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.”