Korea divided: A sister’s long wait and a defector’s bid to save his mother

This feature is part of a series examining how artificial borders reshape daily life, divide families and force loved ones to navigate the human cost of political geography.

Kang Myung Sook was 63 the last time she saw her brother in North Korea. She is 87 now and lives in an elderly care facility in rural South Korea, about 32 kilometres (20 miles) from the border with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

For two days in 2002, the siblings sat across from each other in a hotel banquet hall in a North Korean resort town, surrounded by hundreds of other families doing the same thing: trying to compress 50 years of life, thoughts and memories into a handful of hours, with government minders standing close enough to hear every word.

Then, the buses came to take the families home, half to North Korea, half to South Korea.

“My brother called out from the window of the moving bus, telling me to take care of myself,” Kang said. “We were all crying — it was chaotic. And then we never saw each other again.”

She is one of roughly 34,000 living South Koreans officially registered with the government as separated from family members in North Korea by the Korean War — a fraction of the 134,500 who have registered since the government began keeping records in 1988. More than 100,000 others have since died.

But the registry only counts those who applied, mostly for a shot at the now-suspended reunion programme. It says nothing about the far larger, uncounted number of Koreans — descendants, distant relatives, childhood friends, North Korean escapees — who still carry some connection to someone on the other side of the border.

This is a story about two of them: a woman who has been waiting nearly 75 years for the war between North and South to end properly, and a young man who managed to get back across the line separating both Koreas — twice — to bring the last of his family out.