hyunwoo

Can you give me background of yourself? (name, age, background info such as marriage, job, family, etc.)

Describe more and follow up questions.

My name is Cho Du jin, I am currently 72, I am married, unfortunately my husband passed away from his old age 4 years ago, I have a old son and a younger daughter. My son is right now 43 years old he is working as a real estate agent, he has two daughters and my daughter, she is 41 right now she is house wife just like me, has one son and one daughter. I was working as a barber but right now I am just a normal house wife because I had to take care of family, I living in Daegu, north gu, I haven’t moved outside of this city at all but I have changed my house about 3 times.

From your memory, what was the most unusual thing when the Korean war started? When I was 12, I remember a bunch of people with wagons carrying house holds coming to our village and stayed outdoor without any pillow or covers. Some of people were allowed to stay in villager’s house because they paid the fee for staying with gold.

Why did they pay gold instead of money? I didn’t know why when I was in that age but, later someone told me that people paid gold as a fee because money becomes loses its value unlike gold.

What event do you remember that have frighten you? Two adults who came to my village, had kidnapped a kid for food but it ended up they releasing that kid and asked for forgiveness. I remember him saying ‘My family in starving to death. I couldn’t help it since I don’t have any gold to trade with gold. Please can you forgive my act and give me at least some foods for family to stay alive’. I don’t remember rather him got forgave or not. It was really shocking news for me because he was same age as mine.

Did this kind of things happened often? Since many people from north move down to south, there must have been many problems or fights among Koreans must have been occurred. There weren’t many happenings like this occurred but people often fought for food. But there were a lot of robberies. Some of our rice also got stolen that we ended up hiding rest of our rice underground.

Where did you stay? Have you ever thought about moving away? I stayed at my home, unlike people who used to live in north part of Korea, who had to evade away from war zone. However, one day, I overheard conversations between my mom and dad discussing about rather we should move away. I didn’t wanted to move so jumped into my parents room and asked them not to move away. One week after, people in my village also started to move away one by one. Only few left in the village combining our family there were only 12 families.

Why did your parents decided to stay? Unlike other people?x When I was at that age, I thought it was because of me and harshness moving away from home. However, now I think about it, I think it was because of food and if Daegu get occupied by North Korea, there is no chance to survive even we flee to Pusan or other south part anyway. Do you remember anything about having an actual war? I don’t remember seeing any bombs landing on our village or shooting guns but I remember seeing trucks with Americans riding them. Also, I remember air plane flying over my village. They made quite a noise that I was once scared of air plane.