My dad works at the Korean Embassy, and I don’t have a green card – which means I will be sent back to Korea with my family if the Korean Peninsula enters into total war.
To give you some historical background, the Korean War started at 1950 and ended at…well, it technically hasn’t ended yet.
There was an armistice – resting warfare – at 1953, but North Korea just nullified that armistice yesterday. In other words, the situation is quite bleak. The young leader, Kim Jong Un, is trying to assert his power in the nation, and the last thing he wants is people seeing him as a coward.
Most people believe – or rather, hope – that there won’t be any real threats. After all, North Korea has been craving for attention regularly in the past half century; and the recent threats are just part of that, they say. To me right now, though, whether or not those threats are true isn’t that important; it’s very demoralizing to just have those in my daily life.
I moved from Seoul (the capital of South Korea) three years ago, and my family is the only part of the whole extended family that lives in the US. I have 3 grandparents, 7 aunts, 7 uncles, and 14 first cousins living in South Korea. The vast majority of them live in Seoul, so the North Korean threats are actually personal to me. It’s the same for other Koreans in Langley.
As a high school junior in Northern Virginia, I am already stressed to death from all the schoolwork, SAT’s, and extracurricular activities. Amid this, how am I supposed to deal with these actual threats to the lives of me and my relatives? I cannot say “I was scared about North Korea” as an excuse for not doing my homework. So my brain chooses to just forget about North Korea.
When the relationship was better between the two Koreas, I visited a beautiful mountain in North Korea called Keum Kang, which is right above the North-South Korean border.
Despite its beauty, the way to the mountain was literally lined up with North Korean soldiers holding red flags, ready to arrest any tourist who attempted to photograph the towns of the North. Also, the mountain itself was full of little monuments remembering some good remarks made by the dictator when he visited the place.
However, the people, the people there were Koreans. They looked just like us, they had our names, and they spoke Korean. Come to think of it – North and South Korea are both Koreas, and the only Koreas. Unfortunately, we are very aggressive to each other right now, but I really hope that one day, the “Korean War” will officially end and the two Koreas unite.