The Daily - For a Family Divided by the Korean War, a New Chapter

Episode Date: December 26, 2018

This week, “The Daily” is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened since the stories first ran. In April, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to discuss formally ending the Korean War, a conflict that has divided thousands of families for more than six decades. Sylvia Nam’s family is one of them. Guest: Sylvia Nam traveled to North Korea to find out what happened to her grandfather, who left South Korea for the North nearly 70 years ago and never returned. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Hi, it's Michael. This week, The Daily is revisiting favorite episodes of the year, listening back, and then hearing what's happened in the time since the stories first ran. Today, we're going back to April, three days after South Korean President Moon Jae-in

met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to discuss peace on the Korean Peninsula. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in their historic summit, North and South Korea vowed to pursue a peace treaty that would end the 65-year-long Korean War. That could finally mean reconciliation

for the thousands of families who have been separated from one another since the war broke out. It's Monday, April 30th. My first recollections about my grandfather came from the stories from my grandmother as well as my mother. My grandfather is from South Korea. He was a professor and an engineer. And these stories really involved how his absence basically determined the fate of the family. Sylvia Nam's grandfather went to North Korea in 1950,

just a few months after the Korean War started, and never came back. When my grandfather disappeared, my grandmother was 28 years old. My eldest aunt was four years old. My second aunt was three years old. My mom was about one or two. And my uncle was a newborn.

He was three weeks old. As a kid growing up, my mother would talk about what it meant for her to grow up without a father, both in terms of having a parent love her and also in a family growing up in Korea, where you actually do need a male breadwinner, how it really impacted their lives. They lived in pretty utter destitution. It was a man that I think she was deeply bitter towards because I think that she knew that her life would have been very different had he stayed behind. What did you know about why he disappeared? The thing that I had heard growing up as a kid were contradictory and it included

one story that involved him being kidnapped by North Korean soldiers. The other story was that because it was the Cold War period and he was an academic and intellectual that he had socialist or communist sympathies and therefore went north and therefore potentially had abandoned his family in the name of ideology. And then the third was this kind of gray space, unknown, fill in the blank type of story that perhaps something had

happened to him and that he couldn't come back to the family. So as the years went on and you enter adulthood, did you become more interested in finding out the real story behind what happened to your grandfather? Yeah, so in the summer of 2015, I decided that I was going to go to North Korea to both visit North Korea, but my other hope was that I could actually finally find out about my grandfather. And did you tell your mother that you were going to do this and that you were going to try to find him?

I did, and she was opposed to it. So she told me not to go, and my father was opposed to it, and he told me not to go. Their insistence was that the past mattered very little, but I said, okay, I'm glad you told me that, but I'm going to go. So I submitted a family reunification application and I had included all this information about my grandfather, but I had heard nothing back from them. I thought, okay, maybe he's deceased or maybe they don't know his whereabouts. And so I thought it would be still an important trip for me to go to where I could actually see North Korea firsthand. And so I ended up flying to Beijing from LA and then from Beijing to Pyongyang.

So I arrive at the Pyongyang airport and our handler for the trip looked at me and recognized my face because we had to submit our photos for visa processing. So she looked at me and she said, comrade Sylvia, we found your family. Wow. And I didn't know how to respond because I wasn't prepared for that response. So a few days later, I meet with this government official and he tells me that they found my grandfather

and then tells me that he died in 1987. But the government official also then told me that a few years after he had disappeared, he remarried and that he had children in North Korea and that I had all of a sudden these aunts and uncles that I didn't know about. So the government official asked me if I wanted to meet this family in North Korea, and I said, absolutely. So I met them a few days later. We'll be right back. Sylvia Nam, so you were in North Korea,

and you have just learned that your late grandfather, once he arrived in North Korea, had remarried and had a whole new family that your family didn't know about. And now you have an opportunity to meet that family. So then what happens? So a few days after that meeting with the government official, I, along with my two friends and our handler, left our hotel in our chartered bus,

and we drove to another hotel to meet my family in what ended up being a reserved banquet room. And as we were getting off the bus, my aunts and uncles were waiting there for me with flowers in their hands. And they looked at me and we all started sobbing. Wow. My eldest aunt on that side looked at me and said, what took you so long? We've been waiting for you for over 50 years. So what happens? It's awkward.

We just look at each other and start crying with very little words exchanged. So we have a lot of family photos of my grandfather. So I brought the photo of his marriage to my grandmother. And I brought a couple of other photos. And they had never seen a photo of their father before 1950. They too brought photos of their family. And so I got to see photos of what he looked like, because the last image that I had of him was as a young man in his 20s and 30s. And they showed me photos of him in his 30s, 40s,

50s as well. So it was like as if we were on the same timeline, but ours got cut off at 1950 and theirs began in 1950. So after you all get a little more comfortable with each other and swap these photos, I assume you ask them if they know what actually had happened to your grandfather. Yeah. The way that they tell it is that he was going to some conference in Pyongyang and went with a colleague. But after the conference, as he was trying to head back home, the borders shut completely and he wasn't able to come back.

The other thing that they told me is that he waited five years before remarrying because he thought he could get back to South Korea and wanted to. And he also ended up remarrying a woman from Seoul who was also stuck on the wrong side of the border. So from what your family is telling you in this banquet room, you're getting this answer that you have long craved about what actually happened. And the answer is that he got stuck, that this was just horrific timing in a terrible war, that the border was sealed and he couldn't get back. Yeah.

Alongside the photos, they brought his diaries to share with me. And one of the diaries is dated 1950, August 26. So basically around the time that he left and they started to read from it. Wow. Yeah. And in it, he describes his deep sorrow and asks out loud what happened to his children and to his wife and to his mother. And in a couple of the passages that they read to me, he asks my grandmother to please live, to stay alive.

He asks that his children stay alive so that he can come back and see them again. And there's various passages where he repeats this both deep regret and this deep fear that his children are going hungry or that his wife is going hungry and struggling and that he can't do anything about it. Also, there's one passage in which his colleague shows him a photo of his newborn baby. And he's reminded that he left behind a three-week-old son. that my aunt had said is that, you know, her father would repeatedly tell her that if it hadn't been for the Korean War,

she would never have been born. Wow. So on one hand, it was great to hear that he loved my grandmother and his children, that he left behind, but I could also hear and see what that meant for our North Korean family. That they must have experienced a kind of grief knowing that they were a second best,

an alternative to what he yearned for back in the South. Yeah. And they, I think, carried that with them as well. with them as well. They told me that as he lay dying, that he refused to close his eyes because he had not been able to say goodbye to the family and the self. I have this vision of you leaving that room and calling your parents back in the U.S. and saying, you'll never believe what I just learned.

Did you tell your mother what you found out? So we had no communication with the outside world for the two weeks that we were in North Korea. And so it wasn't until I got to the Beijing airport after flying out of Pyongyang that I called my parents to tell them what I had found out. They weren't initially very excited that I had relocated the family in the North. But I think that my mother ended up relaying that story to my uncle and my aunt, and they were ecstatic by the news that I had found them. And we decided that we'd have a small get-together at their house. So a few months after I returned from North Korea,

we all gathered in the family room of my parents' home. And I showed them the photos that our North Korean family had shown me. This is our cousin. This is our second aunt's son. And that's mom's face right there. It is. It really is. Photos that I had taken with my aunts and uncles in Pyongyang. It's Wesamchun's eyes. Look, it's all his eyes.

And we got to look at their faces and try to trace similarities between the siblings. So then my uncle starts reading from our grandfather's diary. Can you, could someone translate, please? So basically this diary entry says, I'm eating apple, I'm eating tteok, I'm eating ginda tteok. And I think of how my wife, my mother, and my children must be suffering and perhaps going hungry. He's like, my daughter, Geun-hee- daughter, is now nine. My second daughter, is eight years old.

Mom, is now seven. And is now five. When I think of this, how much my heart hurts. Is my family alive? My father was children. Please live. I think of you all the time, and my heart hurts. When can I see you again?

As I saw my uncle and heard my uncle read passages from his diary, like all of us were moved to tears because you could tell that this flew in the face of all of the sorts of things that they had speculated on. Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Sylvia. I think that's a gift to give all of us about you. Thank you. But each time I looked at my mother, I noticed that she was just sitting there very quietly in the corner with tears in her eyes. When we started talking, you described

the toll that all this has taken on your mother, how it kind of hollowed her out in a way and left such a lifelong scar. How do you think that that has changed now that she knows this? It hasn't changed anything. She's lived the entirety of her life with the assumption that this man had abandoned them. And so having this one bit of information, it has significance, but the weight isn't there because she spent her entire life thinking that,

and knowing that she lived in a household without a father. Right. I do wish that there was some closure for her, but I think she had already closed herself off to the possibility that there was something outside of this question of abandonment. Given everything that you have been through and have learned about this really remarkable family drama, what do you think it would mean if North and South Korea officially ended the war

that they are still technically in and that has ripped apart so many families over the past 70 years? A part of me doesn't actually think that reunification is possible. I think that the implications for reunification are almost insurmountable. It'd be some version of the story many times over. I see a lot of challenges that would come along with what that would mean.

And I don't mean that cynically. I mean that just in terms of what sort of work and emotional healing and political healing that would entail. And so what does it mean to undo 70 years of division?

And absence. Yeah, like it can't be instantaneous. would entail. And so what does it mean to undo 70 years of division and absence? And yeah, like it can't be instantaneous. It would require the undoing of seven years of separation. So I think that there has to be some real accounting for what that might look like and the implications of that. Sylvia, thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you. A few weeks ago, I called Sylvia back to see what, if anything, had changed for her mom since we first spoke. You know, one of the things that she started to say to me, I think starting in my 20s, was always this apology telling me, like, I'm really sorry I never knew how to love you

because I never was loved myself. And if I had a father growing up, it would have been very different. But after some time, and then I think with the prompting of the podcast itself, she stopped saying that. In a sense, I wonder if she's saying that she no longer thinks of herself as incapable of love, that she feels differently about the whole concept of love and being loved. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's a really powerful, powerful gift.

And I think from like, I think starting in college, she's like, I want you to write a book about this. And I was like, okay. But then after the daily broadcast, she was like, you know, why don't you write a book? And then they can make a movie about it. And I was like, okay, mom. So are you following her advice? Are you going to write a book about this? Yeah.

following her advice? Are you going to write a book about this? Yeah. So I had, uh, I've been trying to storyboard and think about different elements of, of the family's history and experience and then write it into a book. So if you're writing a book, does that mean you plan to go back to North Korea? I've been talking to my uncle and my uncle is interested in going, but he doesn't want to go alone. So I've been talking to his kids about us going together. So in all likelihood, you will be back soon. Yeah, I mean, that was always the hope, you know? Like mine was just kind of like a reconnaissance type of thing just to figure things out.

And then, you know, for them to actually do the proper reunion. Well, Sylvia, I'm really glad we caught up. And I understand that you are having a baby soon. So I wanted to congratulate you on that. Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, thank you again. Thank you, Michael.

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