Nodutdol . e*News
August 2009
DEEP Report Back: My 38th parallel
by Sooyoung Lee
As a child in South Korea in the mid 1980s, I remember watching on television a program that showed reunification of families who have been separated in South Korea since the war. It was truly heart wrenching to watch but I couldn’t help but be glued to the television. I remember thinking about the war that happened long ago and suffering that Koreans of that generation had to endure. I would say that it was during those times that I have had the most intense feelings about reunification because I noticed that as time goes by my interest and feelings toward reunification have waned significantly. So, in the spring of this year, when some people at Nodutdol asked me if I would consider going to North Korea, I hesitated. I had to ask myself, do I really care that much about North Korea? Even though I find myself transfixed whenever there is a mention about North Korea on television, the thought of actually going there seemed unreal and scary.
The fear was not about whether or not I’d be kidnapped or mistreated in any way, as some have tried to warn me—it was more about how my mind would react to the expected strangeness of what I might see and experience there. I had a fear that my mind would not tolerate North Korea well if what I experienced there felt restrictive both physically and mentally. I spent the earlier part of my life in South Korea until I was eleven years old when anti-communism was one of the most important dogmas in that society. Although long time has passed and I’ve lived far away from that landscape, I had a fear that perhaps some things from my childhood would return to haunt me during my time in North Korea.
Sure enough when I arrived in Pyongyang I did feel the strangeness when I saw slogans and pictures of ‘the Great Leader’ in so many places. Whenever ‘the Great Leader’ or ‘the Great General’ was brought into my conversations with people, I felt uneasy. However, through interactions with our guides and the many people we met during our trip (university students, farmers, children, scholars, soldiers, Buddhist monks, and factory workers) my uneasiness toward North Korea were slowly transformed into feelings of familiarity and closeness.
In order to gain a better understanding of each other, we exchanged many questions with the people that we met on our trip on various topics ranging from reunification to adoption issues to dating to the current economic situation. Some of these conversations were very enlightening and helped to dissolve our initial barriers and to develop closeness, but then there were also some topics that seemed too taboo and returned only answers that sounded like official statements from their government. Eating, singing, and drinking together were activities that frequently helped us to transcend our preconceptions about each other when talking sometimes seemed to get in the way of bringing closeness. I greatly wanted to build a connection with one of our guides, Mr. Huh, who we called Huh dongji (it is a term that is mainly used in North Korea meaning comrade or friend who shares the same cause). Huh dongji was very friendly and funny and quite close to my age. I wanted to be understood by him and also understand him as a person and not be hindered by our labels. In a way it was an experiment on my part to see whether I could really overcome my fear of a North Korean to achieve my symbolic 'person-to-person reunification’. Even though Huh dongji was an ideal candidate for this, some strange fear kept interfering at odd moments during my interactions with him. I began to look within and questioned, what is this fear that I have within me?
One of the questions that I dreaded hearing the most was “So what do you think of North Korea so far?” Even though my impression of North Korea was becoming increasingly favorable as time went by, when this question finally came from Huh dongji, I was afraid to answer. For me this was such a loaded question and I sensed that he knew this also and that’s why he waited many days before asking. Where do I begin? How could I explain my fear when I don’t quite understand the nature of it myself? Not knowing how to respond, I talked about my feelings and about my experience of growing up in South Korea where during that time North Koreans were depicted as monsters and wolves and untrustworthy people. I told him that I still feel uneasy when I hear people praise ‘the Great Leader’ but that I’m beginning to understand where they are coming from. He said when he was growing up he was taught to regard Americans as enemies but never South Koreans. Later he further clarified that what he was referring to when he said “미국놈” (American bastards) is U.S. government and their hostile policies toward North Korea and not the people.
I shared with Huh dongji and others on our last night in North Korea that sometimes I feel that my mind is divided like the 38th parallel that divides our country. Visiting North Korea felt as though I was visiting the home of my relatives who we’ve not been allowed to visit because of some family feud long time ago, a feud that we weren’t involved in but somehow inherited all the venoms of mistrust in our hearts. So it is a strange and fearful, yet familiar encounter. As a Korean American who was born on the southern half of the peninsula but is now living in the U.S., all my life I’ve been exposed to media and propaganda that demonize North Korea and its leaders while often portraying North Korean people as a starving, deluded, and robot-like herd. In contrast to these images, the North Koreans that we met were people of intelligence and kindness, holding a strong sense of self and impressive pride in being Korean, whose lives seem similar to us in many ways including the mundane.
Leaving Pyongyang Airport felt strange. It felt sad and strange to be leaving a place that has started to feel like home. When I left South Korea with my family to come to the United States at the age of eleven, I didn’t know that the trip that I was about to take would remove me from nearly everything that I had known for so long. When I left Pyongyang on August 1, 2009, I felt a sense of irony in going back to the country that has been the reason for the division of our homeland and so much pain and suffering for generations of Koreans and so responsible for this division in the hearts and minds of each of us which are so much more difficult to bind and heal than the physical land that is divided.
As we were leaving, I told our guides who we have spent so much time with during our 12 days of stay that I would come back soon. I stared at Huh dongji in my habit of trying to read his mind through his eyes and told him that I would return so that we could have a 100 percent understanding of each other. He replied in the way that so many North Koreans that we’ve met on this trip have said, “It is difficult to know everything about us in one visit so please visit again and you’ll surely understand more about us”. As we gave each other strong hugs, out of a habit, I almost said “Yes, I hope you can visit us too” but thankfully those words did not come out as that would have surely made both of us feel uncomfortable.
I thought about how isolated North Korea is from the rest of the world. Its ideas about society and people seemed so noble yet foreign. I thought about how underneath their strong pride and their determination to build a ‘강성대국’, a strong prosperous nation, in the face of hostile international policies and sanctions, there might also be longing to be reunited with the rest of the world. North Korea is so often depicted as an irrational and hostile state but what is not so well understood to those outside North Korea is the history of U.S. and Korea relationship which has been the source of North Korea’s grief and the motivation for their determination to survive. I consider my visit to North Korea a privilege since there are so many Koreans whose dreams have been to visit the other side but haven't been able to. As a result of my education and exposure to North Korea, my homeland, and the people there, I feel that I have gained not only an insight and perspectives that I didn't have before but also closeness. Now I feel that it is my responsibility to share what I have seen, felt, and learned in the hope that it would contribute towards healing and more understanding of each other.
As a child in South Korea in the mid 1980s, I remember watching on television a program that showed reunification of families who have been separated in South Korea since the war. It was truly heart wrenching to watch but I couldn’t help but be glued to the television. I remember thinking about the war that happened long ago and suffering that Koreans of that generation had to endure. I would say that it was during those times that I have had the most intense feelings about reunification because I noticed that as time goes by my interest and feelings toward reunification have waned significantly. So, in the spring of this year, when some people at Nodutdol asked me if I would consider going to North Korea, I hesitated. I had to ask myself, do I really care that much about North Korea? Even though I find myself transfixed whenever there is a mention about North Korea on television, the thought of actually going there seemed unreal and scary.
The fear was not about whether or not I’d be kidnapped or mistreated in any way, as some have tried to warn me—it was more about how my mind would react to the expected strangeness of what I might see and experience there. I had a fear that my mind would not tolerate North Korea well if what I experienced there felt restrictive both physically and mentally. I spent the earlier part of my life in South Korea until I was eleven years old when anti-communism was one of the most important dogmas in that society. Although long time has passed and I’ve lived far away from that landscape, I had a fear that perhaps some things from my childhood would return to haunt me during my time in North Korea.
Sure enough when I arrived in Pyongyang I did feel the strangeness when I saw slogans and pictures of ‘the Great Leader’ in so many places. Whenever ‘the Great Leader’ or ‘the Great General’ was brought into my conversations with people, I felt uneasy. However, through interactions with our guides and the many people we met during our trip (university students, farmers, children, scholars, soldiers, Buddhist monks, and factory workers) my uneasiness toward North Korea were slowly transformed into feelings of familiarity and closeness.
In order to gain a better understanding of each other, we exchanged many questions with the people that we met on our trip on various topics ranging from reunification to adoption issues to dating to the current economic situation. Some of these conversations were very enlightening and helped to dissolve our initial barriers and to develop closeness, but then there were also some topics that seemed too taboo and returned only answers that sounded like official statements from their government. Eating, singing, and drinking together were activities that frequently helped us to transcend our preconceptions about each other when talking sometimes seemed to get in the way of bringing closeness. I greatly wanted to build a connection with one of our guides, Mr. Huh, who we called Huh dongji (it is a term that is mainly used in North Korea meaning comrade or friend who shares the same cause). Huh dongji was very friendly and funny and quite close to my age. I wanted to be understood by him and also understand him as a person and not be hindered by our labels. In a way it was an experiment on my part to see whether I could really overcome my fear of a North Korean to achieve my symbolic 'person-to-person reunification’. Even though Huh dongji was an ideal candidate for this, some strange fear kept interfering at odd moments during my interactions with him. I began to look within and questioned, what is this fear that I have within me?
One of the questions that I dreaded hearing the most was “So what do you think of North Korea so far?” Even though my impression of North Korea was becoming increasingly favorable as time went by, when this question finally came from Huh dongji, I was afraid to answer. For me this was such a loaded question and I sensed that he knew this also and that’s why he waited many days before asking. Where do I begin? How could I explain my fear when I don’t quite understand the nature of it myself? Not knowing how to respond, I talked about my feelings and about my experience of growing up in South Korea where during that time North Koreans were depicted as monsters and wolves and untrustworthy people. I told him that I still feel uneasy when I hear people praise ‘the Great Leader’ but that I’m beginning to understand where they are coming from. He said when he was growing up he was taught to regard Americans as enemies but never South Koreans. Later he further clarified that what he was referring to when he said “미국놈” (American bastards) is U.S. government and their hostile policies toward North Korea and not the people.
I shared with Huh dongji and others on our last night in North Korea that sometimes I feel that my mind is divided like the 38th parallel that divides our country. Visiting North Korea felt as though I was visiting the home of my relatives who we’ve not been allowed to visit because of some family feud long time ago, a feud that we weren’t involved in but somehow inherited all the venoms of mistrust in our hearts. So it is a strange and fearful, yet familiar encounter. As a Korean American who was born on the southern half of the peninsula but is now living in the U.S., all my life I’ve been exposed to media and propaganda that demonize North Korea and its leaders while often portraying North Korean people as a starving, deluded, and robot-like herd. In contrast to these images, the North Koreans that we met were people of intelligence and kindness, holding a strong sense of self and impressive pride in being Korean, whose lives seem similar to us in many ways including the mundane.
Leaving Pyongyang Airport felt strange. It felt sad and strange to be leaving a place that has started to feel like home. When I left South Korea with my family to come to the United States at the age of eleven, I didn’t know that the trip that I was about to take would remove me from nearly everything that I had known for so long. When I left Pyongyang on August 1, 2009, I felt a sense of irony in going back to the country that has been the reason for the division of our homeland and so much pain and suffering for generations of Koreans and so responsible for this division in the hearts and minds of each of us which are so much more difficult to bind and heal than the physical land that is divided.
As we were leaving, I told our guides who we have spent so much time with during our 12 days of stay that I would come back soon. I stared at Huh dongji in my habit of trying to read his mind through his eyes and told him that I would return so that we could have a 100 percent understanding of each other. He replied in the way that so many North Koreans that we’ve met on this trip have said, “It is difficult to know everything about us in one visit so please visit again and you’ll surely understand more about us”. As we gave each other strong hugs, out of a habit, I almost said “Yes, I hope you can visit us too” but thankfully those words did not come out as that would have surely made both of us feel uncomfortable.
I thought about how isolated North Korea is from the rest of the world. Its ideas about society and people seemed so noble yet foreign. I thought about how underneath their strong pride and their determination to build a ‘강성대국’, a strong prosperous nation, in the face of hostile international policies and sanctions, there might also be longing to be reunited with the rest of the world. North Korea is so often depicted as an irrational and hostile state but what is not so well understood to those outside North Korea is the history of U.S. and Korea relationship which has been the source of North Korea’s grief and the motivation for their determination to survive. I consider my visit to North Korea a privilege since there are so many Koreans whose dreams have been to visit the other side but haven't been able to. As a result of my education and exposure to North Korea, my homeland, and the people there, I feel that I have gained not only an insight and perspectives that I didn't have before but also closeness. Now I feel that it is my responsibility to share what I have seen, felt, and learned in the hope that it would contribute towards healing and more understanding of each other.
This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of Nodutdol eNews.
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About Nodutdol eNews
Nodutdol eNews is the monthly e-mail newsletter of Nodutdol.Through grassroots organization and community development, Nodutdol seeks to bridge divisions created by war, nation, gender, sexual orientation, language, classes and generation among Koreans and to empower our community to address the injustice we and other people of color face here and abroad. Nodutdol works in collaboration with other progressive organizations locally, nationally and internationally as part of a larger movement for peace and social change.
In this issue
DEEP Report Back: Learning a new language
DEEP Report Back: The road to unification
DEEP Report Back: My 38th parallel
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