Views on North Korea Split Generations

As North and South Korea are divided by the world’s most heavily guarded demilitarized zone, so is Los Angeles’ Korean community split in its attitude toward the communist North.

As evidenced by aging Korean War veterans jeering and dousing North Korean diplomats with water during a historic visit to Los Angeles on Monday, those who suffered through the conflict remain deeply suspicious of the North Korean government. Younger Korean Americans generally want reconciliation, even if that means making concessions.

“Our love for the suffering people of North Korea remains fervent, but it’s important to distinguish in our minds the people from the government of Kim Jong Il,” said Koreatown resident John Kim on Tuesday, who was in the fifth grade when the North attacked the South on June 25, 1950.

So, when the Korean American Federation of Los Angeles gave the visiting diplomats a $20,000 check to help victims of a train explosion that killed more than 160 and injured some 1,300 last month, Kim and others objected that it demonstrated an ignorance of the duplicitous nature of the North.

“We have no assurance that the money is going to the people,” Kim said.

Ki-Suh Park, 72, an architect with Gruen Associates and chairman of the Korean American Museum in Los Angeles, also expressed concern over how the money might be spent -- a concern voiced more frequently by those who remember a war that took the lives of 36,616 Americans, as many as 4 million Koreans and nearly 1 million Chinese.

“The younger generation has a much different attitude toward our northern counterpart,” Park said. “They consider them brothers.” But for older generations, “it requires a lot of healing.”

“We’re in the transition period between the older generation, who have a vivid memory of the Korean War and what took place, and those who have a totally different experience,” Park said.

Bong-Keon Kim, a 77-year-old retired South Korean Army colonel who heads a Korean veterans group, lay down in front of the diplomats’ car Monday in an unsuccessful attempt to thwart the meeting. Born in the north, his family fled the communists.

“President Bush called North Korea [part of the] ‘axis of evil,’ ” Kim said Tuesday. “Yet his State Department allowed them to come to Los Angeles.”

But Johng Ho Song, 41, said the dousing of the diplomats -- which became a hot topic at the United Nations, where the two visitors were members of the country’s permanent delegation -- did little but embarrass the local community.

“I don’t think any of us here who work in Koreatown wanted to see anything like that,” said Song, executive director of the Korean Youth and Community Center. “I’m sure we have our political differences, but I’m not sure we wanted to do anything like that. I’m sorry that happened.”

Song is a member of what is known in the community as the “1.5 generation” of Korean Americans -- the first generation being those who were born and reared in Korea, the second those born in the United States, and the 1.5-ers born in Korea but reared in the U.S.

“We haven’t gone through the war,” Song said. “We learned and heard about the Korean War and how frightening and horrible it was, but we haven’t felt it. So I don’t think I can judge the first generation and their emotions.”

Since the Korean peninsula was freed from Japan’s 35-year occupation in 1945 and partitioned by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, 10 million people of Korean ancestry remain separated from their relatives in North Korea.

There are more than 1 million Korean Americans, some 200,000 of them in Los Angeles County and a quarter of those in greater Koreatown. The community is a bastion of conservatism when it comes to Korean peninsula politics; many of the area’s institutions, businesses and churches are run by people not only distrustful of the north but displeased with the government of South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun, which has advocated a policy of dialogue with North Korea.

Still, many Korean Americans are hopeful that reunification might be on the distant horizon. For years, even the modest conciliatory gesture that Monday’s meeting was supposed to be would have been impossible, many said.

“Those protesters were mostly elderly and, I believe, veterans of the Korean War,” said Edward T. Chang, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside. “I think they represented an older generation with a strong anti-communist ideology, but I don’t think they really represent the whole new perspective and new understanding of reconciliation between South and North.”

In addition to the $20,000, the community raised $30,000 to be delivered to the South Korean Consul General in Los Angeles and forward to the South Korean Red Cross.

Kee-Whan Ha, 56, a businessman and head of the federation, handed the $20,000 check to the diplomats, Pu Ung Pak and Kil Hong Jo, before they were doused. Afterward, he invited them to a private dinner, Ha said Tuesday.

And although he gave them the money, he said he also sent them on their way with some advice: “Kim Jong Il must go.”