Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
ASIA / PACIFIC
September 3, 2018
Elderly Koreans shut out of family reunions use backchannels
By Hyung-Jin Kim
The Associated Press
S
EOUL, South Korea — Kim
Kyung-jae will probably never be
chosen in the government lottery
that would allow him to reunite one last
time with his relatives in North Korea. But
that’s no problem, he said in an interview,
even as a small group of the lucky South
Koreans who won the lottery met with
their loved ones in North Korea.
The 86-year-old Kim is one of a
dwindling number of elderly South
Koreans who, frustrated with North
Korea’s reluctance to allow more frequent
reunions and by the small chance that
they’ll be selected before they die, found
unofficial networks to communicate with
their North Korean relatives. For three
decades, Kim has been sending his North
Korean sister letters and aid.
“It’s absolutely regrettable that other
South Koreans don’t know about these
communication channels,” Kim said,
showing a bunch of letters with North
Korean stamps that his sister has sent to
him over the years.
During August reunions, which were
organized by the rival governments,
hundreds of Koreans, many in their 70s or
older, were reunited for the first time since
the 1950-1953 Korean War. But they are
just a tiny fraction of the separated
families in the Koreas, where millions
were split during the turmoil of the war.
This is the 21st time the Koreas have had
such reunions, but they don’t occur
regularly because of long periods of bad
feelings between the rivals, and
Pyongyang’s reluctance to expose its
people to the outside world.
So Kim and others turn to friends,
brokers, and others in China, Japan, and
elsewhere to try to find out whether their
relatives in North Korea are still alive and
to arrange exchanges of letters, photos,
phone calls, and sometimes face-to-face
meetings with them.
Officially, both Koreas ban their citizens
from contacting each other without
government approval. But South Korea
allows and even quietly helps finance
backchannel contacts among separated
families on humanitarian grounds. It’s
likely that Seoul keeps the backchannel
programs low-key because of worries
about angering North Korea, which
refuses South Korea’s push to have more
frequent official reunions because it uses
them as political leverage. South Korean
officials have occasionally told separated
families of their support for unofficial
exchanges, but they’ve stopped short of
major publicity campaigns because of
concerns about brokers swindling people.
According to a Seoul government tally
on civilian-arranged exchanges between
separated families, there have been about
11,610 cases of letter exchanges and 1,755
face-to-face encounters involving 3,416
Koreans since 1990. By comparison, before
last month’s reunions, government-
sponsored programs saw 19,770 people
reunited in person since 2000; none was
given a second chance to reunite.
The backchannel exchanges flourished
during a previous “Sunshine” era of
inter-Korean detente, but the number has
sharply decreased in recent years as many
elderly refugees in South Korea have died
and North Korea has tightened control on
its once porous border with China.
Because thousands of separated family
members die each year in South Korea
without getting a chance to attend the
on-again off-again government-organized
reunions, these informal exchanges are
often the only way for some to communi-
cate with their relatives in the North.
Kim, who once ran a fisheries export
business in Japan, said he has friends
there who print out his e-mails and mail
them to his younger sister and other
relatives in North Korea. When they get
replies from North Korea, they scan and
e-mail them to Kim.
When he wants to give his relatives
clothes, shoes, and other items, he uses
brokers in China to send them by parcel
post after paying them 200 yuan ($30) for
each 20-kilogram (44 pounds) box.
He said he’s helped about 30 other South
Koreans correspond with their relatives in
North Korea or send them aid parcels.
These South Koreans are mostly from
where Kim grew up in North Korea, before
the war, on the east coast.
Kim said his mail exchanges and aid
shipments run smoothly, in part because
he has never criticized the North Korean
leadership in his letters and his sister, now
in her mid-70s, used to start her letters by
praising North Korea’s ruling Kim family.
COVERT COMMUNICATION. Shim Goo-
seob, 83, shows a photo of his family member during
an interview at his office in Seoul, South Korea. Only
a fraction of the elderly Koreans separated by the Ko-
rean War are able to attend the on-again off-again re-
unions organized by their rival governments, so some
South Koreans turn to unofficial networks of brokers,
friends, and others to correspond with their loved
ones in the North. Shim said he has arranged face-
to-face reunions in China among North and South
Koreans via his own network of brokers and helpers.
(AP Photo/Ahn Young-joo)
His letter exchanges began in the early
1990s when he found the address of his
sister, who years earlier sent him a photo
of his parents and the news of their deaths
via a former neighbor who’d acquired U.S.
citizenship and visited the North. “After
looking at the photo, I cried a lot, really a
lot, because I had thought they were still
alive,” he said.
In 2002, when Kim lived in Japan, his
sister made a collect call to him and they
had an hour-long conversation. She
repeatedly called him “Oppa,” a term
women use for their elder brothers. “I told
her ‘Don’t cry; just say something,’ but she
could only weep and say ‘Oppa’ again,”
Kim said.
Kim now runs an organization with a
fellow refugee to help others connect with
their long-lost kin in North Korea. The
organization receives a state subsidy.
His partner, Shim Goo-seob, 83, said he
has arranged face-to-face reunions in
China among North and South Koreans
via his own network of brokers and
helpers.
Shim said he was able to meet with his
younger brother living in North Korea in
the Chinese border town of Yanji in 1994
after a Chinese helper disguised himself as
his brother’s uncle and invited him to visit.
Shim said he spent three days with his
brother in Yanji, and they stayed up all
night talking about their lives on the first
day.
Shim tried to get his younger sister to
come to China for another brief family
reunion, too, but she couldn’t get a Chinese
visa so he had her come to a border river
and watched her with binoculars in 2003.
Continued on page 5
“Way too short” — A 93-year-old meets his North Korean brother
Continued from page 2
criticize North Korea’s authoritarian
leadership and broken economy and not to
point at portraits of the three leaders of the
Kim dynasty that has ruled the North
since 1945.
“I couldn’t sleep at all that night,” Ham
said.
Day 1: “Brother, it’s me!”
On Monday morning, Ham’s bus crossed
into North Korea. Ham said he felt
“spooky” when three North Korean
soldiers, in olive-green uniforms and large
round hats, came aboard his bus during a
border check.
“They only asked me when I had crossed
over to the South,” Ham said. “I told them
it was before the war.”
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 during a period of
rapprochement in the 2000s. Analysts say
North Korea, which has long rejected
South Korean demands to increase the
number of reunions and participants,
keeps the meetings at Diamond Mountain
to limit North Koreans’ awareness of
what’s going on in the outside world.
Ham unpacked in room No. 512 at the
Kumkangsan Hotel at the resort. It had
nice beds, air conditioning, and hot water,
but the bulky television did not work.
The first meetings took place at about
3:00pm. Ham’s heart trembled as he
walked with his wife and daughter 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 recognized him right away. He was still
that skinny, quiet kid. 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.
Day 2: From thrilled to devastated
Ham had another sleepless night after
the meeting. He was thrilled to see his
brother but devastated that one-third of
their reunion was already over.
On day two, the brothers had deeper
conversations over lunch in a room at a
nearby hotel, away from North Korean
government watchers and the dozens of
South Korean reporters covering the
event.
Dong Chan, who came to the meetings
with his 72-year-old wife, had thought his
oldest brother was dead. He did not know
his mother had made it to the South,
remarried there, and lived for decades.
Dong Chan said he had been
hospitalized in Pyongyang to treat
migraines when he received word from
North Korean authorities that his brother
in South Korea was looking for him.
“He told the authorities that it must be a
different person with the same name
because he was so convinced that I had
died,” Ham said. “When North Korean
officials asked again, this time mentioning
the names of our parents, he was
shocked.”
During those three hours of talks,
workers brought Ham’s bags of gifts. Ham
also gave Dong Chan an album containing
dozens of photos of him, his family, and
their mother. Dong Chan gave Ham three
bottles of liquor made from ginseng and a
silk tablecloth.
Workers then delivered boxed meals of
rice cakes, grilled chicken and octopus,
stir-fried mushrooms, and pickled
cucumbers.
“It didn’t taste good; I couldn’t finish it,”
Ham said.
Ham told his brother about how he
overcame poverty in his younger days and
how proud he was of his three
U.S.-educated children. But because of the
anti-American sentiment prevalent in the
North, he left out that he worked at a U.S.
military base in Dongducheon for nearly
two decades as a civilian employee.
Ham said Dong Chan was equally proud
of his life as a retired North Korean
government worker. Dong Chan said he’s
living in an apartment in the capital of
Pyongyang, which itself is a status symbol
in North Korea. He also talked about a
grandson who was studying at the
prestigious Kim Il Sung University.
“Once I heard that he was living in
Pyongyang, I was relieved,” Ham said. “As
brothers, we had so much to talk about
over so little time. But other South Korean
relatives were meeting North Korean
nephews they’d never seen — some of them
told me it was hard to keep a conversation
going after 30 minutes.”
Day 3: “Exploded with tears”
Ham tried hard to be cheerful during his
last lunch with Dong Chan on day three.
He laughed, clinked glasses of beer with
his brother, and shouted “good health is
the best!”
Ham promised Dong Chan that he will
be the first South Korean to apply for a
North Korean visa if relations improve to
the point where cross-border travels are
allowed. Dong Chan told Ham that North
Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s relationship
with South Korean President Moon Jae-in
was so close that the Koreas will be able to
unify in three years.
But Ham’s spirits sank as the clock
ticked away. After organizers announced
that the meeting had ended, Ham said
goodbye and walked out of the banquet
hall alone, sobbing all the way to the bus
waiting to take him home. Ham’s wife and
daughter lingered a bit longer at the hall,
tearfully embracing the North Korean
relatives they were just getting to know.
Later, outside the hotel, Ham, still in
tears, waved both hands from inside the
bus as his brother came out to see him off.
The bus slowly rolled out of the resort and
headed back to South Korea.
“I had told myself, ‘I won’t cry, I won’t
cry,’” Ham said. “But I exploded with
tears.”