The Other Bank of the River
I recently joined the board of Refugees United USA, the American arm of a non-profit that uses technology to help refugees find their families. I’ve long been a friend and admirer of the founders, David and Chris Mikkelsen, who were just named Social Entrepreneurs of the Year by the World Economic Forum and the Schwab Foundation. But I also have a much more personal reason: my mother was an internally displaced person as a small child, a refugee from war who walked the entire length of the South Korean peninsula to safety.
My mother was born literally days before the end of WWII, in August 1945. When she was 5 years old, the Korean War came to Seoul and my grandmother — who had been widowed a couple months before my mom was born — decided to flee to Kwangju in the southwestern part of Korea, where one of my aunts had married a landowner. Grandma packed up three children and all their worldly possessions in an oxcart and prepared to join the human flood rolling out of the capital.
I’m guessing a lot of people reading this essay have visited Korea, or watched Korean dramas and movies, which invariably show the broad and tranquil Han River lined with parks, restaurants, and footpaths. The river is a kilometer wide in Seoul, and there are now 27 bridges across… but in 1950 there was only one, the Hangang Bridge, and it was promptly bombed out of commission when the war broke out (with 4000 refugees on the bridge at the time, by the way). The only way across the river was a ferryboat.
My grandmother shoved her two young daughters onto one ferry while she tried to negotiate with another for passage with her oxcart. Even trying to imagine crossing a kilometer of water on a flimsy Korean boat with what amounts to a pioneer’s covered wagon boggles my imagination today… but my granny was nothing if not a survivor! She lived to be 94 years old despite experiencing up close the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese annexation of Korea, WWI, WWII, the Korean War and the May 16th coup.
But that day on the south bank of the Han River, my 5-year-old mother and teenage aunt were separated from their mother in the furor of a refugee exodus. Even 50 years later they could barely speak of the terror of being alone and homeless in a war zone. It’s hard to convey to the cellphone generation, but surely even the youngest readers will recall a situation where they needed to meet up with someone but didn’t have cell service or maybe ran out of battery. Multiply that by millions of people trying to flee the same place on foot, and just try to imagine the dust and noise, the chaos, the lack of information and the fear.
Ultimately my grandmother found her daughters, and they got to Kwangju — 270 kilometers — basically on foot. That’s the distance from SF to Carson City NV on the other side of Lake Tahoe, or NYC to Baltimore. At one point they had to jettison their most cherished household possession, a Singer treadle sewing machine, over the side of the oxcart… but they all survived the war and were able to return to their home in Seoul. Because my grandparents were originally from North Korea, the family took in several young refugees from the north — one of whom ended up marrying the aunt that got on the ferry with my mother.
Today when we read about refugees in the newspapers it’s easy to forget that many of us are but one or two generations removed from refugees ourselves. War and famine — and the generosity or cruelty of Americans — have shaped so many of our family histories, and today we need to decide what we owe to those that came before us. For myself, I can’t go back in time to dry the tears of my terrified 5-year-old mother being pushed onto that ferryboat… but I hope through my service with Refugees United I can help some other child in that situation to eventually find her mother on the other bank of the river.
My birthday is this week, and the best gift you could give me is if you would help me spread this essay and awareness of Refugees United on social media! Use the helpful icons at the bottom of this essay to heart, and to share on Twitter or Facebook.
