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Tears mark bittersweet Korean reunions
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Their backs stooped, dozens of elderly North and South Koreans separated for six decades reunited yesterday, weeping and embracing in a rush of words and emotion. The reunions come during a rare period of detente between the rival Koreas and are all the more poignant because the participants will part again in a few days, likely forever.
About 80 South Koreans traveled through falling snow with their families to North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort to meet children, brothers, sisters, spouses and other relatives. Seoul had said about 180 North Koreans were expected.
South Korean TV showed elderly women in brightly-colored traditional hanbok dresses talking and hugging, families trading photographs of relatives who couldn’t attend or had died.
Two men in suits and ties wiped away tears, grasped each other by the necks and pressed their foreheads together as cameras flashed. One old man was brought in on a stretcher, his head propped on a pillow.
These meetings — the first in more than three years because of high tensions — are a vivid reminder that despite 60 years of animosity, misunderstanding, threats and occasional artillery exchanges, the world’s most heavily armed border divides a single people.
The reunion came too late for 90-year-old Seo Jeong-suk, who died in South Korea just 15 days ago. Her daughter Kim Yong-ja, 68, sobbed as she handed her long-lost sister a framed photograph of Seo. Kim Yong Sil clasped the photo to her heart and said, “It’s Mom’s photo.”
For some families, aging and illness did not thwart the reunions but made them bittersweet.
“Sister, why can’t you hear me?” North Korean Ri Jong Sil, 84, asked 87-year-old Lee Young-sil, who has difficulty recognizing people because of Alzheimer’s disease, according to South Korean media pool reports.
Tears flowed down Ri’s deeply wrinkled face as Lee’s daughter began sobbing, telling her mother: “Mom, it’s my aunt. It’s my aunt. She’s your sister.”
These Koreans are the lucky few. Millions have been separated from loved ones by the tumult and bloodshed of the three-year war that ended in 1953. During a previous period of inter-Korean rapprochement, about 22,000 Koreans had brief reunions — 18,000 in person and the others by video. None got a second chance to reunite, Seoul says.
The reunions were arranged after North Korea began calling recently for better ties with South Korea, in what analysts say is an attempt to win badly needed foreign investment and aid.
This first batch of reunions ends tomorrow. On Sunday, 360 South Koreans will meet with 88 elderly North Koreans. Those reunions end on Tuesday.
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