EVENT DETAILS

Ghosts of Our Grandfathers: Searching through Colonial Korea and the Cold War

John N. Kim (UC Riverside) and Sylvia Nam (UC Irvine)
Moderated by Joseph Jeon (Director of CCKS)

Millions of families were separated by the chaos and the confusion of World War II and the Korean War. The peninsula’s division meant that many of these families were lost to each other never to be reunited. Among these separated families are those of John N. Kim and Sylvia Nam. Each grew up in the United States hearing stories about their maternal grandfathers who went missing, presumably to North Korea, leaving their grandmothers and mothers destitute in post-war South Korea. Join us for an event, moderated by CCKS Director Joseph Jeon, as each discusses contending with the ghosts of their grandfathers and their mothers' and grandmothers' stories of loss, trauma, and resilience. Eventually these searches takes one to North Korea and the other to Japan to find the whereabouts of two men whose absences profoundly affected their lives decades later and a generation removed.

Please register HERE to attend.
Click HERE to listen to NY Times' The Daily podcast. Sylvia Nam tells the story of her grandfather, who went to North Korea a few months after the Korean War started and never returned.