The Korea Times close
National
  • Politics
  • Foreign Affairs
  • Multicultural Community
  • Defense
  • Environment & Animals
  • Law & Crime
  • Society
  • Health & Science
Business
  • Tech
  • Bio
  • Companies
Finance
  • Companies
  • Economy
  • Markets
  • Cryptocurrency
Opinion
  • Editorial
  • Columns
  • Thoughts of the Times
  • Cartoon
  • Today in History
  • Blogs
  • Tribune Service
  • Blondie & Garfield
  • Letter to President
  • Letter to the Editor
Lifestyle
  • Travel & Food
  • Trends
  • People & Events
  • Books
  • Around Town
  • Fortune Telling
Entertainment
& Arts
  • K-pop
  • Films
  • Shows & Dramas
  • Music
  • Theater & Others
Sports
World
  • SCMP
  • Asia
Video
  • Culture
  • People
  • News
Photos
  • Photo News
  • Darkroom
  • The Korea Times
  • search
  • Site Map
  • E-paper
  • Subscribe
  • Register
  • LogIn
search close
  • The Korea Times
  • search
  • Site Map
  • E-paper
  • Subscribe
  • Register
  • LogIn
search close
North Korea
Wed, August 10, 2022 | 22:53
[INTERVIEW] Separated families cry out for humanitarian policy for reunion
Posted : 2019-10-06 14:30
Updated : 2019-10-08 07:52
Print Preview
Font Size Up
Font Size Down
The sun sets on the inter-Korean ceasefire line, June 25, 2000, 50 years after the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War. The war ended with an Armistice Agreement but the two Koreas remain separated after nearly seven decades, with July 27, 2019, marking the 66th anniversary of the armistice. Korea Times file
The sun sets on the inter-Korean ceasefire line, June 25, 2000, 50 years after the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War. The war ended with an Armistice Agreement but the two Koreas remain separated after nearly seven decades, with July 27, 2019, marking the 66th anniversary of the armistice. Korea Times file

Joy Lee tells her story as Korean-American missing family in North Korea

By Jung Da-min

Joy Lee Powell Gebhard, an 84 year-old Korean American, still vividly remembers the moment she said goodbye to her mother.

It was Dec. 3, 1950, after the Chinese People's Army had intervened in the Korean War pushing the South Korean Armed Forces and the United Nations forces backwards.

Lee was a 15 year-old girl just ahead of entering a high school in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Born in a house opposite the Taedong River in 1935, her given name was Bok-shin.

The sun sets on the inter-Korean ceasefire line, June 25, 2000, 50 years after the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War. The war ended with an Armistice Agreement but the two Koreas remain separated after nearly seven decades, with July 27, 2019, marking the 66th anniversary of the armistice. Korea Times file
Joy Lee Powell Gebhard / Courtesy of Joy Lee Powell Gebhard
"My family had had a good harvest that year," Lee recalled, during a recent phone interview with The Korea Times.

As Lee was leaving her mother, along with other refugees heading to Seoul, she was wearing her school uniform with additional layers of clothing her mother had put on her, while also carrying rice and snacks her mother had packed.

"My mother, standing in a room with an earthen floor, grasped both my hands and told me to write to her often, and that I must survive. As I was walking away from the house, I had an instinctive feeling that I might not be able to see her again afterwards. I kept looking back and she was still standing there. That was the last moment."

Lee's father had died earlier that year. Her four other sisters ― 22, 11, eight and six years old, respectively, at the time ― had left the house to take refuge as the winter was starting, just before Lee headed to Seoul. Their mother chose to stay in the house to keep the family property.

After leaving Pyongyang to come to Seoul, Lee had no family nor acquaintances in the South, and often went hungry.

"I thought of going back to the North every day," Lee said recalling the days in Seoul after she left Pyongyang. "I thought that I might be able to go back if I climbed up the mountain or if I just keep moving toward the North."

Seeing a recruitment advertisement for a nursing school in Busan, she managed to get to the southern port city.

"When I was in Pyongyang, I had been dreaming of becoming a doctor who could cure cancer. I thought becoming a nurse was another way to enter the medical field," Lee said.

After graduating from nursing school, she entered Pusan National University to major in politics.

As a self-supporting student and an utter stranger with no family or acquaintances in Busan, Lee took on many jobs to earn money. She was a translator for foreign missionaries, a tutor for choir members' children at a U.N. church established by the United States and an announcer for a broadcaster HLKY.

On Aug. 3, 1956, she left for the United States to study further upon an invitation from a Methodist Church coalition in Texas. It was in July 1970 when she came to visit South Korean again after she underwent major cancer surgery in the U.S.

"I wanted to touch the soil of my motherland. But as I could not visit my North Korean hometown, I wanted to visit my second hometown, which was Mount. Gudeok in Busan. I used to climbed the mountain and studied there," Lee said.

Lee also went to the inter-Korean demarcation line along the 38th parallel that divides Koreas at the Demilitarized Zone. She brought a fistful of soil from there to the U.S., putting it in a plastic bag.

Since then, Lee had not given up trying to find her family in North Korea and kept writing letters to her family and calling and writing to embassies of the two Koreas and the United States to find their whereabouts.

Her letters and calls often received no response. The ones she did receive were devoid of empathy and stated that they were not capable of helping her, but she did not stop writing.

"'We are the most miserable people in the world,' that was what I often wrote in the letters I sent, out of resentment that both the South and North Korean government are cruel in that they were not willing to help those desperate to find their separated families," Lee said.

[Reporter's Notebook] Chuseok highlights separated families' agony
[Reporter's Notebook] Chuseok highlights separated families' agony
2019-09-06 17:00  |  North Korea

The sun sets on the inter-Korean ceasefire line, June 25, 2000, 50 years after the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War. The war ended with an Armistice Agreement but the two Koreas remain separated after nearly seven decades, with July 27, 2019, marking the 66th anniversary of the armistice. Korea Times file
In this Dec. 4, 1950, file photo by former Associated Press photographer Max Desfor, residents from Pyongyang, North Korea, and refugees from other areas crawl perilously over shattered girders of the city's bridge, as they flee south across the Taedong River to escape the advance of Chinese Communist troops. AP-Yonhap

In 1988, by the time when she gave up on hearing back, she finally received a letter from North Korea with a Pyongyang stamp. It was 38 years after she left her home there.

"What I first saw was the part where it read my mother had died. I was too shocked to keep reading. I left my house and hovered around my neighborhood in a raincoat…and it wasn't even raining. …… When I came back home and continued to read through the rest part of the letter, my dog kept crying as if it felt my grief and shock," Lee said.

"The letter said that all of my sisters were alive, still living at the address in Pyongyang I remembered. I was told to come visit my homeland anytime, encouraging me to come. I immediately started to get ready to leave."

After a dramatic reunion with her sisters in Pyongyang that year, Lee has since visited the North 15 times before the U.S. government banned its citizens from traveling to North Korea in August 2017.

US travel ban should be lifted for separated families

The travel ban was imposed after Otto Warmbier, a U.S. student who had visited the North in 2016 and died in the following year after released by the North Korean government. Warmbier had been detained for allegations of stealing a propaganda poster from his hotel.

Lee said she would have wanted to break the travel ban if she were younger and had more energy. She will not take the risk now as she is getting old and does not want to stress herself out when her time and energy to go see her family in the North again are limited.

But it is not that she thinks the travel ban is right.

"[The travel ban] is such an unprecedented and dreadful violation of human rights in the history of international community," Lee said, adding that innocent separated families have been sacrificed.

Lee said it is really a time pressing issue as she thinks the concept of separated families itself will fade out in the near future, after the surviving first-generation separated families die out.

"I think the surviving first-generation separated families will die within about 10 years from now," Lee said.

While those in the U.S. who have separated relatives in North Korea are getting old, they have been recognized neither by the South Korean government nor the U.S. government. Almost no governmental-level efforts have been made to help them meet their families.

Some discussions have arisen recently on organizing a family reunion event for Korean-Americans who have separated relatives in the North among the U.S. lawmakers, but they put the decision in hands of Stephen Biegun, the U.S. Special Representative for North Korea.

This showed the family reunion issue is being linked with the political issue of denuclearization negotiations with the U.S. and North Korea, when the separated families cry out that the issue should be dealt with in a humanitarian way, separate from political issues.

The sun sets on the inter-Korean ceasefire line, June 25, 2000, 50 years after the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War. The war ended with an Armistice Agreement but the two Koreas remain separated after nearly seven decades, with July 27, 2019, marking the 66th anniversary of the armistice. Korea Times file
Tourists, far right, take photos before the Taedong River in Pyongyang in this July 23, 2017, file photo. AFP-Yonhap

The U.S. government's travel ban has also impacted those who had been visiting North Korea for humanitarian activities.

Joon Bai, another Korean American born in North Korea before the Korean War, is one of those who had often visited the North for humanitarian work, such as building schools and providing relief goods. Bai was born in 1937 in Hoeryong, North Hamgyong Province. He came to the South when the war broke out and later came to the U.S.

Bai has been helping North Koreans by providing some humanitarian aid, as he considers them as his neighbors in his hometown.

After the travel ban took effect, he could not visit the North any more as his first application for the exemption for humanitarian work had been rejected. He had since applied again and been waiting for the result.

"[Lifting the travel ban for those doing humanitarian work] is really not a question of U.S. government doing things for any purpose. …. It's a human need," Bai said.

Kee B. Park, a Korean American who as a surgeon has visited the North 20 times, also says the travel ban should be lifted as it has lost the justification of protecting U.S. citizens from arbitrary detention at changing relations between the U.S. and North Korea since then.

"It appears the travel ban is now being used by the U.S. as a pressure tactic which in my opinion has minimal value in coercing the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) yet has a devastating effect on the U.S.-based humanitarian workers and the U.S. citizens who wish to visit families inside the DPRK," Park said.

"The travel ban should be lifted immediately. If not, at the very least, allow the U.S. citizens with families inside DPRK an exemption process to visit them. This is an urgent humanitarian issue that is being totally neglected but must be resolved quickly as many divided family members are dying."




Emaildamin.jung@koreatimes.co.kr Article ListMore articles by this reporter
 
LG
  • Capital region to see additional 300 millimeters of rain until Friday
  • North Korea releases water from border dam after downpours
  • [PHOTOS] Damage after torrential rains
  • Visa regulation pits Jeju islanders against justice ministry
  • Canadian YouTuber takes viewers on brewing adventures in Korea
  • China wary of South Korea's US-centered policy
  • Yoon details whereabouts during record downpour to curb conspiracy theory
  • Heavy downpour disrupts e-commerce deliveries
  • Ex-President Lee Myung-bak unlikely to be released
  • Former Starbucks Korea CEO leads growth of Shinsegae brand JAJU
  • Interactive News
  • With tough love,
  • 'Santa dogs' help rebuild burnt forests in Andong
  • 'Santa dogs' help rebuild burnt forests in Andong
  • A tale of natural wine
    • BLACKPINK to start world tour in October BLACKPINK to start world tour in October
    • [INTERVIEW] Im Si-wan finds own narrative for villain role in 'Emergency Declaration' [INTERVIEW] Im Si-wan finds own narrative for villain role in 'Emergency Declaration'
    • 'Free Chol Soo Lee': How young Korean immigrant's wrongful conviction led to pan Asian American resistance movement 'Free Chol Soo Lee': How young Korean immigrant's wrongful conviction led to pan Asian American resistance movement
    • 'Good Doctor' director to debut Netflix's high-strung suspense series, 'A Model Family' 'Good Doctor' director to debut Netflix's high-strung suspense series, 'A Model Family'
    • Crime thriller 'Limit' is about mother's quest to save abducted son Crime thriller 'Limit' is about mother's quest to save abducted son
    DARKROOM
    • Ice is melting, land is burning

      Ice is melting, land is burning

    • Tottenham 6-3 Team K League

      Tottenham 6-3 Team K League

    • Afghanistan earthquake killed more than 1,000

      Afghanistan earthquake killed more than 1,000

    • Divided America reacts to overturn of Roe vs. Wade

      Divided America reacts to overturn of Roe vs. Wade

    • Namaste: Yogis to celebrate International Yoga Day

      Namaste: Yogis to celebrate International Yoga Day

    The Korea Times
    CEO & Publisher : Oh Young-jin
    Digital News Email : webmaster@koreatimes.co.kr
    Tel : 02-724-2114
    Online newspaper registration No : 서울,아52844
    Date of registration : 2020.02.05
    Masthead : The Korea Times
    Copyright © koreatimes.co.kr. All rights reserved.
    • About Us
    • Introduction
    • History
    • Location
    • Media Kit
    • Contact Us
    • Products & Service
    • Subscribe
    • E-paper
    • Mobile Service
    • RSS Service
    • Content Sales
    • Policy
    • Privacy Statement
    • Terms of Service
    • 고충처리인
    • Youth Protection Policy
    • Code of Ethics
    • Copyright Policy
    • Family Site
    • Hankook Ilbo
    • Dongwha Group