Korea divided: A sister’s long wait and a defector’s bid to save his mother

This feature is part of a series examining how artificial borders reshape daily life, divide families and force loved ones to navigate the human cost of political geography. Kang Myung Sook was 63 the last time she saw her brother in North Korea. She is 87 now and lives in an elderly care facility in rural South Korea, about 32 kilometres (20 miles) from the border with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. 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…