Watching the Time Slip Away

Chung In Kook, 82, woke before sunrise and slipped out of the house. He didn’t say goodbye to his wife. He took a taxi heading north, and when it couldn’t go any farther, he got out and walked the rest of the way to an observatory at the edge of the DMZ.

Then he jumped.

When the body was examined, police quickly discovered the reason for the suicide: A slip of paper folded into his wallet identified Chung as Applicant No. 4040 for a government-sponsored reunion for South Koreans to meet family members in North Korea. Just days earlier, Chung had learned that, for the fourth time, he wasn’t among those lucky few selected by computer to participate in the latest round of reunions.

“There is no hope. At this pace, I’ll never be picked,” he told his wife shortly before he killed himself in the demilitarized zone, which was as close as he could get to the North.

This week, nearly 900 Koreans from both sides of the divided peninsula are meeting family members they haven’t seen for more than half a century. The fourth such reunion since 2000, this, like the others, is proving to be a tremendously emotional occasion. Many tears are being spilled.

But those tears are literally drops in the bucket, given that up to 10 million Koreans--one-seventh of the population of the peninsula--have relatives on the opposite side whom they are unlikely to see before they die. It is a classic case of too little, too late, especially for the elderly and infirm, who see their chances waning with each passing year.

Statistics released recently by the South Korean government showed that 12.4% of the 117,576 applicants on a waiting list for reunions had died.

Despite the euphoria that followed the historic visit of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung to Pyongyang, the North’s capital, nearly two years ago, there have been fewer reunions than anticipated, largely because the North Koreans have balked. The fourth round was supposed to take place in mid-October but was abruptly canceled by the North, which objected to a state of alert imposed in South Korea after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“At the current rate, we will be lucky if one out of 10,000 people gets to see their relatives,” said Min Byung Dai, the director of South-North relations for the South Korean Red Cross in Seoul. “It is like a lottery. The chances of being picked in any given round are very small, but people keep on trying for any chance they can get.”

In the turbulent period after the end of World War II, when Korea was partitioned between Soviet and U.S.-administered sectors, millions of Koreans fled their homes to align themselves with one side or the other.

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Family Left Son Behind in 1945

Chung In Kook, a 25-year-old civil servant at the time, left his home in Shinchon, North Korea, in the dark of night in 1945 to escape the Communists. His wife followed him shortly afterward, carrying their infant son strapped to her back, but the couple’s 5-year-old boy was left behind with his paternal grandparents.

“[The grandparents] wouldn’t let the boy go. They said they loved him too much, that it would be too hard for him to make the trip. So I let him stay,” Lim Young Seon, Chung’s 78-year-old widow, recalled as she sat under an arbor of lilacs and ivy at the family’s home.

In South Korea, the family prospered and grew. The couple had four more children--three boys and a girl. Chung quickly found work as a police officer and in later years turned to a more lucrative career as a real estate broker.

But as he aged, Chung grew increasingly melancholy about his family left behind in North Korea. While his wife fretted about their first-born son--they couldn’t even find out if he had survived the Korean War--Chung missed his parents and became consumed with guilt about neglecting his filial duty to care for them in their old age.

“I am a sinner. I deserted my parents,” Chung used to say, his wife recalled.

At Chung’s insistence, the couple moved in 1996 from Seoul to Goyang, a pretty suburb nestled in the hills to the north and known for its abundance of flower nurseries. The attraction for Chung, however, was its proximity to the North Korean border. From here, it’s only 80 miles to his hometown of Shinchon--in any normal country an easy day trip, but in Korea so unthinkable that Shinchon might as well be in another galaxy.

To console himself, Chung went regularly to a small observatory built next to a bridge over the Imjin River, which runs down from North Korea and wends its way through the DMZ. The northernmost reach of South Korea, it is a popular spot for tourists, who can catch glimpses through the barbed wire of the forbidden country still farther north, and for separated family members, who come, especially on holidays, with offerings of food for traditional Confucian rituals honoring their ancestors.

Chung had been there with his wife and children just four days before his death to mark Chusok, the Korean version of Thanksgiving.

Many of the visitors are very old and are brought, sometimes in wheelchairs, by their sons and daughters.

“People sometimes get so choked up by emotion that they faint. They have to be taken away by ambulance.... There are old people too who come every day. When somebody stops coming, we know it is because they have died,” said Kim Kook Hyon, who manages the observatory.

It was Kim who discovered Chung’s body on the morning of Oct. 5. He wasn’t entirely shocked. Just a few months before, he had ordered netting strung under the bridge in case a distraught visitor ever tried to jump. Chung, however, maneuvered his 82-year-old body over the netting and positioned himself so he would fall not in the river, but on a concrete abutment. He hit his head on the concrete and was killed instantly.

“This was the act of one determined man,” Kim said. “He wanted to kill himself and knew exactly what he was doing.”

The separated Koreas are like no other place in the world, with communication between the two defying the most advanced technical capabilities of a wired society. No telephone calls or e-mails are possible. Unlike separated Germans during the days of the Berlin Wall, Koreans are unable even to send letters or exchange messages via the Red Cross.

“It is unique. There is no place like this in the world where people spent half a century so thoroughly separated that they don’t know whether their family on the other side are alive or dead,” said Min of the South Korean Red Cross.

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Reunions Come Too Late for Some

Since the June 2000 summit in Pyongyang, there had been until now three government-sponsored reunions, each involving 100 people from each side selected to meet their relatives. In the South, participants are chosen solely by computer lottery, with some preference given to people over 90 years old and to parents separated from their sons and daughters. They then travel to the other side and meet anywhere from two to 10 relatives. (Therefore, although the number of “winners” is small, a far larger number of Koreans can participate if their names are among those submitted by the winners as the loved ones with whom they wish to reunite.)

It is enormously frustrating for those not selected and who are reduced to watching on television. On Saturday night, hours before this week’s reunions were to begin, the body of a 77-year-old man was discovered in his apartment in Chuncheon, South Korea--another apparent suicide motivated by despair over not being included.

For this fourth round of reunions, participants were originally selected at the end of September with the expectation of meeting relatives in mid-October. But North Korea’s abrupt cancellation and the ensuing six-month delay meant that four of the 200 did not make it: Two died, and two others were too ill to travel to the North Korean resort at Mt. Kumgang, where the reunions are being held.

Eo Byung Seon died at the age of 92 on Friday--just two days before she was to meet a daughter whom she had not seen since 1950. Lee Shin Ho was forcibly recruited by the North Korean army at the age of 14 in the family’s hometown of Namwon, South Korea, which at the time was occupied by the North. But her mother never stopped grieving for her missing daughter and each year on Shin Ho’s birthday prepared a special meal.

“My mother cried and cried when the October reunions were canceled. She was so disappointed. She knew that at her age, she wouldn’t make it to the next round. ‘I’m too old. I won’t have another chance,’ she kept telling us, and she was right,” said another daughter, Lee Bu Ja.

Kim Min Ha, 69, a retired bureaucrat from Taegu, South Korea, who Wednesday is to meet a long-estranged brother in the North, says his biggest regret is that his mother isn’t alive to attend. She died a year ago at the age of 101, after a lifetime of grieving for three children who went to North Korea with the North’s army during the war.

“I watched my mother crying day and night. It was always a mystery to me how a human body could produce so many tears,” Kim said. “But she stayed alive until 101 out of mothering instinct. It was waiting for her children that kept her alive for so long.”

Park Im Hak, 73, who remembers vividly telling his sister, “See you next week” when he last saw her at a port in North Korea, has been waiting more than half a century to keep his date. Although passed over all four times for reunions, he says he will keep himself alive and healthy for as long as it takes.

Chung In Kook’s family advised him similarly: Live long, live well, be patient. Even during the funeral, his widow berated him.

“If only you had waited a little longer, you might have seen your son. Who knows, maybe even your parents. Why didn’t you wait?” she recalls crying out.

In keeping with his will, the family threw Chung’s ashes into the Imjin River with the hope that somehow the waters would take what remained of him back to North Korea.

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Chi Jung Nam and Lim Kyung Hee in The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.