Ocean Family, Yearning and Last Time to See Father’s Face...
In the afternoon of December 11, letters filled with yearning for beloved family members who go out on the rough sea are hung on a large Christmas tree at the lighthouse of the Jodo breakwater in front of Busan port. When the tree and the lighthouse are lit, the letters on the tree will stream out to sea along with the light from the lighthouse, which also sends prayers for safety and comfort.
The Busan Regional Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Office (BRMAFO) collects the Letters for Family starting from November 15. They target families having former and current members who work in the maritime industry that make readers to feel sorrowful.
By the deadline on December 10, 48 letters arrived at BRMAFO. There are various types of letters including wife to husband, children to parents, mother to son, daughter-in-law to father-in-law and granddaughter to grandfather, and they fully show the joys and sorrows of maritime families.
“Some say that love has an expiration date, but our love didn’t have time to fade away because we were just satisfied with our lives as they were and lived content”, wife Jeong Eun-jeong wrote to Kim Soon-taek, the first officer on the 552 Dong-won vessel. The wife also calls her husband "Rocky" and says, “We separated sixteen times in the period of sixteen years.” She longs for her husband and says to him, “We always continued our non-immune separation since I met you and lived with you.”
“During my twenty years of growing up, it counts less than a couple of years when I see my father”, complained son Seong-ho whose father, Sohn Chang-back, is first engineer on the vessel Katrina. The son wrote his little dream on a piece of paper for his father saying, “I can’t wait till we sit down, have dinner and watch TV altogether.”
Daughter Jeong-ha of Vice-Chief Choi Young-ho on the Shinra Sprinter expressed her broken heart when she said, “I heard from my mother that my father’s dentures were broken in two... so he glued them together to eat meals... Thinking of my father, who can’t even eat meat with his broken dentures and lives through a tough life, we do not eat meat at home.”
Mother Park Jong-young who has her son Kim Young-ho on the 35th Han-seong said, “I was so thrilled and overwhelmed that my son from far away sent me a large flower basket for my birthday last month.” The mother also sent her appreciation to her son, who took over all domestic responsibilities way too early because he was the first child of the family.
Daughter-in-law Jeong Mi-young of chief engineer Kim Boo-su on the 302 Dae-hwa penned a message about his new born granddaughter who has not yet seen her grandfather. She said, “When my father-in-law was in town in 2002, I went through the formal bows and he immediately left port after attending the wedding ceremony. It hurt me to see my father-in-law's thin shape when he arrived home in June last year.”
Go You-jeong wrote a letter to her grandfather who lived his entire life fishing and passed away five years ago. Miss Go wrote a story about the burned seaman's pocket ledger of her grandfather and said like playing the baby, “I will wait for you in my dreamland after writing down ‘I miss you, grandpa’ on my feet.”
The letter writers rode on a guide vessel belonging to BRMAFO and headed to the lighthouse of the Jodo breakwater in the afternoon. The group personally hung their letters on a large tree which BRMAFO provided in advance and prayed for their family members to return safely.
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 / 입력시간: 2006. 12.12. 09:13
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