Park Geun Hye's Downfall

Damn, y'all. What a time to not be in South Korea. This is the kind of thing I would have loved to talk about with my students, at least to hear their perspective.

When you're the first minority anything (or at least the first in an official capacity—black people were playing baseball before Jackie Robinson, and so on), the burden is on you to not fuck it up. Beyond that, the burden is on you to be unbelievably good at what you're doing. Twice as good for half the credit, as the expression goes.

As the US is on the brink of its first woman president (knock on wood, get out the vote, etc.), and as I left the country almost four years ago (where does the time go?!), it's a little shitty of me to sit high and mighty and talk about Korea's patriarchal society and its relationship with Park. From a distance, her presidency has looked a little troubled, but I don't know the details. But it's not the details I'm interested in at this point (or well, I am, but you know), but the ramifications.

The next woman to run for office in South Korea is going to have to contend with this shitshow. It doesn't matter which party she's in, or her career up to that point, or how long it's been—the pundits will all bring up Park Geun Hye. Whether it's a favorable or unfavorable comparison doesn't matter; thanks to this scandal, it'll be hard work to come out of the shadow of Park's legacy.

Glorious Vacation: Day 4

Day 4 was Friday, which was when I was leaving Gwangju to see a friend in Busan. I had to do at least one May 18th related thing while I was in Gwangju (see my reason for choosing to visit it at all), so I decided the best one would be the May 18th National Cemetery.  I kind of wish I had done something for the April 19th protest as well, but truth be told there wasn't that much.

The bus that goes to the cemetery (and the surrounding cemeteries where I think other victims of the May 18th massacre are buried) is the number 518. 518. 5/18. I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.

I totally spaced out on the bus and accidentally rode it to the end of the line, which is an old folks' home.

Putting the old folks' home next to a shit load of cemeteries? Really?

Anyway, I had an awkward little moment where I got out of the bus, sat at the bus stop and read for a few minutes, then got back on the same bus with the same driver, but whatever. Fortunately I hadn't overshot the cemetery by nearly as much as I thought I had, so it was all good.

I kind of lost it at the cemetery, y'all. Maybe it's because I'm a big baby, but it was an awfully sobering couple hours. I've been to war memorials before (trips to Washington, D.C. much?) which are in the same vein, but none of them have been as serious and real to me as this. Everyone who died in the May 18th massacre were civilians, or students (at least, everyone buried in this cemetery; I don't think the police officers or paratroopers who died are buried in this cemetery), which to me makes it entirely different. Soldiers are expected (sadly) to die; students are not. Especially not at the hands of their own government. Plus, so many of them would be my parents' age, about, if they had survived: all of these people would have been someone's father or mother, if things had been different. They could have been the parents of someone who would have been my friend. Not to mention even younger casualties: small children inadvertently caught in the crossfire.




In case it's hard to read:

Here in the National Cemetery for the May 18th Democratic Uprising lie the meritorious persons who fought and sacrificed themselves during the Gwangju Uprising of 1980 and those laudable victims who died in the aftermath of the physical or mental injuries they sustained.

The bodies of the victims were carried in garbage trucks and carts and  buried without official reognition in the Old May 18 Cemetery (the 3rd graveyard of the Municipal Cemetery).

With the completion of a 3-year conservation project (1994-1997), all bodies were moved and reburied together in this new cemetery. In accordance with the Act on the Honorable Treatment for Meritorious Persons of the May 18th Uprising, this cemetery, which had been managed by the Gwangju Municipal Administration, was promoted and renamed as the National Cemetery for the May 18th Democratic Uprising on July 27, 2002 by the Korean state.

This cemetery will function as an education center, promoting the conviction that injustice and dictatorship should never return to this country, so that the spirit of the May 18th may be engraved on the hearts of all people making this a sacred place for democracy forever.

Beyond  the "gate" is the cemetery proper.

English translation:

Oh, Gwangju! The Cross of Our Nation! by Kim Jun-tae

Oh, Gwangju! Mudeung Mountain!
Our city of eternal youth
that sheds blood tears
between deaths!

Where has our father gone?
Where has our mother collapsed?
Where has our Son died and been buried?
And, where does our Daughter lie dead,  her mouth gaping?
Where have our soul and spirit
gone, torn and broken into pieces?

Gwangju, which both God and birds have left!
Our blood-covered city
where decent people
are still alive, morning and evening,
collapsing, falling down, and rising again!
Ah, the phoenix, the phoenix, the phoenix
of the South Province full of wailing
that has tried to drive away death with death,
and to seek life with death!

When the sun and the moon nosedive
and all the mountain ridges
stand shamelessly high,
ah, the flag of liberty
that nobody can tear down
or take away!
The flag of humanity!
The flag, hardened with flesh and bones!

Oh, our city
where at times our songs, dreams, and love
roll like waves,
and at other times we are hidden in graves.
Oh, Gwangju, Gwangju
who carries the cross of this nation,
climbing over Mudeung Mountain,
and walks over the hill of Golgotha!
Oh, the son of God,
whose whole body is covered with wounds,
and who is the emblem of death!

Are we really quite dead?
Dead,
unable to love this country any more,
unable to love our children any more?
Are we absolutely dead?

On Chungjangro, on Kumnamro,
At Hwajungdong, at Sansoodong, at Yongbongdong
At Jisandong, at Yangdong, at Kyerimdong,
And, and, and . . . .
Ah, the wind that blows over,
gobbling up our blood and flesh!
The hopeless flow of time!

Should we now
just collapse, fall, and cry?
Terrified of life, how should we
breathe a breath?

Oh, all those survive
lower their heads like sinners.
All those still alive have lost
spirit, and they find it difficult
even to face their rice bowls.
Afraid, they don’t know what to do.

(Dear, I was killed
while I was waiting for you,
waiting for you outside the door.
Why did they take away my life?
Though we lived in a rented room,
we were quite happy.
I wanted to live, loving you.
Oh, my dear!
But I was killed like this,
pregnant with a child of yours.
I am sorry, my dear!
They took away my life from me,
and I took away everything of yours,
your youth, your love,
your son, and all.
Oh, my dear! In the end,
did I kill you?)

Oh, Gwangju! Mudeung Mountain!
Our city of eternal youth
who breaks through deaths
and flutters the ends of white clothes!
The phoenix, the phoenix, the phoenix!
The son of God of this nation
who climbs up the hill of Golgotha again,
carrying the cross of this nation!

Jesus is said to have died once
and been resurrected,
and to live till this day or rather forever.
But our true love
that would die hundreds of deaths
and yet resurrects itself hundreds of times!
Our light, glory, and pain.
Now we will be revived ever more.
Now we become ever stronger.
Now we – ever more.

Oh, now we,
putting our shoulders to shoulders, bones to bones,
climb the Mudeung Mountain of this nation.
Oh, we rise up to the oddly blue sky
to kiss the sun and the moon.

Gwangju! Mudeung Mountain!
Oh, our eternal flag!
Our dream, our cross!
The city of youth that will get younger
as time goes by!
Now we are firmly united,
surely and surely,
we hold each other’s hands tight
and rise up.

To the one side there was an indoor photo memorial, with photos of everyone interred and either white or yellow artificial flowers. To the other was a "tree memorial," a rather nice, bright contrast to the dark and serious photo memorial. It's basically a nicely-manicured garden.

On the same side as the tree memorial was the May 18th museum, one of the more modern museums I've seen in Korea. Since the cemetery was dedicated in the early 2000s, its modernity makes sense. I would have gotten more out of it if my Korean weren't terrible, as they had short documentaries playing at every exhibit, but I did absorb as much of the English signage as I could. (I have to say, I don't think I could stomach an old school Korean version of a May 18th museum: those would be the bloodiest, most upsetting dioramas of all time.)

The one that stuck with me the most, for whatever reason, was a very small display containing wrist watches. These were the old fashioned kind that needed to be rewound, and since their owners were shot, no one rewound them after May 1980.

The whole time I only saw a handful of other people, which made everything even more serious, somehow; loads of families and shrieking kids would have taken away from the atmosphere.

That was the entirety of my day; after this I had a couple hours on buses before I got to my next destination: Kimhae/Busan.

Obligatory KJI Post

Despite knowing fuck-all about international relations, I do have some thoughts on the Kim Jeong-il brouhaha. That's for later.  I just thought that where I was and what I was doing when I (and the rest of South Korea) found out was kind of funny:

I go to a jjimjilbang three days a week to use their "health room" (super-small gym) and get the rare hot shower  whose length isn't dictated by the size of my water heater.  The shower is the bigger attraction than the gym, but I use the gym to justify it financially (7,000 won just for a hot shower seems rather dear, but add in the weight training and cardio and it's cheaper/just about equivalent to a real gym, which may or may not have a sauna).  I had finished in the health room (and technically I do it backwards by doing the health room first and THEN the sauna, but I'd rather finish off by relaxing in a hot tub instead of panting on a treadmill) and was getting ready to shower when I noticed there were way more people hanging around the TV in the locker room than normal.

So there I was, naked and glasses-less, squinting at the TV with maybe a dozen other naked Korean women, sweaty from my workout and the heat in the locker room. Before us, a never-ending parade of North Korean footage and propaganda with South Korean commentary on top of it.  Periodically it cut back to well-groomed news anchors discussing something.  The only Korean in the headline that I could understand was Kim Jeong-il's name.  I tried to wrack my brain for the verb for "to die" or "to kill," but came up short.  The footage had all the unmistakable tinge of "this person's dead now," and as soon as I saw it, I knew.  I posted a question on Facebook to be sure, and I saw a few other women texting furiously or calling people—never mind that some of them were still wet and sweaty from the sauna.

That's a memory I'll probably carry around the rest of my life: me, and the ajummas, and the weird naked solidarity we shared watching the lunchtime news.

I hope I don't inadvertently jinx Obama by tagging this post as "dead presidents."

I had an interesting political discussion with one of my sixth grade classes yesterday.

I forget why, but the topic of presidents came up. "Obama is very clever," one boy said. "Very smart. Face is very ugly. Dirty. Very old. I look at Obama, I see grandfather."

"Good president? Or bad president?"

"Good president," the class replied. "Lee Myoung-bak is bad president."

"Bad? Why?"

"Crazy cow in Korea."

"Mad cow disease?"

"Yes! Yes. Lee Myoung-bak bring crazy cows to Korea."

They then quizzed me on South Korean presidents, and to my shame, I only knew of the ones who had recently died.

"Yi Seungman?"

"No."

"Number one president of Korea."

"First?"

"Yes, yes. First."

"Park Chung-hee?" (The dictator who ran the country for 18 years, from 1961 to 1979.)

"Er...no."

"Chun Doo-hawn?" (Another dictatorial president, this one with only an 8 year term.)

"Kim Dae-jung?"

"Yes, yes. Kim Dae-jung good president? Or bad?"

"Good, good." They gave the thumbs up.

"What about President Roh?"

"Good president."

I wish they spoke better English, if only so I could have more conversations with them like this, but oh well.

Another One Bites the Dust

That's two posts in a row with songs for titles. They're just so apropos...

I mentioned earlier that South Korea's former president, Roh Mu-hyun, jumped to his death/was possibly murdered. The one prior to him, Kim Dae-jung, recently passed away (of natural causes). He was born when Korea was still just Korea and constantly advocated for a reunification. It was his "Sunshine Policy" that Roh tried to continue all throughout his presidency.

He was also tough as nails:

Kim was born into a farming family in South Jeolla province in Korea's southwest when the country was still under Japanese colonial rule.

He started a business after the end of Japanese occupation and it survived the 1950-53 war on the Korean peninsula.

But as South Korea's government veered toward authoritarianism, he chose to go into politics and quickly marked himself as a dissident.

After three losing bids, he was elected to the National Assembly in 1961. Days later, Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee staged a military coup and dissolved parliament.

Kim ran for the presidency a decade later, nearly defeating Park, who altered the constitution to guarantee his rule in the future.

Just weeks after the election, Kim was in a traffic accident he believed was an attempt on his life. For the rest of his days, he walked with a limp and often leaned on a cane.

In 1973, South Korean agents broke into his Tokyo hotel room and dragged him to a ship where he claimed they planned to dump him at sea. The would-be assassins aborted the plan following intervention by U.S. officials, who sent an American military helicopter flying low over the ship.

...

Upon his return to Seoul in 1973, Kim was put under house arrest and then imprisoned. His release came only after Park's assassination by his spy chief in late 1979.

Kim was pardoned a few months later. But the drama did not end there.

Weeks after Park's death, military leader Chun Doo-hwan seized power. Five months later, tens of thousands in the southern city of Gwangju — one of Kim's political strongholds — took to the streets to protest the junta.

Troops suppressed the uprising, killing some 200 people by official accounts. Accusing Kim of fomenting the uprising, a military tribunal sentenced him to death. Washington again intervened, and the sentence was commuted to life and then reduced to 20 years.

Kim refused to consider it a setback.

The sentence was later suspended and he left for the U.S., where he lived until 1985. He was 72 when he was elected president.

Expressing his trademark forgiveness and lack of vengeance, Kim immediately sought a pardon for Chun Doo-hwan, the military general who ordered Kim's death in 1979 and was sentenced for mutiny and treason.

Chun was among well-wishers who went to Kim's hospital room in recent days.

But the defining moment of the Kim presidency was his historic meeting with Kim Jong Il in 2000.

That summit — the first between the two Koreas — eased decades of tensions and ushered in an era of unprecedented reconciliation.

Families divided for decades held tearful reunions, and South Koreans began touring North Korea's famed scenic spots. Kim won the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

"In my life, I've lived with the conviction that justice wins," he said in accepting the honor. "Justice may fail in one's lifetime, but it will eventually win in the course of history."

Full article here.

President Roh's Funeral

Images from the funeral of President Roh, courtesy of a friend of mine from the language exchange.









And the last one from the Chosun, an English language newspaper based in Seoul:



I'm sure lots of places were closed for the funeral; Sherlock Academy was not. Michael spent most of the day watching the funeral on the Internet.

There is some speculation that "this was no suicide...this was MURDER." South Korea's very own Kennedy assassination. At the very least, lots of Koreans hold the current president, Lee Myung-bak, responsible for the death, as he pushed for the aggressive corruption probe into the kickbacks scandal surrounding Roh.

Kim Sung-gyeon, a 50-year-old man in a motorized wheelchair, said the public needed to know the true circumstances behind Roh's death. "In my opinion, this is a political assassination, a political murder."

The outspoken Roh, who served from 2002 to 2008, crafted an image as a clean politician with humble roots who stuck up for common people. Young voters liked him because he promised to stand up to Washington. Others favored his policies to promote democracy, fight corruption and push for better relations with North Korea.

Roh's funeral procession began rolling at dawn from his southern hometown of Bongha, where he killed himself on May 23. Villagers lined the streets as his hearse, covered in white chrysanthemums, departed for the capital.

His official funeral ceremony was held in the courtyard of the 14th-century Gyeongbok Palace in the heart of ancient Seoul. Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns chanted prayers as part of the multifaith ceremony reflective of South Korea's respect for religious diversity and its changing society.

Roh's suicide note was read aloud, including his pleas to his wife and two children not to be "too sad" and his description of his suffering as "unbearable."

Opposition lawmakers jeered President Lee as he and his wife approached the altar to pay their respects.

"President Lee Myung-bak, apologize!" opposition lawmaker Baek Won-woo yelled, jumping to his feet and cursing Lee before security guards hauled him away. "This is political revenge, a political murder!"

Suddenly the tagline for this blog is rather (in)appropriate.

Korea's former president, Moo-hyun Roh, jumped to his death a few days ago. The Guardian has a decent write-up on it, but the Cliff's Notes is as follows:

Roh was (from what I can tell) a popular president in South Korea (especially amongst the "386" Generation, akin to the tail end of the American "Baby Boomers": born in the 60s, attended college in the 80s, and in their 30s when the coin was termed, hence "386") and probably would have been the kind of guy popular in America as well: poor family background, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, etc etc. His victory in the 2002 elections, on a platform of anti-corruption and continuation of the "sunshine policy" of his predecessor, Dae-jung Kim, was something of a surprise. Presidential terms in South Korea are five years long, so he had only left office in February of 2008.

Allegations arose that he had taken something like $6M USD in bribes, but it gets tricky: it's unclear whether parts of that money were intended to settle a debt or intended for legitimate business ventures or outright bribes, and it's unclear just how much Roh knew about the money and what it was meant for.

Roh's suicide note talked about ill health as well, but popular opinion seems to be that the stress and scandal involved with all this talk of bribes proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. It's all very reminiscent of Budd Dwyer, though it wasn't broadcast on live television.