Korean moms are strong

By Kim JI-myung

“Women are weak, but mothers are strong.” And someone said, “Being a mother is learning about strengths that you did not know you had, and dealing with fears you did not know existed.” Korean mothers are famed for their conspicuous dedication to family and children.

Grandma Kang Sun-gyo, 84, fled North Korea in 2006 at the age of 75. She wrote an autobiography titled “Crossing the Border of Despair in the Name of a Mother,” (Haengbok Publishing House). Her story is the first book written by a senior North Korean refugee, a condensed modern history of the Korean Peninsula.

“I feel like a salmon, coming back home to breed and face death after roaming in the wide ocean for a long time,” said the former nurse, who formerly lived in Manchuria, North Korea and China. She had too many agonizing memories and wanted to share them before she died. She told that to police Lieutenant Kim Sun-gi, who had been in charge of her. Lt. Kim, who was adopted as her foster son, helped arrange the publishing of the book.

Kang grew up in a mountainous village in North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, until 1944, a year before Korea was liberated. When she was 14, Kang’s family moved to Manchuria to avoid the Japanese Colonial Government’s mobilization of Korean girls. Her family could not come back when Korea regained its independence in 1945. Kang was mobilized as an army nurse for China’s Eighth Route Army (Balu-jun) during the war between the Chinese Communist Party and Nationalist Party forces. She served in the Chinese Army during the Korean War, treating soldiers and prisoners from both sides.

She married a man from Tongyeong, a southern coastal city in South Korea. In 1962, they tried to return to her hometown with her parents, but it was impossible as China had no diplomatic relations with South Korea. Being of South Korean origin meant no job, no food rations and no good schooling for her children. Her husband died in 1970.

She could barely feed the family by gathering medicinal herbs on the mountain. The big flood of 1986 worsened the famine. By 1994, the official food rationing system came to an end. It was rumored that, “Even dogs and pigs eat cooked rice in the South.” Her first attempt in 2002 to flee to the South via China failed, and she and her family were detained in a criminals’ camp in North Korea. Of her five children, two sons and three daughters, all made it to the South through grueling processes, except the second son who starved to death in detention.

She says, “I am happy to have presented a free country to my children. I crossed the border many times, risking my life. It was all for my children.” Dramatic stories abound of refugee families in poverty, fear and war. But history tells us that the sudden division of a nation and several decades of continued separation among families are highly unusual.

“Still Life with Rice” by Heily Lee (Translated into Korean as “A Landscape with Grandma” by Hong Hyeon-suk) is also a drama about Paik Hong-yong. The author is a granddaughter of the heroine. Paik grew up in an extremely conservative family where, “A good girl should not be able to count 10 dishes.” She married a typical bad husband ― weak, incompetent, irresponsible and cheating. Lady Paik, faced with fate, moved to China with the entire family. She ran a restaurant and sold whatever could earn her money, even opium.

Under the communist regime in North Korea, her well-to-do Christian family was a target of political suppression. The family moved to the South during the Korean War, walking all the way to Busan. Later she was devastated to find her first son, Yong-il, who was supposed to arrive earlier with his father, had been left alone in the North. Her husband died soon after.

It was her religion that kept her going. She made a successful living by practicing a kind of traditional Chinese massage therapy, but Korean law came to disallow the folk remedy of obscure origin. After that, she opened another life chapter. She moved to the United States to join her daughter’s family. She had never forgotten her son in the North and made every effort to contact him. At last, in 1991, she received a letter from Yong-il’s daughter. A moving scene of regaining contact with her son is included at the end of Paik’s granddaughter’s book.

Reality, however, is more dramatic. Six years after the letter from the North reached the lady, she helped Yong-il escape North Korea. Lady Paik hugged Yong-il again, 47 years after he was separated from her in 1950 as a 16-year-old. “Only God knows how women of our family have supported husbands,” Paik said.

Maybe the best-known North Korean exodus was that of the Kim Man-cheol family which sailed a boat to “go to a warm land” in 1987. All 11 family members, including children, arrived in Korea on a 50-ton ship via Japan and Taiwan. The whole process was arranged by the mother.

When a Korean man makes a political exile to South Korea, he often comes alone. But when a mother comes to the South, she usually brings all her children and even other relatives.

The writer is the chairwoman of the Korea Heritage Education Institute. Her email address is Heritagekorea21@gmail.com.