The Daily - For a Family Divided by the Korean War, a New Chapter

This week, “The Daily” is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened since the stories first ran. In April, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to discuss formally ending the Korean War, a conflict that has divided thousands of families for more than six decades. Sylvia Nam’s family is one of them. Guest: Sylvia Nam traveled to North Korea to find out what happened to her grandfather, who left South Korea for the North nearly 70 years ago and never returned. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

Duration: 23m
Broadcast on: 26 Dec 2018
Audio Format: other

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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Brought to you by the Capital One Saver Card. With Saver, you are an unlimited 3% cashback on dining, entertainment, and at grocery stores. That's unlimited cashback on ordering takeout from home. Or unlimited cashback on tickets to concerts and games. So grab a bite, grab a seat, and earn unlimited 3% cashback with the Saver Card. Capital One. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com for details. Hi, it's Michael. This week, the Daily is revisiting favorite episodes of the year, listening back, and then hearing what's happened in the time since the story's first ran. Today, we're going back to April, three days after South Korean President Moon Jae-in met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, to discuss peace on the Korean Peninsula. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbara Rowe. This is the Daily. Today, in their historic summit, North and South Korea vowed to pursue a peace treaty that would end the 65-year-long Korean War. That could finally mean reconciliation for the thousands of families who have been separated from one another, since the war broke out. It's Monday, April 30th. My first recollections about my grandfather came from the stories from my grandmother, as well as my mother. My grandfather is from South Korea. He was a professor and an engineer. And these stories really involved how his absence basically determined the fate of the family. Sylvia Nam's grandfather went to North Korea in 1950, just a few months after the Korean War started and never came back. When my grandfather disappeared, my grandmother was 28 years old. My eldest aunt was four years old. My second aunt was three years old. My mom was about one or two, and my uncle was a newborn. He was three weeks old. As a kid growing up, my mother would talk about what it meant for her to grow up without a father, both in terms of having a parent love her. And then also in a family growing up in Korea, where you actually do need a male breadwinner, how it really impacted their lives. They lived in pretty utter destitution. It was a man that I think she was deeply bitter towards, because I think that she knew that her life would have been very different had he stayed behind. What did you know about why he disappeared? The thing that I had heard growing up as a kid were contradictory and included. One story that involved him being kidnapped by North Korean soldiers. The other story was that because it was the Cold War period, and he was an academic and intellectual, that he had socialist or communist sympathies, and therefore went north, and therefore potentially it had banned in his family in the name of ideology. And then the third was this kind of gray space unknown, fill-in-the-blank type of story that perhaps something had happened to him, and that he couldn't come back to the family. So as the years went on and you enter adulthood, did you become more interested in finding out the real story behind what happened to your grandfather? Yeah, so in the summer of 2015, I decided that I was going to go to North Korea to both visit North Korea, but my other hope was that I could actually finally find out about my grandfather. And did you tell your mother that you were going to do this, and you were going to try to find him? I did, and she was opposed to it. So she told me not to go, and my father was opposed to it, and he told me not to go. Their insistence was that the past mattered very little, but

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