“She’s 69 years old now. I left her when she was 6. Because she had gotten old without freedom, she looked older than I did. Other people asked me whether she was my sister”
Photo: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos Women of the World is a series of snapshots of how women live, in honor of International Women’s Day. Hyung-Sook Kim, 90, fled from North to South Korea with her late husband during the Korean War, leaving a 6-year-old daughter behind. She intended their separation to be temporary, but when the war ended in 1953, closing the border, she and her daughter were stranded on opposite sides.
I have four children who were born in South Korea, one daughter and three sons. For years, I thought my [other] daughter was dead, so I couldn’t believe it when I got a call from North Korea. I was puzzled — my granddaughter, a 43-year-old teacher, had applied for a reunion, but we didn’t know who she was because I didn’t even know my daughter had a child. So I contacted the Korean Red Cross, and I told them I didn’t know her.
I didn’t recognize her at first. She’s 69 years old now. I left her when she was 6, so a lot had changed in between. Because she had gotten old without freedom, she looked older than I did. Other people asked me whether she was my sister. The life over there — the living conditions in South and North Korea are so different. How much toil must she have gone through, I thought, that people asked me if I was there to see my sister, when I am her mother? That breaks my heart.
The North Koreans gave them only two hours of freedom in their schedules, without agents. During those two hours, they came to our hotel and we were able to exchange gifts and talk about what we wanted to talk about. There were rules about what we couldn’t bring — for example, we couldn’t bring items like gold — but I brought a lot of daily necessities that my granddaughter would need for her everyday life. She said she needed medicine, so we bought a whole bag for her.
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