Hyun Mi was 13 years old when she fled Pyongyang with her parents and five sisters to escape fighting on the Korean peninsula. Chinese troops were approaching the North Korean capital and her family planned to hide further south until they passed.
“I thought it would be a week, but that week turned 70 years old,” said Hyun, now 83.
But now, for the first time since the family fled, Hyun has been able to visit her childhood home – or at least a version of it – using virtual reality technology.
In the absence of a real family reunion, the South Korean government hopes that a new virtual reality project will bring some comfort to North Korean refugees who fear the time is running out.
Fleeing north of Korea
Thousands of people like North Korea’s Hyun fled during the Korean War in the 1950s, across the border into China and Russia. Many of them ended up in South Korea.
Photo released on December 26, 1950 of Korean civilians taken over by an armed police jeep, fleeing to South Korea. The photo was taken during the Korean War between North and South Korea. Credit: AFP / Getty Photos
Hyun said many North Korean women stayed after guarding their homes while men and their children fled, fearing they would be killed by Chinese soldiers, who were considered so vulnerable. to kill a woman.
The family left her two youngest sisters, ages 6 and 9, in the care of their grandmother.
They planned to return when the fighting subsided, but after the war ended with a peace treaty in 1953, North and South Korea built an almost inaccessible border between the nations, stopping any crossing on all sides.
Many families like Hyun separated from the places they knew and the people they loved.
In the decades since, North Korea has become more isolated from the world, led by descendants of dictators who want the reunification of the Koreas but under its own conditions.
A motionless photograph, taken on 18 January 1951, showing Korean refugees passing frozen rice fields as they fled south. Credit: AFP / Getty Photos
Although the two countries have allowed elected families to reunite for brief and emotional meetings, most wartime separated families have never been able to see their loved ones. .
Meetings are held by lottery system based on age and strength of family ties. It has been suspended in the past when relations between the two countries have deteriorated. The last meetings were held in 2018, when 89 South Korean families had the opportunity to meet their North Korean relatives. Many took part in their 90s.
Memories of the past
The massacre of separated families was opposed to South Korea’s Unification Ministry to ask the country’s Red Cross to create a project to link them to their homes.
The Red Cross worked with Ahn Hyo-jin, chief executive of Seoul-based VR company Tekton Space, to create VR experiences for North Korean refugees.
“There are a lot of abstract people in Korea and they all want to visit their city but they can’t because of the situation,” Ahn said.
Hyun – a well-known South Korean singer whose songs include a 1960s song about being separated from loved ones – was the first North Korean refugee to make a real tour of the country. her own.
Pyongyang 3D artist sketch based on Hyun Mi memorabilia. Credit: With the permission of the Ministry of Union
Reconstructing places in a reformed North Korea was not easy, Ahn said.
His company interviewed Hyun, asking her to remember lively moments from her childhood. As she spoke, a designer sketched what she described, periodically checking to see if the picture matched her memories. These sketches were then converted to 3D design.
“It was really awesome when we started,” said 3D designer Moun Jong-sik. “What if what I did is not like her memories?”
But when Hyun put on the VR headset in September this year, she discovered she couldn’t stop crying.
“I made it to North Korea!” Hyun banned.
Virtual Reality of the Market in Pyongyang, North Korea, where Hyun Mi spent her youth. Credit: With the permission of the Ministry of Union
Pyongyang’s pastime wasn’t exactly what she remembered, she said, but it was close. As Hyun explored a snow-covered pastime of the house where she grew up, she said she kept thinking about her parents, now long dead.
“The faces of my mother, father, sisters and brothers were showering before me,” she said.
Hyun remembered how full their house was with eight sisters around the dinner table, and going into her father’s store to eat squid without his knowledge. She saw a seafood market in Pyongyang where she used to play jump rope, and Taedong River, where she used to swim as a child.
Hyun is still alive with the pain of leaving two of her sisters. She briefly merged with one of them in China 20 years ago, a meeting made possible by a broker with business connections in North Korea. His meeting was filmed by a documentary team and re-televised. Her sister was just 6 years old when she left, and she would have lived a much harder life.
“If I came with you, I could be a star singer just like you,” her sister Hyun recalled saying at the reunion.
Recreation of Hyun Mi house in Pyongyang. Credit: With the permission of the Ministry of Union
“She was close to 60 but she still looked the same. I saw how she lost all her hair, teeth and toes too,” Hyun said.
In the 1990s – around the time Hyun met her sister – a famine struck in North Korea that led to about 600,000 deaths, although earlier estimates put the figure much higher.
“Even today when I go to a buffet restaurant, I cry, because there is so much food,” she said. “It is a great pain to see any food. thrown out because it makes me think of my sisters in the north. “
Plans for future refugees
While there is no official account of the number of North Korean refugees in South Korea, the South Korean Unification Ministry said in their latest figures released last month, from 1988, that 133,000 people have officially registered to meet their family in the north. But the chances of these reactions decline as the refugees age. As of November, 49,700 refugees are registered still alive in South Korea.
Ahn hopes Hyun’s experience is just the beginning.
The country’s unification ministry has expressed interest in expanding the project next year to model other areas where refugees previously lived, Ahn said. A ministerial official said he is currently considering a plan, although they do not yet have a timeline. However, it will not be possible to create specific projects for each refugee, he said.
The Ahn company has interviewed a number of abstract people who, like Hyun, wish they could visit their city. They also want to see their family, but VR technology can’t help that – the experience doesn’t involve people.
Hyun said while The virtual reality project gave her some comfort, what she wants is freedom to see her family members in real life.
“I don’t want much – I don’t even want to unite. I’d be happy if we could visit each other,” she said.