Hello, stranger: South Koreans recount awkward reunions with families in North | Reuters

Instead, she says, she just wanted to return home.

“It was like I met someone I don’t know at all,” said Jung, who was among 89 South Korean families who joined in reunions last week of relatives separated by the Korean War, fought from 1950 to 1953.

“I wish my nephew resembled my brother, but he did not. They were like strangers,” she told Reuters, days after the event held in North Korea’s tourist resort of Mount Kumgang.

“I don’t want to meet them again. I don’t know how other separated families felt, or maybe I am just cold-hearted.”

While many wept and embraced loved ones they were meeting for the first time in more than six decades, others, such as Jung, couldn’t connect at all with their Northern relatives.

The disconnect shows how far apart the neighbours have grown in the decades since they ended hostilities in a truce rather than a peace treaty, leaving them technically in a state of war.

 

Source: Hello, stranger: South Koreans recount awkward reunions with families in North | Reuters