During the opening ceremony for the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, I
didn’t expect to cry when athletes from two Koreas marched as one into
the stadium, carrying the flag of unification, but tears filled my eyes.
It was as if my body couldn’t be stopped from remembering some unspent
grief. The twenty-third Winter Olympics are closing out their second
week, and the Games may yet live up to their billing as the “Olympics of
peace.” A joint Korean women’s ice-hockey team went winless in five
attempts, but the images of athletes from the North and South playing
alongside one another will be slow to fade. North Korea’s leader, Kim
Jong Un, also invited the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, to
Pyongyang for a summit.

For Koreans around the globe, the Pyeongchang Games have the power to
evoke the yearning to reconcile with an estranged twin, but they also
carry the painful history of warring brothers. I was born in Seoul, in
1968, and am the child of two Koreas. My eighty-three-year-old father is
from Wonsan, on the northeastern coast of what is now North Korea, and
my seventy-six year-old mother is from Busan, at the southernmost tip of
South Korea. I lived in Seoul until I was seven, and my family
immigrated to Queens, New York, in 1976. Although I’m a naturalized
American citizen, when I watch the Games, I root for the athletes of
three countries: the U.S.A., South Korea, and North Korea.

My favorite Korean Olympics story is the one that nearly every Korean
knows. Sohn Kee-chung was born in 1912, in Sinuiju, in what is now North
Korea. The son of a grocer, Sohn attended his local school during
colonial-era Korea, when Japan brutally occupied the Peninsula. As a
boy, he was such a remarkable runner that he was sent to Yangjeong High
School, in Seoul. At first, he ran shorter distances, but he eventually
found his métier in the marathon, setting world records even before
competing in the Olympics. To run the marathon at the Berlin Games, in
1936, Sohn had no choice but to compete for the Empire of Japan and as
Son Kitei, the Japanese version of his name. In Germany, Sohn Kee-chung
won the gold medal, running the course in 2:29:19.2.

In Berlin, Sohn insisted that he was Korean, not Japanese. At the medals
ceremony, he held the small oak-tree plant he was given close to his
chest, to intentionally cover the Japanese flag. At the press conference
afterward, Sohn tried to tell his minders that he was Korean. He
autographed his name in Korean and even sketched a map of his country.
The Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo published a photograph of Sohn’s
victory but erased the Japanese flag from his running uniform, resulting
in the imprisonment and torture of journalists from the paper and the
suspension of the Dong-A Ilbo for nine months. The Japanese government
forced Sohn into early retirement and did not allow him to compete as a
runner.

After the Second World War, Sohn became a South Korean citizen, and he
coached the next generation of runners, including two winners of the
Boston Marathon and an Olympic gold medallist.

In 1988, when I was nineteen, I watched the opening ceremony of the
Seoul Games with my parents on our Zenith color television, the size of
a large apple crate. Sohn was in his seventies then, and he burst into
the stadium carrying a smoky torch, both his arms raised proudly, waving
at the crowds. He ran swiftly around the track, and the audience went
wild with good feeling. This elderly man was so vigorous and joyous, and
I felt proud to be Korean, because he had resisted the humiliating
occupation and the destruction of his country. For a depressed nation
needing a powerful symbol of resistance, Sohn Kee-chung served as a
patriot and hero. He died in 2002, at the age of ninety, beloved and
celebrated.

For the current Games, despite the national hoopla, Pyeongchang has
become a byword for apathy among young South Koreans. They don’t
consider the Olympics to be a step toward reunification; rather, they
think the Games are just that—games, and, frankly, they do not appear
interested. In a 2017 survey by Seoul National University, more than
seventy per cent of South Koreans in their twenties said that they
opposed reunification. The reasons are myriad, but the one cited most
often is the economy. The younger generation is not willing to bear the
extraordinary cost of reunification, estimates of which range wildly
between one trillion and three trillion dollars.

I think I understand. South Koreans have good reason to be wary after
making numerous political and economic concessions over the years, all
while suffering betrayals and persistent nuclear threats. The elderly
and the middle-aged lack sufficient trust to engage again and cannot see
how reunification can work ideologically, while the young cannot imagine
the sacrifice.

South Korea has achieved the “Miracle on the Han River,” the
extraordinary economic growth of a formerly colonized and war-devastated
nation. But the young South Korean is profoundly anxious for her future.
For several years now, young people in South Korea have been calling
their country “Hell Joseon” to indicate the inequity of the rigid class
system, which benefits the economically privileged and the well
connected. Facing high unemployment rates and the insecurity of the gig
economy, the young bemoan the futility of their immense efforts. The
mental-health data is nothing short of alarming. For thirteen years
straight, South Korea has had the leading suicide rate for nations in
the Organization for Economic Coöperation and Development, an umbrella
group for the world’s democratic, free-market economies. In their
passionate pursuit of postwar reconstruction, South Koreans have worked
too hard and rested too little, and they are spent.

Unfortunately, peace Olympics or no, the Korean problem today is the
Korean problem of yesterday. Because of its geography, the Korean
Peninsula remains regionally significant to very powerful nations:
China, Russia, Japan, and the United States. For the Koreas to get
along, let alone to reconcile, they need to deal with the interests of
their respective allies, which may not necessarily represent the
interests of their own people. If the youth are rolling their eyes, I
imagine the middle-aged and the elderly are shrugging their shoulders
and sighing, Aigoo.

And yet.

It takes little imagination to know how much the North Koreans are
suffering. The North Korean people lack the most basic freedoms: press,
travel, information, religion, organization, education, and individual
expression. Twenty-five million North Koreans are hostages to one young
dictator. His sister-emissary received adulatory coverage at these
Olympics, but even she could easily be eliminated, just as others before
her have been.

So I worry about my family in both republics—the twenty-five million who
live in fear of a ruthless young leader and the fifty-one million South
Koreans who have been running for their lives without pause.

The Olympic Games will soon end, and South Korea will have achieved
another impressive feat, but what next? I worry that Koreans never seem
to get a reprieve from the constant anxiety of a war that has not yet
ceased. Perhaps what is initially needed for Koreans to heal the deepest
fracture is to admit that the brinkmanship of competence or military
strength may in fact be enervating, not rejuvenating.

Recently, I went to a poetry reading in the Bronx, where South Korean,
Japanese, Filipino, and American high-school students were meeting via
Google Hangout. The kids meet regularly, as participants in the
International Poetry Exchange Program, created by Caroline Kennedy, the
former Ambassador to Japan, who was also in attendance.

It was a Friday night, and I’d gone because I like kids and poetry. My
son is away at college, and I miss his energy and the sound of him. I
thought it would be nice to listen to teen-agers from the Bronx read
poems to their counterparts overseas. I needed some joy. I sat down in
my hard plastic chair, waiting to feel something that happens now and
then when we listen to poems being read out loud.

Choi Hyeong-seok, an eighteen-year-old from Poongsan High School in
Andong, stood up. He was physically seven thousand miles away from us,
but the wall-sized white screen was only five feet from my seat. His
dark, slender eyes looked pensive, and I looked at his genial, open
face, curious as to what he was feeling. Choi read his Korean haiku,
which he had translated into English:

I felt something sharp. He was talking about the North Koreans, the
ever-present tension and anxiety—But always in here. He was writing
about them and himself, and he was moved.

After he finished, the organizer asked if there were comments or
questions in the audience. Leaning forward a little in her seat, Kennedy
raised her hand, and she asked Choi quietly, “What do you mean by
‘freezing, melting’?” The young man opened his eyes wider and said
without hesitation that he was thinking about the Olympics and what they
meant. He was trying to sort out his questions about his nation. His
thoughtfulness gave me hope.

When I was his age, I had Sohn Kee-chung as my example of what a Korean
could be in the world. This young man will have the unification flag and
memories of these Games. They’re imperfect guides, but they might
inspire him on the uncharted course of peace.