The author shares her experience of meeting her great-grandfather, a Korean independence activist, through the exhumation and reinterment process in South Korea.
You never expect to meet an ancestor. Not in person, at least. But I did. My great-grandfather was tall for his time. I discovered this when gravediggers assembled his skeleton at my feet earlier this year. For 57 years, Lee Jong-wook had been buried on a small plot of family land in Busan, at the southeastern tip of South Korea . In life, he had been deemed a dangerous renegade, a Korean independence activist who posed a security threat to the peninsula’s Japanese occupiers and was imprisoned.
But this year, he was recognized for his patriotism, and his body was moved from the family plot to the national cemetery, with full honors. The Post's Michelle Ye Hee Lee's first person account of the exhumation and reinterment of her great-grandfather in South Korea's Daejeon National Cemetery. (Video: Michelle Lee/The Washington Post)With the approach of his reburial, I set out to learn about him — and, along the way, discovered how his life and mine bookend a century of a uniquely Korean existenc
Ancestor Great-Grandfather South Korea Korean Independence Activist Exhumation Reinterment
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