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>> 87 5 National Reunification and Family Meetings In 1999, my paternal grandmother expressed great joy at meeting again with me, the older of her favorite son’s two daughters who had been left by their father at the orphanage Star of the Sea (haesŏng) in Inchon. She cried in silence, compressed my hands for a long time, looked at my palms in the hopes of reading a promising future, asked me for forgiveness, and confided to my interpreter with a sigh: “To find Woo-Jung [my Korean name as it is spelled in my adoption documents] again is like meeting my North Korean relatives again. We watched television often in case she would appear on the screen.” In line with the official discourse, my grandmother referred to the war and to the partition even though, occasionally, she would also mention ordinary familial problems: my birth parents’ divorce, difficult material conditions after my grandfather died, my father’s inability to take care of us once my mother had returned to her maternal home, and so forth. With the establishment of a Communist regime in 1945, which brought occupying Soviet forces to Pyongyang, and the general worsening of living conditions, 3.3 million North Koreans left for the South until 1949 (Kim 1988, 30; Foley 2003, 66–67). Because he had previously been a functionary in the police force, my grandfather felt he was in a dangerous position and consequently decided to leave for South Korea. My grandmother, who was pregnant with her second child, joined him; she left their four-year-old first son behind with relatives, thinking their separation would be only temporary. But, caught in the conflict , my grandparents were never able to go back to North Korea. They settled as well as they could at the southwest tip of South Korea, first in Mokp’o, then in Inchon. They managed to raise their four children who were born in South Korea during and after the war. My grandmother’s words link the relatives left behind in North Korea and the two grandchildren relinquished to an orphanage who were adopted abroad. Her words confirm the historicized interpretation of her family’s story. For my grandmother, the separation from her first son and the separation from my sister and me are two comparable losses, two episodes of the same sad story. Indeed, the recurrent meetings of 88 > 89 kept fluctuating owing to various uncertainties introduced by the Cold War (Foley 2003). After 1970, following a period of hostility and tension, the South’s attitude toward the North started to improve (Choon Soon Kim 1988, 102). On August 12, 1972, the president of the South Korean Red Cross proposed negotiations for “the prompt solution of purely humanitarian problems.” Several meetings ensued but were stopped suddenly by the North Koreans’ withdrawal from the negotiating table. From 1973 to 1983, North Korea made multiple terrorist attempts on South Koreans and Americans stationed in the demilitarized zone (106–107). Finally, because of Pyongyang’s hostile attitude, the prospect of reuniting divided families across the thirty-eighth parallel became utopic. South Korea decided to reunite families that remained divided within its own national territory (98–122). Massive direct participation and an unprecedentedly large viewing audience led KBS to change its programming to allow more time for the Telethon (109–112). The success of the telethon was reflected in the unprecedented airing time and the all-time high viewing rate (112). Of course, the viewing audience of 78 percent was not limited to members of divided families (127). Using new media technology, the telethon enabled searches to be conducted with a great deal of success not only nationally but also internationally (111). The year 1983 marked the beginning of this collective passion for meetings of divided families, a passion that would continue to grow in the following decades. The two studios of KBS are both located in Yŏŭido.2 The oldest and main one is still the symbol of the family meetings that first took place outside. Once I watched a documentary made in 1985 by KBS to commemorate the forty years of separation that many families had experienced after 1945. The documentary recalls the big moments of the telethon. It shows a monumental stone staircase leading to a vast esplanade with multiple entrances to the massive building. For this event, all the paving stones were carpeted with cardboard signs and papers bearing the names and birth dates of the lost. Signs even covered...

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