I remember the winter when I was twenty, when I went alone to the hilltop cemetery in Mangwol-dong for the first time. I walked among the graves, looking for him. At the time, I didn’t know his family name. The only information I had was that he was called Dong-ho, a name that had easily lodged itself in my memory as it was similar to that of my uncle. And also that he had died at fifteen.
I missed the last bus going back to the city center, so I had to walk along the darkening road with the wind at my back. After I’d been walking for some time I realized that I’d unconsciously placed my right hand on the left-hand side of my chest. As though my heart had fissured open. As though this were something I could carry around with me in perfect safety, as long as I held it tight.
—
There were soldiers who were especially cruel.
When I first started poring over the documents, what had proved most incomprehensible was that this bloodshed had been committed again and again, and with no attempt to bring the perpetrators before the authorities. Acts of violence committed in broad daylight, without hesitation and without regret. Commanding officers who would have encouraged, no, even demanded such displays of brutality.
In autumn 1979, when the democratic uprising in the southern cities of Busan and Masan was being suppressed, President Park Chung-hee’s chief bodyguard Cha Ji-cheol said to him, The Cambodian government’s killed another 2 million of theirs. There’s nothing stopping us from doing the same. In May 1980, when the demonstrations were gathering force in Gwangju, the army used flamethrowers against unarmed citizens. The soldiers were provided with lead bullets, despite these having been banned by the international court of law on humanitarian grounds. Chun Doo-hwan, who had been so much in Park Chung-hee’s confidence that he was known as the former president’s adopted son, was looking into sending in Special Forces and subjecting the city to aerial bombardment in the unlikely event of the Provincial Office holding out. On the morning of May 21, not long before the army opened fire on the massed crowds, he was seen arriving in a military helicopter and stepping out onto the ground of Gwangju. I saw him on the news: the young general with his air of self-possession. Striding briskly forward from the helicopter, greeting the officer who came forward to meet him with a firm handshake.
—
I read an interview with someone who had been tortured; they described the aftereffects as “similar to those experienced by victims of radioactive poisoning.” Radioactive matter lingers for decades in muscle and bone, causing chromosomes to mutate. Cells turn cancerous, life attacks itself. Even if the victim dies, even if their body is cremated, leaving nothing but the charred remains of bone, that substance cannot be obliterated.
In January 2009, when an illegal raid by riot police on activists and tenants protesting their forced eviction from central Seoul left six dead, I remember being glued to the television, watching the towers burning in the middle of the night and surprising myself with the words that sprang from my mouth: But that’s Gwangju. In other words, “Gwangju” had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down, and brutalized, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair. The radioactive spread is ongoing. Gwangju had been reborn only to be butchered again in an endless cycle. It was razed to the ground, and raised up anew in a bloodied rebirth.
—
And there is still that young woman’s face.
That young woman whose photograph had made such a terrible impression on my eleven-year-old eyes, dead with a bayonet wound from her cheek to her throat, one eye cracked open and the other closed.
When those wretched corpses were lying in the waiting room of the bus terminal, sprawled in front of the train station; when the soldiers fell upon passersby, beat them, stripped them to their underwear and forced them into a truck; when even the youths who’d stayed quietly at home were ferreted out and arrested; when the roads into the city were blockaded, and the phone lines were cut; when live shells were fired at crowds protesting with no other weapon than their naked bodies; when the main road became littered with a hundred corpses in the space of twenty minutes; when the rumor that the whole city would be massacred struck terror into the populace; when ordinary civilians gathered in twos and threes to defend the bridge and the local primary school, armed with the antiquated rifles they’d found at the army reserves’ training camp; when civil self-government was instated at the Provincial Office, after the authority of the central government had leaked away like an ebb tide.
While all this was going on, I was busy riding the bus in Suyuri. When I returned home and opened the front gate, I bent down to pick up the evening edition of D newspaper. Crossing the long, narrow yard, I read the lead article. GWANGJU IN STATE OF ANARCHY FOR FIFTH DAY. Blackened buildings. Trucks filled with men wearing white bandannas. The atmosphere inside the house was both subdued and unsettled. They’re not working, the phones still aren’t working. Mum kept on trying to put a call through to her family, who lived near Daein Market.
As it turned out, none of my relatives died; none were injured or even arrested. But all through that autumn in 1980, my thoughts returned to that tiny room at one end of the kitchen, where I used to lie on my stomach to do my homework, that room with the cold paper floor—had the boy used to spread out his homework on its cold paper floor, then lie stomach-down just as I had? The middle-school kid I’d heard the grown-ups whispering about. How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?
—
After loitering near the site of the home-fixtures store now occupying the site of my family’s old house, I eventually stepped inside. The proprietor, a woman in her fifties wearing a lilac sweater, looked up from her newspaper.
“Can I help you, love?”
Having left this city when I was still young, for me its dialect was inextricably associated with my family; now that I was back, it stirred up an oddly discomfiting pathos to find perfect strangers reminding me of family members.
“There used to be a hanok on this spot…when did this building go up?” Just as I’d been thrown by the woman’s dialect, so she seemed unsettled by mine, and the air of friendly camaraderie dissipated.
“You were hoping to visit the previous inhabitants?” she responded, having switched to scrupulously formal Seoul speech. I said yes; any other answer would have been too complicated. “That house was demolished the year before last.” The woman’s voice was completely flat. “There was an old woman living there alone; after she died her son decided there was no way he could rent out such an old house, so he had it pulled down. This current building is only temporary. We signed a lease for two years, and after that we’ll leave.”
I asked if she’d met the old woman’s son in person.