The separation between North and South has played an important role in Korean literature. The realities engendered by a peninsula spliced in half have proven fertile ground for writers to wax symbolic about the less visible psychic wounds.

One such writer, renowned author Lee Ho-Chul, was in Los Angeles recently, wrapping up a book tour promoting the English releases of the novel Southerners, Northerners (Namnyok Saram, Pungnyok Saram) and Panmunjom, a collection of his short stories.

“I’ve been writing for 50 years, but I’m like a little child,” Lee said during the December book reading. “I’m naïve, innocent, idealistic. But that’s good. A writer should not be corrupted by power.”

The prolific writer, born in 1932 in Wonsan, Kangwon Province in present-day North Korea, has spent most of his life dedicated to a single, idealistic goal: reunification. It’s what the people want, said Lee, who left behind his parents and two siblings at the onset of the Korean War.

He feels that reunification will happen not because the international community is intimidating Kim Jong Il and threatening to overthrow the government, but through reconciliation and forgiveness on a more immediate level.
Lee rejects a strictly political solution to the problem. The more pragmatic approach to bridging the divide is on a “person-to-person (han saram, han saram) level,” he said in an interview with KoreAm.

“If there are more people sharing rice from a communal bowl (han sot bap), you then develop jeong, a mutual affection and understanding,” he said. “We need to get on boats and trains and whatever it takes to start to understand each other on an individual basis.”

It is unlikely that North Korea will be able to sustain itself as is, with millions dying of starvation, and more people choosing to defect, he said. Intimidation tactics won’t work.

“We need to coddle it, get it to open its doors, so that people from the North and the South meet more frequently,” said Lee. “Only then will a feeling of commonality return. If we go through this process, don’t you think we’ll find, one day, that without our even knowing it, reunification will have arrived? We’ll have entered naturally into reunification. We’ll be sitting down together in the midst of it.”

The pro-democracy dissident, who believes in “returning government to the level of the people,” was twice incarcerated for his outspoken views. Accused of violating South Korea’s National Security Law, Lee was imprisoned in 1974 for more than 10 months. He was, by then, an award-winning writer, acclaimed for his 1955 literary debut, Far From Home, and other stories, like Panmunjom.

Active in Citizens for the Defense of Democracy, Lee, in 1973, participated in the movement to oppose Park Chung Hee’s adoption of the Yusin Constitution, which would have significantly increased the powers of the president, such as indefinitely increasing the length of term. Lee was arrested shortly thereafter.