A few weeks ago, I went out to meet a friend named Crystal.
Crystal was a long-term expat living in Korea, when suddenly, a spinal problem surfaced that has put Crystal in a wheelchair, dealing with chronic pain, mobility issues, and all kinds of crap that goes with it.
I'd suggested a meeting on Facebook, and then volunteered to be a camera operator of Crystal and Tommy as they worked on a video about navigating Seoul's subway system. We went from Sadang Station to the KTX platform at Seoul Station -- KTX advertises itself as being wheelchair friendly and accessible -- and we decided to put that to the test.
Other than that, I think the video speaks for itself: Crystal and Tommy had good points to make during the trip, and it was kind of shocking for me, moving through places I've navigated many many times, taking totally for granted my mobility, ability to use stairs, ability to walk a lot without getting exhausted. Give it a watch: skim, or watch minute by painstaking minute as we discover how much harder and slower it is to move through Seoul's public spaces.
Warning: there is one point where there is shoving and cursing, as a bunch of older folks tried to shove into an elevator without letting us off first. If verbal abuse and shouting upset you, skip from 41:00 to 43:00.
Here's the video. It might change the way you look at public spaces in Seoul. It was good to see my friend, but it broke my heart to see how much trouble it was to move around in a wheelchair (the rest of the trip, Crystal reported being refused repairs when wheelchair tires popped or got damaged, and, by the way, Tommy mentioned to me that the experience seen in this video was a totally ordinary day: not remarkably good or bad, for a wheelchair user, and remember that many folks in wheelchairs don't have someone like Tommy there to push them, and occasionally shout "Get out of the way!" for them.
First of all: I'm okay. My family is okay. One nice thing about being a dad is that my Halloween party plans tend to be in the afternoon, not at night.
A few thoughts on it:
First... if I were going to go to a Halloween party, it would have been either Itaewon, where this whole thing happened, or Hongdae, where the youngs like to hang out.
Second... if you asked me to drop a pin last Thursday, the location where it happened is one of the two places where where I would have thought it would happen: It's right next to the subway station, it's also a little T-shaped intersection between the back streets where there are a lot of clubs and restaurants, and the main strip. What that means is: in that little area, a bunch of people are trying to get OUT of the back streets, a bunch of people are always trying to get IN, a bunch of people on the main strip are trying to head AWAY from the subway station to get down to where there are more party events, and a bunch of other people on the main strip are trying to head TOWARD the subway station, to head to the other end of Itaewon, or get to the subway station.
Normally that just means dodging past a bunch of people going in every direction, but if the crowd is big enough for it to become a bottleneck... this happens.
This is particularly haunting to me, because all last week I was telling my students that it's fun to go to a Halloween party at least once while you're a university student. I hope they all went to Hongdae (the other club area popular with international folks and students).
A little while ago, I think when the thing in Indonesia happened, my son asked me about crowd crushes, and we learned a bit about them through some Youtube videos. So here: learn a little about how they happen, and a bit about what to do:
Now I am hearing people invoke the Sewol Ferry disaster here—the Sewol Ferry sinking was a horrible confluence of risk factors that led to 304 deaths, worst of all, many who were high school students.
This time we will again see shocking numbers of casualties in their teens and twenties—these were partygoers! [update: this is starting, and god it's sad]
But I don’t think they are quite as comparable as all that, other than the utter, gut-punch grief that will wash over the country as we start seeing photos and learning about the people we lost last night.
The Sewol became a political disaster because it was a boat run by a company that had been cutting corners, exploiting loopholes, and taking advantage of some sloppy or careless safety inspectors, to pile up risk factors until they all went wrong at once. The failure of safety inspectors and regulations directly implicated the government who’d loosened regulations and the entire chain of command who systematically turned a blind eye as conditions that should have been enough to ground the ship until it passed safety protocols... didn't. The slow, confused, chaotic response by the coast guard and reporters who utterly botched the initial reporting meant that some lives were lost that didn't need to be.
But the things that went wrong this time? I don’t think you can put them at any regulator or safety inspectors feet. The response was pretty quick, though a crowd crush happens so fast that unless crowd control is already on scene, it won't matter much. [UPDATE: I am changing my mind on this. Word is that people were calling emergency services hours before the crush turned deadly, saying "Hey the crowds are out of control in Itaewon... is somebody on the job of making sure nobody gets hurt?" Not to mention... crowds are always bananas on Halloween in Itaewon. Everybody knows that. And if that's the case... yes. Let's get mad.]
How did this one happen?
Among the factors that led to this crowd crush:
1. It was Halloween and Itaewon.
See, every other holiday has festivals and parties all over Seoul—you can go to a Christmas or New Year's or Valentine’s Day party in Kangnam, Jamsil, Hongdae, Jongno, Itaewon, Sinchon, Keondae, and nine other areas that are mad that I forgot them in my list. For Halloween, Itaewon and Hongdae are very much THE destinations, so everyone wanting to dress up and party went to one of those two places.
2. Hallowe'en is special and kind of weird.
For a crowd to get THIS big, it has to be a holiday that's celebrated by Koreans. At least... enough Koreans. If it were celebrated by all Koreans, there'd be parties all over town (see above)... so Hallowe'en is weird, because it's celebrated by a lot of Koreans (mostly younger ones who had Halloween parties at their English academies), but it's still mainly associated with foreigners (who mostly live in Itaewon). This odd confluence is the reason you'd have a lot of people wanting to celebrate, but also find all on them crammed into one or two places to do it.
It was the first “post-pandemic” Halloween.
3. For partygoers:
The Covid pandemic isn’t *actually* over, but regulations are relaxing and people are moving a bit more freely. Anyone who likes Halloween parties, but didn’t get to go in 2020 or 2021, was sure as hell going to go balls to the wall this year!
4. For Bars and Clubs:
If you think the pandemic was tough on people who like to party, imagine how much harder it was for people whose livelihoods depend on selling stuff to partygoers! With that “post-pandemic” feeling, every club and bar with an online presence was sure as shooting planning a “Hallowe’en is Back!” Event to bring out the customers. And bring them out they did.
5. It happened around 10-11:00pm.
This is exactly when the early partners, who came for dinner but have a bedtime or curfew, are leaving the area, and the late night partiers, who plan to go until dawn, are showing up. That means a lot of coming and going at the same time, so traffic would be heavier coming both in and out of the subway station -- and one of the busiest subway exits was right around the corner from the crush.
6. Midterm exams just ended.
This means that all the university students who have been stressed out about midterm tests and wanted to cut loose, needed a place to do so. Where better than Itaewon, where the Halloween parties are?
I've watched a few videos about crowd crushes -- junior was curious about them after the Indonesia disaster earlier this year, and here are a few things we learned.
7. First: a large crowd can turn into a crush unexpectedly
It doesn't take much with a large enough crowd. If the people at the back are nudging the people ahead of them with light pressure, that's no problem... except if the crowd is 200 people deep, and each layer nudges the row ahead with that same slight increase in pressure... well, a light nudge in every direction at once, multiplied by 200, is enough to pin someone so tightly they can't breathe. The crowd doesn't even need to be loud, wild, or panicked, for it to happen.
8. Second: Such a big crowd makes it hard to communicate.
That same large crowd is big enough that the people at the back or outside might not know, or hear, what is happening at the front, or center, of the press. At a rock concert, everyone's paying attention to the singer, so the performer could stop the music, ask everybody to take three steps back, and stop pushing. There was no center of attention for this crowd that could stop the music and ask everyone to stop pushing. The specific place where this happened is especially bad for communication, because it's a narrower bottleneck between two wider streets (see map)
Courtesy of google maps and imac screenshots
The bottleneck is the bridge of an H, with brick walls on every side. On one end was the main Itaewon strip with a subway station people were trying to get to -- or out of -- and the main restaurant/club backstreet just back from the main stretch on the other end. This means that the disaster was around a corner from many of the people who were pushing and shoving to try and get through the crowd. They could never have known.
I'm not going to post photos or video clips (I've seen them, though)...but that crowd was definitely deep enough that the people at the back didn't know what was going on in the center.
I hope you're all safe, my dear ones.
*UPDATE*
I am steadily having my mind changed on the theory that there isn't really one spot to place blame here. Diffusion of blame -- each of the groups responsible for the problem aren't responsible for enough of the problem that they see an incentive to changing their behavior (see, for example, the US political process) -- makes it easy for groups to point fingers and say "It's out of my hands" but... I've seen Korean police navigate massive protests and big rallies and counter-rallies close enough together that it's a surprise violence didn't break out... with surprisingly minimal damage to life and limb.
Reports I am hearing from people I know who were in Itaewon that day are saying to me that the crowds were absolutely nuts hours before the crushing incident, which means there was time to deploy police and get the crowding in hand. That this didn't happen is inexcusable: no, the Halloween party isn't run by a single organization the way a protest or a tourism festival is, so there isn't a point contact to talk to the police about expected crowds, or an organization with an insurance company ready to answer the phone, or pay whoever it is that makes crowd size estimates, but it's well known that Halloween is bonkers in Itaewon, and the writing on the wall was there that it was going to be unusually busy, because... the writing was literally on the Facebook walls of dozens of clubs and restaurants and other venues promoting their Saturday Night Halloween Bash. The police should have been on site in very very large numbers by 4pm that day, certainly by 7pm, and whoever makes that call missed it, and now 150 people are dead who didn't have to die.
I have changed my mind.
*/UPDATE OVER*
So what happens next?
Well, after the Sewol Ferry disaster, Koreans came together in sorrow and solidarity in a really cool way. I hope the communal grief experience ends up being one that pulls Koreans together in a tough time.
After the initial outpouring, it started getting political, as the opposition party started attacking the party in power for its slow, confused and jumbled response, and from there the Sewol disaster and the yellow ribbon that symbolized it began to be a symbol of political conflict instead of grief and solidarity.
There were clear, actionable responses along the lines of safety standards and rigor in regulation checking with the Sewol, but I don't know if that will happen here. The confluence of those eight danger conditions, all at once, in that specific time and place, was a great example of the swiss cheese model of a disaster. You could hold a hundred festivals in Itaewon and not repeat this disaster -- and they have. The things that prevent a crowd crush -- and there are some -- aren't particularly useful if they're installed in that spot, because the next crowd crush in Korea might be in Busan, or outside the stadium before or after a Kpop concert or a big sports event, or in City Hall during a World Cup soccer game, or on the morning of a super mega discount crazy sale at a shopping center. If that alley in Itaewon should have guard rails and direction arrows, about a hundred other places around Seoul -- entrances and exits for concert or sports venues, outdoor festival locations, subway exits with narrow stairwells that open into popular shopping, clubbing or event-having neighborhoods, subway stations close to once-a-year-events, and public protest spaces, should all be kitted out with the same things.
That might be a good idea... but there isn't a clear fall guy to blame for this one the way there was for the Sewol Ferry Disaster, so let's hope it doesn't turn into a political fight. [*Update... see above. I am changing my mind on this... but I'm still not convinced the event creates the kind of political leverage the Sewol did. It might, though.*]
Here are some of the things that can prevent a repeat crowd crush:
--Steel barriers separating people walking one way and the other way.
They could put these up, but if that alley needs steel barriers, about a hundred other alleys around Seoul need them, too.
--CCTVs and computer modeling that predicts when an area will reach danger level
Someone should already be at work designing a Seoul-wide system for observing crowd density, with details about which measures should happen at which point.
--Close down the subway stations serving the busiest areas
The Seoul Fireworks Festival already closes down the subway stations serving the busiest areas closest to the fireworks display. The train doesn't even stop: it just passes through that station until the event is over, and then subways show up to bring people home. There should be a rule that the subway stations stop dropping people off at a station once crowd density reaches some threshold: this could be the next level intervention, if police deployed haven't made an impact on the crowding. This might not work as well as it does for the fireworks festival, because that has a clear ending after which nobody is still trying to go to Yeouido, so urban planners might have better ideas than I have.
--Putting up LED signs around subway exits and narrow but busy alleys that can flash instructions like "This subway exit closed. Please cross the street" "Dangerous Crowding Ahead: Take An Alternate Route" Make sure these instructions are multilingual.
--Spreading out the time of an event -- after a crowd crush in Mecca, Hajj organizers started giving people passes that told them what time of day they could attend the most crowded parts of the Hajj ritual, so that people would be coming all day long, instead of all at once.
This could happen at every festival in Seoul, and maybe should. Someone could design a process where clubs and bars and restaurants get assigned hours of the day, or days of the weekend, to host their own festival event so that the stream of visitors is spread out, instead of every bar in Itaewon planning an event from 9pm-1am. It might take some tweaks to get a system everyone feels is fair, but it could work if some stickler in the bureaucracy really wanted to make himself a pain in the ass of every business proprietor in busy areas.
Again, if these measures are implemented in Itaewon, they should happen in a dozen areas around Seoul -- around Lotte Mall and Myeongdong on big sale days, around the stadiums and sports watching venues during the World Cup, and all protest zones.
My hope is that this was enough of a freak incident that nobody finds a way to turn it into a political bludgeon, no dumbass starts making arguments that there's something about Korean culture that makes Koreans particularly prone to crushing each other at Halloween parties, nor that foreign cultural festivals are clearly a blasphemy and Dangunshinhwa must be punishing Korea for letting its culture be sullied with foreign traditions.
Celebrity pastor blames the gays in five.... four.... three....
Keep safe, everyone. Hug the people you love, and keep your head on straight next time you go to a busy event.
This was a note I wrote on Facebook, but I think it deserves commemoration on my blog, too. It's not the first time I've written about mom on my blog (her eulogy is here, and my Jesa post, which is still one of my favorite blog posts that I've ever written, is here, and if you want to know more about Jesa -- korea's ritual to honor those who are gone, and the ancestors in particular, you can read about it here, or from Ask A Korean! here.)
Story: When mom wanted to finish a roll of film, she would walk into a room and say “hey everybody” and snap a picture of them all looking over with dull “whaa?” expressions, until the roll was full. Consistently bad, uninteresting pictures. This day, she had a roll of film, and started doing that, and me, Deb and Dan said, “no, Mom. Let US fill out the roll” and took a series of photos that are, to this day, some of my favorite pictures of the youngest three siblings.
September 8, 2005, was the day my mom left this earth. If any of you has ever spent some time with me and come away thinking I'm gentle, or caring, or a good listener, that I'm warm and affectionate, or encouraging, or good with kids, then you have met my mother as well, one step removed. If you have not thought those things, I take the blame entirely upon myself, because that is the kind of person she showed me to be, and I guess I failed to live up to that.
Most of these pictures are of mom. The one of me sitting in a tree was taken by her, and it has a story.
Rob alone, sittin' in a tree... story below.
See, for all her good qualities, mom was a spectacularly bad gift-giver. She just never got the hang of figuring out what other people would like, so she mostly got other people the thing SHE would have liked to get as a gift.
This led to a nadir one Christmas that involved some tears and a quick save through our family's very very weird sense of humor, but at that point mom kind of threw her hands up, and instead of trying to surprise us, she made a plan to take us each shopping on our birthdays: bring us to the mall or wherever, and let us pick out the thing we wanted or needed. This worked much better in general than trying to surprise us and disappointing us instead.
Near the end of my university years, she moved up a level: the best thing she could offer, really, was her time and her company. Mom was a wonderful person to be with, no matter what you were doing, so the last few birthdays I had with her, she figured out that the very best gift she could give me was to take me out to spend some dedicated time with her. She'd take us out to a play, or something we wanted to do or see. The picture of me in the tree was from one of those excursions. She picked me up at university and drove me into Vancouver, where we had tickets to see a play (Amadeus). Before the curtain opened, we hung out in Stanley Park, probably Vancouver's best landmark, and she'd brought a camera, so we snapped a few pictures, that being one of them, and one of my favorite photos of myself from that time, because of the day when she took it, which was a lovely day from top to bottom.
We saw the play, and then we went for dinner, and I had lobster for the first time in my life... Mom hadn't asked Dad for permission to eat such fancy stuff -- I suggested lobster almost as a joke, airily saying, "You know I've never had lobster!" with the subtext, "How ridiculous, suggesting such an expensive meal! Can you imagine if Dad, who makes the responsible money choices, heard us suggesting such fripperies?" (Dad ran the family checkbook), so she agreed to do it with a conspiratorial smile. The lobster was wonderful, and the feeling of mild transgression with your mom was another layer of fun on the entire day.
(We did get busted: mom paid for part of the meal with cash to hide how large the bill was, but Dad noticed a disproportionately large tip when he was balancing the checkbook, and mom 'fessed up. He couldn't do anything anyway: that money was already spent!)
Mom was the best at making people feel loved. The absolute best. Nobody's perfect, but that is the thing that stays with me all these years afterwards.
Grief is the mirror image of the love you had for someone: some loves never end, some people leave impacts on us that linger for our entire lives, whether they're still around or not, and where mom's love made me a better, kinder, more balanced or confident or generous person, each of those spots is a little hollow, a knot in the wood, where sorrow gathers now that she's gone.
But that's OK. It's normal, it's appropriate, I'll even say it's *proper* that such an important person in my life is still grieved, all these years later. She absolutely deserves the occasional tear or sob, the occasional melancholy 'wish you were here' dream (I had a dream where I introduced her to my son once), the occasional nostalgic thumb-through of the photo album. That's just the mirror image of the love and goodness she brought to my life, and ultimately, my life is richer and fuller both for the good things she gave me, and for the ways grieving her made me softer, more gentle, more empathetic, and better at showing my special people I love them while they are still around for me to appreciate them.
Miss you mom!
RIP
Mom with her oldest grandchild. She had a special relationship with him, and one of the hardest parts of losing her is that she never got to be a special Oma for my kid, or a special mom-in-law for my wife. My step-mom, Nana, is wonderful, and a blessing in all our lives, to be clear. I'm thankful for everything about her because she's just awesome. But I'm still sad Juniorseyo never met his Oma. It's hard, but those can both be true.
Mom and dad, at their 25th anniversary party. This is how Mom looks in my memory. A little soft, in just the right spots to give transcendent hugs.
Mom with Dad, in her last year. Losing weight because of stomach cancer. Fuck cancer.
Update: My sister Deb shared the post I wrote, which I've copied above, and added a few thoughts of her own, which were just lovely. I've had a few really nice responses and reflections from a few of the people who loved mom -- including one of her best friends, and a few cousins and relatives whose lives were touched by Mom's love, and I'm really grateful for them, too. How wonderful is it that seventeen years after someone died, they can still bring people together? That is just such a perfectly Mom thing to do.
So, with permission, here's what my sister Deb wrote.
[My brother wrote this linked post:] This is a beautifully crafted piece about my mom. My brother describes both her and the loss of her so perfectly.
One of my favourite memories of my mom was ALSO an excursion rather than a gift (I had a dream once where she NAILED Christmas. Every gift was perfect...I woke up laughing, realizing it had to be a dream because in real life that never happened!! 🤣🤣🤣)
My mom and I went walking one day up and down the walkway at White Rock. We did the beach on the way down, and the shops and restaurants on the way up.
We stopped for dinner and shared a Bellini, my first restaurant bought alcohol and still my favourite drink when I'm in the mood for a drink.
At the end of the day we had dessert (crème brûlée) and watched the sun set and rabbits frolic from a rooftop patio. It wasn't fancy, we didn't solve the world's problems, but we were together and I knew there was nowhere else mom would have wanted to be that day than spending time with me.
Mom loved unconditionally, laughed with her whole body and held onto the special moments and memories that were given to her in time shared.
I miss her on the good days and the hard days.
I don't wallow in sadness, I don't have a deep unforgiving ache, but Rob puts it very well, deep love leaves a deep hollow and I do have moments where I just wish that hollow could be filled.
That dream where mom gave great gifts? I woke up laughing, but also, I got in a few more great mom hugs during that dream, and I'm glad I remembered those when I woke up too.
17 years feels like forever and so fast all at the same time. Love you, mom.
/END QUOTE
I'm so grateful to my sister for sharing this. I never heard this story, nor about her (hilarious) dream where mom got every Christmas present right... but it's so great any time you get a few more mom hugs, even if they're in a dream. I love the line that "I knew there was nowhere else mom would have wanted to be that day than spending time with me." --one thing that was always great about mom is the way that when she was with you, she was with you -- she was fully present and focused on the person she was with. She died before the first smartphone appeared on the market, but I think she would have hated them more than anybody, because they cause people to be only half-present, half-looking at the phone, and mom was never less than 100% present for someone.
and I'm also grateful for my sister mentioning that mom laughed with her whole body -- things got silly in our house sometimes, and mom was a little small, and a little round, and when she really laughed hard, it looked like she'd roll right onto her back: a rock backwards so that her (so very short) legs were off the ground as she rocked back in her seat, accompanied with a welt-worthy thigh slap, and a full-throated belly-laugh that could be heard from outside the house. Oh, it was fun to try to get her to laugh like that.
Thanks again to every last person who saw and responded to my little FB tribute to mom, or who comments here. Grief doesn't have a time limit, and neither does love, and if this cluster of paragraphs can encourage someone to make a phone call or send a note to remind someone that they're loved, that'll be a perfect fit with mom's legacy, so go on and do that, and somebody new will get a chance to meet my mom, a few steps removed!
Love Rob
Speaking of grief, today, the 17th anniversary of mom's death, was also the day Queen Elizabeth II went to meet her maker. The whole English speaking world is sad on the day I'm remembering mom... Queen Elizabeth was my favorite royal by a long-shot, and carried a great deal of the English royal family's legitimacy on her strong shoulders. I wonder what will happen next, but QEII was awesome, and I'll miss her being around holding the entire rest of the royal family back from being sucked completely into a black hole of scandal.
USA just had 3.2 million people file for unemployment in a week. USA also just blew past China to take the world lead in Covid 19/ ChinaVirus TrumpVirus infections.
Meanwhile, US politicians are starting to float the idea that maybe a few hundred thousand deaths is just the price you have to pay to keep the economy chugging. (Seriously, fuck those guys.) That idea -- the "herd immunity" idea Boris Johnson floated in the UK is inhumane, and anybody who promotes it should have to pick which 20% of their parents (or beloved elderly relatives, friends or mentors over 70) "gets" to die to save the economy, and then sit at their bedsides.
THIS IS YOUR FUCKING PLAN? Holy shit I'm mad.
But... something's gotta give, right? You can't just lock down for eighteen months.
A friend, who is a paramedic (and you think your job is stressful) asked me how I think South Korea flattened the CoronaVirus curve, so I wrote this for her. I figured I'd share it because hey, why not? These are thoughts I've had spread out over a number of Facebook comments and things, but seems like a good time to get them all in one place. There are places where I paint with a very broad brush here. Deal with it.
Hi [redacted awesome person's name], you have asked me to talk about how Korea flattened the curve, and which actions South Korea took that I think contributed to that. I'm doing this with voice to text, so forgive me if there are weird voice recognition errors.
First, let's be clear, I think South Korea is not out of the woods yet. South Korea's big climb in infections was mostly from one super spreader in a city called Daegu. She went to a mass church service, and declined to get tested for covid-19, and was just generally reckless. At one point 80% of all the covid-19 cases in South Korea could be traced directly to this one woman. Google “patient 31” to learn more about her if you want. The number of cases in Seoul has been pretty steady rather than climbing exponentially, but also not decreasing.
Weirdo that I am, I'm commemorating the CoVid19 lockdown by watching plague movies, and because I love you, dear reader, I'm writing them up for you, and I'll end the series with a nice best-of countdown!
Scoring:
Films that fail to hold my attention get a DNF (Did Not Finish) and no score (that would be unfair).
Films that hold my attention are scored on four dimensions: Frightening (Is it the kind of scary that builds up, and stays with you afterward?) Dread & anxiety get points here. Scary (Is it the kind of scary that makes you jump in your seat, or wish you'd eaten a smaller lunch?) Surprises and gross-outs get points here. Plausible (Does the plague, and people's response to it, seem realistic, as if it could possibly happen?) Awesome (Is it a good movie? Does it hit its marks?)
Each of these dimensions will be scored out of five.
Finally, for bonus demerits/points: "But wait, there's more!" stinger (Does the film end by hinting that the infection is on its way to a sequel new location?) That's tacky, and I take away points depending on the amount of cheesiness.
I made a weird connection a while ago. Bear with me.
Mr Rogers is back in the zeitgeist these days, with an upcoming film where Tom Hanks plays him, and a documentary about the real man coming out last year. When the trailer for "Won't You Be My Neighbor" came out, a snippet of music caught my ear.
Catch it at 1:05.
Those horns rang a bell for me, thanks to a song from a CD I once had recommended to me by the guy at a Hongdae music shop. It was an album called Whiskey by Jay Jay Johanson. It was alright: my clearest memory of it was one of my coworkers viscerally hating it. But a song on it titled "I'm Older Now" sampled the song where that beautiful bit of horns first appeared, which is why I recognized it.
When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain Before high piled books in charactery Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain When I behold upon the night's starred face Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance And think that I may never live to trace Their shadows with the magic hand of chance And when I feel, fair creature of an hour That I shall never look upon thee more Never have relish in the faery power Of unreflecting love--then on the shore Of this wide world I stand alone and think Till love and fame to nothingness do think.
That is a poem by John Keats, the most poetic of English poets. Others were more important, more popular, or more often studied, but John Keats made English more beautiful than any writer has before or since. He gave us the Odes (to a Nightingale, to a Grecian Urn, and my own favorite, on Melancholy). His poetry is the most vivid, most sensuous, most alive poetry I've read, and to read it is to celebrate being alive.
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
John Keats died before his 26th birthday. The poem above meditates on how fleeting his life might be, and his fear that his death might come before he had written out all the poetry churning in his brain, which is exactly what happened. To love John Keats is to be forever teased by the would have, the could have, of a poet whose poetry reached heights few other poets ever could, but who was robbed of the chance to write more, just as we are now robbed of the chance to read it.
I woke up on Friday morning to the horrible news that another perfect artist, another artist whose work transcends time and language and genre, whose art, at its best, skips blithely past our defenses and strikes something deep within us like a dart, has been taken from us too soon. Prince is dead. How can we go on? Prince is dead.
I did not grow up in Minnesota, like a few of my friends on Facebook, whose grief I cannot imagine. I did not know Prince personally, and I can't imagine what his loved ones are feeling right now. I did not even grow up on Prince's music: I was just a little too young to catch him at his apex. My musical taste's development caught the end of his prime as an absolute world-straddling hitmaker, and I have "7" on the mix-tapes I made by listening to the radio with my fingers hovering over the "record" button, but I was too young for Purple Rain, Sign O'The Times, and Kiss, all the more for 1999 and Little Red Corvette. I was around for a few of the "Prince or Michael Jackson" conversations, and for the Love Symbol replacing his name. Prince didn't belong to me: his activism, name-checking Black Lives Matter, naming the first song on his last album "Baltimore" and singing that if there is no justice, there is no peace: the struggles he sings about are ones I care about, but they are not my story. I admit it is impossible for Prince to mean as much to me as he means to other people.
There is no reason I should be quite as distraught as I am about Prince's passing: Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson and David Bowie didn't make me feel this way. Pressed to it, I can't think of a single artist whose death would make me feel the same way Prince's has, and so I sit a step removed, and watch myself grieve, startled at how hard this hit me.
Which other celebrity could have the lights shone on public monuments turned purple, and for everyone to know exactly what it meant, and who it was for? What artist was talented enough to claim an entire color for himself (and not even an obscure one like puce or chartreuse, but one of the big, "in-every-crayola-box" ones), and for everybody to go "Yeah. OK. You can have purple from now on," like they did for Prince? What artist was big enough that you said "Prince" and nobody said "Prince who?" (even my royalist sister-in-law)? Nobody.
I play every version of Purple Rain I can find again and again, I plumb my friends' Facebook feeds for articles, tracklists, videoclips and bootlegs, I watch interviews and tributes, I read distraught articles by people who loved Prince like an uncle. In the absence of a friend who can come over, maybe this is how I can feel connected to the mourning: by sharing in the videos and articles that all the other mourners are also watching and reading. Thank you Michael, Regina and Jane. The links you've been sharing on your Facebook pages have helped me feel like I'm sharing with someone. And that poem by John Keats runs through my head when Purple Rain does not.
Prince was the most talented musician I will probably ever encounter in my life. He wrote every song, played every instrument, sang every vocal, and produced and mixed every song for Sign O'The Times: every single step of recording one of the best albums in my collection was completely and solely done by him. His songs all hit the mark -- whatever he's trying for, he does it. And then live, you can't take your eyes off him, and his guitar solos are all perfect combinations of wild unpredictability and technical perfection. All I can do is wonder, and reel in awe.
To impress upon my wife how important Prince is, I explained that for much of the 80s, "Who's better: Michael Jackson or Prince?" was a legitimate question. It seems Purple Rain didn't make as big an impact here in South Korea as Thriller did, but that seemed to be a good frame. But what that comparison doesn't cover is that Michael Jackson hadn't been relevant as an artist for a decade by the time he passed on. Until the end, Prince was recording music, performing, mentoring other artists, writing songs, producing, creating, and supporting communities and activists. That longevity (as well as staying out of tabloids) is why I don't think we can argue anymore that it's a contest between Prince and Michael Jackson. Jackson probably had a higher peak in terms of popularity, but Prince's footprints are deeper and wider spread.
And then I think that, like John Keats, I am sure that Prince had more music in his head, that we will not get to hear. I realize that this is a selfish thought, and also that Prince has done so much that it is right to celebrate him, and not to cheaply wish we could have yet more. But the world is poorer. Music is poorer for his passing. He had more young artists to mentor. He had more albums to make of his own, and more collaborations, and more stages to crash and songs to raise to a new level with a perfect guitar solo. His talent and his ability to perform stayed with him right until 2016.
I did not like Prince right away. In fact, for much of my 20s, I had an out and out prejudice against music from the 80s. My music taste developed in the early 90s (they say the music you liked around age 13-14 is the kind of music you will like for all your life), and at that age, grunge music was backlashing against the synth pop sounds of the 80s, so my distaste for keyboards and that "Hungry Like A Wolf" sound kept me away from 80s music entirely for years.
Prince is the one who brought me back. The song Purple Rain, specifically, was the song that went right past my guards and defenses, and convinced me to give the 80s another listen. It is the ultimate confessional song. It is the very sound of a person pouring their heart out in music, it is an absolute show-stopper, yet so moving and personal at the same time. How a man could create that song, which holds so much meaning for so many people, hits them so deeply, amazes me. It is one of the greatest songs I know, from beginning to end. It is a song that owns its greatness, wears its ambition on its sleeve, and actually achieves its moon-shot. Starting with the undeniable Purple Rain, Prince's music slowly, irresistibly grew on me, and he steadily climbed in my esteem, until now, when he is one of my top two artists, and every song I can ever hope for from him is already in the bag, or the vault.
Prince is gone. I am sad, and I want to be around other people who loved him. But I also celebrate him. I celebrate his humanitarian work. I celebrate his genius. All those perfect solos and all the different personas he sang with. The way he could be passionate and confessional, fun, goofy, sexy, dirty, silly, whimsical, experimental or as "pop" as pop can be, without ever ceasing to be Prince: that he could contain so much inside him, still inspires and awes. Prince is the John Keats of music: a pure genius, unsullied even when he sings about ugly things. A perfect conduit of joy, grief, love, of all the emotions we have, making us all more alive, helping us experience the world more vividly and sensuously and abundantly, then taken from us too soon. So, thank you Prince, for the gift you shared with us for your time on the planet. Thank you for giving 80s music back to me, for moving your fans in so many different ways, for making my kindergarten students and my son dance, and for connecting everybody who is now sharing purple-themed grief on their websites and facebook walls. Music brings people together, and now, even in our grief, we are not alone, because we love you, and we will miss you.
It's a year after the Sewol Ferry disaster. Later today I'll walk around a few of the mourning and commemoration sites. Perhaps I will post photos if I deem it fit to take photos. Chances are good that I won't, because people deserve privacy for their grief. [Update: yeah. No photos.]
I wrote this last year, in the original aftermath, after visiting the memorial outside City Hall, which was there all the way from April until December, when they finally took it down to build the outdoor skating rink.
Socially and culturally, it's been long enough to fairly assess some of the effects of the disaster here in Korea, and while some would say the one year anniversary is a crass time to do so, because of the families, others would say there isn't a better one. Put bluntly, the Sewol disaster chucked a pipe bomb into the national psyche, and everybody's been scrambling to return to normal, or re-assert the status quo. The status quo has been re-asserted, but those who like to kick back against the status quo are a little larger in number, and their grievance is a little closer to the surface, than it was before.
(Hopefully Arirang won't get indicted for defaming the president.) In fact, given the way things have gone lately for critics of the president, I'd better take a moment to say I also think it's a great idea for President Park to leave the country on the one-year anniversary of the disaster that was the biggest embarrassment for the administration so far. (And that's despite the best efforts of everybody taking bribes. You know things are bad when you have to narrow your search terms down so much just to get a news link: Here are the results for "Korea president corruption scandal April 2015." To differentiate from the other corruption scandals.) Buggering off out of country is another in a long line of politically pragmatic or astute moves and/or/mostly non-moves. Really! It's a great idea, so that she won't be around and remind people how long it took for her to show up, and then how much longer to show leadership, and then how quickly before she and hers started shirking responsibility by burying their accusers under rhetorical, political and legal obstacles or rabbit trails again, after the original disaster. This is clearly a politically savvy move to get people looking forward to Korea's next president. Way to inspire hope and faith in Korean democracy, President Park! I hope she and her team get all the rewards they deserve!
Investigations into the disaster have been mired in political and legal wrangling repeatedly, particularly when someone wanted to increase the scope of the investigation to anything broader than "let's pin as much blame as we can onto the people who are already in jail, and make sure to avoid any investigation that might discover that rabid deregulation of entire industries was the thing that allowed the Sewol to get so dangerously overloaded, or allowed it on the seas at all. Instead, the ruling party is trying to discredit the families of victims.
Korea's progressive party badly misplayed the hand it had been dealt, attempting to channel rage and anger over the Sewol ferry into success in the 2014 by-elections, but forgetting to attach a coherent vision and policy goals and, you know, have a platform other than "We're mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore!" leading to a humiliating failure that's a black mark on the records of every progressive leader involved. Since that defeat, the Korean political left has returned to its usual habit of eating itself.
This is just an eye test sort of judgment, but shit hasn't changed. Public safety crackdowns, if they happen, are pretty much headline bait, and not sustained enough to actually cause changes in behavior. Like using a flashlight to get rid of cockroaches instead of pesticide. The frequency of news stories about death or injury due to sheer negligence or disregard remains about the same. The leaders you'd expect to effect this kind of change seem mostly to be interested in covering their own asses. And buses run red lights and crosswalks, and people forget to put on their seat belts, and motorbikes go up on sidewalks of dive through traffic at about the same frequency as ever. It'd be nice to at least see leaders going through the motions of acting as if they were going to try to improve public safety, at least. Before the new showcase tower in Jamsil falls over or something. Korea is third in the OECD in work-related deaths. Traffic statistics are equally dismaying.
The captain of the ferry was prosecuted, and they're seeking the freakin' death penalty for him, as if this is the thing that will expiate all the grief. You know, rather than tangible evidence of a deeper and more energetic regard for safety over speed and profit starting at the policy level and enforced right down to the rank and file. Which would take time... but again, it'd be nice to see our leaders going after that, rather than mostly just interfering with the investigation as if they have something to hide. (read the last half of this article for a description of what I mean). Now, I have more to say about the death penalty, but even all that aside, I think the death penalty is an embarrassing overreach and an example of populism in one of the very, very, absolute last places it belongs.
There's more, but what started as a messy failure at multiple levels leading to a needless, needless loss of lives, has resulted in a messy political mess that hasn't really accomplished much at all, other than undermining the faith of another generation in its elders to provide wise and long-seeing leadership. I would be happy if our young folks got angry instead of just discouraged, but we'll see how long that lasts. I'm surprised to hear just how jaded I am about this, because normally, in terms of social progress and the arc of history, I am very much an optimist. I do believe that even a messy situation that brings ugly things to light often ends up as a net good, because once ugly things are brought to light, people can start doing things about them. But that's not what I see this time, and it's fucking depressing.
If I were melodramatic, I'd say that every day, every year, every presidential term that goes by when we don't clean things up, root out the corruption and the complacent "it's OK" "just get it done" or "not my problem" attitudes that contributed to this, or at least advance another step in the process of doing so, we're killing these kids again, burying another class of school kids in a watery grave, or another dozen migrant workers under I-beams in an industrial accident, or poisoning another roomful of electronics company employees with industrial chemicals. It's not often that the cost of those kinds of attitudes gets highlighted so starkly, but as I wrote in my last Sewol elegy, we're still waiting for a miracle.
And it hasn't come yet.
Rest in peace, once again, children of the Sewol. May the heroes who push against the complacency and corruption yet arise, and may it take shorter than I fear it will, as the remnants of Grimy Old Korea die off, before proponents of Safe New Korea have their day.
Here are the closing words of my elegy for the Sewol, written (a little less than) a year ago. This is the promise we are waiting for those in power to make good on.
Maybe this tragedy, after so many ignored warnings, will finally be the violent turning of a new leaf. Maybe the shame on one side, and rage on the other, will finally stop settling for band-aid solutions and transmute into real change, real accountability, until Grimy Old Korea is a closed chapter, and public safety is no longer a luxury for the moneyed. That would be a different kind of miracle than we started off hoping for.
There was a promise implicitly made in Grimy Old Korea's heyday, that the nation under construction would be worth the work. That sacrifice and strain would mean future generations enjoy a better nation than the parents inherited. That was the deal. There is a yearning for Korea to be prosperous, but to round that out by also being compassionate, not just toward shareholders, but toward the strangers who live and die, grieve and starve, and still check nervously for Grimy Old Korea barreling toward them at every crosswalk.
I wish that the next generation of leaders, contractors and entrepreneurs would see their neighbors, and moreover their customers, tenants and passengers, as part of the great "We," not just during times of crisis and joy, but all the time. The delivery that we want right now is not the one that buzzed by on a sidewalk motorbike, with a metal takeout box that nearly clipped my son. We'd rather have those in power deliver on that promise made in the 60s and 70s, that one day we will be able to enjoy, in peace and safety, the fruit of the sacrifices and griefs we have been asked to bear for too too long. We've worked so hard and lost so much: why are we still so unhappy? Why do these things still happen?
The takeout delivery always arrives on time, but the delivery that really matters, has been delayed again and again. And with our yellow ribbons waving in the downtown, maybe that is the miracle we are still waiting for.
A few news items have been blazing across my Facebook wall, and I'd like to weigh in briefly on a few of them. I'll be as concise as I can.
Sewol Ferry Law, Riot Police Overkill and Overreaching
The National assembly is deadlocked, as the ruling party and the opposition party cannot agree to the conditions for a special investigation into the Sewol Ferry disaster, and the opposition party are boycotting participation in any other parliamentary actions while waiting for the leading party to capitulate to their demands. Read up here. And here. And this one is my favorite. This longer piece at The Marmot's Hole looks into the motivations of the political players.
At the same time, the Gwanghwamun area, which I regularly travel through and around in my weekly schedule, is also deadlocked, with police buses and riot troops turning broad roadways into traffic bottlenecks. In my opinion, the number of police sent out there is overkill by a magnitude of order. There look to be 10 police for every one protestor I've seen. On the other hand... perhaps that mad overkill is what dissuades larger crowds from bothering to show up... and I can remember back to 2008 and 2009, when protesters would overrun police barriers and block traffic all weekend in Gwanghwamun, just because they could, misguidedly thinking that snarling the entire downtown would gain sympathy, rather than turning every driver against their cause... and well, at least the police keep one lane open.
I'm annoyed by both situations, because both dumb deadlocks are based on one side presuming that the other side will go nuclear - protestors getting violent and destroying police buses and attacking police, and politicians headhunting the president at every opportunity - given the tiniest shred of leeway. The problem, in both cases, is that in the past both protestors and opposition politicians have done exactly that, given any opportunity, so while I really hate all this recalcitrance and stubbornness, I see where it's coming from, and while I really hope the Sewol families get justice, and a full accounting for what went wrong, and they don't seem to be getting that from the ruling party, it's a shame they have to align with the political left, who come across (as usual) as if they're in it more for the damage they can inflict on the ruling party than out of any actual concern for the families devastated in this tragedy. I knew this Sewol thing would get politicised eventually, but I'm disgusted by how it's happened.
I keep going back and forth, like Louis CK.
On the one side... when a party acts as if it's hiding wrongdoing (perhaps simply out of habit), after a while people start guessing it's because there is some serious wrongdoing just waiting for the right rock to be overturned.
On the other side, it makes sense that they are acting defensively, trying to pre-emptively prevent the investigative committee from turning into a presidential head-hunting team, because the progressive party goes after the president whenever they can. Given their track record for overreaching, they've given the conservatives no reason to expect they won't do it again. Nor me.
Part of the story hinges on the formation, and composition, of a "fact finding committee" -- and the formation of special committees has always been fraught in South Korea, where everyone suspects everyone has an agenda, and/or has something to hide. The sordid track record of politicising Truth and Reconciliation Commissions is a good place to start for the way grievances never seem to get resolved in South Korea, especially when they involve powerful people.
It's a mess. It's a quagmire. It's the reason Korean people don't have faith in their government. It's the reason Korean people latch onto newcomers who promise to "change the way politics is done" -- as if it could be done, when every politician except that one person has something to lose in the case of actual change. Koreans seem to expect the worst of their politicians, yet Korean politicians have repeatedly lived down, and then sunk below that expectation.
Could the president have done something to make the Sewol tragedy unfold differently than it did? Probably, but not on the day it happened. There are heads that richly deserve to roll, and people who did get away with stuff. Who have covered up their shame more cleverly and subtly than the Sewol captain, and who'll probably get away with it. Shit is still happening that shows that actual concern for safety hasn't been impressed on the rank and file, those to whom we trust our safety (Saemangeum seawall workers were out having dinner instead of warning boats not to approach the seawall while the gate was open).
Dog meat is a generational thing, and if foreign lobby groups had ignored it in 1988, causing certain people to cling to "our culture" mainly because "dem furriners" were telling them not to, and screw them! I believe dog meat would probably already be nearly extinct.
Humanity and cruelty aside, it's economics that will do dog dishes in, and there just isn't a future in the market for it, when nearly every consumer is grey-haired. It'll go the way of bbundaegi (which is also slowly vanishing, with much less fanfare, because foreign lobby groups never convinced a group of Koreans it's part of "their" culture).
An academic paper I came across while researching the '88 olympics, discovered these outcomes from global pressure to ban dog meat in Korea during the buildup to the olympics:
The goal of this paper has been to assess the world polity perspective for one empirical case: the debate surrounding dog meat consumption in South Korea. In this case, global cultural scripts rejecting dog meat consumption did not translate directly or in a predictable fashion to conforming Korea’s practices into the world system. In this case, integration of world cultural norms has transformed existing cultural practices into something not quite resembling what came before (traditional dog meat eating practices) nor what the adherents of the world polity perspective might predict (the abolition of dog meat). Rather, dog meat eating practices have transformed into a more widespread cultural activity legitimised by greater protections against animal cruelty and greater awareness of the role of dog meat consumption within the discourse of South Korean national pride.
*Minjoo Oh & Jeffrey Jackson (2011) "Animal Rights vs. Cultural Rights: Exploring the Dog Meat Debate in South Korea from a World Polity Perspective." Journal of Intercultural Studies. 32.1, 31-56.
That is to say, by trying to ban dog meat, global animal rights groups created a backlash, causing a practice that had been dying out anyways on its own, to be practiced and cherished as a site for practicing and celebrating cultural identity. That cultural pride association had become strong enough by 2002 (World Cup) that anti-dog lobbyers were met with resistance that used the language of respect for cultural uniqueness. If international animal rights folks had said nothing in 1986-7, I think dog meat would probably have died away on its own before 2000, lacking any wind in its sagging sails.
I said in previous posts -- meat is meat, and I have trouble accepting arguments that it's OK to eat one critter, but not another, and I've always argued that Korean society will age out of dog meat in its own sweet time. Interesting to see I'm being proven right.
The Pub Thing
The offensive sign in the pub, and the outraged response, has been beaten into the ground on Facebook, and was blogged about at Asia Pundits, Adam R Carr's blog (which tries to sniff through the (in?)sincerity of the proprietors' initial responses and denials), and Korea Observer, who attended the "apology" night, where the owner got too drunk to apologize (yikes!). A surprising number of people have come out on Facebook to defend or pooh-pooh outrage over an action that is indefensible in any way.
Mostly this summary was an excuse to share this
funny image from the Dokdo is Ours post.
For the record, the signs were only up at the location for about an hour, but the same article by Korea Observer that mentions that fact, seems also to give us a clue as to the real motivations for putting up the sign: a group of bar patrons from ... um... a country that would be excluded if all Africans were banned... who were bothering females in the club. Even Dokdo Is Ours (hey hey!) got in on the feeding frenzy, ending with a joke about the way so many people have trouble naming more than a handful of countries in Africa, and talking about Africa as if it were a single, undifferentiated country.
If I were the bar owner, I'd close down for a week and re-open under a new name. But honestly, given now many people attending bars in Itaewon either aren't tuned into expat facebook activism anyway, and how short expat memory is because of high turnover, not to mention how many people drinking in Itaewon aren't even foreigners anymore these days, I doubt a Facebook activist run boycott (if anybody bothered to organise one) would even have a serious effect. The location probably matters more than whether the proprietors are or aren't racist, but next time we suggest a sign saying "the management reserves the right to refuse service to any customer at any time" instead of "No Africans because... um... Ebola, I guess."
You can hear more of my thoughts on that issue at the Cafe Seoul Podcast -- some of my blogging energy has been going into the Cafe Seoul Podcast lately, and I am rather pleased with it. It's put together by my friend Eugene, and a couple of other pals, and our last few episodes have all made me happy. Maybe they will make you happy, too.
I, like everyone else of my generation, was staggered by the unexpected passing of Robin Williams: we were raised on his movies. There were conversations about which Robin Williams movies we loved (Hook, Aladdin, Good Will Hunting, The Fisher King, Dead Poets' Society, are my top five), the ones we not-quite-loved (Death To Smoochy, What Dreams May Come, and Jakob the Liar were two of the movies that taught me that even actors I like can make bad movies), and who can forget his appearance on Whose Line Is It Anyway, topped only by Richard Simmons' "Possibly The Best Five Minutes On The Internet", or his stand-up.
And the conversation veered into discussions of suicide. Cracked had the subtly titled "Why Funny People Kill Themselves", and my sister-in-law wrote this beautiful bit on her blog, which I'm copying but not linking, because I didn't ask permission, and if she wants my readers on her blog, she can put the link in the comments. Perhaps she doesn't.
Cancer, and diabetes, and kidney disease, and strokes, and fatal heart attacks, and Alzheimers are all horrible illnesses. But you know what happens at the end of them?
The person dies OF the disease.
We say, "Shirley died OF cancer," "James kidneys failed him," "Bonnie had a horrible stroke." The disease killed them, got them, attacked them. The disease was not associated at all with WHO they were, quite the opposite in fact, the disease got them.
I don't know why it is that this isn't the case in with mental illness. We likely won't speak of Robin Williams "dying of depression," or being the victim of "brain failure." Forever his death will be tainted with the tag "suicide," and in that, just so many complicated and avoided issues.
...When people commit suicide, they are sick. End of story. They are sick like any dying person laying in a hospital bed, only they are likely getting far less comfort, love, and compassion in the hours leading to their passing.
They die OF something. They do not choose to die. The disease has killed them, at least any shred left of who they once were.
Similar sentiments here. Fact is, depression and mental illness still face a stigma other diseases don't. Nobody goes into the cancer ward saying "Why don't you just... not have cancer any more?" and if they did they've be acknowledged without debate as an ignorant asshole. But people do that for depression. "I'm getting tired of you and all this leukaemia shit. Snap out of it!" Said no-one, ever. "You know, maybe a little exercise is what you need for that liver failure." "Some volunteering might help put your muscular dystrophy in perspective." "I think you're just having tuberculosis for attention." So... it's terribly sad we've lost another hero of my childhood, particularly for his family and the people around him. Hopefully it will start more conversations about mental health, which will have positive outcomes in the end. But if that happens, to be clear, it doesn't mean it was worth it that even one more person, famous or not, lost the battle with depression. Every life lost is a deep tragedy.
Those are a few of the things floating across my brain-dar these days. Hope it was interesting for you to read, and that the thoughts are mostly well-formed, rather than half-baked.
If you're connected to Korea, you've probably spotted this image. On social media, everyone had this image or a yellow ribbon like it as their online profile photos.
The Korea Herald explains that the yellow ribbon campaign commemorated, and as time went by, mourned the victims of the April 16 Sewol Ferry disaster. The text says "하나의 작은 움직임이 큰기적을," translated by The Herald as "one small movement, big miracles." The ribbon pictured first turned up on April 21st, but there were no such miracles after the rescues made on the first day. We are still waiting.
As the mourning continues, I notice something I have always admired about Koreans: in times of great joy or crisis, the entire nation galvanizes. South Korea is usually fractured and polarized: north/south, Gyeongsan/Jeolla, political and class and generational fault lines all regularly explode into public antipathy. Yet World Cup Fever still carries everyone away, the figure skating hero captures our eyes and dreams, and then she is no longer Yuna Kim, but "Our Yuna." It becomes "Our team." There is also "Korea's singer" "Korea's little sister" and Korea's representative X in diverse fields. When a Korean does well abroad they are suddenly everyone's brother, sister, uncle, aunt. The same spirit brings Korea together in times of grief and crisis. People pulled gold teeth out of their mouths, and gave up heirloom gold, to help out during the 1997 Financial crisis. Why? Because it's "Our" country, and "Our" crisis. Much of the language at the Sewol memorial in City Hall is familial, or collective.
At the City Hall Plaza memorial.
Those yellow ribbon images again.
This heart was made of yellow paper boats, hand-folded.
And all of Korea grieves now, because these are "Our" children, taken away through entirely preventable causes. "We" failed to protect them. "We" let scofflaws and crooks willfully put lives at risk over a profit margin, and it is already too late for "our" lost children.
One feeling I've picked up is that these are not isolated cases, either. "We" feel that it could have been any of us. Everybody went on school trips like this. One day my son will. Everybody has boarded a train or a boat not knowing whether it cleared its last inspection with room to spare, or just barely, or only because somebody was hurried, or called in a favor. On the streets, we have all passed the preschool with a plastic slide instead of a fire escape, tut-tutted helmet-less scooter drivers weaving through traffic. In my first year, a fire lit by some kid in my seventh floor hagwon was doused with water carried from the bathroom sink, because the legally required fire extinguishers were locked in the owner's office. In my second year, our seventh-story kindergarten had one day of classes on the second floor while the fire inspector came by, because the seventh floor had a permit for special activities but not regular classes. Our secondary fire escape was a pulley. Just this January, I saw a car tear through a crosswalk at passing lane speed, and had a middle-school girl crossed two steps faster, I would have seen her die. These are anecdata: not much on their own, but Korea's workplace injury and traffic fatality statistics confirm what the smell test suggests: there but for the grace of God go any of us.
At times like this it feels to me like Korea is two different countries at the same time, one built right on top of the other. The first is a corrupt kleptocracy, a country of dirty fire traps, short cuts and sweat shops, held together by guts and profit, run by wealthy wheeler-dealers with well-placed friends, populated with beaten down factory workers, low-wage drones, headlong delivery drivers, and the discarded humans who didn't run fast enough, now collecting recycling material on the street. Buildings with poor foundations, sketchy wiring, bad welding and corners that aren't square, literally or figuratively. Get it done, do it fast, next contract. All of Korea looked this way from the 1950s to the late 80s. Let's call it Grimy Old Korea, and have a moment of silence for Jeon Tae-il, the martyr of Grimy Old Korea, and the patron saint of what came after.
Korean language doesn't always include pronouns.
Literally, it says: "Sorry. Won't forget you."
Spirit of the phrase: "We're sorry. We won't forget you."
People could lay white flowers on the display, and bow.
There is another Korea built over top of Grimy Old Korea. Construction started in the 1990s. This is a Korea where taking a year abroad happens. Where kids grew up with cellphones, and people visit coffee shops and have photo blogs. Its citizens grew up wondering where to find free wi-fi, unlike their grandparents, who grew up wondering if they would eat meat that week. In this Korea people buy organic. They buy new shoes instead of visiting the cobbler near the bus stop. They wrinkle noses at squatter toilets. Let's call the country they live in Shiny New Korea. It has public parks that are no smoking zones. Grimy Old Korea smokes there anyways, though.
At City Hall
Money is part of it, of course. Living in Shiny New Korea is pay as you go, and Korea is as safe as you can afford it to be, up to a point. Not all rich are part of Shiny New Korea, though. If you've ever had gangsters evict a tenant, or settled a grievance with a lead pipe, you're part of Grimy Old Korea. And not everyone trying to inhabit Shiny New Korea is privileged: the distinction cuts across generation and education and geographical region as well as class. Many would-be Shiny New Citizens are simply concerned parents and grandparents, buying second-hand foreign imports less for the prestige and more for the assurance that German and Swedish inspection codes are less susceptible to greasy palms. They scour blogs and word-of-mouth networks to verify what's good, what's safe, which preschools meet fire codes and run background checks on their teachers, and which restaurants don't disinfect. Those hours spent looking things up are the tribute they pay to ward Grimy Old Korea off another day.
The parents and grandparents with blood, skin, and kin in the game hope public transportation and public buildings are managed and inspected by members of Shiny New Korea, doing their jobs to the letter, and not the other kind. But even if you spare no cost, track the user reviews and get the import with extra airbags, sometimes Grimy Old Korea runs a red light coming the other way, and there's nothing you can do. Grimy Old Korea cannot be shut out entirely, and it can snatch away your kid, your dream, or your health, just like that.
To be fair, Grimy Old Korea had a good run, and accomplished a lot: the vitality, the entrepreneurship, the energy and determination of those same generations that filled the country breakneck quick with fire traps, tombstone apartment blocks and smokestacks, also demanded and achieved, at great human cost, a democracy wherein the Shiny New Citizens are free to complain about the wi-fi. Korea's modern history is knotty, and resists simplifying narratives.
Memorial at Cheonggyecheon Plaza
Academics and technocrats would employ the language of uneven development: advancement always follows the money first, before extending to everyone else. And in a country that developed as quickly as South Korea, it's no surprise that the contrast is sharp. Parts of this country feel like somebody threw a white tablecloth over a table cluttered with takeout. Of course the crystalware is crooked: there's a side dish beneath it! But with countries, you can't just clear and wipe the table before setting out the nicer new dishes. And some of the old dishes are nice, in their fashion.
Shiny New Korea and Grimy Old Korea don't often see eye to eye. Grimy Old Korea sidesteps the accusations of recklessness and ruthlessness with the language of nation building. It takes a tragedy like this for Grimy Old Korea to hang its head, to stop pleading "It's what everybody was doing!" and agree that they all rushed too quick, overlooked too much, and favored filling their own coffers over designing a nation made for its people.
Inside a globe of yellow ribbons:
the white flowers used in Korean funerals
Maybe this tragedy, after so many ignored warnings, will finally be the violent turning of a new leaf. Maybe the shame on one side, and rage on the other, will finally stop settling for band-aid solutions and transmute into real change, real accountability, until Grimy Old Korea is a closed chapter, and public safety is no longer a luxury for the moneyed. That would be a different kind of miracle than we started off hoping for.
There was a promise implicitly made in Grimy Old Korea's heyday, that the nation under construction would be worth the work. That sacrifice and strain would mean future generations enjoy a better nation than the parents inherited. That was the deal. There is a yearning for Korea to be prosperous, but to round that out by also being compassionate, not just toward shareholders, but toward the strangers who live and die, grieve and starve, and still check nervously for Grimy Old Korea barreling toward them at every crosswalk.
I wish that the next generation of leaders, contractors and entrepreneurs would see their neighbors, and moreover their customers, tenants and passengers, as part of the great "We," not just during times of crisis and joy, but all the time. The delivery that we want right now is not the one that buzzed by on a sidewalk motorbike, with a metal takeout box that nearly clipped my son. We'd rather have those in power deliver on that promise made in the 60s and 70s, that one day we will be able to enjoy, in peace and safety, the fruit of the sacrifices and griefs we have been asked to bear for too too long. We've worked so hard and lost so much: why are we still so unhappy? Why do these things still happen?
The takeout delivery always arrives on time, but the delivery that really matters, has been delayed again and again. And with our yellow ribbons waving in the downtown, maybe that is the miracle we are still waiting for.
People could write a note on these papers. So I did.
