Conflicts in Korea

As numerous Peninsula students have families living in South Korea, the impact of North Korea’s heightening threats is evident even thousands of miles away. Though these threats are no the first of their kind, they have still led to a variety of reactions from Korean students at Peninsula.

To start, some students do not feel quite as directly affected as others. For example, junior Alice Park, while acknowledging the situation’s impact, does not feel that Korean Americans have been affected to a large extent.

I think that it does not affect Korean Americans as much just because the issue is on the other side of the globe, which gives the effect of ‘it’s not going to happen to me,’ but I think it’s appropriate to say that they are worried for their friends and family,” Park said.

Senior Christine Jung, on the other hand, is more deeply connected to the conflict because she has thirteen relatives living in South Korea.

“Since many Koreans here have families in Korea, there’s fear that war will start, and the fear of war definitely grew this time because it’s the first time that North Korea actually said that the armistice has ended,” Jung said.

She also explained, on the other hand, that “most people joke about the possibility of war” because every time North Korea does something like this, such as bomb tests, nothing happens. For example, when she was young, she saw news about a similar issue in North Korea; upon asking about it, her mom “laughed because nothing has happened for fifty years.”

“Still, there’s that little bit of doubt… that fear is lurking in the back of our minds because many people say that the Korean War happened out of nowhere too,” Jung said.

One of the most poignant examples of the effect of conflicts in Korea on Peninsula students, however, is junior Jenny Kim. Jenny’s grandfather is North Korean and crossed over the border during the Korean War; he never saw his family after that. Therefore, she has heard first-hand accounts about life in North Korea.

“Beyond just the threats of war, I’m also extremely concerned about North Korea’s human rights violations, especially with freedom of speech and religion… they even have concentration camps that are absolutely terrifying,” Kim said.

In addition, two of her male cousins are in the South Korean army because of the draft, and all of her dad’s family lives in Korea, so the threat of war is especially worrisome for her family.