The sun sets on the inter-Korean ceasefire line, June 25, 2000, 50 years after the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War. The war ended with an Armistice Agreement but the two Koreas remain separated after nearly seven decades, with July 27, 2019, marking the 66th anniversary of the armistice. Korea Times file

Joy Lee tells her story as Korean-American missing family in North Korea

By Jung Da-min

Joy Lee Powell Gebhard, an 84 year-old Korean American, still vividly remembers the moment she said goodbye to her mother.

It was Dec. 3, 1950, after the Chinese People's Army had intervened in the Korean War pushing the South Korean Armed Forces and the United Nations forces backwards.

Lee was a 15 year-old girl just ahead of entering a high school in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Born in a house opposite the Taedong River in 1935, her given name was Bok-shin.

Joy Lee Powell Gebhard / Courtesy of Joy Lee Powell Gebhard

"My family had had a good harvest that year," Lee recalled, during a recent phone interview with The Korea Times.

As Lee was leaving her mother, along with other refugees heading to Seoul, she was wearing her school uniform with additional layers of clothing her mother had put on her, while also carrying rice and snacks her mother had packed.

"My mother, standing in a room with an earthen floor, grasped both my hands and told me to write to her often, and that I must survive. As I was walking away from the house, I had an instinctive feeling that I might not be able to see her again afterwards. I kept looking back and she was still standing there. That was the last moment."

Lee's father had died earlier that year. Her four other sisters ― 22, 11, eight and six years old, respectively, at the time ― had left the house to take refuge as the winter was starting, just before Lee headed to Seoul. Their mother chose to stay in the house to keep the family property.

After leaving Pyongyang to come to Seoul, Lee had no family nor acquaintances in the South, and often went hungry.

"I thought of going back to the North every day," Lee said recalling the days in Seoul after she left Pyongyang. "I thought that I might be able to go back if I climbed up the mountain or if I just keep moving toward the North."

Seeing a recruitment advertisement for a nursing school in Busan, she managed to get to the southern port city.

"When I was in Pyongyang, I had been dreaming of becoming a doctor who could cure cancer. I thought becoming a nurse was another way to enter the medical field," Lee said.

After graduating from nursing school, she entered Pusan National University to major in politics.

As a self-supporting student and an utter stranger with no family or acquaintances in Busan, Lee took on many jobs to earn money. She was a translator for foreign missionaries, a tutor for choir members' children at a U.N. church established by the United States and an announcer for a broadcaster HLKY.

On Aug. 3, 1956, she left for the United States to study further upon an invitation from a Methodist Church coalition in Texas. It was in July 1970 when she came to visit South Korean again after she underwent major cancer surgery in the U.S.

"I wanted to touch the soil of my motherland. But as I could not visit my North Korean hometown, I wanted to visit my second hometown, which was Mount. Gudeok in Busan. I used to climbed the mountain and studied there," Lee said.

Lee also went to the inter-Korean demarcation line along the 38th parallel that divides Koreas at the Demilitarized Zone. She brought a fistful of soil from there to the U.S., putting it in a plastic bag.

Since then, Lee had not given up trying to find her family in North Korea and kept writing letters to her family and calling and writing to embassies of the two Koreas and the United States to find their whereabouts.

Her letters and calls often received no response. The ones she did receive were devoid of empathy and stated that they were not capable of helping her, but she did not stop writing.

"'We are the most miserable people in the world,' that was what I often wrote in the letters I sent, out of resentment that both the South and North Korean government are cruel in that they were not willing to help those desperate to find their separated families," Lee said.