WASHINGTON - Won Yun last saw his grandmother and sisters on the banks of the Taedong River during the . Eventually, Yun, his grandfather, parents and three brothers made it to the South, while his grandmother and two younger sisters remained.
The 8-year-old Yun believed the entire family would reunite after the war. They could not.
Like thousands of other Korean-Americans, Yun, now 76, yearns to be reunited with relatives in North Korea.
For many of them, the recent summit meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un raised the hope of family reunions.
“[Korean-American divided families are] the last living human link between the U.S. and DPRK,” said Jason Ahn, board chair of the (DFUSA). He referred to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. “This is a humanitarian issue and we need to act quickly to resolve this as soon as possible.”
Since the in 1950, an estimated 100,000 Korean-Americans have been cut off from relatives in North Korea.
While the U.S. and North Korea do not have a formal reunification channel for Korean-Americans and their North Korean relatives, since 2000, North and South Korea have held 20 reunions for their divided families, both physically and virtually. The at North Korea’s .
The greatest deterrent to reuniting Korean-Americans and their North Korean families has been the tense relationship between the U.S. and North Korea, now warming somewhat, and the precedence of the denuclearization issue.
“I’ve argued that human rights issues ought to be part of any conversation that the United States has with North Korea,” said Ambassador Robert King, the former special envoy for North Korean human rights issues in the Obama administration, adding that denuclearization is “an extremely important issue … and there’s no question that it’s the most important.”
But the divided families issue cannot wait.
“These [divided family members] … they’re all in their 70s, 80s, they’re all going to die,” Yun’s son, David Yun, said. “So that 100,000 is no longer 100,000 anymore.”
DFUSA and its partner organization, the (NCDF), each keep a registry of Korean-Americans with family members in North Korea.
Within the last year, several Korean-Americans on the registries have died. Others decided they no longer wanted to be registered. Some just fell off the radar.
“We need to be prioritized … even before normalization [of relations between the U.S. and North Korea] or even before the nuclear issue is resolved,” Ahn said. “That may take many years and … people are dying. Literally dying.”
Some Americans have made their own way to North Korea. That’s what Heang Ki Paik did.
A 69-year-old taekwondo master who lives in San Francisco, Paik is the son of a North Korean mother and a South Korean father who married before the Korean War. Paik, his parents and his five brothers fled to the South in 1951, leaving behind his mother’s side of the family.
“My mother … spoke in a North Korean dialect, and everyone knew that she was North Korean,” so she was discriminated against in the South, Paik said in a translated interview with VOA.
When Paik’s mother died in 1991, she left him the last known addresses of her North Korean family.
Paik moved to the U.S. in 1992 and began seeking her family.
Fifteen years later, in October 2007, Jung Woo-jin, a Korean-American taekwondo grandmaster and publisher of Taekwondo Times, hosted North Korea’s national Taekwondo Demonstration Team to The North Korean group consisted of 18 taekwondo athletes and seven officials.
Among them was .
Paik, who coordinated the event in San Francisco, stuck close to Chang over the course of three days.
“I knew this person was my only chance, so I worked hard to become friendly with him,” Paik said. On the meeting’s last day, he asked Chang to find his mother’s relatives.
Three months later, a U.N. representative for North Korea contacted Paik and confirmed that his aunt and uncle were alive.
Three years later, on Oct. 22, 2010, in his mother’s hometown Nampo, Paik met his family and spent three days with them.
?
Other divided Korean-American families seek different avenues.
Yun’s parents never gave up looking for their daughters. When they died, Yun, who had been living in the U.S. since 1965, continued their quest. He contacted a Canadian organization that said they had located his sisters.
“I was very skeptical … I think that’s the feeling that everyone had,” said David Yun, whose doubts failed to deter his father.