Korea's version of Thanksgiving -- the holiday known as Chu'sok -- is a time when Koreans return to their hometowns, honor their ancestors and renew family ties. This year, after months of a grueling economic crisis, one young writer from the Korean diaspora returned to find that families are now divided by more than just the DMZ. PNS editor Katherine Cowy Kim is a Bay Area freelance writer and works with YO! Youth Outlook.

SEOUL -- I arrived in Seoul on the eve of Chu'sok, Korea's most important holiday. It is the country's Thanksgiving, the Harvest Moon festival, a time when Koreans return to their hometowns, honor their ancestors and renew family ties.

Divided families are a fact of Korean life. More than 10 million people from both sides have been separated since the end of the Korean War when the 38th Parallel split the country into the North and South.

My own family is not separated so much by lines of latitude, as by lines of class.

On my last visit here, Seoul was a bustling metropolis of globalization. But a year into this country's financial meltdown, the city was sober and gray.

I saw both sides of my family. They live within one city, but in two separate worlds -- one wealthy, the other middle class. The prosperous side rejects the "lowly" family, which in turn finds them "corrupt" elitists.

As the visiting American relative, I had seen this distance before, but the difference has never been so stark.

My cousin Gowun met me at a noodle house in eastern Seoul. The streets outside were packed with vacationing students and last-minute holiday shoppers. She sat cross-legged on the floor, dressed simply in blue jeans and a t-shirt, and pushed her dyed orange bangs from her face as she slurped her cold buckwheat noodles.

She talked about her family, and about the recent changes in Korea, but she did not talk about herself. At 22, and a recent college graduate, she had been unemployed for almost half a year.

"My parents could not come because they had to work lately." She laughed and covered her mouth politely. "I mean, late."

Her parents, my aunt and uncle, own and run a shoe and handbag store in one of Seoul's many underground arcades. Because business has been slow, and also because of Chu'sok, they were staying open until midnight.

"And my brother is still in the army," she added, referring to the military duty mandatory for Korean men in their twenties. She told me, with pride, that President Kim Dae Jung visited her brother's camp, the closest camp to the 38th Parallel, and commended the soldiers there.

On my last visit, Gowun was working in the reference room of a newspaper, a step toward her dream of becoming a writer. She left that job in hopes of finding work online, writing about Japanese anime and video games, but the economic crisis hit and she has since been out of luck.

Gowun had suffered a major blow from the recession early on. She was a foreign exchange student at Toronto University when the won depreciated to half its value, and she, like thousands of hopeful Korean students, was called home. Since then there has been a moratorium on students traveling abroad, as the government struggles to keeps capital within the country.

A few days later, I traveled across town to a two-story, Spanish-style stucco house in the hills. Adorned with Asian and European antiques collected in his many diplomatic missions around the world, my uncle Myung's villa is maintained by a live-in maid, chauffeur and gardener.

Peering over the rim of his caramel-colored Alfred Dunhill frames, my uncle took a sip of Scotch.

"I am going to buy a new computer," he announced, "since there are many on sale now." He asked me questions about Celuron and Pentium chips, RAM and color monitors.

He finally chose a model more advanced than any I have seen in the States. He was determined to have Internet access, although he knows nothing of net-surfing or e-mail. He seemed untouched by the economic crisis.

My aunt mentioned some visible changes over the past year. "I shouldn't say such things," she said, her eyes coyly cast downward. "But there's a lot less traffic and it's easier to get a reservation on the golf course."

My cousin Hyon joined us. He is an executive with an American ad agency, and his cell phone rang incessantly throughout dinner. On my last visit, he was in the military, but his family pulled strings and got him a cushy desk job at an army base in Seoul, in sharp contrast to my other cousin's precarious perch.

Two years ago, my cousin Gowun came to this house with me for a brief visit. She stood uncomfortably unwelcome in the "salon," marveling at the view and the imported raspberry sorbet -- clearly impressed, but with a tinge of sadness.

She felt this sadness because she knew the middle class, her own family, was suffering for the mistakes of the rich. That awareness keeps my family divided.

Last week, a luxury liner departed from the east coast of South Korea on a historic tour to the North. The Hyundai Kumgang carried some 1,500 South Korean citizens -- pop singers and business leaders as well as senior citizens eager for one glimpse of their homeland, where many still have families, before they die.

Those of us who are younger, scattered throughout the Korean diaspora, have little personal sentiment for family reunification. It is our elders--like the majority of those on the North Korean tour-- whose immediate families remain in the North. For that matter, we have very little personal sentiment for families.

I have seen my grandmother's generation split by a war and a line on a map. I have seen my parents' generation split by emigration and western-style divorces. As tourists from the cruise ship stare teary-eyed over the land where their families may or may not be, I realize that I can only gather my known relatives as names on paper in a two-dimensional family tree.