During summer in South Korea, a young college student reunited with his relatives on the 90th birthday of his aunt. He saw both new and familiar faces during the huge celebration where most of the larger family—around 30— came together and reconnected with each other.

Jae Lee, a senior at Harvard University, recalls being surprised and fortunate to be able to talk to so many of his relatives again last August. Usually, he considers this family reunion meaningful because such event takes place once or twice every summer and also gives him the opportunity to reconnect with his other family members whom he hasn’t had the chance to spend much time with.

But, this summer, he expressed strong feelings of concern for his family in Korea, including his father, due to the current North Korean nuclear crisis.

“Having my family there impacts my stance because obviously I’m more concerned about the prospect of war than Americans – a lot of U.S. people I talk to say that the bombs won’t ever reach the United States, but for South Korea a war will definitely have impact and cause a lot of damage,” Lee said.

Lee's answer represents the sentiment shared by most South Koreans in Boston, whose interviews reveal their concerns about the escalating conflicts surrounding the North Korean nuclear crisis. However, he recognizes that people’s sense of urgency about the situation differs from one another, especially from those living in South Korea.

“There wasn’t so much as a fear as much as it was a worry about what will happen and worriedness about the future because the tensions are rising high between North and South Korea right now,” Lee commented again.

Tensions between North Korea and South Korea and its western allies have risen as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pursued a nuclear program. In the last few months, North Korea has reportedly tested more nuclear bombs that can reach farther around the globe.

On a scale from 1 to 10, Lee said his personal degree of worry is 6, regardless of how his family members in Korea feels. “I think that the situation has escalated to the point where it’s dangerous and there are real consequences,” he said.

1. Popular Holiday Gift: Survival Kits

The Korean adult population in the Boston area have different degrees of worry.

Hyuna Jeong, for example, is an Korean mother in Newton who has considerable worries about the escalating situation. She came to United States with her children in 2013 for education while her husband remained in Korea due to his work as an acupuncturist.

Jeong remembers the unease caused by the hostile relationship with North Korea before she came to US.

“Some people, especially the elderly, came to America because of a risk of war with North Korea,” she said in Korean.

Jeong said the current situation is different from the tensions she felt a couple of years ago.

“[In 2013], North Korea still did nuclear tests, but it was different from now,” Jeong said. “Within the span of 5 years, it seems like North Korea successfully obtained and developed nuclear weapons... Now I feel like something might happen.”

She also said that during this Chuseok, a major harvest festival in Korea, people gave each other survival kits as presents.

“If a war were to break out soon between North and South Korea, the winner of a war should be known in around a week due to the advanced military technologies. So, I heard that these survival kits could help people eat and survive during that one week,” she said. “This was the reason why these survival kits were quite popular as holiday gifts.”

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Now, several months have passed since our interview. When we met her again, she laughed it off saying, "I'm glad that the war didn't really break out. I guess I was too distressed at the time with the pessimistic news going around. Now, I feel better knowing that the war will not break out any time soon with the North Korea-United States summit meetings and agreements taken care of."

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2. Is There A Need to be Afraid?

In 2010, Jennie Kim was working in a private school in Korea when the South Korean navy ship Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean torpedo. The incident spread panic and a sense of fear in the minds of her foreign colleagues, and they were planning to go back to the United States.

“But then after a while, they became immune to it because [the media] talk about it all the time,” said Kim, now working as a college counselor at Noble and Greenough School. “They talk about it so much that you lose the urgency of it. After a couple of years, it didn’t really bother me at all.”

Kim is an example of Koreans in Boston who do not feel the urgency of the crisis as other Korean-Bostonians do. Due to the constant bombardment of threats from North Korea, some have become less concerned about an immediate attack from North Korea.

Kim did, however, admit that the incident shocked her at first.

“It’s something that my family always talked about, but I was surprised to mentally absorb it as an adult,” she said. “But after like a week or so, I was like, ‘Whatever. It’s not gonna happen.’”

Although it is clear that North Korea now has nuclear weapons, Kim still believes that war is not imminent.

“Maybe I should be feeling [a sense of greater graveness to the situation], but as a South Korean, and my parents being there and them always talking about it, I think we all believe that nothing is going to happen,” Kim said. “We all think that North Korea’s not brave enough to actually do anything with it. And they always use it as a bluff and to scare people off.”

3. Geopolitical Concerns as a History Teacher

People who have studied history say that President Donald Trump’s tendency to overreact makes this crisis different.

“In United States, you know, one of the things that is different is [Trump’s presidency],” said Nahyon Lee, a member of the history faculty at Noble and Greenough School. “As a non-Trump supporter, I feel that Trump’s presidency is erratic. He doesn’t really know geopolitics very well. I think he is a bit of a narcissist. I just don’t know how much he understands geopolitical needs and stability of the world.”

Lee is one of the local Koreans whose degree of worry is quite low, as people she has talked to do not show much concern for the situation. However, she says that her job as a history teacher affects her view on the nuclear crisis.

“We have one character like Trump who is an unknown variable,” she said. “You have Kim Jong Un, who is also like that.”

Previous presidents understood world relations, who is and is not a US ally, like South Korea and Japan, and how they need to work with rising China, Lee said. She compared the current situation to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“The thing you learn from JFK is from the 13 days. He met with people for 13 days so that we don’t escalate,” she said. “You don’t want to provoke Kim Jong Un. How do you prevent him from escalating and how do you prevent Donald Trump from escalating?”

4. What Comes Next?

Koreans in Bostons have conflicting views about what needs to happen.

For people like Jeong, they believe that more should be done to prepare for the worst case scenario.

“People in Korea might not think much about this crisis as North Korea did threaten us for 15 years,” Jeong said. “However, people who live all the way in America may be able to look at this crisis more objectively, and I think that people need to prepare more, even citizens, since as a nation, Korea isn’t doing much, apart from buying the survival kits.”

However, others like Jae Lee feel that people can only hope that the situation doesn’t further escalate.

“One potential way would be to bond together and get a national discourse going or pay more attention to media, but I don’t think that would necessarily be effective or have much of an impact,” Lee said. “It’s really dependent on the top policymakers of the United States.”