Decades after the fighting in the Korean War ended under a 1953 armistice, many South Korean families still did not know whether relatives separated by the war and by the division of the peninsula were alive. In 1983, KBS, South Korea’s public broadcaster, launched a special live program to help separated families reconnect. It was a simple procedure. Relatives would come to the broadcasting station, fill out an application, and appear on television holding a sign telling their story, while viewers could recognize them by name or face and contact them. The organizers of the program could not foresee what the reaction would be, and what was supposed to be a short one turned into a marathon.
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