Finding love across boundaries
Amidst the conflicts between the North and South Koreas, the optimistic matchmaker Choi Young-Hee seeks to reunite the people living on opposite sides of the border.
”From the bottom of my heart, I really hope for reunification,” she says. In just five short years, she has arranged the marriages of 500 couples, hoping that her approach will create a new way for people to think of the other side, to emphasize that despite the obvious geopolitical problems they may be having, they are, after all, made up of “the same people.” There is a strong sense of hope that the two countries can in time get by peacefully with one another.
Among the 500 marriages, Choi has had a great track record, with only three cases ending in divorce. North Korean women desire the stability and the acceptance that a South Korean man can provide and South Korean men look for a more traditional Korean wife, as Choi believes. Height, education, and job status are the criteria that Choi uses to determine who is set up with who, but she emphasizes the importance of a personality match. These marriages, as Kyung Lah, writer at CNN, suggests, are not borne out of the desire to reunify the two countries, but rather to show how there can still be love between people of (very) different backgrounds.
