April 12 and February 8, momentous days in our family lore, are remembered as the “gotcha” days for my well-loved nephews, Lucas and Noah. They joined our extended family prior to their first birthdays, having been in foster care placement before embarking on their long journey to the U.S. I was privileged to travel to JFK International Airport on both dates to bear witness to these long-awaited arrivals. Cherished memories of those days include assisting my sister as she gingerly changed her first diaper in the confines of an airport bathroom, and of tiny bare feet captured in a photo of Noah, his parents, and the young Korean student who transported an extra package on her way to university.
The boys were born on land south of the 38thParallel on the Korean Peninsula, thousands of miles from their new home in North Tonawanda, NY. For reasons best understood by many birth mothers around the world, provisions were made for the children to be adopted through an international agency, and so they came, tiny immigrants, joyously welcomed and embraced.
Recent events in Korea, quickly displaced from the world stage by immigrants at a different border, include the glorious 2018 Winter Olympics, with its Korean team symbolically marching in unity, and the bluster exchanged between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un (labeled Little Rocket Man) and Donald Trump (a dotard, by Kim’s description). Remember the January tweet war? “I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
By April 27, Trump was tweeting, “KOREAN WAR TO END.” And by June, the two men were meeting in a summit, after which Trump assured the world, “Everybody can now feel much safer . . . because there is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”
Given my personal connection to Korea through my nephews, I’ve been deficient in understanding its history, including the open-ended war that I thought was over, and the North’s nuclear threat. My quick and dirty, internet-aided history lesson yielded these basic facts. For about five hundred years, Korea was a united country, led primarily by rulers of Korean heritage. In 1910, it was annexed by Japan and remained under its rule until the end of World War II. Considered one of the spoils of war, the country was carved in two. The land in the north was occupied by the Soviets, while the land south of the 38thparallel was occupied by U.S. forces.
When agreement could not be reached on the reunification of Korea, the Soviet-influenced government of North Korea invaded the south in 1950; thus, the Korean War. This conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice. Its cost: an estimated five million military and civilian deaths. 36,923 American bodies returned home in flag-draped coffins or were haphazardly buried in Korean soil. Now, more than sixty-five years later, South Korea is a thriving democracy, and the north is governed by dynastic dictator Kim Jong Un, with a familial reputation for immense cruelty.
According to a 400 page United Nations Commission of Inquiry report from 2014, “the gravity, nature and scale of these [North Korean human rights] violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” Its prison camps (gulag) hold an estimated 120,000 political prisoners, and indoctrination and religious persecution is all-encompassing. As one North Korean woman explained, “if the government finds out I am reading the Bible, I’m dead.”
In 1950, eighteen members of a brass band from The Salvation Army’s Seoul Boy’s Home were marched at gunpoint towards North Korea. These orphans, some as young as ten or eleven, were never heard from again. In the light of the terror, death and destruction in North Korea from 1950 to the present, their kidnapping is but a small drop in an ocean of misery. Yet as I listen carefully to the strains of Korean history, the lingering echo of the boys’ band marching to oblivion sounds a cautionary note to my ears. Dr. King warned, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.” Talks and tweets are a start; now to transparency and accountability.
No comments:
Post a Comment