Bid to unite families split by Korea border
Bay Area man helps ease communication with isolated North
Before Heang Ki Paik’s mother died in 1991 in South Korea, she told him she had a final wish: that he return a family ring and other possessions to her family in North Korea, whom she hadn’t seen in more than 40 years.
Paik had been in South Korea since he was a year old, when his mother fled the battle-torn North for the South in 1950 during the Korean War. “I always saw my mother desperately missing her home, and it hurt for me to see her in such pain,” Paik said through a interpreter. He resolved to find his family.
The separation of North Korean families like his has been a long and painful chapter on the tensely divided Korean Peninsula, and some of those families now span two continents, after a long wave of Korean immigration to the United States. Paik relocated to the Bay Area and finally reunited with his late mother’s family in North Korea in 2010 after decades of trying — but his success was a rare exception.
That sense of helplessness for thousands of separated Korean families may soon be changing, however — at
least in some small way.
The North Korean mission to the United Nations presented Paik with a letter in October after he had been in contact with diplomats for 15 years, saying the organization will aid in the reunification of families. And Paik intends to run hard with that authorization, thin though it is, in hopes of reconnecting as many people as he can while he has the chance.
“The Overseas Korean Aid Commission has entrusted us with providing reliable support to the San Francisco (Northern California) Council of Korean Americans, that you may be successful in your efforts to have divided families and relatives meet,” the letter reads, according to a translator. “It has also informed us that it will thoroughly guarantee courteous guidance and physical safety for applicants for family reunions during the time they are visiting the fatherland.”
A man at the North Korean mission who identified himself as a counselor but declined to provide his full name confirmed that the mission had sent the letter. The mission consists of the only North Korean diplomats in the United States, and they have been used as a diplomatic back channel for years. They’re notoriously hard to reach and reluctant to divulge information.
Paik is seeking applications from anyone in the United States who has been separated from family in North Korea, and he promises to work with the mission to begin finding their relatives, free of charge. So far, he has received one inquiry, but at a recent news conference in Millbrae announcing his initiative, he said he expects that to change fast.
“I am advertising in Korean-language papers,” Paik said.
There are an estimated 1.8 million Korean Americans in the United States, according to the U.S. census, though it’s unknown how many have origins in what is now North Korea.
Paik is on the board of the Northern California Council of Korean Americans from North Korea, a small Bay Area cultural group. His improbable relationship with North Korean diplomats began with tae kwon do, he said. He is a certified grand master with a studio in Millbrae, and in 2007 he hosted a North Korean delegation of athletes who came to the Bay Area.
He befriended a member of the Olympic Committee and gave him his mother’s address in the hopes that he might be able to find her family. Three months later, Paik said, the North Korean mission to the United Nations contacted him and said they had found his mother’s younger sister and younger brother.
He began sending them letters. Response time was slow — it could take about three months between sending a letter and receiving one. Then, in October 2010, one of the diplomats contacted him and asked whether he’d like to visit his North Korean relatives. He went almost immediately.
“I am unable to express how moved and happy I was to meet my family,” Paik said at the news conference. Of seeing his aunt, who was more than 80 years old when he visited, Paik said, “I saw her approaching and she looked just like my mother. The way she walked, the way her fingers were short, the way she looked, I knew it was her and I began to cry.”
After his visit, Paik stayed in touch with the North Korean mission, and he has been hoping to facilitate reunions for other families who are continentally divided. It’s been a difficult process because so many people were displaced during the war. He joked: “You kind of have to find people by bicycle.”
Location is only one of many obstacles to these reunions.
While some Korean families have been able to reunite, as Paik did with his, escalating tensions between the two countries resulted in a sixmonth travel ban that took effect Sept. 1. “There are exceptions for humanitarian issues,” Paik said.
Still, he said that even if he’s only able to connect families via mail, it would be an accomplishment.
The day before Paik’s announcement, there was encouraging news for longstrained North-South relations — North Korea agreed to send athletes to the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea and to reopen a military communications channel that had been closed.
“We support improved inter-Korean relations,” a State Department official, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive international relations, wrote in an email. “We refer you to the (South Korean) government for more information on the family reunions.”
Eun-Joung Lee, 44, an Oakland resident, said at Paik’s news conference that when her father was able to reunite with his older brother in North Korea around the year 2000 after at least 50 years apart, it was highly emotional. She said that allowing families like hers to reunite would be “incredibly humane.”
“There will be only so many years left, and then that generation will pass,” she said, referring to those who fled during the Korean War. “So if there’s even a fleeting chance of uniting them with family members, then we should grab every opportunity to do so.”