AP reporter views swing in Korean relations with wary hope

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA » At the height of North Korea’s torrid run of nuclear and missile tests last year, I was constantly joking with my Associated Press colleague Hyung-jin Kim about how we could be writing about something entirely different once the calendar turns to 2018.

North Korea was being unusually provocative, and its nuclear threats had become genuine. There was also a new president in Washington who seemed serious about using military force against the North, even at the risk of triggering a full-blown war.

Each story we wrote seemed more doom and gloom than the previous one.

Still, I kept in mind that inter Korean relations have always been characterized by wild swings. Plus, South Korea’s Winter Olympics in February looked to be an easy opportunity for Pyongyang to reach out to the world while carefully crafting ways to explore nukes as diplomatic leverage.

Perhaps by spring, we’ll be filing stories on reunions of war-separated families, Hyung-jin would say.

We had no idea how right we’d turn out to be.

The past few months have been a blur, with things moving forward faster than anyone could have imagined, often leaving us catching our breath and struggling to understand what it all means.

North Korea flooded the Pyeongchang Olympics with hundreds of people, including the photogenic sister of leader Kim Jong Un, who conveyed her brother’s desire for a summit with South Korea’s president.

And there he was on Friday, the young and brash leader in a Mao suit, beaming and grasping the hands of gray-haired South Korean President Moon Jae-in as the two strode over a cracked concrete slab marking the Koreas’ border.

It was stunning to watch Kim appear from a building on the northern side of the Panmunjom truce village before trotting down the stairs and then toward the Military Demarcation Line as his entourage parted like Moses at the Red Sea.

Hundreds of reporters sequestered at a media center well away

from Panmunjom erupted in cheers and claps as jumbo television screens showed the moment Kim and Moon met.

I could tell many of the South Korean reporters were getting goose bumps. I wasn’t one of them. I actually couldn’t tell what I was feeling, or how I should feel, about a significant event that could potentially change the future for millions, including me and my family, for better or worse.

My biggest pride as a South Korean has always been that we shed our own blood to win democracy from brutal military dictatorships that ruled the country from the 1960s to the ‘80s. I never learned to romanticize about a shared statehood with what now seems to be one of history’s worst examples of dictatorships.