Interview 1, Survivor
Would you introduce yourself?
I am Yoo Yong-yi and I am 86 years old, born in 1938 in Seoul. My mother, Suh Eum-jeon, was from Masan, a city in the South Gyeongsang Province and my father, Yoo Soon-bok, was from the North. They first met when he went down to Masan for work. They set off for the North after my mom got pregnant with me. I was later told that she almost had a delivery on a running train.
They made their home in Jinnampo, Pyongyang. He was a mechanical engineer at a Japanese military station so I was sent to a Japanese kindergarten accordingly. My dad was a talented man. Having studied abroad in Japan, he continued to exercise his expertise by running a car manufacturing factory, teaching how to drive and repairing cars after the war.
Do you recall the independence day of 1945?
Working for the Japanese military, my dad could afford a well-off lifestyle for his family, a rare way of living during the Japanese colonization, which also antagonized our neighbors and subsequently brought us terror. We lived in constant fear of them attacking us if Korea became independent. He and his colleagues, who were informed that Japan would soon surrender in World War II before anyone else, decided to come down to Masan where my mom and my younger sister had resided.
On the day of fleeing, he had me sit on the back of his bicycle hastily heading to Kaesong, where a few trains remained running to the South after Japan’s sudden retreat, only to find throngs of people waiting for the same train. They mounted on the top of the train with a rope in hand secured to the vehicle and we were among them. We threw ourselves flat whenever “tunnel!” being heard. The trip got our faces completely coated with soot, looking unsightly and horrific by the end.
Yoo Yong-yi, right, in a neon green vest and black hat, has been one of the most enthusiastic community members for peace and racial equity in recent years. This photo of her was taken on April 27 at an event for Korean American March for Peace in Korea, marking the 6th anniversary of Panmunjom Declaration.
How old were you when the war broke out?
I was a seventh grader. Families of the military were subject to an early evacuation for a first target to be killed by the enemy. Villagers promised to warn one another of Chinese armies approaching by rocking a can with a small stone in it, especially for women susceptible to sexual assault.
My mom would do laundry at the US military station, earning canned foods in return that became our lunch. It was a novel gustatory experience to me. Not to mention it but we all suffered hunger. Starvation brought an endless line of famished people to school during lunch hours. What drew them was rations, a mixture of food waste sourced from adjacent US stations, often contaminated with cigarette butts and trash. You know beggars can’t be choosers. People didn’t have a say but waited in a queue for a ladle of it. In hindsight, they were all refugees, of whom many came from the North and Busan, a southern coastal city.
With the education facilities all ravaged, regular classes were indefinitely canceled. Instead we would study under a canopy or at a theater that was closed in time of war. Created by Japanese colonizers, caves soon became our summer haven where ambient temperature was cooler. We students were called upon to rebuild the school at least an hour everyday. By the end of work the U.S. military would offer bags of corn and milk powder, of which soup was made and we all had a cup of it.
Did you take refuge in other regions?
Being told that we’d be safe in Masan, we decided to stay put. Since the beginning of the Pacific War, we had been given an instruction that steamed rice be the first thing to pack when the air-raid siren went off. The notion of us being split in case of emergency had long agonized our mother. Ironically, as a wife to a soldier, she had to leave us with our uncle in order to move around the nation with him. The separation persisted throughout the war.
In Masan we became the mock of classmates for speaking a northern dialect, except for times when our uncle, a military policeman, drove a SUV car to school to pick us up. Admiring the car, their eyes glowed in envy.
Although it was definitely lucky to have family members look after us after our mom had gone, we were too young to perceive it as such. I have recollections of our aunt occasionally treating us like hangers-on and giving us the cold shoulder, which sparked numerous fights between the couple. Being saddened deeply by those, we would go out the door and begin to comfort ourselves by reciting poems.
Were you able to reunite with your family after the war?
Yes, I was. My dad came home alive and uninjured. After the discharge, he took his old job back, an engineer, repairing broken cars and motorcycles. He would turn a broken car into a bus, allowing him to go to a remote market and sell logs and firewood. All resources had been exhausted by three years of the war following decades of the Japanese colonization, lumbering was one of few means left to make a living. He set up an office as well where injured veterans came to find jobs and receive a small amount of money. It was sort of a charity and he was a warm-hearted man.
In retrospect, the war is just unspeakable. Every hospital was plagued with the injured. Outside the hospitals it was no different with respect to dead bodies dotting hill sides. I would go onto nearby mountains after school to gather edible herbs and greens, growing indifferently around piles of corpses of soldiers and civilians. The scene still registered with me that the boots of the bodies dangled out of trucks.
You mentioned that one of your uncles was a serviceman as well. How about your uncle?
He was a driver of a regiment commander in the army and lost one of his legs during the war. Frantically crawling under a car in a sudden bombardment, he failed to have his one leg tucked in, for which it had to be amputated and resulted in his medical discharge amid the war. The war left a myriad of veterans injured and living off government subsidies, never enough to make a living. So they begged around all the time. Armless veterans had a hook affixed to their severed limb, the appearance of which provoked fright to people and ultimately isolated them. By comparison my uncle had a better life working as a driver.
Do you still have other family members in North Korea?
I used to have extended families on my father’s side in the North. I had an aunt who died after the war. I know neither how nor when she passed away due to the divided state. I also had an uncle, a North Korean soldier. One day he visited us out of nowhere and told us to relocate to the North with him and his family. Though he even snuck out of a military operation by his army unit at his own risk, his younger brother, my dad and a South Korean serviceman, didn’t let it happen.
He was kind of a guy who wouldn’t send his children to school, worried that they’d be brainwashed by learning bourgeois ideology. Later he and his family slipped to Sokcho, a city in Gangwon province approximately 30 miles south of North Korea. They took a boat to North Korea but eventually got caught up and arrested. They were miraculously released after testimony given by one South Korean soldier, whom his wife once had helped take shelter during the North’s raid. But he soon died from severe torture that had been inflicted while being held.
