When one South Korean family lost their son to the invaders from the North in 1950, they never thought they would see him again.
One day in the summer of 1967, a young South Korean army captain named Oh Hyung Jae received a summons from the army counterintelligence corps. His specialty was not espionage, but applied mathematics, which he taught at the Korea Military Academy. What could they want with me?, he wondered as an army Jeep pulled up to his office.
At the counterintelligence bureau in Seoul, an agent was waiting for him. In his hands he held Oh’s old military academy application from 1955. A grim, knowing look stretched across his face. “Didn’t you leave something out?” he asked Oh, handing him the document. He had: Under the section for “family relations,” Oh had neglected to list one of his brothers, Oh Young Jae, who had gone missing 17 years earlier in the welter of the Korean War. Hyung Jae’s stomach dropped. In the course of a sweeping counterintelligence operation, the South Korean military had discovered that Young Jae had been conscripted by the invading North Korean army in the July of 1950—a secret the family had held close since then. In the South Korean military, those with personal ties to North Korea were barred from service. For this reason, Hyung Jae explained, he’d omitted mention of his brother from his application. But that wasn’t all the military knew: Young Jae, who the family had long since given up for dead, was in fact alive and may be training as a North Korean spy, the officer told Hyung Jae. “I immediately ran outside and broke down in tears,” Hyung Jae said. “The officer told me to let it all out.” The discovery would result in Hyung Jae’s discharge from the army in 1974.
Despite the revelation, “we… went on with our lives. But I don’t think my mother ever truly forgot” about Young Jae, Keun Jae, one of the Oh brothers, told me.
In the following decades, South Korea transformed itself from a poor, war-ravaged nation into a wealthy democracy, deepening the contrast with the opaque, dynastic dictatorship that had emerged in the North. With the war behind them, the Oh brothers settled into careers in academia and started families. As North and South Korea set on vastly divergent paths, reunification became a distant dream, even as thousands of South Koreans like the Ohs, separated from their loved ones during the war, wondered if they would ever see them again.
September 4,1990, some 16 years after Oh Hyung Jae’s discharge, began like any other day for him. That morning, he picked up a copy of Hankyoreh, one of South Korea’s top dailies, which contained a dispatch about a literary exchange program for North Korean, Korean-American, and South Korean poets and writers. As Hyung Jae scanned the article, his eyes fixed on the name of a poet in Pyongyang who had grown up in South Korea: Oh Young Jae, the same as his long lost brother’s. The poet, the article said, “wept as he sang Bandal [or ‘Half Moon’]—a song he sang with his brothers during their childhood. The poet also mentioned the name of his mother, Kwak Aeng Soon. Hyung Jae gasped with shock, feeling his “entire world collapse.” He had found his missing brother. Stranger yet: after reading the piece, Hyung Jae learned that his brother had become one of North Korea’s most venerated ideologues, the author of long socialist epics and hagiographies of the supreme leaders.
For the Oh brothers, Young Jae’s life was a series of mysteries, a strange alchemy of shifting identities, unknowable motivations and perilous historical forces cast against the national trauma left by the Korean War. As they would discover, there would be no easy answers in their quest to understand how a teenager with no political beliefs had become a propaganda mouthpiece for the enemy state, and to find out whether he was still the brother they’d once known.
Little information exists about Oh Young Jae’s life in North Korea, especially in the years before his reemergence. But from his autobiographical writings, poetry, and testimonies from those who met him emerges a story about the complexities of national identity, and the ways in which family bonds can defy ideological divides.
Oh Young Jae was born on November 17th, 1935, in Jangseong, a small farming village off the southwestern coast of South Korea. The second eldest of seven siblings, he was a headstrong teenager who “would get in your face,” Hyung Jae recalled of his older brother. Young Jae had little interest in schoolwork or books, much to the dismay of their strict father, a school principal.
Within weeks of the outbreak of the Korean War, the North Korean army marched into Gangjin, the small farming village where the Oh family then lived. “One of the first things the North Korean military did when they arrived was indoctrination through music,” Keun Jae said. “The young North Korean soldiers would come to the village every night to teach us military songs and the North Korean anthem.” The festive gatherings included singing competitions and performances of “plays about a poor farmer being exploited by an evil landowner,” Hyung Jae said.
The indoctrination was the first step in the process of recruiting South Korean youth like Young Jae. The army conscripted young men from local schools, including the high school Hyung Jae and Young Jae attended. The North Korean army would eventually force, coerce, or indoctrinate, as many as 100,000 South Koreans, most of whom never returned home. Men were forced to fight on the front lines or perform logistical duties, while women took on nursing or propaganda roles. By the time the North Korean forces had reached Gangjin, they had secured a number of decisive victories against the South Korean army. To the villagers, a North Korean victory seemed imminent. “[The propaganda officers] told us a new era had come,” Hyung Jae said.
One day, several weeks after the army swept into Gangjin, the North Korean officers assembled Young Jae with his peers to recruit volunteers, as Hyung Jae, who attended the same school as Young Jae, told me. Egged on by his classmates and teachers, Young Jae, only 15 years old, stepped forward, and was soon taken to a village 20 miles away for a week of basic training before marching out to the front. When his mother learned of his decision, she rushed to stop him, walking 20 miles on a winding mountain dirt path with her infant daughter on her back.
