AUTHOR CRAFTS PLOT FOR DARING DEFECTION; LOVE, HARD WORK REUNITE KOREAN KIN.

Byline: Sharline Chiang Daily News Staff Writer

When Helie Lee returns to Los Angeles today after an emotional reunion in Seoul with her uncle and other relatives whom she helped escape from North Korea, she will carry enough stories to fill a book.

It was more than six years ago, while working on her first book about her grandmother, that Lee discovered that her halmoni - Korean for grandmother - had had a son, her uncle, who'd been left behind in the mayhem of the wartime exodus of refugees from North Korea.

Last April, after Lee realized her book had put her North Korean relatives at risk, the author met her uncle across the Yalu, the river that divides China and North Korea, in a risky effort to reunite him with his mother.

The 33-year-old writer, who grew up in Woodland Hills, stood with her father in the cold on the bank of a narrow and shallow stretch of the river and called to Lee Yong Un on the other side.

It was the first of five harrowing and heartbreaking missions and meetings over nine months that would lead to the escape last week of Lee Yong Un, 62, and eight members of his extended family.

Overwhelmed by emotions during their first meeting, Lee Yong Un passed out and was unable to make it across the water for a planned secret reunion with his mother, Lee's maternal grandmother, who was waiting at a hotel in northern China.

Lee was overcome as well.

``I was crying so much I could barely keep my eyes open,'' Lee said in a telephone interview Monday from her hotel in Seoul. ``I didn't make the connection that this was my flesh and blood. But what hurt so much was seeing the oppression and feeling it so thickly.''

Lee's grandmother began exchanging letters with her uncle in 1991. He had been separated from his family 47 years ago when he was 16. When they found him, he was living in Hyesun, near the Chinese border, with his wife and children.

It wasn't until the book - including a letter from her cousin - was released by Scribner in 1996 and translated into Korean that the 33-year-old author felt compelled to help her ``Big Uncle'' escape from North Korea. It was then that Lee realized she might have put her North Korean relatives in peril.

``I thought to myself, `What did you do? Why didn't you think before?'' Lee said. ``But then again I couldn't have known all this stuff would happen. But I know the outcomes outweigh the mistakes and naivete.''

A son is lost

Lee's book - ``Still Life with Rice: A Young American Woman Discovers the Life and Legacy of Her Korean Grandmother'' - is a memoir of the life of Hong Yong Baek, who escaped North Korea in 1950 with a month-old baby girl and three other children, but whose son was separated and lost.

Helie Lee's journey to rescue her ``Big Uncle'' was difficult and dangerous. Lee spent nine months plotting her uncle's escape, weathered dangerous routes, paid bribes to armed officers and fees to guides and go-betweens to ensure a safe journey.

Last Tuesday, after 47 years of separation, the entire clan - nine from North Korea and four from Los Angeles - was reunited in a frenzied scene on the grounds of the ancient Toksu Palace in downtown Seoul.

The reunion brought Lee's uncle, his wife, two grown daughters, two grown sons, a daughter-in-law and two grandsons together with their American family, including Lee, her grandmother Hong Yong Baek, 85, of Koreatown; Lee's mother, Lily Fa, and her father, Jay Hak, a retired electrical engineer, of La Crescenta.

The defecting family members were granted asylum and will remain in South Korea under the care of the government.

Risky mission

Lee risked her life for their freedom, plotting their escape in clandestine meetings along the river. She secretly taped and photographed the mission by placing recorders in her bag, in which she had torn holes for the lens and microphone. She hid cords in her sleeves.

Gun-toting guards patrolled the bank of the Yalu River. At one point Lee took a snapshot of her uncle across the river and was confronted by an angry Chinese policeman.

With the help of ethnic Koreans living in China, Lee and her father arranged the meetings to plot the next step. At each step, there was a price. Lee estimates the trips, air fare, guide fees and other connections have cost the family as much as $140,000.

Plans to help the entire family escape were complicated by emotions, fears and loyalties that threatened to tear the group apart, Lee said.

Out of fear for collaborators' lives and others who might want to follow the path of her family, Lee is circumspect about some details of the escape, which liberated a few family members at a time over several months.

At one point, a first group of several members, led by the uncle, escaped. But a cousin who was leading a second group, including the uncle's wife, refused to come along.

``He was so convinced the government would protect and feed him,'' Lee said. ``When only half came out we were torn whether to send the first group back. But the first group said there was no living for them if they went back. We were so filled with guilt.''

Later, convinced that the world outside could offer him a better life, the cousin relented and the group was led out 20 days after the first group. They had to take a separate, longer route, to avoid detection.

The two groups hid out separately for about two months before they were reunited Dec. 30.

Although her own family is free, Lee said her work is far from over.

``Now that I've started this it's hard to go back to a normal life,'' Lee said. ``My main focus now is to draw attention to those who need asylum, those who didn't have the luck or fortune that our family had.''

The saga of Lee's family, a safe escape of North Koreans to South Korea, is rare but increasingly possible with North Korea's critical food shortage. Guards and residents on both sides of the border are often willing to help for the right price. About 180 North Koreans defected in 1997, compared to about 80 in 1996.

Documenting the despair

Lee hopes to write another book about her experience and to make the world aware of the plight of people in North Korea.

Lee had invited a three-person television crew from Seoul Broadcast Systems-TV to document her family's journey to freedom ``in case we would have to show the struggle we went through,'' and to help their case for asylum once they reached South Korea. The documentary aired in South Korea last week.

When Lee returns she plans to take a short break in Los Angeles before flying to Washington, D.C., for an interview with ABC's Nightline.

``I've learned that by being an American we have such an enormous power,'' Lee said. ``Even everyday people, we have the power to make political changes just because we have American passports and U.S. dollars. My family is proof of that.''

(1 -- color) Helie Lee has written a book about her grandmother, Hong Yong Baek.

Michael Owen Baker/Daily News

(2) Lee Yong Un

Spirited out of Communist North

Map; Korea

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2 Photos, map