GANGNEUNG, South Korea (AP) — When Kang Hwa-seon married into a family that lived in a thatched house in this eastern coastal city in the early 1940s, she was in essence a mother to her little brother-in-law. She fed him, took him to school, watched him grow into a handsome boy who carried her baby daughter on his shoulder.
Then, during the Korean War, they were pulled apart.
In late 2015, she traveled to the North and tearfully reunited with her brother-in-law. By then, Song Dong Ho was an 81-year-old man with a gaunt, wrinkled face. They met under now-dormant family reunion programs that the two Koreas hold when relations are good.