Fleeting reunion for brothers on opposite sides of Korea
DonGDUCHEon: Ninety-threeyear-old Ham Sung-chan’s eyes widen with excitement as he describes the shock and euphoria of reuniting with his baby brother, now 79, during three days of family reunions in North Korea.
But there is a deep and bitter regret, too. After nearly 70 years of a separation forced by a devastating 1950-53 war that cemented the division of the Korean Peninsula into North and South, Ham and his North Korean brother only got a total of 12 hours together.
Ham was one of 197 South Koreans who visited North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort from last Monday to Wednesday for rare reunions with relatives in the North.
“There’s a large sense of dejection that has set in,” said Ham.
“The time we spent together was too short, way too short. It wasn’t a week, it wasn’t 10 days. Just after we met, we had to depart.”
Born in eastern North Korea, Ham was in his 20s and working in the South when war broke out in June 1950 and prevented him from returning to his hometown.
Ham thought his mother was still in the North until he met her in the South in 1983. But he did not expect any of the three brothers he’d left in North Korea to be alive. If they wer- en’t killed by the war or North Korea’s 1990s-era famine, he thought they would have died of old age.
But one of his brothers, 79-yearold Ham Dong Chan, was still alive and eager to meet his oldest brother. Ham’s joy when he learned of this soon gave way to anxiety though.
“Who’s this person they say is my brother? Will he resemble the skinny, quiet kid I remember? What if I don’t recognise him? Did he have a difficult life? Does he have grandchildren?” he wondered.
The day before the reunions, Ham, his wife and younger daughter drove to a resort in the South Korean coastal town of Sokcho, where the South Korean participants spent a night before crossing into North Korea by bus.
Red Cross officials arranged health check-ups for the participants, who were told not to criticise North Korea’s authoritarian leadership and broken economy and not to point at portraits of the three leaders of the Kim dynasty.
On Monday morning, Ham’s bus crossed into North Korea. After arriving at the Diamond Mountain resort, Ham marvelled at how the modern facility differed from the underdeveloped surroundings, where small, crude homes were scattered around fields and on hills.
The resort was built by South Korea’s Hyundai business group in the 2000s. Analysts say North Korea, which has rejected South Korean demands to increase the number of reunions and participants, keeps the meetings at Diamond Mountain to limit North Koreans’ awareness of the outside world.
The first meetings took place at about 3pm. Ham’s heart trembled as he walked toward the banquet hall where the North Korean relatives were waiting at white tables.
As Ham approached a table marked with the number 90, a slim, deeply wrinkled man in a suit and tie sprung from his seat. The brothers embraced tightly, smiling widely, tears streaming down their faces.
“He yelled, ‘Brother, it’s me!’” Ham said. “I recognised him right away. Maybe our bloodlines pulled us together.”
For four hours, Ham and his brother mostly talked about family, explaining to each other when their parents and brothers had died.
On Tuesday, they had a deeper chat over lunch at a nearby hotel, away from North Korean government watchers and South Korean reporters covering the event.
Dong Chan, who came to the meetings with his wife, had thought that his oldest brother was dead.
He said he had been hospitalised in Pyongyang to treat migraines when he received word from North Korean authorities that his brother in South Korea was looking for him.
During those three hours of talks on Tuesday, Ham told his brother about how he overcame poverty in his youth and how proud he was of his three US-educated children.
Ham said Dong Chan was equally proud of his life as a retired North Korean government worker.
He tried hard to be cheerful during his last lunch with Dong Chan on Wednesday. But his spirits sank as the clock ticked away.
After the organisers announced that the meeting had ended, Ham said goodbye and walked out of the banquet hall, sobbing all the way to the bus waiting to take him home.
Later, outside the hotel, Ham, still in tears, waved from inside the bus as his brother came out to see him off. The bus slowly rolled out of the resort and back to South Korea.
“I had told myself, ‘I won’t cry, I won’t cry,’” Ham said. “But I exploded with tears.” — AP