Korean Wife Chronicles 53 Years of Heartache

It was Sept. 21, 1965, 15 years after her husband was taken by communist troops during the Korean War. Sick and confined to a room, Sung Kap-soon wrote in her diary:

“Dear God, please let me see him even if only once before I die. The children are growing up and leaving me one by one. I will be lonelier than ever. Several times a day, I blankly look at the sky and the ground, and I miss my husband.”

Sung and her husband, Ha Kyok-hong, lived in Seoul running a flour mill when the Korean War broke out in June 1950. In an infamous blunder of the war, President Syngman Rhee told the people of Seoul to stay put while his ragtag military retreated helter-skelter before the communist invaders. While Rhee slipped out of the capital on a special train, tens of thousands remained. Within just three days, North Korean troops entered Seoul

For South Korea, what happened from then until the city was captured by U.S. troops three months later was a chapter that remains unresolved. Today is the 50th anniversary of the truce that ended the war, but for Koreans like Sung, it still isn’t really over.

Thousands of South Koreans were sympathetic to the invaders. But many others -- some say up to 88,000 politicians, educators, judges and businessmen -- were arrested and taken to the north with retreating North Korean forces. Sung’s husband, then a 29-year-old member of a rightist group and brother of a rich businessman, was a natural target.

Today, they remain the overlooked victims of a war that left up to 5 million people dead, wounded or missing -- half of them civilians.

Sung was 26 and married for seven years when she last saw her husband. Her tattered, dog-eared diaries vividly capture the despair of a woman struggling to rear three daughters in South Korea’s deeply male-oriented society. Always hoping against hope for her husband’s return, she never remarried.

“I miss you each night, each dream,” she wrote when she began keeping a diary in 1959. “I have spent the past 10 years with tears and sighs. All I want is to have you back.”

“I find it extremely difficult for a woman to succeed in life alone. It almost takes a miracle. ‘Work Hard!’ That is my slogan,” she wrote.

Sung wrote that she missed her husband the most when the daughters got sick or graduated, when she couldn’t pay their tuition on time or buy them new clothes, or when she saw children walking with their fathers or couples dating.

On March 21, 1962, she wrote that two police detectives interviewed her about her husband.

South Korea was authoritarian and staunchly anti-communist then. Democracy would not come until the late 1980s, and having family members in the North was a burden for relatives in the South. Police blacklisted them and checked on them regularly. Family background haunted them with each job application.

“I have had a hard and rough life and am still struggling but no one seems to care. Sometimes I feel bitter about my own country,” Sung wrote on June 25, 1969, the 19th anniversary of the war’s outbreak.

Sung sold socks, cosmetics and noodles from street stalls to get by. She saved to rebuild her war-destroyed home in a busy commercial district in Seoul. She eventually got rich and followed her eldest daughter, emigrating to Canada in 1977.

Last year Sung gave two boxes of diaries to her youngest daughter, Ha Young-nam, a librarian at UNESCO’s South Korea office. The daughter posted the Korean-language diaries on her Web site to share them with relatives and help readers understand the impact of the war on a family.

“All these years, mother lived with the duty of raising us children so that she could be proud when father came back,” Ha said. “Before she emigrated, she refused to move from our old home because she believed that father might return someday.”

Ha spoke of a childhood awaiting her father’s return.

“When I was playing outside and someone told me to come home quick, I would rush home believing that father was back,” she said.

North Korea refused to return kidnapped civilians, saying all South Koreans in the North were “converts” to communism. Many of these people are believed to have died of old age, if they weren’t killed or executed during the war.

For 50 years there have been no phone lines or mail between the Koreas. North Koreans seldom get to travel abroad; South Koreans can only visit the North with government permission.

Relations thawed after an inter-Korean summit in 2000, but efforts to trace these people’s whereabouts stalled amid persistent distrust. There were no wartime abductees among the few thousand people who met lost relatives in temporary family reunions after the summit. A crisis over North Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons program suggests a permanent peace is still distant.

Sung says she visited the South Korean Red Cross in Seoul in late 2000 and was told her case was hopeless.

The South Korean government has appealed to North Korea to shed light on the captives’ fate, but says no concrete progress was made. Kim Sung-ho, head of the Korean War Abductees’ Family Union representing about 370 families, says the victims deserve better.

“They were abducted by communists because they trusted their government. Now they are ignored by their own government again,” he said. “They are double victims.”

Sung, now 79, lives alone in a Toronto apartment. “Tears have been my life’s partner but I had no one to talk to about my feelings,” she said in a telephone interview. “The diary was my way of letting off my frustration and stress. It was a monologue to myself.

“I cherish memories of those short seven years with him.”

In an entry dated April 9, 2001, her 58th wedding anniversary, she wrote: “I still remember the yellow forsythias I saw as I and my husband drove home from the wedding.”