In the Absence of Sun: A Korean American Woman's Promise to Reunite Three Lost Generations of Her Family Review

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(More customer reviews)The Korean reunion that Helie Lee writes about in this book is significantly different than those scheduled for late April and ealry May 2002 in North Korea. Those are government-sponsored and end after three days, an experience that must be glorious and agonizing all at once. Lee was determined to reunite her family permanently. To do so she had to smuggle nine people out of North Korea, not an easy task! It took eight months to make it happen and Lee got a thorough education on all kinds of unusual things, including dealing with the Korean CIA, bribing North Koreans, evading Chinese security checkpoints and more.
The story is powerful but not because the outcome is in doubt. The mission was completed (with several false starts and many roadblocks, both literal and figurative). The rescue received widespread media attention, including a Seoul Broadcasting System four-hour documentary and an ABC Nightline story that included secret footage shot by Lee. The book is captivating because of what it took to make the reunion happen and because of what we learn about the author both personally and via her identity as a Korean and an American. In the end there is success for the Lee family as their separation comes to a glorious conclusion. But for millions of Koreans the wait continues.
Next summer marks the 50th anniversary of the armistice in Korea that halted the three-year Korean War and brought an uneasy peace to the ravaged peninsula. Since that signing the Korean War, which claimed some 30,000 U.S. lives, has largely disappeared from the American consciousness and is often known now as "the forgotten war." But the war's impact will not soon be forgotten for the people of Korea, living in a divided land. The war split not just geography, but geneology too, breaking apart families from their land and from each other, breaks Koreans have been hoping to heal for the half century since. Helie's Lee's powerful account of such healing provides hope for all who one day would see the peninsula again reunited.

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