Korea of their memories has no North, no South

In Bong Se Kim's Korea, the country known as "the land of the morning calm," the sky is big and crisp and the apples are red and sweet.

Nam Chung's Korea is unbroken, unsliced by the 38th parallel - as it was before the Korean War, which began 50 years ago this week and World War II.

The Korea before the ignominious Demilitarized Zone, the world's most fortified location, locked millions of families apart. This is the Korea alive, too, in the memory of Ikwhan Choe.

Korea had been unified longer than a millennium when, in 1910, Japan took control of it and attempted to eradicate all elements of Korean culture.

Bong Se Kim was born three years later.

If history books recall that period as shameful and painful, Kim's memories of his life up through his mid-30s, when he finally fled, are largely lovely.

He draws a blueprint of his house, with a curled, tiled roof, several rooms facing a courtyard. The house, which held fine porcelain collectibles, sat on 13 acres of good, rich soil in the northern province of Pyongyang.

Three generations of his family, including his grandmother, lived in the house in Shin Eu Ju, where Kim had expected to raise his children.

In his Korea, the church bell rang every Wednesday and Sunday, and Kim would escort his grandmother to services. Always, Kim remembers, his grandmother would pause in midtrek as the two of them reached the hill that led to church. And she would pray and tell her grandson how she wished he would be blessed with a long life.

He always planned to go back

By the end of World War II, by the time Japan lost Korea and its control in other parts of the Pacific Rim, the United States and the Soviet Union had divided the Korean peninsula in half. Soviet troops had already advanced south to the 38th parallel, so it was decided that the Soviet zone would remain north of that line and the U.S. zone would be the area south.

In 1948, within three weeks' time, two rival governments were formed: to the north, the communist Democratic People's Republic of Korea; in the south, the Republic of Korea.

In the early morning on June 25, 1950, the North Korean government sent 70,000 troops into South Korea, triggering the war.

Nam Chung, 68, a man with the energy of a person 20 years younger, with a voice deep like black tea, is also from Pyongyang, North Korea. He tells his story from his home in Federal Way, where his 1-year-old granddaughter buzzes about. His daughter, Christi Yi, interprets.

He was the eldest of five children, a young man with more heft than height, which made him a good defensive player in volleyball and soccer. His mother had aspirations of his one day becoming a pastor.

In the end, he didn't disappoint her.

When the fighting began, the North Korean government forced anyone over 16 into the army. Chung was 18. So he hid in a trench in his back yard for three months. His hair grew. He never bathed. He looked, he says, "like a wild man."

The war quickly turned into a horrific ebb and tide: The South Koreans and the United Nations troops swept north; the North, with the Chinese, pushed them back.

Chung, desperate, decided to flee. He planned to take refuge in the south, imagining enrolling in a university and then in a seminary in Seoul, as his mother, who had died years earlier, had wished. He figured his departure would be only temporary.

Go and study and then come back, father told his oldest son.

"I had much hope," he says.

Everything happened in such a hurry, he didn't pack; he grabbed. He took a Bible and no photos, and never gave a real goodbye.

He walked 15 days to Seoul, crossing two rivers as bombs dropped and the dead and dying lay at his feet. He rummaged abandoned houses looking for food and crawled into fields to sleep.

The war continued for two more years before it ended in a stalemate. An estimated 5 million people were dead, injured or lost. And the 38th parallel, which neither side had really considered a definitive border, became the 155-mile long Demilitarized Zone, created by an armistice signed July 27, 1953. It effectively sealed millions of Koreans apart.

Chung cobbled a new life in South Korea, then in Tacoma, where he moved in 1972 to help a friend he had met in a Seoul seminary.

The Tacoma Joong-Ang Presbyterian Church is a congregation 2,000 strong, a membership that prays, their Bibles tucked in black zip-up covers, in a new octagonal church building in Lakewood, Pierce County.

Chung was the senior pastor for 26 years before he retired two years ago and his congregation threw him a thank-you party and gave him a Cadillac, a gift he modestly acknowledges. He realizes his father likely died some time ago. As for his four brothers and sisters, who live in his memory as four small children, he could only wonder each year, as he celebrated another birthday, if they had too.

In Chung's family, as in millions of other Korean families, what has become known as "the forgotten war" was never forgotten.

Very few know of families' fate

An estimated 7.6 million South Koreans, according to the South Korean consul general's office, are known to have relatives in the North. The number of people who have confirmed the whereabouts of their families in North Korea through letters is 2,068. The number reunited, in meetings in China, is 525.

Local Koreans mail letters and Christmas cards each year to North Korea but say they never know which ones arrive or which get lost, or which arrive only to be censored or destroyed.

Ten years ago, Chung received his first letter back, written on thin, crinkly paper, looking in every way like it had come a long distance. His daughter remembers how he cried.

Now Chung, who volunteers for World Vision, a Christian agency doing relief work in North Korea, wants to remain healthy until he is able to see his family again.

"Never forget," says Chung, who retreats each morning to his study to pray he may return. "Always, in my heart, North Korea."

A growing presence in the U.S.

Thirty years ago, only about 60,000 Koreans lived in the United States. Today, the population exceeds 2 million; the largest communities, in descending order, are in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and the Seattle area.

Pockets of Aurora Avenue North in Shoreline and stretches of Highway 99 in Edmonds, Lynnwood, Federal Way and South Tacoma are honeycombed with Korean markets, video stores, restaurants, travel agencies and hair salons - the latter, explains a young Korean-American professional, because it's preferable to go to someone who knows how to cut the texture of Korean hair. "And, if you don't speak English, you can tell them what you want," she says.

In 1977, Federal Way's Korean population comprised seven families; it is now about 9,000, or 12 percent of the city's population.

The month of June, always remembered somberly as the month the Korean War started, is a big story this year, its 50th anniversary. This June is also the month when the leaders of the two Koreas, which technically remain at war, met for three days.

So it was with great anticipation - and little expectation - that Koreans everywhere watched the meetings of the president and the premier two weeks ago, unfolding in the Korea usually kept from the world.

The meeting was every bit monumental.

"One small step for reconciliation," read The Korea Times. "One giant leap for reunification."

That leap toward reconciliation included an agreement to work toward reunification and to begin exchange visits by members of divided families in August.

Starting over - and over again

In his Federal Way apartment, Bong Se Kim - a small, fit, white-haired and incredibly smooth-faced man for a person 87 years old - devoured every story and sound bite of the summit, staying up two hours past his usual bedtime to watch the Korean-language news on cable Channel 29.

If he had remained home in Korea, Kim says, his granddaughter Carla translating, he suspects he would have been killed or forced into the North Korean army. So even though his father urged him to stay, telling him the Americans "would take care of this," Kim decided to leave.

The family - his wife and six children, the younger ones piggybacked on their older siblings - traveled by train and then boat on that surreal voyage. Two children died because Kim didn't have money for penicillin.

In Seoul and then in Pusan, the Kim family started over. They had two more children, and within two years of their flight, Kim's mother joined the family in the south. She, too, thought she would be apart from her husband only temporarily, only until everything returned to the way it was.

In South Korea, Kim sold medical supplies and earned a living sculpting rocks, doing the sort of work he had only dreamed of in North Korea. His father had expected him to be a school administrator, like him.

With his wife, Young Soon Hong, Kim combed rivers to find large rocks that looked like things or could look like things - say, an animal or the ridge of a mountain. They would chip and buff the rocks, setting them in containers full of water, the predecessor of the popular rock fountains found in living rooms of today.

Kim has been in the U.S. for 20 years, since his wife died in 1980, living first in Wisconsin and now in Federal Way, where his daughter, her husband and their three daughters meet every Sunday for dinner.

From his apartment, it is only a short walk to the Korean shops, where Kim is a regular, leaning on his cane and, always, wearing his trademark black beret.

What reminds him of Korea, he says, are the clouds, like those in landscape photos he hangs on his wall. The moon, too, is the Korean moon he gazed at as a youth.

His only possession from his Korea is a book in Japanese, with a taped-up spine, in which he has tucked two letters from his nephew in North Korea. They are his proof to persuade authorities to grant him access to Pyongyang, where he hopes his church and his house still stand.

"It was all taken away," Kim says, bitter about the life he thought would always be his.

In the U.S., he says, he has never felt truly in place.

A big unknown: family visits

There is a saying in Korean: "Even tigers need to go back and see their roots."

Two days after the Korean leaders agreed to begin family exchange visits later this summer, CNN reported that more than 2,000 people in South Korea had already applied through Red Cross registration offices.

But no additional information about the visits, or how many people might be allowed to go to North Korea, is yet available, according to the office of the North Korean U.N. representative in New York.

It is also unclear how the governments will prioritize any visits, specifically, how Koreans living in the U.S. might fare.

About 45 million people live in the Korea open to the world. Seoul is a bustling, high-tech metropolis with skyscrapers draped in giant TV screens and thoroughfares clogged with Hyundais and DaeWoos. This is the wondrous Korea, the country that rebuilt itself after the war, hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics and will co-host, with Japan, soccer's World Cup in 2002.

"There is so much construction and development going on," says Michael Park, the mayor of Federal Way, who is from South Korea. "Every time I visit they're changing the maps."

The Korea so many wish to see is home to 25 million, a country reliant on foreign and private aid to sustain its people as it grapples with a food shortage, aggravated in recent years by floods. It continues to work on a long-range nuclear-missile program. And in an agreement signed by both governments, it has also begun to draw some South Korean tourists, who are allowed to visit Mount Kumgang on the east coast.

But in his mind, says Ikhwan Choe, 70, there is only one Korea, not the two shown on maps with the thick black border in its middle, what he calls "an ugly scar."

A grave with yellow flowers

Choe, a retired university professor now living in Lake Forest Park, fled North Korea 50 years ago, leaving behind his parents, two brothers, three sisters, a sister-in-law and a newborn niece. He left in the winter, his youngest sister escorting him by the hand to the edge of town and waiting there until she saw Choe disappear.

He came to the U.S. in 1964 and for 30 years he knew nothing about his family until he met a Canadian newspaper publisher, a Korean immigrant, who had helped people find information about their families in the north. Not too long after, Choe received a politely worded letter from North Korean authorities saying his family was well.

In 1983, as part of a group of academics visiting Japan, Choe managed to secure a North Korean visa from Beijing. He flew to Pyong yang, and there, at the airport, among a small crowd in suits and ties, he saw a woman. She called out to him and he recognized the voice of his older sister, a woman he remembered as being in her 20s.

She was in her 50s now, and the two of them, too stunned to talk much, stood face to face and wept. They were too overcome to catch up right then, so the next day over lunch, she told him, one by one, who had died: their parents, a brother, a niece and the baby sister, the one who had last seen him flee home.

Choe returned to North Korea in 1987 and again in 1988. He visited his parents' grave and that of his younger sister. Her grave, recalls Choe - apologizing because he is crying now - was covered in yellow flowers. He sees similar flowers here in Washington, and when he does his memory flashes back to the day he is fleeing and he sees his sister, waiting and watching, a speck in the snow.

Florangela Davila's phone message number is 206-464-2916. Her e-mail address is fdavila@seattletimes.com