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Life & Times Transcript
05/25/06 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- A war left their country divided, but is there a way to reunite their divided families? Alice Suh>> For ninety-nine percent of Korean-American families, they would just be happy to find out if these people are still alive. To send a letter or even to make a phone call is beyond their wildest dreams right now. Val Zavala>> And then, a fourth generation of this musical family is now part of a California tradition. Meet the Arias Troubadours. These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> Imagine fleeing your country during wartime and leaving everything you have behind you, including some members of your family and then having absolutely no contact for more than fifty years. Well, thousands of Korean-Americans have had to live with that situation ever since North Korea sealed itself off from the rest of the world. But now a few of them are trying to pry that door open just a bit. Is it a lost cause? Sam Louie has the story of one family who won't give up hope. Sam Louie>> Korea, a once single nation torn in two after the end of the Korean War. Since 1953, the demilitarized zone known as the DMZ with its minefields, watch towers and barbed wire separates the nations of North and South Korea. The contrast between the countries is stark. North Korea's communist regime puts its military first. South Korea's democratic government oversees a thriving capitalistic society. But transcending these sharp differences are families separated by war, bound by blood ties that know no politics. It's estimated that more than ten million Korean families were divided by the war. No phone calls, letters or correspondence have been allowed since, but now some Korean-Americans here in the United States are hoping to change that. Ken Park of La Mirada in Orange County is originally from North Korea. His family fled to the south during the war, but his grandmother and younger brother stayed behind to watch over their land. After the war, he came to America. That was in 1953. He hasn't seen his grandmother or brother since. Ken Park>> We left and we left them over there. So we thought he would be in an orphanage in North Korea because my grandmother was old and nobody could take care of him, so he must be in an orphanage. We really felt bad, especially my dad and my mother. Sam Louie>> Park is part of a project called the Saemsori, whose aim is to open up diplomatic relations between the United States and North Korea so that more families may be reunited. Alice Suh>> Our mission statement is to be a constructive voice for family reunifications and positive human contact between the United States and North Korea. Sam Louie>> Alice Suh is the Director of the Saemsori Project which, translated from Korean, means "the voice of a fresh spring". Alice Suh>> For ninety-nine percent of Korean-American families, they would just be happy to find out these people are still alive. To send a letter or even to make a phone call is beyond their wildest dreams right now. Sam Louie>> Los Angeles is home to the largest population of Koreans outside of Asia, many with ties to North Korea. Alice Suh>> There are, I think, six hundred thousand Korean-Americans in this Los Angeles area. At a low estimate, they say ten percent of those families are from North Korea. That's about sixty thousand people who have absolutely nowhere to turn to in the United States government. Sam Louie>> Suh also wants the United States government to set up an office to handle these urgent cases before it's too late. Alice Suh>> Many of them are getting older and, even within the past five years, a tremendous percentage of them have died. I mean, the rate is accelerating every year because people are getting older. This is really our last chance. We might have two or three more years. In ten years, there won't be too many people left at all. Ken Park>> My oldest brothers, my older brother. Sam Louie>> This is a picture of Ken's family reunion back in 1997. His younger brother is nowhere to be found. Ken Park>> Even though we cannot meet him, we like to know if he's still alive or not and we'd like to know where he's living. Sam Louie>> Right now, you have no information about your younger brother? Ken Park>> No information at all. Sam Louie>> Don't know if he's alive, don't know if he is alive, where he might be living? Ken Park>> No. Sam Louie>> If he's still alive, his brother, Hyo Joon Park, would be sixty-three years old. Ken's organizing another family reunion to celebrate their father's ninety-ninth birthday. Once again, his brother will be missing. Ken Park>> I'm praying for his health and a way to see him as soon as possible. Especially we'd like to meet him before my dad is passed away. He's very old. He cannot live very long. Sam Louie>> It's been more than fifty years since the end of the Korean War. How would you describe just the separation and the loss of not being able to contact your younger brother? Ken Park>> It's painful, it's very painful. So it doesn't make any sense that we couldn't meet him. Sam Louie>> Ken's older sister, Hyun Joon Koh, is now sixty-nine and still grieves over her lost brother. Kyun Joon Koh>> I think about his difficult time growing up without the family and the sorrow and hardships he must have gone through. Sam Louie>> In recent years, North Korea finally began allowing visits between separated family members, but the visits are awarded to just a handful of South Koreans, those who are lucky enough to be picked by a lottery. For Korean-Americans, though, the chances are close to nil of ever seeing their loved ones. There are no government-sanctioned reunifications since North Korea refuses to discuss the topic with the United States. Alice Suh>> "Even within our own community of Korean-Americans, they are the most voiceless. They are the ones that nobody has heard from for over fifty years." Sam Louie>> Some Korean-Americans are so desperate to find their relatives, they resort to the use of smugglers. Helie Lee>> He was sixteen years old during the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Sam Louie>> Author Helie Lee, featured on a Life and Times program three years ago, talked about the dramatic rescue of her uncle and extended family from North Korea. Helie Lee>> This is an actual escape of my uncle's family. Half of them came out in 1997. We had a guide go across into North Korea and sneak my uncle and eldest daughter and eldest son out of North Korea into China. Here you see them running through the riverbank and climbing walls. Sam Louie>> The escape was a success, a rare one, leading to this emotional reunion, but these kinds of rescues are often unreliable, extremely expensive and very dangerous. Sam Louie>> Ken Park admits he has considered hiring smugglers, but he couldn't bring himself to take the risk. So when he heard about the Saemsori Project, he signed on, although he realizes that relations between North Korea and the United States are not likely to improve anytime soon. Ken Park>> We have to do something, you know. Somebody has to do something, so we have to work together to relieve this kind of pain. Sam Louie>> In the meantime, Ken Park draws strength from this piece of artwork made by his daughter. It is one of the few reminders the family has of the brother they left behind more than fifty years ago. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> Does your kid prefer a PlayStation to a playground? Are they more plugged in than they are let loose? Well, one author says there are some serious side effects when our kids are deprived of nature. Saul Gonzalez talked with author, Richard Louv, about his new book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder". Saul Gonzalez>> In both your writing and your speaking, you explore how America's children are increasingly alienated and estranged from nature, from the outside world. Talk about that. Richard Louv>> Well, first I'm not talking about an exercise in nostalgia in comparing my childhood to my boys' childhood. I'm really talking about something that's larger than that. When you think about it, through all of human history, children went outside and spent much of their time either playing or working in nature. Within two or three decades, in western society at least, we're in a position of maybe seeing that go away. Yes, there will always be kids who play outdoors, but it is increasingly becoming a rarity. Saul Gonzalez>> And if children are increasingly strangers in a strange land when they go out in nature, what are the consequences of that? Richard Louv>> Some of the research that has appeared in the last decade really suggests terrific benefits for a nature link to healthy child development. Everything from attention deficit disorder, kids who have those symptoms, the symptoms get much better when they go outside just a little bit into nature. A study at the University of Illinois is showing that. Creativity studies show that it affects creativity. Full use of the senses, how we learn, cognitive functioning, a lot of studies showing even standardized test scores go up when kids have outdoor classroom experience. Saul Gonzalez>> And you also write that, when kids are outside for less and less time, it really chokes their creativity. It kind of grinds down their curiosity about the world they live in. Richard Louv>> Yeah, and I think we have to really look at that. We're a country that's based on space, on physical space and mental space. Our creativity as a country, our economy, in a sense, has been built on that. What if we take that away? Even more important than that is the sense of wonder. The most important word in the book is wonder. What if we take that first window onto wonder? You know, when a child goes out and turns over a rock and sees the universe of life and finds he or she is not alone, or goes out into the woods and has that sense of something larger. How can we take that away from future generations? Yet what we're doing, I think, is really creating a time when that is going to disappear if we're not careful. I do think we can turn that around. Saul Gonzalez>> Of course, nature has a lot of competition nowadays. Richard Louv>> Yeah. Saul Gonzalez>> The internet, videogames, blockbuster summer movies. How do the mountains, how do the streams, how does the beach compare with those kinds of things which are so compelling, so attractive, so seductive? Richard Louv>> We spend so much time blaming those things which admittedly are great distractions. They're very seductive, but we don't talk to parents very much about the alternatives. What parents face is, I think, probably the more important things that parents talk about than electronics or even access to nature because so many of those woods that we played in as kids have been torn down, but what parents talk about the most is that they're terrified of stranger danger, of letting their child outside. I felt that fear as a parent. My kids did not have the kind of free-range childhood that I did growing up outside of Kansas City. Saul Gonzalez>> Wandering in the fields, wandering in the woods. Richard Louv>> Right. But I was really intentional about getting them outside and taking them fishing. My younger son and I just went fishing a couple of days ago, so we still do that a lot. Saul Gonzalez>> And when you talk about nature and getting kids out into nature, you're not necessarily even talking about that week-long trip to the Grand Canyon or traversing the Ozarks. It's really just discovering the wonders that are outside the front door in the neighborhood. Richard Louv>> Yeah, and that's a very good point. The people who study this talk about nearby nature as being very important. That's the clump of trees at the end of your cul-de-sac or the ravine behind your house. You know, to us as adults, those look fairly minimal, but to children, particularly small children, those are whole universes. Those are very, very important for kids. So in addition to, you know, that many environmentalists are focused in terms of urban areas, of preserving the wildlife corridors now that we need to do. We do need to do that, but often they forget that those little pocket parks, those little places of nearby nature, are also important. Maybe not so important for the endangered species of wildlife, but certainly for the endangered species of the child in nature. Saul Gonzalez>> I'm also struck in reading your book by how you really point a finger at the people in companies who create and plan our new communities and suburbs for being at least partly responsible for this. We're creating neighborhoods that increase the chasms between kids and the natural world. Richard Louv>> Right. And ironically in some of the older cities, Philadelphia, for instance, even New York City, there's a surprising amount of nature in those older cities. Central Park was created for health, for the health of the workers and their children by the industrialists. It was a good idea. We forgot about that idea for a while. So I'm, in a sense, almost as concerned about the kids who are growing up in the suburbs as the kids who are growing up in the inner city core, maybe more concerned. You go out to some of these developments and -- Saul Gonzalez>> -- there's not a soul outside. Richard Louv>> No, there isn't. If you see green, it's totally manicured. In addition, you have what I've described as the criminalization of natural play. If you start adding up all the laws and regulations, including environmental regulations on picking up Horned Toads and all of that, all the way down to the huge rise in community associations and covenants and restrictions that almost every new housing development built in the last thirty years in America has, these control everything in peoples' lives that we would never allow public government to do. But just try to put up a basketball hoop in some of these communities, let alone let the kids build a tree house or a fort. I don't care what somebody's religion or politics are. They all want to tell me about the tree house they had when they were a kid or that special place in the woods that they had when they were a child that still remains in their heart, no matter what the bulldozers did. That is something that is fairly universal. It's something we can come to the table about. Saul Gonzalez>> What would you recommend to parents out there, parents who are just trying to get through the day, trying to get their kids fed, to school. That seems like challenge enough. Richard Louv>> The neat thing about this is that the minute you go outside that front door with a child and introduce that child to nature, you as an adult are receiving all of the same benefits. The longer attention span, the dramatic stress reduction, the sense of wonder. All of those things that the studies show that come to us, you're going to get as a parent. This is not a bitter pill. It's also an issue that transcends parenting. As important as parenting is, studies of environmentalists, conservationists, whatever we want to call them, show that almost to a person they had some transcendent experience in nature. What happens if we take the chance for that away from a large part of the generation and even larger of the next and a larger part of the next? Where will future stewards of the earth come from? Yes, there will always be environmentalists, but increasingly that relationship with nature, they'll carry it in their briefcases more than in their hearts and that's a different relationship. Saul Gonzalez>> Well, Richard Louv, I want to thank you for helping to start a very important and interesting conversation about our place in nature and our children's place in nature. Thank you very much for being on Life and Times. Richard Louv>> Thank you. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> It's often been said that southern California forgets its history, but that's not true of the Arias family. Since the early 1900s, the Arias Troubadours have captured the essence of southern California in their music. Independent producer, Jon Wilkman, has their story. Jon Wilkman>> Every spring for more than eighty years, one of southern California's oldest historical traditions is celebrated with performances of the outdoor play, "Ramona". It is also a celebration of a remarkable Los Angeles family, an ensemble of musicians and their founder, Jose Arias, Sr. Kenneth Marcus>> As I studied the music of early Los Angeles from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, I became fascinated with Jose Arias and his family as a musical dynasty and indeed one of the oldest musical dynasties in Los Angeles that I know of. [Film Clip] Jon Wilkman>> Today, eighty-three year old Jose Arias, Jr. and his brother, Alfonso, lead the Arias Troubadours. Encouraged by University of La Verne professor, Ken Marcus, for the first time in more than fifty years, the group gathered to record a musical tradition that runs deep in southern California's past and to remember the man who began it all. [Film Clip] Kenneth Marcus>> Jose Arias, Sr. immigrated from Mexico to California in 1910. Jose Arias, Jr.>> My father was always searching for anything musical. In those days, there was still some very large ranchos, Sepulveda to Dominguez especially, as big land holdings and they would have their fiestas. There weren't too many musicians around. They'd always invite my father who was a very gregarious man -- not like me. I'm kind of shy. He was always out there smiling. So he would go up to those fiestas. My father would listen to them and to their songs and to their type of music and he melted right into it because he was a very adaptable musician. [Film Clip] Jose Arias, Jr.>> Between 1910 and 1915, he was in vaudeville and he traveled all over the United States. So he got the training of vaudeville into him which was very deep into his performing. He learned to perform to please the public and that's what he did all his life. [Film Clip] Kenneth Marcus>> Jose Arias became a kind of musical ambassador of Los Angeles to the rest of the country and he did this in a variety of ways. Because as he got better known to the Los Angeles communities, especially to groups like the Chamber of Commerce, they began hiring him in particular not only to play at the gatherings, at the festivals, at the parties in Los Angeles, but also to encourage him to go on the road. [Film Clip] Jose Arias, Jr.>> In 1931, Los Angeles was bidding the Chamber of Commerce for the Lions International Convention which was being held in Toronto, Canada. So they sent my dad and his group of musicians, singers and dancers to play half an hour in Toronto, Canada in promoting Los Angeles. They built the big mission stage background and, when they were playing and performing, they had these starlets from Hollywood come down the aisles passing out oranges (laughter). Naturally, they got the convention. Kenneth Marcus>> Jose Arias, Sr. was able to act as a kind of crossover figure to the Anglo world, to getting to know early Hollywood and playing on movie sets. Jose Arias, Jr.>> The early motion pictures were mostly westerns and they were naturally always the cantina and the fights would break out. My father caught on right away, you know. They're going to want a guitar broken on somebody's head in the fight scene, so he would always take two guitars, a cheap one and a good one. When the director would say to start fighting up near the orchestra, grab the guitar and hit this guy, my father would switch guitars so he would break the cheap one (laughter). [Film Clip] Jon Wilkman>> The Ramona Pageant was inspired by Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel, "Ramona", written to protest injustices against Native Americans. In the end, the book's appeal was more romance than reality, a sentimental legacy lastingly preserved when the story was dramatized in 1923 by writer-director, Garnet Holme. Kenneth Marcus>> One of the brainstorm ideas of Garnet Holme was to try to choose a music group that he thought would represent the music of the era. Jon Wilkman>> That group was the Arias Troubadours. The Ramona Pageant is a mix of history, romance and community pride. The Arias family was there from the beginning, following their father. Jose Arias, Jr.>> He went to play in the Ramona outdoor play in 1924. I was only five years old when he took me to the play and I've been going ever since. Every year, I've never missed a year that I've been in the play at least once or twice in that performance. Jon Wilkman>> The musical and entertainment heritage of the Arias family is far from played out. Jose Arias, Jr.>> My boys are very involved and they're wonderful musicians themselves. Now my granddaughters, they're wonderful singers and dancers and instrumentalists. They're picking up instruments too to keep the legacy of the Arias family. It's going on. It's not stopping. [Film Clip] Jose Arias, Jr.>> The music adds a lot to the play. It sets the tone and the mood. We can play some sad songs when they were going away and the happy fiesta themes, all of that. [Film Clip] Kenneth Marcus>> And the star of this project is bringing history alive so that people can see and hear what music sounded like in the past and know that the past is not dead, that in many ways the past is still very much with us. Jose Arias, Jr.>> California has always been a musical state. I mean, the flowers dance to the music my father played, as he used to say (laughter). [Film Clip] Jose Arias, Jr.>> Most of our work is around people, face to face. There is the gratification. I've seen them just infused with the spirit. Let's sing a song. I'll play the guitar. You sing (laughter). Val Zavala>> The Ramona Pageant is playing in Hemet through May 13. For details, you can go to their website at ramonabowl.com. And for more information on the Arias family, you can check out their website at ariastroubadours.com. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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