When North Korea’s Naegohyang Women’s FC arrives in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, this weekend for next Wednesday’s AFC Women’s Champions League semifinals, South Koreans will witness something rare: Young North Koreans walking openly among them again.
The visit itself rings historic bells. This will be the first North Korean women’s football team to compete in the South since the 2014 Incheon Asian Games. It will also mark the first sports delegation of any kind since the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.
That last date is highly significant because it was then that the portcullis came down on inter-Korean exchanges.
It is worth explaining how that happened. Nobody on this side could see it coming — such was the earnestness with which rapprochement was being pursued — but it was Kim Yo-jong’s exposure to the South during those subzero days in Gangwon Province, ironically the world’s only divided province, that appears to have crystallized reality for North Korea’s number two.
It must have seemed to her that, in the race to be the real Korea, the North’s revolution had crashed and lay sprawled, skis flailing in the air, watching in dismay as its rival sped toward gold.
Confronted by the astonishing transformation wrought by the “corrupt puppets” of Namjoson, as they call people here, she knew there and then that the 50 million fashionable and individualistic South Koreans would never be theirs.
She went home and the rest is history. Inter-Korea dialogue and exchanges ended, and her brother, leader Kim Jong-un, declared an end to the founding national aspiration of reunification. South Koreans are foreigners, he told his people. Because they want to “unify” — i.e., absorb — us, they are hostile, armed and dangerous.
Given this, how might South Koreans feel seeing North Koreans for the first time after all these years? Not politically. Emotionally.
When we think about it — and we rarely do — South Koreans are psychologically incapable of viewing North Koreans the way they view other foreigners. A Japanese athlete, a Chinese tourist or a European visitor can simply be themselves: Outsiders, familiar or unfamiliar, but comprehensible.
North Koreans occupy a category entirely their own. They are not foreign, but neither are they compatriots.
Source: Korea Times News
