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“Even after I got separated from my family during the War, my mother would still set out a place at the table for me. At night she would make my bed and hope for her son to return. She died before I ever got the chance to see her again.”
This is how 79 year-old Kim Dae Jong retells the tale of his mother’s life, as relayed to him by his younger sister, who he finally met after 60 years of separation at a reunion in November last year. When the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, Kim fled his hometown in Poongsan County, North Hamgyung Province, and headed south on his own, not knowing it would be the start of 60 years of longing to see his family again.
Although the memories had faded with time, the tales of his mother brought to the surface all the tears Kim had been holding back until then. His heart was tight at the thought of the countless number of sleepless nights his mother would have spent thinking about her son. Kim says his final wish is to visit her grave, alongside his sister, to pay his final respects.
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“We had spent so long apart that we didn’t recognise one another, but as soon as I saw my sister’s face I could tell we were the same flesh and blood. She told me that my mother had wanted to see me just once before she died.” It is a matter of boundless sorrow to Kim that he couldn’t be by his mother’s side when she died, weighed down with the anguish of separation.
The lead up to their reunion was not without its own complications, but it finally happened last year. Now, with Chuseok having just passed he has mixed feelings at recalling their meeting, namely because the first ancestral holiday since they parted ways again has reopened the wounds of separation. The hardest thing for Kim is that he cannot visit his parents’ grave back home, a traditional event at Chuseok.
“I’m not that envious seeing other families go to pay their respects together on other holidays,” Kim said prior to Monday’s holiday. “But now that Chuseok is getting closer, the yearning for my hometown is deep. Before I die I would like to visit my mother’s tomb to pay my respects. I want to stand in front of my parents’ graves and yell ‘Mother! Father! Your no-good son has returned!’” He looks like he wants to say more but his words trail off.
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Kim isn’t giving up hope that he will meet his sister again, the only blood relative he has left. He is holding onto the thread of hope that unification someday will allow them to live out the rest of their days together.
And although it has been a year now since their reunion, Kim says the memories of that day are still vivid in his mind. “When I was told last year that I would be able to meet her I couldn’t sleep properly. I spent three days preparing gifts for her and wondering what she would look like now, whether she was keeping well. You have no idea how much I missed my family those 60 long years.”
“When I woke up on the morning of the reunion, it was a fine day. ‘Even the sun knows you are seeing her for the first time in 60 years!’ I thought to myself. When we first saw each other again we talked about where it was that I had become separated, and she still remembered all of those details. We embraced straight away and started sobbing, even though we told one another not to cry. ‘We’ve already lost 60 years, who’s got time to cry?’ we said. I don’t know why but that one hour went by so quickly, it felt like 10 minutes.”
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Go Jae Hyeong, 87, is another to have met his younger sister at the reunion event last November. Like Kim, he too feels the pangs of yearning at Chuseok – especially so this year, the first one since that day. Go left behind a wife and daughter in Yeonbaek, part of Hwanghae Province. He had been a town official in Yeonbaek and was on business on the day of the 27th – the day President Truman ordered the US Navy and Air Force into Korea – and found himself severed from his family trying to flee the conflict.
Go’s reunion was bittersweet. His sister had the unenviable task of informing him that that right after the war an infection spread around which had killed his wife and parents. Until then he hadn’t given up hope that he would still see them all before he died, but they were already long departed. The only ones left in North Korea now are his younger sister and his daughter. He says that the reunion with his sister gave him a chance to find out some information about his daughter.
“My sister and my daughter are still in North Korea. Apparently my daughter has epilepsy, which can be treated here in South Korea, but not in North Korea because the medical facilities aren’t good enough and there is not enough medicine. I’d like to bring her here to get treated but I can’t, and that saddens me,” Go says rather sorrowfully.
Naturally he would like to see unification happen as soon as possible to reunite him with his remaining family, but for now all he can do is hope that they live well. “I spent the last 60 years counting each day and hoping the time would come where we could live out our time together, but frankly I just don’t know when it will happen. I’m physically and mentally exhausted, it would just be nice if my sister and my daughter were living well,” he says.
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“My sister said she would like to see me again while we are both alive. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? We can’t meet just because we feel like it. It would be so nice if times became better and we could see one another again, but all we can really do is try to stay as healthy as possible for as long as we’re alive.”
“My sister has problems with her hip, so her children came along to help her move around at the reunion. It looked like she hadn’t been eating properly or getting the right treatment back home. That made me very sad. Unification would be nice, but I would just like her to get some treatment and to see her one more time looking healthier.”
Although both Kim and Go and their respective families were unspeakably happy to see each other again, both men sensed the barriers of ideology at their relatives’ constant parroting of indebtedness to Kim Jong Il.
Says Go, “There were agents watching over them at the reunion. It seemed like my sister and her kids couldn’t say what they wanted to because they were trying not to displease the agents. My sister kept repeating how she was eating and living well thanks to the Dear Leader. I couldn’t say anything; I just sat there and listened.”
Kim observed the same thing. “To be honest, I noticed there was a kind of fence between us when she said not to worry about her because she was going to live well by the grace of the Dear Leader. We got to have our own individual reunions in private at the hotel, but even then my sister and her children didn’t feel free enough to talk about their lives in North Korea. Even though there was nobody there they chose their words carefully as if somebody was watching over them. North Korean society is just so…” Kim says before his words trail off again.
In 2005, Statistics Korea estimated that the number of separated family members is still as high as 710,000 in South Korea alone. Over the 60 years that have passed, many have died or given up hope of ever seeing their relatives left in the North, although more than 80,000 still express a desire to be reunited with long lost family members.
These families do not want politics to stand in the way of this fading dream. Ideally, a designated meeting spot should be established at Panmunjom or somewhere else for reunions to be held frequently, regardless of the state of inter-Korean relations.
“The political problems between North and South only worsen the grief of separated families,” says Go. “From a humanitarian standpoint it would be nice if they could just forget about who is right and who is wrong so there could be more frequent reunions.”
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