Amid Tears, Koreans Cross 50-Year Divide

SEOUL —  All of Korea cried Tuesday, or so it seemed.

In extraordinary homecomings filled with wailing and minutes-long group bearhugs, 200 elderly Koreans--100 each from the North and the South--were reunited with their families in Seoul and Pyongyang for the first time since war divided the peninsula half a century ago.

There were plenty of tears at seeing faces long ago given up for dead; tears for the five decades in which they’d had no contact, unaware of whole new lives--wives, babies, grandchildren; tears as some learned for the first time of the deaths of parents and siblings; and tears because they knew that at the end of these three days of reunions, they may never see one another again.

Throughout South Korea, people clustered around TV sets at home and in public places weeping, as much for their own families as for the poignant stories they saw unfolding before them on live television, the result of a historic summit between the leaders of the two Koreas in June.

Kang Young Won, 66, began sobbing when he caught sight of his 90-year-old mother and 62-year-old sister in the Seoul civic center where they awaited him.

All wept, their arms locked tightly around one another, for at least 10 minutes.

“Mother, Mother,” Kang, who left South Korea for the North when he was 16, sobbed again and again. When they finally sat down, he dropped to his knees, leaning on his mother’s lap, never letting go of her hand. “You’re alive, you’re alive.”

Nearby, North Korean Lee Jong Pil, 70, was weeping too, as he tried to communicate with his 100-year-old mother, Cho Won Ho, in a wheelchair and somewhat dazed. “I’m your son, I’m your son,” he said loudly. “I’m your son, I’m your son.” His sister, Lee Jong Hee, 56, screamed into the old lady’s ear again, trying to make her hear.

“Say my name,” he said. “Can you recognize me, Mom?”

One 95-year-old woman, Chung Sun Hwa, swooned several times during the lengthy delay of the North Koreans’ arrival--she’d been too nervous to eat for the last few days. Chung, who held out until after her son arrived, was wheeled out of the arena on a stretcher.

At least 7 million families in South Korea have relatives in the North, the isolationist nation with which Seoul is technically still at war. Aside from a few reunions in third countries and a smaller one of 50 people from each side in 1985, residents in the two nations have been allowed no mail, phone calls or visits across the border. Most had no idea if their relatives were even alive until they were selected for the reunions by their respective governments.

At the June summit, South Korean President Kim Dae Jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il agreed to simultaneous reunions, one each in Seoul and Pyongyang, their respective capitals. The date was set for Liberation Day, which commemorates the end in 1945 of the Japanese occupation of the peninsula.

One hundred South Koreans, chosen by computer based on age and relationship--parent/child and spouse were given priority--headed north. And 100 people from the North--chosen by unknown means, although the process appeared to favor loyalists of the ruling Communist Party--came south.

Reunion Activities Tightly Controlled

The reunion activities are highly controlled in both nations. South Korean families who had a North Korean relative arriving could bring only five members to the reunion events. The North Koreans are being housed at a separate hotel from their family members, and participants must stick to the official program. The families will be able to meet only a few more times before the North Koreans leave Friday. The reunion arrangement in Pyongyang is similar.

The reunion hall in the Seoul civic center was filled with 100 round tables, one for each family, set with drinks, rice pastries and symbolic Han Maeum cigarettes, the latter products of one of the first joint ventures between North and South Korean companies. The backdrop was a huge vinyl banner with the names of the 79,183 South Korean families who had registered to participate in the reunions.

Several of the South Koreans awaiting their relatives arrived in wheelchairs, and many of the women were dressed in the hanbok traditional dress. Many brought flowers, photo albums or enlargements of photos so their relatives from the North could recognize them.

The South Koreans stood up anxiously and grew quiet as big screens began showing footage of the North Koreans arriving at the center and ascending escalators. Whoops went up as relatives spotted one another.

Sometimes, anger was mixed in with the joy. Paik Bok Hwa grabbed her brother Paik Gi Taek, 68, and fell to the floor, shaking him as she clung to him. One sister went looking for him when he disappeared, she said.

“She climbed mountains and crossed rivers to look for you everywhere,” Paik reprimanded her brother. “And Mother was so happy to have you--the only son--she was always looking for you, even in her dreams. When she died, she didn’t even close her eyes.

“How could you? How could you?”

A Red Cross worker stepped in to calm her, easing her back into a chair. Her tight embrace had scratched her brother’s face.

Learning About Deaths of Loved Ones

And there were stories of how parents had died, sometimes decades earlier. Kim Dong Jin, 74, learned from his brother of his mother’s death.

“Mother told me to bury her facing north, to wait for you. But you can’t go to her grave,” Kim Dong Man told his brother tearfully. Visits to parents’ tombs, considered an obligation in Korea, are prohibited on the trip.

The historic day began as Air Koryo Flight 62 touched down at Seoul’s Kimpo Airport, the first time that a North Korean commercial airliner had landed on a South Korean runway. It dropped off the North Korean delegation, including the 100 family members, journalists and officials, and then took off with 151 South Koreans, including the 100 family members, for North Korea.

In a sign of cooperation between the two nations, a South Korean Asiana Airlines jet will reciprocate by flying the participants home Friday.

Foreign journalists were barred from North Korea. South Korean television footage showed emotional reunions in the North, although there was less coverage of the Pyongyang event.

In Los Angeles, many Korean Americans stayed up until after midnight to watch the reunions live on local Korean television. “I watched it all night,” said Jimmy Choi, a Koreatown dentist and community activist. “I was moved. I cried.”

Some of the tears shed were bittersweet. “My first feeling was, ‘Why 50 years?’ ” said Charles J. Kim, a Korean American community leader. “What took them so long to cross over that stupid line [the 38th parallel]?

“When I saw them [on TV] . . . I was happy, and I was angry.”

The relatives met at a Pyongyang hotel after having traditional Korean cold noodles, for which the city is known. There, Choi Tai Hyon, 70, gave a gold ring to Park Tae Yong, 72, the wife he had left behind in the North. It was a gift from the woman he married after fleeing to the South.

“I am so sorry to my wife in North Korea, who must have led a hard life here in North Korea, and I am only grateful that my wife in South Korea understands what I feel and supports me,” said Choi, who also found his son, an elder sister and three younger brothers still alive in the North.

In contrast to the South Korean delegation, the well-dressed North Koreans who arrived in Seoul were relatively spry and dapper: Most were men sporting suits and pins of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. Only three were older than 80, compared with 23 of the Southerners.

In the South, some family members stood in the airport and along the streets holding welcome signs with their relatives’ names, hoping to catch a glimpse of them or to grab their hands. The North Korean visitors clapped and waved each time they entered the airport, hotel and other places, as did the South Koreans who turned out to welcome them.

Inside the large civic center and shopping mall complex, people were glued to television sets, tears welling in their eyes.

“I cried very hard,” said Kim Se Han, 31, a makeup artist with three earrings in one ear.

“After all the 50 tragic years, we finally came to this historic event where we can even just meet each other,” said another viewer, Kim Chang Wan, 42. “But I was also struck by the tragedy that they will have to leave again--my heart was aching a lot.”

One man said the reunions were bittersweet. “They are Communists,” said Jeon Joung Young, 33, a banker who said he was shocked that a North Korean plane had landed in Seoul. “Kim Jong Il’s strategy toward South Korea is still unchanged.”

Several North Koreans parroted the party line when asked how they’d ended up in the North after disappearing from hometowns in the South. Some North Korean officials hovered around the reunion tables, leaning in to listen to conversations. Not a few South Korean “guides” did the same.

“I couldn’t bear any more of this colonialism,” said North Korean Choi Pil Soon, 77, who left behind a pregnant wife and young daughter. Tuesday was the first time he had seen his son, Choi Joong Sun, 49. His wife was dead.

Asked if it was hard to leave his family behind to go to the North, he said, “That’s why we must struggle and work for unification.”

There were awkward moments during the three-hour meeting. When Ri Bok Yon, 73, spotted the two sons he had left behind in the South, he hugged them. But when he got to the wife he’d also left behind, he just touched her arm and said very casually, “Hello, dear,” using a Korean phrase common among those who are dating, not married.

He had remarried and had several more children. “Why did you come now? You’re late,” answered Lee Choon Ja, 70.

“Thanks for being alive, not dead,” he replied.

Her next question seemed incongruous: “Did you get that bicycle?”

The last time she saw him, he told her that he was going across the Han River to buy a bicycle. He never returned.

Over the next few hours, before an official dinner they would attend together, the families showed off photos, pulled out cell phones so other relatives could say hello and reminisced about old times.

They didn’t share everything. The children of one woman, who had willed herself out of her hospital bed to see her long-lost son, told their brother from North Korea that their mother had rheumatism--not terminal cancer.

They had worried that Lee Duk Soon, 87, wouldn’t be able to make it to the day she’d been hoping for all her life. But there she was Tuesday, sitting in a chair and clad in her best yellow hanbok, beaming.

After the hugs and the cries with prodigal son Ahn Soon Hwan, he told her that she had three more grandsons and two more granddaughters than she’d realized. And she took off the gold chain from around her neck and handed it to him, asking him to give it to his wife.

It was one of the best days of her life.

“He looks so young,” she said of her son, 65. “I am so happy.”