By Jason Lim

My dad was 16 years old in Pyongyang the last time he saw his mother and baby sister. He is now 78 and living in New Jersey, more than 6,000 miles and 60 years away from his family.

When he left Pyongyang, following the steps of the retreating U.N. forces during the Korean War, he couldn’t have imagined that he would never see his family again. The separation was to be only for a few days, just to avoid the initial onslaught of the communist forces who were sweeping down.

Everyone thought that the U.N forces would surely regroup and push back up north to take back the city in a few days. A week at the most. Of course, that never happened. The opposing communist and U.N. forces were stuck in a stalemate along the 38th Parallel for the rest of the war without any significant changes to the territory.

My dad, hungry and scared, found himself in Busan after a few weeks, not being able to understand or be understood ― such was the difference in the dialects between Pyongyang and Busan. He eventually joined the South Korean army. He didn’t really have a choice. And soon found himself shooting at North Korean soldiers, some of whom probably his classmates.

That was the last goodbye with his family.

His mother is obviously long gone. His baby sister is probably dead also, probably from the American bombing during the war when Pyongyang was leveled to the ground. Even if she had survived somehow, she would have faced daunting odds of making it to a stately grandma in her 70s. By the way, they would be my grandmother and my aunt, respectively.

My dad’s story is not unique. Far from it. And that’s the tragedy of separated families. Although exact figures are not available, there are probably close to eight million divided family members in South Korea. That means that eight million South Koreans have one or more family members in the North whom they cannot see, hear from, or even know about.

We bandy statistics about so easily these days. But let’s take a pause and think about what this means. This means that millions of sons and daughters have already lost an opportunity to say goodbye to their parents. Millions of mothers have died with a huge hole in the hearts, not knowing whether their children were dead or alive.

Millions of fathers have died with a lingering, soul-eating guilt that they had somehow let down their baby girls. Millions of brothers and sisters have never had the opportunity to grow old together, or even know what happened to one another. And that’s just the first generation of separated families.

Second generation like me has never had the opportunity to know our extended families. No weekend trips to grandma’s. No fishing trips with granddad. No mucking up with your cousins over summer vacation. Where we should have had laughing children and shushing adults, we grew up with silence. And a vast emptiness.

No wonder many people call the divided families the longest-running case of human rights violation in the world. This cruel and unusual situation is not limited to Korea. In fact, there are over 100,000 American citizens of Korean heritage who have immediate family members in North Korea.

And it’s their stories that Jason Ahn and Eugene Chung, along with their team of dedicated volunteers, seek to tell in Capitol Hill on at 6 p.m. on Oct. 4 in the Dirksen Senate Building. They have been invited by Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk, a noted supporter of Korean-American issues, to screen their documentary on divided families living in America.

Ahn and Chung are not professional filmmakers. In fact, Ahn is still a student in Harvard Medical School. However, their dedication to this documentary rivals that of any professional film director, perhaps because they are also a part of the divided families Diaspora.

As Ahn tells it, “When my grandmother was hospitalized for stomach cancer, she received a letter from her younger sister in North Korea. She said she would have to go to North Korea to see her sister. She took it as a must to see her before she died. But she died without realizing her dream.”

“For reply, we had no other choice but to send her funeral photos to her sister. Her tragic story belongs to our own, but I have realized that there are many similar stories like that of the Korean immigrants in America. As the second-generation Korean-American, I see it’s necessary to produce a film that exposes their tragic reality to the American public and speaks for them in the future,” he said.

There is still no formal mechanism for Korean-Americans to reconnect with their families in North Korea. But efforts such as this documentary will speed up that day when such an opportunity may be available. My dad might not be here that day, but hopefully I could one day stand where he would liked to have stood once more. And let him know that he has finally made it back home.

To find out more about the documentary, “Divided Families,” please visit www.dividedfamilies.com.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based consultant in organizational leadership, culture, and change management. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com and on Facebook.com/jasonlim2000.