The Long Ride Home
Story and Photographs by Daniel Won-gu Kim
KoreAm Journal
http://thestrategycenter.org/pdfs/eng.%20gk%20trip%208.pdf
For 82-year-old L.A. Bus Riders Union organizer Hee Pok Kim, traveling to Seoul for a milestone anniversary of Korean liberation becomes a bittersweet journey in search of home. Fellow organizer Daniel Won-gu Kim accompanies “Grandma Kim,” as she is popularly known in Los Angeles, and records their 10-day journey.
August 10th
Grandma Kim is waiting for us on the curb in front of her apartment. Instead of the expandable mega-bags that halmeonis traditionally cart to Korea, she has two small knapsacks — “only what I can carry myself.”
“You know what?” she confides as we get into Andy’s car. “I haven’t slept for three days. I keep waiting for this whole thing to vanish, like it was just a dream. Even when Tammy gave me the plane ticket, a part of me still didn’t believe it. Are we really going to the airport?”
Grandma Kim has been invited to join the North American delegation traveling to Seoul for this year’s historic 60th celebration of Gwangbokjeol, which means “the return of light.”
August 15, 1945 — or Pal-il-o, which translates to “8-1-5” — was the day Koreans emerged from the 35-year darkness of Japanese colonization. But the very day of its liberation was also the first day of Korea’s division into North and South. What makes this year’s Pal-il-o so special is that it marks the first joint North and South Korean celebration of independence. On this 60th anniversary, more than 200 North Korean delegates will cross the DMZ to join 400 South Korean delegates, as well as 150 Korean emigrants now living in Australia, Europe, Japan, Canada and the United States, in celebration. The event symbolizes the Korean Peninsula’s acceleration toward peace and tongil (reunification) after the watershed Inter-Korean Summit of 2000.
An invitation as an official delegate to such a celebration is typically bestowed upon hulryunghan (prominent) people — church leaders, politicians, professors. Grandma Kim does not fit the profile: an 82-year-old immigrant who spends her retirement years organizing for the Los Angeles-based Bus Riders Union. The BRU, made up predominantly of black, Latino and Asian members mostly decades her junior, is a civil rights and environmental justice organization that fights racial discrimination in the county’s public transit system. Her inspiring leadership in this struggle has gained Hee Pok Kim, a North Korea native, the nickname, “Grandma Kim.”
She doesn’t believe she deserves this invitation.
“Maybe I’d deserve this honor if I had 10 years under my belt, instead of just four,” she says, referring to her years of activism with the BRU. “Maybe if I had been able to achieve more ….”
In fact, over the past two years, she has increasingly questioned whether her organizing has fallen far short of her goals. As the BRU organizer who recruited Grandma Kim to the organization four years ago, I’ve been trying to help her dispel her sense of personal defeat. I try to remind her of her unique role leading the BRU’s 2001 breakthrough into Koreatown. She has inspired me and many second-generation Koreans across the United States to resist the deep streak of conservatism in our communities, daring us to fight on the side of immigrants, women, workers, the oppressed, the poor. But the truth is, her heroism is not easy to recognize or explain.
Standing up at a board meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), which operates the county’s buses and trains and has for nine years fought implementation of a Civil Rights Consent Decree for more buses, to deliver a militant rebuke or marching to protest a war — these public acts are perhaps the easiest dimensions of her work. What makes her heroic is her determination to get up day after day to recruit and retain members. In her four years with the BRU, she has recruited 200 new members — an organization record. Working as a volunteer, Grandma Kim has built — slowly, but surely — a previously non-existent Korean base in the BRU that scares the hell out of the $2 billion-a-year MTA.
She has also taken on new work: joining the BRU’s new “Clean Air, Clean Lungs” environmental justice campaign and door-knocking to help elect Antonio Villaraigosa, L.A.’s new mayor.
She has done all of this, even as her rising political profile has increased the redbaiting and isolation she faces in her ethnic community.
Grandma Kim offers some snacks before boarding the plane for Korea
For over a year, those of us working at the Labor/Community Strategy Center, which founded and helps run the BRU, have been looking for a way to recognize Grandma Kim’s tremendous work. We thought that sending her on a journey to the native homeland she left in 1988 would give her an opportunity for reflection and rejuvenation, as well as give the Strategy Center a chance to make connections with like-minded progressive organizations in Korea.
L.A.’s traffic gives us no trouble today, and we are among the first to arrive at the airport gate. She immediately reaches into her knapsack to pull out bags of food: limes to energize, almonds for all-around nutrition, raw peanuts for the eyes, dried apricots to slow dehydration and ddeok for the festive mood.
August 11th
Between bouts of sleep during our 18-hour flight, we talk. When I tell her how my father tried to convince me not to go on this trip because it was too political — “It could be dangerous,” he said — Grandma Kim puts our trip into perspective.
“This is such an important occasion for us,” she says. “I was in Seoul when our liberation came. I was young, I ran out into the streets. Flags suddenly seemed to be everywhere. We went everywhere cheering and singing and shouting ‘Mansei.’
“Our liberation is not something that just happened to us. So many people sacrificed so much, their lives, their bodies, to win it. My uncle (an independence movement leader) was like that. Do you know that he sold his house to raise funds to send his hubae (people he mentored) to the best schools so that they could gain skills and positions to build the movement? He was not alone in doing this.
“We will not be able to set this world right all at once. That spirit of commitment and sacrifice must be passed on from generation to generation. We are still not truly free. We are only half-liberated while our land is divided in two. Back then, we thought that the division surely could not last. On the eve of liberation, we felt the passion of one people; tongil felt like it would come tomorrow. How could my uncle have imagined that after 60 years, we would still be split in two?
“In that time, the South has done very well, beyond anyone’s imagination. They say that now they have everything we have in L.A., even more. But we’ll see. What good is economic success if the society is rotten inside with greed? What good is prosperity if it comes from wealth snatched from other people’s hands?”
She sees me taking notes while we talk. I am trying to write in Korean. She praises my clumsy efforts and tells me how much easier it is to learn Korean now. Scholars have done a good job improving the language. “It used to be that you wouldn’t leave spaces between words when writing. There’s a joke about that. You would write, ‘A-beo-ji-ga-bang-eh-deul-leo-ga-sseo,’ and it could mean, ‘Father went into the room.’ But it could also mean, ‘Daddy went into the suitcase.’” We laugh and then she turns the conversation into a meditation on respect for tradition and the nature of progress.
When she was young, girls, unlike boys, were not taught to write. Often, they weren’t even given proper names. When she would go to see relatives in the country, they would call her “set-jjae” (the third one). She hated that and refused to answer to it. Her father would take her side: “She has her own name, a beautiful name.” But they would persist. “We can’t be rigid about our traditions,” she concludes. “We must embrace the good parts, but we have to throw the bad parts out.
August 12th
”We start our day in an Internet café so that I can search the Web for trails to the two people she wants to see: a Mr. Yun and a Mrs. Woo. For many years before she came to the United States, Grandma Kim had been a mother to them, even nursing one through illness. The three of them shared youthful dreams of forming a Christian missionary group and traveling the world: Yun would be the minister, Woo would be the missionary and Grandma Kim would be the group’s singer.
Mr. Yun and Mrs. Woo fell out of contact about eight years ago. We find some good leads and leave many phone messages. In the meantime, we decide to try to track down the house in Naesoo-dong where she raised her two sons for 10 years before sending them to study in the States.
Grandma Kim searches for her old home in a neighborhood that has seen many changes since she raised her two sons.
It is a wistful experience. An area that was once full of traditional houses and small storefronts along mazes of alleyways has been cleared into high-rise city blocks of banks, condos and a performing arts complex. I follow her as she tries to feel her way through the neighborhood on memories, but it is unrecognizable.
We wander for a couple of hours and end up in a real estate office looking at their sales map. The agent points out the block where her home would have been and explains that the last remaining traces of it were cleared over five years ago for a condominium complex. We go to a centuries-old neighborhood park, where her sons used to play. It doesn’t help bring a sense of closure.
We are sitting in a pastry shop eating lunch when we finally hear news about Mr. Yun and Mrs. Woo. Two churches where Mr. Yun had worked call us back to tell us they have not heard from him in years. We also hear from the minister at Mrs. Woo’s old church. He’s sorry: She died a few years ago. I turn to Grandma Kim to tell her. She is eating halmeoni-style: borrowing a knife from the kitchen to cut melon and snacking on corn that she bought on the street. She grows suddenly quiet and tells me with tears in her eyes that she wants to go back to the hotel.
“Do you know why I wanted to see these two people so much? They’re like me, Northerners who became refugees during the war. We all ended up here, leaving all our family and belongings behind in the North. But we found each other, and we became each other’s family.”
Grandma Kim seems her upbeat self again this morning. She wants to try to find the house in Donam-dong where she lived just before liberation. “It was a small house, but it was hanok (Korean traditional wood-frame house). The whole neighborhood was built new on a mountainside, hanok as far as you could see — it was so pretty. They wouldn’t tear those houses down.”
But they have. At first she can’t believe we’ve come to the right place. As we drive up an old mountain road, however, reality sinks in. The driver is almost apologetic as he tries to explain: “Everything is modern high-rises now. They say people like them even better than houses these days.”
She responds, “If someone came to visit our country and landed here, they’d get off the plane and wonder where they were. They want to call this development! What is left to express the character of our land? Just the smell of concrete.”
On the way back to the hotel, we stop at Jongmyo Park. In the middle of hectic downtown Seoul, it is a wide, tree-shaded paradise for the elderly. The entrance has the feel of a fair, with vendors and peddlers. We follow the sounds of music into the park. Groups of seniors are gathered here and there around portable karaoke units.
There is one whole area where players and onlookers have gathered around baduk (the Korean game similar to go) and janggi (Korean chess) tables. Everywhere you look, there are elderly singles, sitting in pairs and threesomes, talking, reading, sleeping, picnicking. There must be hundreds. A poongmul (traditional drumming) group comes together flying bright traditional colors and strikes up — no member younger than 60. Grandma Kim enters their circle to dance. She is laughing.
As we ride the subway home, she tells me, “Ever since we got here, I’ve been wondering where my generation has gone. In L.A., I see so many elderly Koreans every day, everywhere I go. But here, we’ve been on the subway, on buses, in marketplaces, department stores, restaurants, and it’s all young people.
“Do you know why I wanted to see these two people so much? They’re like me, Northerners who became refugees during the war. We all ended up here, leaving all our family and belongings behind in the North. But we found each other, and we became each other’s family.”
-Grandma Kim
August 13th
We’ve hardly seen anyone old like me. Until today.”
The opening ceremonies are held in the 2002 World Cup soccer stadium. Imagine 60,000 fans cheering, chanting, doing the wave — but for tongil. I can’t find words for it, so I keep asking Grandma Kim how she feels. For once, she can’t help me.
She tells me about a march for tongil that she went to earlier in the summer. “We were 30 people that day in L.A.,” she says. “Compared to that, how does today make any sense?”
The young people seem to touch her especially. Thousands of college students from across South Korea have converged on Seoul to support and promote the events. Wearing T-shirts that read “My true love is … tongil,” the young women laugh shyly when Grandma Kim reaches out to give their hands a warm squeeze.
As we continue toward the stadium, Grandma Kim seems to grow quiet, serious. I remember how apprehensively she told me earlier about news reports of right-wing groups promising to disrupt these “traitorous” events. But as I approach to ask her if she’s OK, I realize that, behind her sunglasses, she’s crying.
My own tears come during the opening ceremonies. After the declarations and speeches of welcome, the entire stadium sings “Go-hyang-ui Bom.” It is an unofficial Korean anthem, sung at the close of almost every major social occasion. The song is about the arrival of spring. Each verse describes different childhood memories — of the budding wildflowers, the feel of the warm Southern wind — and ends with the chorus: “I miss those spring times, how we used to play in the village.”
It is a song I learned as a child, going to Korean school on Sundays. I never liked the “corny” songs they made us sing. But as I join my cracked voice to this chorus of thousands, I begin to understand the song’s undercurrents of sadness and yearning. Our ancestors and families come from villages like that. But because of the division of our land, millions of us have been cut off, unable to return home. For 40 years, Grandma Kim had no way of seeing or contacting her parents, her favorite aunts, uncles and cousins she grew up with in the North. By the time she traveled back to her home village in 1991 during a government-sponsored family reunion visit, all her close family members were gone.
I think of the song again during the final event of the ceremonies. The North and South Korean national soccer teams are playing a friendship match. After slide tackling a South Korean player, a North Korean
Seeing these seniors performing poongmul in Jongmyo Park helps lifts Grandma Kim’s spirits, and she would soon join in.
August 14th
Celebrating the 60th anniversary of Korean liberation.
The festivities for Gwangbokjeol had as its theme a vision for tongil — reunification with North Korea.
player helps him up and gives his shoulders a squeeze as they head back into the game. The crowd cheers them, and it occurs to me that the excitement in the stadium tonight captures something of what Gwangbokjeol must have felt like in 1945. In the camaraderie of our cheers, our singing and our bright “One Korea” flags, we are returned to the lost springtime of the song, a springtime of our people. In Gwangbokjeol 2005, however, we emerge not from a 35-year colonial winter, but from the 60-year winter of Cold War partition.
We all know how difficult the road to reunification will be, but tonight it feels as if we are already one.
We are still trying to come to grips with the strangeness of tongil’s ordinariness here. In L.A.’s Koreatown, to talk about tongil in public almost instantly marks the speaker an activist, drawing suspicious glances from passersby. Here, tongil is what we chat about with the cab driver, who thinks we could already have peacefully reunited if not for “war-mongering” President Bush. The South Korea I knew from my parents’ stories included billboards alongside highways that exhorted: “Be vigilant — let’s catch the [North Korean] spies in our midst.” Seeing these 200 North Korean delegates welcomed so warmly in Seoul for Gwangbokjeol feels about as real to me as the thought of 200 Cubans arriving in Miami as honored guests to celebrate an anniversary of the Cuban revolution.
We’re not the only ones who are surprised by the palpability of change. At the closing ceremonies last night, it was the turn of the national women’s soccer teams to play a friendship match. I was asking one of our event coordinators if it felt strange to have the riot police protecting us for a change. He pointed at the nearest line of police guarding the stadium aisles. He said, “Look at how relaxed they are. And they are only one row deep. Just five years ago, at a similar event, they were two or three rows deep and very tense. South Korean fans would throw things at the North Korean players whenever they scored a goal. Now look at everyone — they’re cheering for both sides.”
Each day seems to contain 100 lessons. For now, just a couple of thoughts from the whirlwind of the past three days:
On Monday, we toured Sodaemun Prison, built by the Japanese to imprison and torture Korean independence movement leaders and supporters. It is a museum now, with guides explaining the torture techniques employed back then while we walk down the halls of cells. Grandma Kim would shake her head as she listened, expressing “aigus” under her breath. I watched her squeeze into a solitary confinement cell and knew she was remembering her uncle, the independence leader.
“On the eve of liberation, we felt the passion of one people; tongil felt like it would
come tomorrow. How could my uncle have imagined that after 60 years, we would still be split in two? In that time, the South has done very well, beyond anyone’s imagination. They say that now they have everything we have in L.A., even more. But we’ll see. What good is economic success if the society is rotten inside with greed?” -Grandma Kim
August 17th
Back on our bus, she told me how her uncle was always under surveillance and going in and out of prison. The informants were always Koreans. There was a man in the town where she grew up who became infamous when he turned his own nephew into the Japanese. When this uncle brought the police, his nephew could not believe it: “Uncle, how could you do this to me!”
“By doing this,” he replied, “I am able to bring status and power to my family.” Grandma Kim explained that this is why she, like so many other Koreans of her generation, still can’t stand the sight of police. The colonial police force was full of apjabis, Koreans who decided to throw in their lot with the Japanese. “If a policeman came and ate in your restaurant, you would throw salt on the floor as soon as they left to chase away the bad luck.”
I realize she has started whispering out of habit. Hers is no longer an acceptable attitude in Koreatown, especially after Sa-i-gu. Many poor and working-class Blacks and Latinos feel about the Los Angeles Police Department the way we once did toward the colonial police. Yet, instead of feeling solidarity, somehow Koreans have ended up on the opposite side — deepening our racial suspicions and fears of these other communities of color, armoring our stores and inviting LAPD substations into K-town. With the daily indignities these blacks and Latinos experience shopping and working in our businesses, we must seem to them like apjabis for white society.
***
Wherever we go, Grandma Kim seems to be scanning crowds. “I keep rubbing my eyes, hoping that, when I open them, I will recognize a familiar face in the crowd. I know it’s not realistic, but I wonder if I have a Northern cousin walking around here somewhere,” she says.
When I suggest that it would take a miracle to run into a friend by chance in the middle of Seoul, she replies, “Why not? Some things are meant to be. Right after Yuk-i-o (Korean War), the city was chaotic and full of refugees like me, and yet I ran into my uncle one day right in front of Doksugung Palace. There he was, having just fled to Seoul with only the coat on his back. You never know.”
And she is right. On this final afternoon, there is a lunch for the delegates who haven’t already left town. We sit down at a table only to realize that four Koreans at the table are delegates from the Chinese city of Dandong. Dandong sits on the Chinese side of the Yalu River, opposite Sinuiju on the Korean side. Grandma Kim spent her teenage years in Sinuiju. In those days, the two border towns were cosmopolitan sister cities, joined by a bridge. For Grandma Kim, meeting these North Korean emigrants is like being reunited with long lost family.
Two of the women are almost Grandma Kim’s age, and they reminisce fondly about the places they used to go. Grandma Kim, who never drinks, is so happy that she allows one of them to pour her a drink to toast their meeting. Grandma Kim sings from memory a ballad — in Chinese — from “Song of the White Orchid,” a film that is a touchstone of her teenage years in Sinuiju. When her memory of the lyrics stumbles at the end, she laughs and says, “I don’t know what’s come over me. I’m being so silly.” Her new friends laugh and encourage her. Grandma Kim takes another sip of beer and beams at me, “This is me, this is the real me, when I can be myself.”
Grandma Kim and Daniel Kim during their trip to Sodaemum Prison.
Grandma Kim meets Koreans from China who grew up near her, just on opposite sides at the Korea-China border.
August 19th
We’ve spent our last two days with Phyllis Kim, the president of One Korea L.A. Forum, visiting with progressive people and their organizations. They include the professional artists’ collective Gurimgongjang, who designed the stage sets for the ceremonies, and the journalists with Jajuminbo, who are creating independent media to nourish the tongil movement.
Today we also visit with Y.J. Kim, director of external relations for the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). We learn so much about the history of the Korean labor movement and how — especially through the workers’ experience of the International Monetary Fund crisis — the KCTU has developed its work around not only traditional labor issues, but also tongil and three related national, coalitional campaigns: to abolish the authoritarian 1948 National Security Law; to remove the U.S. military from Korea; and to resolve finally the 1953 Korean War armistice into a permanent peace treaty.
Grandma Kim says that she knew so little about these issues that she feels like a baby, needing to be taught. Mr. Kim replies gently, “Please don’t say that. Elders like you are so precious to the movement. When there are no elders to show us the meaning of commitment, the young people don’t stay.”
August 20th
Last night was a beautiful send-off. We went to a small celebration dinner hosted by Silchunyundae, a promising new tongil organization that is growing across the country, led mainly by recent alumni from the militant student movement. They are a younger group mostly in their 30s and 40s, and we felt instantly at home.
After dinner, there was an informal meeting. It was a time for elders and leaders to share their thoughts and sum up all the months of work they put into this historic Gwangbokjeol celebration. Grandma Kim was accorded tremendous respect. The older men — many of them, former organizers and street fighters against the military dictatorships of the 1960s through the ’80s — would begin their opening remarks by acknowledging her as the elder in the room and thanking her for her presence.
It was so moving to see her recognized this way because she has faced such disheartening responses to her organizing in her own community in Los Angeles. Although she continues to receive gratitude from many Koreatown seniors, she has also been told by others that she should be staying at home and babysitting grandchildren. That she looks ridiculous doing this at her age. That she should have her mind on more important things, like getting ready to “leave” (die).
It has been painful for us at the BRU and Strategy Center to witness her being hurt this way. We find ways to let her know how much she means to the mostly non-Korean core of our members and staff. But here, for the first time, it seems that she could truly feel from her own people how special she is.
When asked to speak, she captured the exhilarating sense of possibility that everyone had felt at some point in this past week: “I’ve been anxious all week, worried that something might go wrong. I’m still in the mentality of Yuk-i-o. When the firecrackers exploded in the stadium, my first reaction was to think it was a bomb or gunshots! But that is how close tongil feels — like something very, very big is going to happen any minute!”
She closed by acknowledging the tremendous political distance between Seoul and Los Angeles: “I knew it was going to be a big event, but I had no idea it would be like this. Honestly, I feel that I need to apologize to you. Here in Korea, everywhere I look, countless people are working tirelessly for tongil and justice, and the whole country seems to have caught fire. Compared to Seoul, our community in L.A. is sleeping. Except for the few conscious, progressive people, our larger community is trapped in the past. When I go back to L.A., I will tell everyone about what I have seen and what I have felt. I will work hard for tongil.”
Grandma Kim addresses a group of Korean activists at a special dinner where she was accorded tremendous respect.
Epilogue
In L.A.’s Koreatown, just about every delegate and fellow activist that we met on this trip would be considered a “North Korea lover,” “anti-American” and/or balgeng-i . A recent Gallup Korea poll seems only to confirm what so many of our immigrant parents and grandparents suspect: the South has embarked on a new political course. Asked which side they would take if the U.S. and North Korea were at war, 66 percent of young South Koreans said they would take North Korea’s side. Only 22 percent said they would take the U.S. side.
The distance between the South Korean and Korean American worldviews, Grandma Kim says, has grown as wide as the expanse between heaven and earth.
Korean Americans returning from visits to Seoul always remark how quick and deep the pace of change there is. You won’t recognize it anymore, they say. For 10 days, Grandma Kim and I experienced a Seoul of our dreams, at turns familiar and strange, exhilarating and disturbing, filled with deep sadness and tremendous hope. History itself seems to have rushed forward on the Korean Peninsula, she says, while we Koreans in L.A. have been sleeping.
Will the rest of us share her struggle to wake?