Photo by Charlie Crane, from Welcome to Pyongyang

Growing up, SAT scores and mathematics were higher on my priority list than genealogy. I knew little about my family beyond my parents’ own lives, that they were a city girl and a country boy brought together in Seoul’s most prestigious university.

Now that I am older and my extended family has begun gathering more regularly, I’m hearing stories about Korea that seem straight out of a movie. It’s hard to believe I am of their blood.

My mother recently shared a very dark story about her uncle, my grandfather’s brother. An aspiring political rebel from Seoul, he ascended to a position of power in the medical community in Pyongyang after World War II. Through the turmoil of the following decade (and a change in regime), he suddenly vanished without a trace.

This is a typical tale coming out of North Korea, but inexcusable for any country with an ounce of respect for human rights. Should we be surprised?

It’s bone-chilling knowing that if it were not for this, I’d have a bigger family.

Moreover, my mother visited him with some regularity in the years before the division was final. She could have been trapped there; I could be witnessing the DPRK first-hand now, been executed at birth, or have never been born at all.

You can sit around and mull over all the philosophical land mines (pun intended) in the “What if?” situations, but the simple fact is this: It’s real. It’s all painfully real and I’ve never been more aware that there’s a big, nasty world out there. I only have the most distant idea of what it’s like to have family stuck in the most treacherous country in the world, but this vague ghost of terror is so much more than I already want to feel.

This is how I know that no matter what opportunities there are to travel beyond that border and take photos of a lifetime, it can never happen for me.

Perhaps my parents did the right thing not scaring their little girl with stories that don’t have happy endings.