Hands in Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s “The Waiting”

Over the past month, I have read two powerfully moving graphic novels about the separation of families during war. Miriam Katin’s We Are On Our Own focuses on Miriam and her mother’s escape from the Nazis in Budapest during World War II. Along with Katin’s memoir, I read Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s The Waiting, a fictional story, based on Gendry-Kim’s mother and sister being separated during the Korean War, separated by the 38th parallel which split the country in two. The Waiting tells the story of Gwija, whose novelist daughter Jina relates it, and her experiences during the Korean War and the separation of Gwija from her son and husband.

The Waiting moves back and forth between the past and the present, detailing the feelings of loss and the physical separation enacted because of the war. In the present, The Waiting centers around the 2018 family reunions at Mount Kumgang in North Korea. These reunions, occurring 65 years after the end of the Korean War and held in conjunction with the South Korean and North Korean governments, reunited families and loved ones who had been separated for decades. 57,000 families applied for the reunions, and only 89 were selected.

In “A Lifetime of Waiting,” the afterward to The Waiting, Gendry-Kim talks about the 2018 reunion and her mother’s reaction to not getting accepted to participate. She writes, “She was…