LTI Korea 
DLKL 
SIWF 
Placing the Past Within the Present scrap
by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom / 정울림
November 26, 2025
I was seven years old when the first state-organized family reunions between North and South Korea took place. By then, five years had passed since I had been forcibly taken from my birthplace, Busan, and sold for adoption to a foreign country. I remember thinking how cruel it was that families could be kept apart by others, not realizing that my own life had been and would continue to be affected by similar gatekeeping.
I was twenty-three when South Korea introduced a lottery system to select the lucky few permitted to travel to North Korea to reunite with loved ones. Six years had passed since I had made my first, but failed, attempt to find my Korean parents. I remember the anxiety I felt watching the news coverage of the reunions, knowing that by the next time the lottery was held, even more people would find their time had run out. For adopted people in search of their origins, knowing that finding family members is a race against time is a constant source of stress. Yet for many of us, it can take half a lifetime or more to find the strength to initiate the often draining process of family search.
I was forty-one when the last state-organized reunions took place. By then, six years had passed since I had reunited with the mother I’d lost on the day I was born. Holding my hands in hers, she told me she had spent her whole life wondering whether or not I’d survived after I was taken from her. Not knowing what happened to the family you were separated from freezes you in time. On the outside, life moves on, and your body ages, but some part of you remains in the place where you last saw your loved ones. That part doesn’t grow older. It simply waits, yearning for a time that can now exist only in memory.
Few works capture this suspended grief as hauntingly and beautifully as Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel The Waiting (tr. Janet Hong, Drawn & Quarterly, 2021). Narrated by the semi-autobiographical character Jina, the story follows Jina’s mother Gwija, who was separated from her husband and firstborn while fleeing their home in the north during the Korean War. Her life becomes defined by waiting, by the hope of being chosen in the reunion lottery.
We are taught that war is bound by dates—that the Korean War began in 1950 and ended in 1953. Adoption, too, is often framed as a single event rather than something that reverberates through a person’s entire life. On one level, this is simply how we narrate history—through timelines, markers, and endpoints. But on another level, this can become a way to simplify and erase lived experiences that demand accountability and action long after the main event has ended.
Gendry-Kim dissolves the illusion that the trauma of family separations is confined to the past. Her work shows how war continues—quietly, persistently—in the daily lives of those left behind. She conveys this through visual contrasts: the terror and confusion of war, communicated with thick, expressive brushstrokes in heavily packed pages, with slow-moving panels featuring present-day Gwija as she prepares food, battles the remote control for the television, and struggles with her aching and aging body to answer the phone. At times, the timelines are blurred together and flashbacks bleed into the present. When Gwija’s friend Jeongsun is chosen by the lottery and meets her younger sister, the final page depicting their reunion shows Jeongsun’s elderly figure. Floating before her, almost as if she’s carrying them in her hands, are the two sisters as smiling children. Earlier, Jeongsun had said, “I thought I’d be meeting my little sister. But it was a granny who showed up.” In this moment, Gendry-Kim places the past within the present, clearly showing that the past isn’t something we can just put behind us. It continues to live within us and shape our identities and relationships.
The Waiting is far from a story about passivity. While “waiting” may imply inaction, a state of not doing much, Gendry-Kim treats it as a form of resistance. By participating in the reunion lottery, by repeatedly asking for updates, and by sharing her story with her daughter, Gwija embodies strength, persistence, and hope. Memory becomes an act of defiance, a refusal to let lost family members fade into the faceless ghosts Gendry-Kim poignantly portrays them as on one of the spreads in the book. The struggle of separated families for reunion mirrors the struggle of countless adopted people who must fight against adoption agencies, government institutions, and private interests just to access basic information about their origins.
For those who haven’t experienced the violence of permanent family separation, it can be difficult to understand why some of us continue to hope for reunion, given how impossible it seems. But with The Waiting, Gendry-Kim not only brings attention to an overlooked aspect of war, she also shows that these human experiences have value, that they deserve to be documented and recorded. While the media tends to focus on the rare, emotionally charged reunions, it often rejects the far greater number of people who never find their families. These stories are typically deemed unworthy of attention since they lack “entertainment value.” In offering a deeply moving, highly engaging portrait of someone who remains waiting, Gendry-Kim proves that the stories of those who are not yet reunited are just as important. For me personally, The Waiting has given me a deeper understanding of how my family separation fits into Korean history and has inspired me to keep going in my own work as a comic book artist.
Writer 필자 소개
Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom / 정울림
Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom/정울림 is a comic book artist, writer, and adoptee rights activist. She has published the graphic novels Palimpsest (Ordfront, 2016), an autobiographical account of her search for her Korean family, and The Excavated Earth (Galago, 2022), which follows Chilean children who were stolen for adoption. She is currently working on her next graphic novel, which focuses on adoptees and mental health.
Did you enjoy this article? 별점
Did you enjoy this article? Please rate your experience
![[Featured Review] On the Eve of the Uprising](/_img/www/comn/noimg_190x235.png)
