post-war reunions

As I read about all the various post-adoption reunion challenges, I've been reflecting on the commonalties of the complex dynamics (eg. guilt, jealousy/envy, fear of rejection, fear of offending others, etc) within families reuniting post-war, regardless of whether adoption was involved or not. For example, I recall that when I was studying Chinese language in Taiwan, my textbook included a whole chapter about Taiwanese elders reuniting with their Chinese mainland family members several decades after the 1940's civil war in China. The textbook depicted actual photos of elderly siblings crying on each other's shoulders or sobbing at Buddhist prayer rituals where one honours one's ancestors. Then the textbook wrote about the mixed feelings that the Taiwanese returnees felt in confronting the sadness, the poverty of their Chinese mainland family members, being hit up for expensive gifts, etc; The actual textbook conversation directly addressed commonly held misconceptions that reunion is all just happiness and relief. I found that when I explained some of my adoption reunion challenges to older Taiwanese people, they actually had a lot of understanding of how difficult the reunion could be. They knew of many people who, altho' weren't adoption-related, had faced similar challenges upon reuniting with war-separated family members. This is not to say that all war survivors will be sympathetic. I've heard from some Vietnamese adoptees that people from within the Vietnamese refugee community have unsympathetically commented to them, "Oh well, you're lucky you didn't have to endure the horrendous boat ride like us!"