Koreans in Las Vegas recall images of war

Friday, July 25, 2003 | 9:38 a.m.

Although more than 50 years have passed, the images of the Korean War remain burned in Chae Lim Burris' memory.

The day North Korean soldiers dragged her 19-year-old brother off as an unwilling conscript in their military is still all too clear in her memory. She also still remembers in vivid detail those soldiers using a bayonet on a man who had dared to give her family refuge.

Today, Burris, 60, and her organization welcome new Korean arrivals to Las Vegas. Her group encourages many of the estimated 15,000 Koreans living in Southern Nevada to become fluent in English and to get involved in the community and with politics.

It is a close-knit community that has not forgotten what American soldiers did in Korea a half-century ago, she said.

The former Chae Lim Cho of Las Vegas, says her story is not unlike those of the tens of thousands of other Koreans who suffered but, because of the efforts of the United States military, remained a free people.

"My father was a politician so the North Koreans targeted him," said Burris, a former Boulevard Mall retail manager and current president of the Korean-American Women's Association of Las Vegas.

"Me, my mother, four brothers and two sisters left Seoul (before its fall on June 28, 1950) for Taegu (150 miles to the southeast). But father would not come with us because he would not jeopardize the lives of his family."

The Chos, a prominent family in Seoul, walked many miles, hopped rides on trains or got picked up by occasional motorists as they made their perilous cross-country trek.

"When I was about 7 years old, we walked past one village where people were laying on the ground and their food was cooking on the (outdoor) stove," Burris said. "I asked my mother why they were sleeping during the day and why they had not eaten their food. She said, 'Don't look, keep walking.'

"It was not until years later that I learned they had been killed by a bomb just before we got there."

Young Chae's previously comfortable world had been turned upside down. At their large home is Seoul she had her own room. At one of their refuges, all eight family members were crowded into two small rooms. The North Koreans, looking for her father, found the family hiding in that home.

"They took the landlord outside for everyone to see," Burris said. "As two soldiers held him, another cut his arm (with a bayonet). After that, many people were afraid to help us, so we had to move on."

The North Korean soldiers interrogated the family, including Chae's 2-year-old sister and 5-year-old brother, on their father's whereabouts, but the family did not know where he was hiding.

The soldiers did not harm the family, but took Chae's oldest brother to fight against his own people. He escaped six months later and somehow found his family as they traversed South Korea, Burris said.

During the war, Chae suffered a major ear infection. Because so many doctors were in the army, her family could not get her the treatment she needed. As a result, Burris went deaf in her left ear.

But Burris and her family survived the four-year ordeal and eventually returned to Seoul, where they were reunited with her father, who became vice mayor of the city.

Chae returned to school and eventually graduated from college in Seoul. She married American Navy veteran and Department of Defense employee Delbert Burris and moved with her husband to the United States in the late 1960s.

Like many Korean women who came to America as part of an interracial marriage, she faced hardship.

"It was such a culture shock, especially for the women who came before me in the 1950s," Burris said, noting that because of racial prejudice couples had difficulty renting apartments. "Also, there were no Korean markets back then so they could not prepare the food (to which they were accustomed).

"I was very fortunate to arrive in Key West, Fla., in 1969. By then there were Koreans at the military base and we helped each other when there were problems."

Burris and her husband raised two children. Today she is a grandmother of two. Residents of Las Vegas for six years, the couple enjoys traveling. They visited Korea last year.

"When I left Seoul, there were 2 million people," she said. "Today there are more than 13 million and so many buildings and so many cars. It was not the sleepy town where I grew up. It was another culture shock for me."

Although highly industrialized compared to poverty-stricken North Korea, South Korea doesn't have the military power that North Korea has. Because of that, Burris said, the peace always will be a shaky one.

"The North Koreans will never give up their Communist ways," she said. "The only way we will be able to defend ourselves is with America's help."

"Without the help of Americans, I would be a Communist or dead today," Burris said. "We have never forgotten how important American GIs were to our freedom. We always try to show them our appreciation for their courage.

"It will never be 'The Forgotten War' to us."

During Sunday's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice at the Gobel/Lowden Veterans Center and Museum, Burris and other members of the Korean-American Women's Association and the Full Gospel Las Vegas Korean Church will present a Korean buffet, Korean folk music and other entertainment.