Mother, daughter reunite after 40 years of separation

The mother left her four-year-old third daughter at a relative`s home saying she would come for her when she gets better off. That was the daughter`s last memory with her mother. The daughter, whose surname is Lee, was sent to several more homes and was finally adopted by an old couple living in South Jeolla Province. Her registered family name was also changed to Yoon Jeong-mi. Forty years have passed since their separation, and the daughter could barely remember the face of her mother and her two older sisters. Lee just thought that her mother might have passed away.

Now 44-year-old Lee got a phone call on Monday from Child Fund Korea who told her they found her mother, who is 70 years old. According to DNA profiling by the National Forensic Service, the genes matched 99.9 percent. Lee could not believe her ears. She was four years old when her mother left her, and is now the mother of a 22-year-old son and a 17-year-old daughter.

At the Child Fund Korea office in central Seoul on Tuesday, Lee and the mother met after having departed due to poverty. They recognized each other at first glance and shed tears of remorse for more than 20 minutes. The mother patted her daughter repeating, "I`m sorry that you had to go through such hardship." On her knees in front of her mother, Lee cried without a sound before finally saying with tears, "Mom, sorry for having misunderstood you."

The two people met after 40 years largely thanks to a missing children finding institution under the Child Fund. The mother had tried in vain to find her daughter even as she had appeared in TV programs and advertised at regional newspapers. This wasn`t successful because Lee hadn`t even tried to find her mother because she thought she was abandoned. However, Lee registered her DNA in August last year after one of her relatives offered to do so. As the mother herself registered her DNA with the police in October this year, the missing children finding institution asked for DNA comparison.

After unable to sleep all night due to both fear and excitement, Lee kept on wiping tears off her mother`s face. She said, "It had always weighed on my mind of not being able to show my children to my mother. Now I`m really glad that I could do that in the end."