"If you're a senior citizen without money to do a trip on your own, there is no place you can turn to," Linton said.
More than 2 million ethnic Koreans live or work in the United States, according to figures supplied by the South Korean Foreign Ministry last year. About 10% of the population of South Korea is believed to have family members in the North, but the percentage is thought to be higher among Korean Americans because many of those displaced during World War II or the 1950-1953 Korean War came to the United States.
Millions of families were wrenched apart in the chaos of the war years.
"This is a very painful and emotional issue for us," said Cha-hee Lee Stanfield, a 65-year-old librarian in Chicago who is working on the reunion project through the Korean-American Coalition of the Midwest. She has been trying for decades to meet a brother she has not seen since her family was separated near the Chinese-North Korean border at the end of World War II. "There is no way to communicate."
In 2001, Korean Americans collected more than 20,000 signatures on a petition calling for the State Department to raise the issue of separated families with the North Korean government.
A meeting was set up by Rep. Mark S. Kirk (R-Ill.) with then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. But the effort stalled amid deteriorating relations between the United States and North Korea largely because of conflict over the North's pursuit of nuclear weapons.
