From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbarale. This is the Daily.

Today, in their historic summit, North and South Korea, vowed to pursue a peace treaty

that would end the 65-year-long Korean War.

That could finally mean reconciliation for the thousands of families who have been separated from one another

since the war broke out. It's Monday, April 30th.

My first recollections about my grandfather came from the stories from my grandmother as well as my mother.

My grandfather is from South Korea. He was a professor and an engineer.

And these stories really involved how his absence basically determined the fate of the family.

Sylvia Nams' grandfather went to North Korea in 1950, just a few months after the Korean War started, and never came back.

When my grandfather disappeared, my grandmother was 28 years old. My eldest aunt was 4 years old.

My second aunt was 3 years old. My mom was about 1 or 2. And my uncle was a newborn. He was 3 weeks old.

As a kid growing up, my mother would talk about what it meant for her to grow up without a father, both in terms of having a parent love her.

And also in a family growing up in Korea, where you actually do need a male breadwinner, how it really impacted their lives.

As they lived in pretty utter destitution, it was a man that I think she was deeply bitter towards, because I think that she knew that her life would have been very different, had he stayed behind.

What did you know about why he disappeared?

The thing that I had heard growing up as a kid, where contradictory and included one story that involved him being kidnapped by North Korean soldiers.

The other story was that because it was the Cold War period, and he was an academic and intellectual that he had socialist or communist sympathies, and therefore went North.

And therefore, potentially it had abandoned his family in the name of ideology. And then the third was this kind of grace-based unknown fill in the blank type of story that perhaps something had happened to him and that he couldn't come back to the family.

What did your mother think happened to him?

The more plausible explanation for his disappearance and one that I think my mother held on to was the fact that he defected in the name of ideology and then abandoned them.

This is the one that I think helped her understand how things panned out for her, as well as her mother and her siblings. And it was also the most painful theory as well.

So as the years went on and you enter adulthood, did you become more interested in finding out the real story behind what happened to your grandfather?

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