Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

by Suki Kim

  My father still attends biannual, regional Gwangsan Kim meetings, which take place in a Korean restaurant near where he now lives, in Fort Lee, New Jersey. About twenty members sit around the Korean meals of kimchi chigae and gamjatang and discuss the greatest achievements of our ancestors, who are buried in Yunsan borough in Nonsan City of Chungcheong province, including my grandparents. Unable to tend to their graves the way a good Confucian son should, my father is plagued with guilt. One year I traveled to South Korea in his place, although the gravesite was hard to get to without a car. The train took about two hours, and after that I had to take a bus to Yunsan. Everyone within a ten-mile radius was Gwangsan Kim, according to the bus driver, who asked me, “Who’s the caretaker of your plot?” I told him, and he nodded in recognition. It was a rural area, and everyone either knew one another or was related. He helped me find a taxi, which took me to a particular turn in the road shown on a map hand drawn by a relative. There was no sign, but I got out of the taxi and trekked along the path, endless burial mounds unfolding before me, tiny hills that had held the bones of my ancestors for hundreds of years, each one with a stone tablet as a marker. There they were, the people who made me, whose unions had led me to stand there in that time—the history of me.

  Except that the letters on each tablet were in Chinese, as Koreans still relied on written Chinese for matters relating to death. Throughout history, China was always the big brother to neighboring Korea, this tiny kingdom unfortunately located adjacent to the massive empire, and in some ways, that tradition seemed to have held up. Anyone following North Korea would tell you that it is China that really holds the power.

  Since mandatory instruction in Chinese did not begin until the seventh grade, which was when I emigrated, all I knew of Chinese was my name. Every gravestone featured the character “Kim,” followed by individual names, which I could not read. The Gwangsan clan of Kims were all gathered there, and had I not been a woman—according to Korean custom, a woman is buried with her husband’s family—and had we stayed in Korea, I too would have ended up there, along with my father. (As for unmarried women, I have no idea where they are buried. For a very long time, in Korea, no one talked about them.)

  For thousands of years, scarcely anyone left. Korea was the hermit kingdom, with its spiritual basis in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism, until 1910, when it was annexed by Japan and colonized for thirty-five years thereafter, followed by the Korean War in 1950. Having been born and raised under these brutal colonizers, my paternal grandfather spoke fluent Japanese. Shortly before his death, in the mid-1980s, he came to stay with my family in Queens, where he befriended a young Japanese woman, a missionary from the Unification Church. When my father confronted him about his sudden interest in the cult, my grandfather answered that he didn’t care about the Moonies, he only enjoyed the chance to speak Japanese with his new friend. Like others from his generation, he suffered from a sort of Stockholm syndrome and missed the language of his oppressors. Koreans’ love–hate relationship with Japan carries on to this day, compounded by their relationship with the superpowers who took over where Japan left off: the United States and the Soviet Union, who together liberated Korea only to carve it up as a proxy for the Cold War.

  Today, South Koreans are largely mixed in their attitude toward the United States, which keeps almost thirty thousand troops stationed smack in the middle of the capital, occupying prime real estate.* Many of them resent the presence of these foreign protectors, more than sixty years after the armistice, and yet they readily acknowledge that it is their alliance with the United States that has helped South Korea become a democracy as well as a first-world nation. If South Korea is indebted to the United States for its prosperity, North Korea has been largely indebted to China for its survival since the fall of the Soviet Union. Although both China and the Soviet Union had a hand in the division of Korea, North Koreans do not speak of that; they blame only the United States and Japan. Alliances can be hard to break. History is a record of many such irrationalities.

  On that visit to my ancestors’ graves, it occurred to me that tradition is not well suited for globalization. Traditions are about holding on to the past, whereas I belong in a new world, and in my new world of America, one reinvents oneself constantly, which is a certain kind of privilege. It was in 1983, following decades of military dictatorship in the South, that my parents finally left the old country. They were the first generation of Gwangsan Kim to turn their back on all that was in front of me in those burial mounds, and here I was, years later, the descendant who had crossed the ocean to return, unable to identify my grandparents’ gravestones until the caretaker came and led me to them.

  MY MOTHER’S SIDE is more humble, at least according to her. I don’t know how true that is, as my mother deferred to my father on almost everything, including the degree of nobility in their backgrounds. Although her Yoon clan had originated from the ancient region of Papyeong in Gyeonggi province, she was born and raised in Seoul, as were her parents. The Papyeong Yoons were known for their queens. Often the bride of the future king was selected from faded noble families who lacked ambition, since those holding power in the court tried to guard against anyone who might usurp their power. Her preoccupation, however, was with more recent family history.

  As my mother tells it, June 25, 1950, was a quiet Sunday. She was just four years old, although she remembers it all as if it happened yesterday. That was the day when North Korean bombs first fell over the southern capital of Seoul. That day marked the end of a childhood that never really had the chance to begin.

  So it goes like this, our conversation.

  The bombs were coming, and we ran, my mother says. She is not sure if she heard them, but she knew they were coming because everyone in the neighborhood was fleeing.

  Where were you going? I ask.

  Her reaction then is always the same—incredulous at being asked something so obvious.

  To the south, of course! Anywhere, so long as it was toward the south. We knew that if we stayed there, we would die. At least that was what my mother said when she was packing.

  Her father is away on a business trip to Busan at the southernmost tip of the country. This is unusual. He is an administrator at the local community center—not a job that requires business travel. But the family is lucky that he was sent south, not north, for work. An overnight trip north, a couple of hours away, and some families are separated forever. The war announcements must be airing on the radio because almost no one has a telephone or TV. The mood is urgent, panicked even, and my mother remembers a sudden cold breeze sweeping across the living room, even though it was summer and humid. The neighbors have begun fleeing, carrying their possessions on their backs, checking in to see what Mrs. Yoon is up to, why she has not left yet.

  “Palgengis [the Red] are coming!” they scream. “There’s war!” These people have lived through the Japanese rule. They are accustomed to catastrophe.

  My grandmother must make the decision alone. The children must be fed and dressed, and the youngest one will have to be carried. My mother is a quiet child, but she is even quieter than usual; she can tell something big is about to happen. My grandmother tells the children to start packing. They all gather their things frantically.

  Five children in total, but not really.

  What do you mean, five children, but not really?

  My mother would pause here. She might be in the midst of cutting up daikon or roasting seaweed for my lunch box. She might be getting ready for a night out with my father, standing before a dressing mirror in her green silk wrap dress and matching leather gloves. I can still see her reflection in the mirror, her hair blow-dried into a windswept Farrah Fawcett do, not a trace of the war-fleeing child visible. She modeled once, in the sixties, for a Japanese photographer who spotted her in a restaurant in Seoul because of her striking resemblance to a Japanese movie star. This resemblance inspired a Korean TV producer to pursue her for months and cast her in a we
ekly soap opera, but the week before filming she took off on a seaside outing with my father and never showed up. She was not irresponsible by nature, but she wasn’t sure what a model or an actress did because in postwar Korea, TV and magazines were still new and mysterious. At the moment, her beauty seems even more exaggerated as she pauses and gazes into a distance. My mother is still young. Just barely in her thirties, the wound still raw.

  What do you mean, not really five?

  You see … there were nine originally. Four died in infancy. Babies didn’t always live back then.

  This part always mystifies me. I am a child, and death is something someone invented somewhere. I am lost as to where those other babies went.

  My mother sighs over the deaths she did not witness. She is the lucky one. She came last—the youngest of the nine. She survived and grew into a beautiful woman, a wife, a mother. Four others never made it. As a mother, saying these things aloud scares her, and she pulls me toward her and squeezes me very hard as though she is afraid of losing me too. I don’t like this moment. I don’t like the fear in her eyes, but I keep on asking so that it will distract her and she will finish telling the story, although this story has no ending. A loop that does not complete a circle. A gap that will never be filled.

  All she recalls is the sudden chaos, her mother and her siblings in a great hurry. Her eldest brother takes charge. He is only seventeen, but with his father missing, he is the man of the house, telling his mother to get some rice balls ready for their train journey. It is decided that they will first go to Suwon, nineteen miles outside of Seoul, where they have a relative, and from there, they will make their way to Busan, where her father is. She is soon picked up, in the arms of her eldest brother. The other three children follow, each with a parcel of things on his or her back. My grandmother gazes at the house one last time, afraid she might never set eyes on it again. It will be three years before she does, but she does not know that as she reluctantly turns away to begin the long walk to the train that will take them to safety.

  You see, it was all farmland up there in the hills, a good hour walk to Seoul Station.

  Tucked beneath the rocky Bukak-san (Mount Bukak) towering above and adjacent to the Gyeongbokgung imperial palace and the Blue House, where the president resides, my mother’s childhood neighborhood of Samcheong-dong was long ignored as a sleepy corner where public transportation was inconvenient and the daily patrol by armed guards made even a casual walk difficult. Although the view from there has always been spectacular, Samcheong-dong, for a long time, remained a poor cousin to wealthier nearby districts.

  Samcheong-dong today bears no resemblance to the forgotten hills of my mother’s recollection. In 2009, when I was living in Seoul on a fellowship, I took tennis lessons in Samcheong Park, about a hundred yards from where my mother’s childhood home had been. Nobody lived there anymore. My uncle had long since sold the family house and moved to the suburbs as the neighborhood began to attract real estate developers. Many of its run-down hanoks (traditional Korean shingle-tile roofed houses) had been converted into cafés and boutiques, and the area had become one of the city’s most popular destinations for couples. I would walk past the imperial palace every morning, up the winding road that was oddly reminiscent of the picturesque Montmartre one sees in romantic movies. The fashionable trend that year was young male baristas. Everywhere it seemed that handsome young men in their early twenties were taking orders with their iPads and pouring coffee with exaggerated precision and explanations—slow drip, siphon, Chemex. Seoul in 2009, Samcheong-dong in particular, seemed hipper than anywhere else I had recently visited, but when I told my mother about it later, back in New Jersey, she looked at me blankly. Then, after a long pause, she said, “What about the creek? I used to take our dirty laundry and wash it there.” I told her that no one did laundry in creeks anymore and that I hadn’t seen anything resembling a creek in my walks. In her mind, though, she was back there, the youngest of the family, taking the washing to the creek on afternoons when she was let out of school early.

  Again the mind does a loop, and all roads converge on a single moment on June 25, 1950. For those of her generation who lost somebody, life is forever divided between before that day and after.

  It takes the six of them several hours to reach Seoul Station because the streets are packed with people fleeing. The older children take hold, protectively, of the hands of the younger ones. The walk is about two and a half miles, but my grandmother is alone with five children, carrying as much as she can on her back. My seventeen-year-old uncle must have led the group.

  No family photograph remains from that day or those immediately thereafter. Photographs are an indulgence when you are running for your life. I have looked up black-and-white pictures of Seoul from that day, faded evidence of refugees who could be from any Asian country fleeing any war. They put their heads down and made their way to the south, where the bombs from the North would not reach. No one complained. No one questioned. This was the generation that had seen it all, the heartache of having their country taken by Japan, their mortal enemy, and now the heartache of this division that seemed to have happened overnight. Those years, from 1945 to 1950, had been confusing, with Kim Il-sung, the Red Army major, in the North, and Syngman Rhee, the American protégé, in the South. Cold War politics knows no bounds, and the people had no say in its dreadful consequences. Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious.

  It was a miracle that we made it to the station before nightfall. We were lucky … at first.

  It is this “at first” that makes my heart sink. I don’t like the part that comes next, but I let my mother continue because I know that we must.

  After fighting her way through the jam-packed station, my grandmother learns that all tickets on all southbound trains are sold out. She sees people climbing onto the roofs of departing trains in desperation. After waiting there for hours, she hears about some trucks giving rides to families with young children. So she and the children run, small fists tightly folded over the smaller ones. And, miraculously, there is a dusty truck with people in back but with room for more, and they hop on, and my grandmother, soaked in sweat, makes sure that all five children are there, including the baby girl in her arms, my mother, placed there by her eldest son. These are good children, good eggs, the ones who survived against all odds.

  She plops down, leaning against the tailgate, and takes a deep breath, her tremendous breasts heaving, these breasts that fed nine infants, although she has only five to show for it. She is forty-five years old, but she looks and feels older, and she realizes she is tired, exhausted in fact, not the optimal emotion to feel at the dawn of a war, although she is not yet sure if it really is war. All she knows is that they are on a vehicle, away from the bombs, and that somehow, without her husband, she has managed to get all of them here. She feels smug for a moment and wants to congratulate herself for this accomplishment, but instead casts a lingering glance at her oldest, the son, the one who survived. He is her lucky charm. It is with him that the tide turned. He lived, and each successive baby lived, as though with him came this beautiful gift of life; and look at him now, all grown and handsome at seventeen. She can barely contain the overwhelming love in her heart and tries to pull away her gaze although she is incapable of doing so, and it is then that a shout is heard from somewhere.

  As my mother tells it, no one could clearly remember that moment afterward. There is so much confusion and commotion. Suddenly dirty faces are peering in, and people are clutching the side of the truck in a desperate attempt to board this ark that will take them away from the coming flood of violence; the only way to flee the bombs, away from Seoul, the mountainous, sprawling capital that has housed Korean royals for centuries, the epitome of every Korean’s desires, but in this moment, all at once, everyone wants to chuck it into the nearest trash can and run. The goal is to get the hell out of Xanadu, if only the truck would move.

  If only it had pulled out right then a
nd there …

  There it is again, the mantra “if only.” I am always made aware of the alternative universe where things turned out differently, in which lives were saved. I am used to the mantra. For immigrants, regret can become a way of life.

  Shouts are coming from somewhere. Somebody, some panicked mother or father, a desperate voice pleading with young men to give up their spaces to women and children. Before the shouts register, before my grandmother has a moment to ponder the words or protest, the seventeen-year-old rises. “I’ll go,” he says, then reassures her: “I’ll find another ride, Mother. Don’t worry.” Then, just as quickly, he is out of sight, followed by the sound of the engine. It all happens in a blink, and my grandmother, bewildered by this unexpected twist, turns frantically in the direction where her son has gone, and the truck is moving suddenly, too fast for her to think clearly, and only later does it occur to her that she should have jumped off right then and dragged him back. She should have sought out the one who had shouted and gouged out his eyes. This is war, and a split-second decision is costly. There she is, my grandmother, dumbstruck on a speeding truck, without her oldest child. The baby that lived.