu River dividing China and North Korea, Yong Woon’s family on one side, Lee and her father 60 yards away on the other. The tension of this first meeting was heightened by the North Korean soldiers who had been bribed to let them continue but who, nonetheless, stood looking down on them, rifles in hand.

“It was a terrible moment of recognition to see how frail and gaunt [my uncle] was as he stood across the river from us,” remembered Lee. “I could see from his physical appearance alone how much he had been deprived of from being left behind.” Yong Woon was nearly skeletal and dressed in rags. Lee told him that his mother had never forgotten him.

North Korean refugees, said Lee, “are in a desperate state. They are hiding out in absolute fear of being captured and repatriated. When that happens, anything from execution to being put into a concentration camp to being maimed is possible, so these people do not want to be captured at any cost. My relatives carried rat poison with them to commit suicide rather than be caught.”

Finally, her uncle’s family successfully crossed into South Korea and settled into lives of freedom.

In retrospect, Lee said, “none of us realized what we were getting into. We had thought it was going to take a few weeks, and it turned out to be a seven-month odyssey. There were times we wanted to give up, when we didn’t think it was going to be possible. There were too many things going wrong, and if we failed, the consequences were so huge. I would just have to remember that there were nine lives resting in our hands.”

Appreciating America

“In the Absence of Sun” also chronicle’s Lee’s difficulties as an American woman in a society in which even to have a slight disagreement with her father would mean a loss of pride for him, and in which she had to deal with the chauvinistic assumptions of the guide about her intelligence and abilities.

“I had to go to Korea to find out what an American I really am and to appreciate America for everything this country has allowed me to be,” observed Lee.

Lee said she was so overwhelmed by the journey, the book poured out of her upon her return. “Whenever I was awake I was writing, I never took a break. It was only when we got home and everyone was safe that it really struck me what we had done and what was at stake.”

In contrast to her uncle, Lee and her family, including her father, Jae Hak, mother Duk Hwa and siblings David and Julie, had been living a comfortable existence in Los Angeles after leaving Korea when Lee was 4. After a one-year sojourn in Canada, the family relocated to the San Fernando Valley in 1969, and Lee went on to attend El Camino Real High School and UCLA, earning her degree in political science in 1986. Her grandmother joined them in the 1970s.

After spending time doing various jobs, some in the entertainment industry, including a stint as an assistant to Keenan Ivory Wayans on “In Living Color,” and managing her own cafe on Beverly Boulevard, Lee set about discovering her family’s history. As she learned of her grandmother’s dramatic past she was inspired to write “Still Life With Rice,” which became a national bestseller. She said it was in discovering her grandmother’s history for that book that she first heard the name of her uncle, a subject that until then had been too painful for her grandmother to talk about.

Desire to Flee Is Strong

But their story is not unique. About 10 million families were separated by the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement, said Gina Lee of the Korean consulate in Los Angeles, where the Korean community numbers about 675,000. And the desire to flee North Korea remains strong as North Korean refugees storm embassies in China hoping to find asylum.

Though some family reunifications have occurred in the last few years, they are only for brief visits, said Gina Lee, and for 12% of those who had applied to visit their lost relatives, time simply ran out as they grew old and died.

Helie Lee’s grandmother, affectionately known as Halmoni, which means “grandmother,” held on through her family’s ordeal long enough to see her son again and admire his family, to see them start anew in the south. Halmoni died at 90 on a recent Sunday morning at her home with her younger sister holding her hand. Before she died, Lee said, “I sat by her bed, holding her hand and said, ‘It’s OK, you’ve found him, you can let go now. You’ve gotten what you wanted.’ She said, ‘I can’t go until I see you married to throw you a big party and help you with your first child in gratitude for what you have done for me.’ Even in death I’m holding her to it.”

Yong Woon flew in from South Korea for his mother’s funeral and spent the night he arrived alone at his mother’s home, sleeping in her empty bed. “It is a loss for all of us,” said Lee, “but for him the time lost will never be regained. He had just found her, and now she is gone.”

Since her trek five years ago, Lee has grown into an activist on behalf of North Korean refugees and last week spoke before a Senate subcommittee on immigration. She testified to the ordeal her family endured “to give voice to all those refugees who are still in China, to have our government open the gates here to give these people shelter.”