Month: June 2021

Part Fourteen: Tomorrow Comes

In the aftermath of the Uprising, Chun Doo-hwan moved quickly to consolidate his control over Korea. The dictator and his cronies pressured the Cabinet to declare a special tribunal investigating the incident, chaired by Chun himself. Before a month had passed, the tribunal had indicted opposition politician Kim Dae-jung (remember him? The perennial gadfly for the militarists) for inciting the rebellion and sentenced him to death, along with several dozen others. Waving the “need for stability” in the face of the Northern threat at the United States, the regime shuttered newspapers, closed down opposing political parties, and arrested or fired journalists who wouldn’t go along with the party line. Across the country, at the behest of the insecure Chun, police departments cracked down, bringing in more than 60,000 citizens for questioning, arresting some 3,000, and shipping tens of thousands off to military camps for ‘further education.’ By August, the puppet President Choi was gone and Chun was elected with a totally plausible 99.9% of the vote. In the face of this, the Carter administration more or less shrugged, the President saying in a televised address that he’d obviously prefer democracy, but we couldn’t choose our allies.

However, while Chun and the US foreign policy establishment would have liked nothing more than to sweep the Gwangju Incident, as they referred to it, under the rug and forget that the slaughter of thousands of citizens had ever happened, the people of Korea stubbornly refused to get with the program. The truth about what had happened in South Jeolla continued to leak out in the months and years to come, an ulcer eating away at the Chun regime. For example, on May 30th, just three days after Splendid Holiday, a young college student, Kim Ue-gi, climbed to the top of one of Seoul’s hundreds of skyscrapers – and hurled himself to his death. Along the way he scattered thousands of flyers proclaiming the truth of the massacre in Gwangju. It was an act of self-martyrdom to demonstrate his devotion to democracy, reminiscent of the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves to protest the Diem presidency in South Vietnam 15 years earlier. Indeed, two weeks later, on June 9th, a former labor organizer named Kim Jong-tae burned himself to death in Seoul after handing out more Gwangju leaflets. And every May thereafter, Chun had to deal with the headache of college kids hurling themselves off buildings while screaming denunciations of his regime, which made his insistence that he loved democracy, that he loved the Republic of Korea just a bit harder to swallow.

For the thousands of rebels – students rounded up in the inital fighting, rebels taken during the fall of the city, and ordinary citizens rounded up in the crackdown afterwards – the ordeal continued for months. They were kept in hot, overcrowded prison cells, poorly fed and poorly treated, around Jeolla. Eventually, most would be released, after months, sometimes years. Some never recovered. Many were tortured, as the regime obsessively tried to get each and every rebel to denounce Kim Dae-jung as the organizer of the rebellion. The Catholic Church, which took upon itself the duty of overseeing the welfare of the prisoners, documented in one letter about Kim Cheong-bae (For example):

Quote

“Mr. Kim was detained at dawn on the 27th of May by the Martial Law Command for having held the position of student representative on the Citizens’ Committee to Seek Solutions to the Kwangju Disturbance. He was tortured day and night, was hit on the head with an M-16 rifle butt, had two teeth broken, was beaten severely on the face and forehead, and still bears the scars from all of these beatings. Only after losing consciousnessthree times and having been subjected to forms of violence and torture beyond human imagination did he bend to his interrogators’ demands that he put his fingerprint on the false “confession” contained in the indictment (Communiqué, March 1, 1981, p. 40).”

Also the case of Park Yon-son, another university student:

Quote

“At the urging of his father, Mr. Park turned himself in to the Joint Investigative Command on June 3. From that time until June 7, he was beaten and tortured repeatedly, and on suffering severe damage to his spinal cord, he fell into a coma. Even after he was transferred to the army’s General Hospital in Kwangju and although he showed signs of mental disorder, he was not given appropriate treatment. Instead, he was made to take painkillers continuously and has lost his ability to speak. The indictment against him has been terminated for the present, yet his family’s request to have him released due to his severe physical ailment was refused. He is still being held in the intensive care ward of the hospital (Communiqué, March 1, 1981, p. 40).”

Most prisoners were released in 1981, after Chun announced an amnesty for all political prisoners and an end to martial law just before his visit with the newly inaugurated American President.

The final casualty count, as I have said, is difficult to know. Officially, based on the 1987 inquiries (see below), the government admitted to less than 200 deaths. The Injured Person’s association claims 284 dead and 2700 injured, which seems to be in the ballpark. A final count is difficult to determine, because so many lives were destroyed by the whirlwind of violence over those may days. Chang Pok-Son suffered a blow to her head during the fighting and was in and out of mental hospitals through the 1980s. She committed suicide in 1993. Kim Chon-sul saw his wife, Park Yon-ok, killed by paratroopers. He became an alcoholic and drank himself to death by 1984. Professor Myong No-gun was 46 years old when he supported the students of Chonnam University – he died 20 years later and was buried in the 5.18 Memorial cemetery. His wife sadly commented that those involved in the uprising all seemed to die too soon.

The Gwangju ulcer recurred every spring while Chun was in power. In May 1981, students in Seoul surged into the streets on the anniversary of the massacre. The secret police waded in, breaking skulls and arresting the biggest trouble makers, and hundreds of students were expelled. But the protests continued. In May 1983, Kim Young-sam, one of the two Kims in the opposition, began a hunger strike on the second anniversary of the Uprising. The other Kim, Kim Dae-jung (who had escaped execution and was living in exile in the United States), issued statements of sympathy. The two Kims joined forces thereafter, and on May 18, 1984, the third anniversary, they created a joint council agitating for democracy in Korea.

Chun was caught between two fires. On the one hand, he ached for nothing better than to crush these insects as he had Gwangju, and rule as Park and Rhee had before him. On the other, though, he was desperately attempting to modernize Korea. The economy had soared to never-before dreamed of heights under Park, and under Chun that continued. But he needed foreign investors for that. Furthermore, he was working hard to build Korea’s prestige abroad, hosting the 1986 Asian Games and successfully bidding to host the 1988 Olympics – a huge project for a country that had been mostly peasant rice farmers ten years before. But while those projects brought prestige and glamour to the nation (and by extension, the government), they also brought scrutiny – and the damnable students would not let that whole Gwangju thing go. It was a lingering source of embarrassment for the regime with no good solutions for Chun.

By 1984, 4 years after the massacre, Chun thought he might try a lighter hand as the parliamentary elections loomed. The military government had the two main opposition parties well in hand (they supposed), and the economy had continued to boom under Chun, to say nothing of his successes abroad – even the North had seen a thawing of relations and there were talks of reunification on the peninsula for the first time in years. So, he permitted the elections to proceed – and got egg on his face when the two Kims converted their council into a political party – the New Democratic Party – and won more votes than Chun’s Democratic Justice Party. The DJP clung to power anyway, claiming a narrow parliamentary majority, but Kim Dae-jung felt safe enough to return from exile and all the momentum was clearly in the direction of democracy.

While the truth of the massacre had been surprised in a way that, ten years later, with CNN and fax machines, Tiananmen could not be, it still spread among underground circles – whisper by whisper, the story was made known to all of Korea. Lee Jae-eui, who had escaped the final downfall of the city, crept out of hiding and was pressed by his friends to write down his experiences. Haltingly, tentatively, he wrote down everything he had seen, found all the survivors he could, and wrote down what they saw, too. His Gwangju Diary is still the definitive account in any language of the uprising. It circulated in the Korean underground for nearly three years before it could be openly published in 1987.

Again and again, the Uprising proved to be a fatal weakness in Chun’s quest for legitimacy. With political representation, again students surged into the streets, forming committees on the 5th anniversary of the massacre to demand truth and justice – and they did not confine their criticisms to Chun. American culture centers in Korea came under attack, being burned in Gwangju itself, in Busan, Seoul, and other cities. Students demanded answers for the role of the United States in the massacre.* When the students occupied the US Information Service in Seoul, the press abroad took note and Chun found himself under heat from the Reagan administration. Chun attempted, over the summer break that year, to force through new legislation letting him crack down on the damned kids, but his position had grown so weak that Parliament balked – no longer a puppet – and the government was forced to back down.

Matters came to a head in 1987. When Chun had finally had himself elected President in the late summer of 1980, he had been in such an uncertain state due to lingering resentment over hte massacre in Gwangju that he had limited himself to a single 7-year term under the revised Constitution. That term would expire in ‘87. The last three years had seen the regime reeling, lacking the popular support or the foreign support to truly crack down on an emboldened and fast-growing democratization movement, galvanized and united by the memory of that May in Gwangju. Both sides prepared for an all-out battle over the Presidential election.

The straw that broke the back of the Chun regime, and with it the more than 3 decades of authoritarian rule in the Republic of Korea, was the death of another student. Just as the murder of a high school student had toppled Synghman Rhee in 1960, now in January of 1987 another student, Park Jong-cheol, died in police custody. The police lamely claimed that the boy had died suddenly when an investigator pounded the table while he was being interrogated, but during a memorial mass for victims of the Gwangju massacre, one of the policemen involved revealed the truth: That Park had died under torture. Through February and March tens of thousands of citizens marched in the streets, protesting police torture of innocent civilians. More than 40 cities participated in the marces, and the public began to sense that the regime could no longer stop them.

Desperate, Chun tried his last gambit. He announced in April of 1987 that no further talk could be had of amending the constitution, or of democracy. Such things would have to wait until after the Olympics in 1988. The election in 1987 would proceed under the current Constitution – which provided for only one candidate, the hand-picked successor of Chun (Roh Tae-woo, a participant in the 1980 War of the Stars). The announcement jolted the growing democratic movement, and students, laborers, journalists, politicians, and all the disparate members of the unwieldy coalition put their differences aside to face down this last, greatest challenge from Chun.

On May 18, 1987, tens of thousands of students marched in Seoul in memory of the Uprising, and laid the groundwork for future protests. In the weeks to come, the students took to the streets again and again, joined by more and more common citizens who protested the brutality of the Chun regime and the latest power grab by the President. In Seoul, the Catholic church joined the protests to defend marchers from police teargas. In Busan, over 300,000 citizens were in the streets, utterly beyond the power of the police to halt. In Gwangju, where Chun’s name had been mud for 7 years, the people were once again rallying in the Provincial Hall plaza. By the 26th – 24 years ago this week – over one and a half million Koreans were marching for democracy, in more than 16 major cities. The police were swept away, literally running out of tear gas in some places. As a last-ditch Chun met with Kim Young-sam, hoping to find a negotiated solution. But Young-sam was firm: free elections, or nothing.

Only two options remained for Chun Doo-hwan: to call on his last base of support, the military, and attempt to crush the protests through main force, or to bow to the will of the people. The United States had made its position clear: no more Gwangjus. And the Olympic Games were scheduled to open in Seoul in only a year’s time. A bloody fight in the streets of Seoul…it was impossible. Chun relented. On June 29th, Roh Tae-woo, the designated successor to Chun Doo-hwan, announced that there would be free elections, that the political prisoners would be released, and a new constitution written for Korea. More than forty years after the end of the Japanese empire, and seven after the bloody rebellion in Gwangju, democracy had at last come to the Republic of Korea.

——

Since 1987, the ROK has had regular Presidential elections every 4 years. Kim Young-sam and Kim Tae-jung, flush with the heady thrill of victory in 1987, were unable to agree on a joint candidacy and split most of the vote between themselves, letting militarist candidate Roh Tae-woo achieve an improbable victory in the first free election in Korea – well, ever. In 1991, though, the goobers got their act together and Kim Young-sam became the first civilian head of government since Rhee’s fall 30 years before.

Under President Roh, the first parliamentary investigations had been permitted into the Gwangju Massacre – most of the official documentation of the uprising, siege, and final battle comes from this time. Kim Young-sam made the trial of former presidents Chun and Roh a centerpiece of his administration, both men tried for corruption. Chun was also convicted for his role in the Gwangju massacre and in 1996, was sent to prison. Young-sam ruled until the Korean financial crisis in 1998 led to his ouster by Kim Dae-jung, and the normal cycle of democratic politics has dominated Korea ever since.**

Chun Doo-hwan served very little of his prison term for bribery and corruption, and he never paid the massive fine levied against him – pleading poverty. He was pardoned by Young-sam in 1997 and has lived a private life since. His memoirs have never been published due to protest by the 5.18 memorial foundation.

Jimmy Carter and other US officials have never spoken publicly about their roles in the massacre.

Lee Jae-eui devoted most of his life to speaking and writing about Gwangju, in memory of his slain friends. He served in teh city government and today lives quietly in the city.

Linda Sue-Lewis left Gwangju that summer, but she returned the next year. She has written extensively about the memory of Gwangju in Korean politics and frequently visits the city.

The city itself today is peaceful and pleasant. Buses ply the streets, pulling right up to the old Provincial Hall square – now the 5.18 Memorial Plaza. The fountain still stands and still runs, and the old government office where the rebels made their last stand has become a museum devoted to the Uprising. Around the city you can find little plaques remembering the days of violence back in 1980 – here the taxi drivers gathered, there is a bullet hole from the helicopter, here is the spot the students first protested.

And just north of the city, in the quiet hills that still surround the City of Light, lies the cemetery.

*in fact, most modern Korean anti-Americanism can be traced back to the way the USA facilitated the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising. 

** Probably the most interesting facet since the arrival of democracy in the ‘90s was the presidency of Park Geun-hye. Geun-hye is the daughter, of course, of Park Chung-hee, who dominated the country in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and whose assassination set in motion the chain of events that culminated in the Gwangju uprising. She fell from power after a scandal involving her influence by a cult – cults are rampant in Korea these days, I myself was approached by at least four while I’ve lived here.

One final rally was held in front of Provincial Hall plaza the night of May 26. It was a rainy, miserable evening. A few thousand gathered around the fountain – gone were the tens of thousands who had sat there on the sunny afternoons of free Gwangju, listening to the speeches about democracy and self-government. Most of the militia had surrendered their weapons and gone home. As the sun sank behind the hills west of the city, the leaders admitted: The military’s deadline for the surrender of the city had passed at 6 pm that day. The army could enter at any time.

Many in the crowd were for giving up the struggle. They had disarmed, trusting to the hope of a peaceful, negotiated solution. The shinmingun was gone, disbanded, except for a few hundred die-hards. The popular fervor of tens of thousands directed against a few hundred outnumbered paratroopers was no longer present – instead, they would be facing nearly three full divisions of trained, prepared troops. There was absolutely no chance of victory, and everyone knew it.

As the last few thousand holdouts sat there in the descending darkness, from one corner of the square one woman started to sing –

Our wish is reunification.
Even in our dreams, our wish is reunification.
With all our hearts, reunification.
Reunification, let’s bring it about.

A DPRK video of the song so you can get the melody

It was an old song, going back to the three-decade old division of the peninsula, popular in both North and South. Everyone there knew it. It was an anthem of the people, often sung in defiance of the regimes in Seoul or Washington that played games of power with Korean lives.* Gradually, the crowd all around the fountain took up the chorus:

Reunification that revives this nation,
Reunification that revives this country,
Reunification, come true soon.
Reunification, come true.

The 6,000 marched, still singing the chorus, into the street, emptying the plaza for the last time, and as they proceeded down the battle-scarred Guemnam-no more citizens joined them, and more again, until as they neared the barricades they numbered 30,000 strong, according to Lee Jae-eui. There, after a final round of chanting and show of defiance to the soldiers preparing their assault, the crowd dispersed, and most people went to their homes to see what tomorrow would bring.

Now, nothing is more nightmareish for an army than an urban assault. As far back as 1870, Paris had revolted against the French government and for a few weeks made itself a free city. The defeat of the Paris Commune had been a prolonged, bloody affair that lasted a week and resulted in tens of thousands of casualties. Everyone knows the horrors of Stalingrad – and of Aachen, Arnhem, Berlin, and a dozen other European cities in the Second World War. Even modern militaries are stymied in places like Mogadishu and Fallujah.

The Korean army had emphatically wanted to avoid a bloody street battle against their own people. Leaving aside the morality of the thing, the damage to Gwangju would be enormous, and the blow to the regime’s legitimacy – still fighting to establish itself after the assassination of Park back in October – would likely be fatal. Hence, the week of negotiation, the patient work of disarming the rebels with false promises of amnesty and reconciliation. In the end, the strategy had proven wildly successful – instead of tens of thousands of armed and trained rebels, the several thousand troops would face only a few very poorly-armed college and high school students in a small area of the city.

Back at the square, only 150 militia members remained. They had  few pistols and rifles left between them, and had a grim choice – for most, literally life or death. Rally organizers paced the square, shouting, “Leave the square, unless you’re ready to die! We will fight the military to the death tonight! We may all be killed!” But most stayed.

The Hall itself was held by about 100 fighters, spread out in 2-3 person teams around the perimeter and in the various offices and rooms of the building. The remainder held various elementary schools, markets, and intersections in the neighborhood around, often spontaneously reinforced by other citizens. For example, as the night closed in, one teenage boy came, weeping, to the Hall. “Give me a gun!” he said. “Let me fight!” The paratroopers had killed his sister.** Two other college students, who had been studying for final exams on May 18 and missed the initial uprising, also turned up. They had been in hiding the previous week, they said, but they couldn’t live with themselves if they missed it all. They were given weapons – they, too, did not survive. Thus, the final strength facing the Army is difficult to estimate, but may have reached as many as 500. Losses, similarly, are also very difficult to determine with any certainty, with some sources (Lee Jae-Eui) claiming that as many as 150 people were killed in the final assault.

Of the 150 rebels who initially gathered on the plaza, 80 had completed compulsory military service, and about 70 were high school students. 10 of the 150 were women. They had a last meal in the YMCA – joking that it was their own Last Supper – and then the leaders, Yun Sang-wŏn, Pak Nam-sŏn, Kim Chong-bae, Chŏng Sang-yong – met to plan while retired military officers led the kids through shooting drills. Then, by about 11 pm, the final defenders of Free Gwangju dispersed to various strongpoints around the Provincial Hall and prepared to sell their lives.

One man, anonymously interviewed later, described his motivation to stand and fight.

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“At the time he had been a student, newly returned to college after completing his compulsory military service; unlike other insurgents, he was a married man with a child…[his motivation was] quite simple: he told me that he was not concerned about how people might judge his actions; rather, it was a matter of self-respect. Even though they all knew they would certainly be defeated, he understood that this was the course of all liberation movements in Korean history—the willingness of some to fight to the end. No one had expected the government to use such force in Kwangju, and he felt he had no choice but to continue the struggle for the honor of the uprising itself.”

For most, Gwangju was worth fighting for. They knew that they could not save the city – that when the paratroopers returned they would roll over the small militia with ease. They knew that there was no guarantee any of them would survive to be taken prisoner, that they might all be executed out of hand. But most were prepared to fight anyway.

Because May 18 had to mean something. They had to show that they were a free people, and that they would defend to the death their dream of democracy. Show the world? Most had given up hope that their story would ever be told to the wider world. The province was cut off. Show the country? Maybe. The true story might someday leak past the regime’s lies, denouncing them as communists and vandals. Perhaps they just had to show themselves that some things are important – some things are worth dying for. With their deaths, they could become a symbol to Korea as a whole – sacrificing their lives in return, not for freedom and self-determination, but to give the peninsula hope that one day these things would be true. So they stayed, young men and women mostly – college students, even high schoolers, who refused to be sent away by their elders to live. They stayed, and they prepared to face Splendid Holiday.

One of the militia was Park Yong-jun, an orphan, a young man who had made a living shining shoes. On his body in the YMCA was found the following note:

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“If you want our blood, my Lord, I will dedicate this small body of mine to You. Lord, what am I? I am a feeble being, a man trapped in a miserable existence. Lord, I have tried to live without shame or guilt. Please pour more pain, more agony, and more hardship on me, to give me the power and wisdom to overcome this world. The people spit upon us orphans, the scum of the earth. My brothers, my young brothers—is there nothing I can do for them? Will they live and die as trash, ever more burdened, after my death? Lord, what should I do? What is conscience? Why do you put me under such a heavy yoke? Must I beg you for the strength to serve? Then, I will do it Lord. Help me, and forgive us all in Your name—and mercy and love for the world. “

—-

Downtown Gwangju, May 27, 1980. 31st Division attacked from the north, 20th from the east, and 21st from the west.

Splendid Holiday began shortly before midnight, May 27th, as the army cut the phone lines into the city. Outlying rebel outposts found themselves quickly cut off from headquarters as the soldiers closed in.

At the Provincial Hall, by 2:30 am, most knew the final attack was imminent – the phones were cut and nothing had been heard from their outposts in hours. The leaders of the militia – Yun Sangwŏn, Kim Yong-ch’ol, and Yi Yang-hyŏn – held hands in farewell. “We will meet again in the next world,” they said to one another. Park Nam-sŏn, commander of headquarters, gave final orders. Do not shoot first; there isn’t enough ammunition. Don’t fire until you’re told and at close range.

Lee Jae-eui writes of the start of Splendid Holiday that, “artillery fire roared like thunder, and flare bombs and tracers lit up the sky with moments of daylight. At first, state forces shot their M-16s indiscriminately, at any sign of life, even in residential areas.” Linda Sue-Lewis wrote at the time, “At dawn – before 5 am – the sound of guns. Not just the ping-ping of guns and the ak-ak-ak of automatics, but big booms that I thought might be tanks but M said was dynamite.”

In the north, about 30 men, led by a reserve army commander, dug in around the YMCA and Kyerim Elementary behind the school fences and around the nearby highway overpass, in an effort to delay the assault of the 31st Division from the north. By 2 am, many of the rebels’ nerves had cracked here, and all but 20 fled to a nearby church for sanctuary. The remaining militia had only 10 guns between them, so the unarmed members headed back to the Provincial Hall to try to draw more weapons from the armory there. Then they returned to their positions.

The attack there lasted about ten minutes. The small rebel force was quickly flanked out of their position near Kyerim elementary and attempted to flee to the south, scaling a 7-foot wall to regain some breathing room. A second flanking force struck them from the rear of nearby Gwangju High School, and the men scattered. The reserve commander, wounded in the thigh, fled into a nearby private home. Most of the rest of his cell were killed, captured, or fled into the night.

At the Provincial Hall, some of the high school students’ nerves had cracked, and one boy, in tears, begged that the high schoolers, at least, should surrender, so that someone would bear witness to what happened there. The 20th division rolled swiftly down Guemnamno, led by armor, and by 3:30 am had surrounded the plaza, shining bright searchlights onto the former government offices. The rebels responded with fire, and the building was stormed.

Writes Jae-eui:

   Quote

“Yun Sang-wŏn was among the fifty insurgents on the second floor of the civil-service building, which was being used as a mess hall. They fired on invading troops, and dodged bullets coming from below. A high schooler screamed and collapsed onto the floor. Yun crawled over to him, and tried to shake him back into consciousness. “Hey, wake up!” he yelled. But when Yun lifted the boy up, his head fell back—he was already dead.
As Yun ran back to his position, a bullet tore through him. “Brother Yun!” the other rebels shouted. Yun did not respond, and dark blood oozed from his side. His body was covered with a blanket. Shortly thereafter, someone screamed, “No bullets, no ammunition!” and the few remaining survivors retreated to a nearby room. Paratroopers fired through the hallway windows; the rebels shot back, grabbing bullets from the bodies of the dead, and tried to duck under the line of fire.
When all the ammunition was spent, they declared defeat. “Give us your weapons,” the military demanded. “Point it at yourself and slide it through the window.” The soldiers rushed in with guns and grenades, calling for surrender. In one room, three rebels crawled out from behind a file cabinet; a total of ten survivors were forced face-down to the steps, their hands tied behind their backs. In one case, a pointed both his M-16 and a confiscated M-2 carbine at a captive’s head. When the rebel tried to run, the soldier shot him dead. He then turned the carbine onto eight insurgents whose hands were raised in surrender. As they approached the yard, he mowed them down, and joked to a rebel underfoot, “How was that? Was it like a movie?”

Only 10 of the 40 defenders of the second floor survived to be captured.

For hours, the battle at the Hall went on. Some rebels attempted to sell their lives dearly. Others hoped to be captured, so that they might at least make a statement at their trials before their executions. Prisoner after bloodied prisoner was roughly hauled out of the building and bound in the plaza outside. By dawn, the Provincial Office was back in government hands.

Over at the YMCA, the building was surrounded and bombarded with machine gun fire. Unarmed rebels tried to surrender, but were cut down when they exited the building. Then the building was stormed. Among those killed was the orphan shoeshiner, Park Yong-jun.

For many of the people of Gwangju, the most enduring memory they had of Splendid Holiday was the voice of Park Yong-sun, a 21-year old college student who had made herself known to all as the voice of the revolution, driving through the streets making announcements on her car’s public address system. As the battle went on, she drove through the city, shouting over and over, “Citizens, government troops are invading. Their guns and swords will kill our beloved brothers and sisters. The time has come! Rise up and fight! We will defend Gwangju to the death. Do not forget us.” At about 3 am, Yong-sun’s voice fell silent. She was not heard again.

—-

Splendid Holiday lasted about 3 hours in total, from 3 am to 6 am, May 27th. The government officially admitted to 22 soldiers killed and 150 ‘rioters’ killed, though some sources argue that the figures should be far higher. The last stand of Free Gwangju was over, though, and no one now remained to resist the will of the Chun regime. A cautious order was established in the city, as the soldiers processed the prisoners they had taken and shipped thousands to various nearby prisons.

Not all those who survived, of course, survived intact. One of those who survived the final assault was Kim Yŏngch’ŏl. Kim, thirty-two years old, married, and the father of three young children, was a political activist before 5.18; he worked with the urban poor through the YWCA credit union movement. When the new leadership was organized on May 25 as the Citizens and Students Struggle Committee, he was appointed planning director, and he was in the Provincial Office Building at dawn on May 27. In the final assault, he suffered contusions on his head and shoulders and while in detention at Sangmudae attempted suicide. Sentenced to twelve years in prison for his role in the uprising, in December 1981 his wife found him at 3 a.m., wandering outside his house, partially paralyzed and mentally deranged. She struggled for several years to keep him at home, but he required constant supervision. He banged his head on the floor and walls, ran naked through the neighborhood, was caught shoplifting, and suffered from delusions. He still imagined that his comrades-in-arms from 1980 were  alive and talked about meeting them.
Finally, he had to be institutionalized.

Overall, nearly 1400 people were arrested and imprisoned following the fall of the city. Throughout the summer and fall of 1980, the police and military were hunting for those involved in the uprising and dragging them away for arrest and conviction. 12 people received life sentences. 7 received death. Others, such as Lee Jae-eui, had fled the city during the siege and skulked in hiding, sometimes for years at a time. Gwangju itself lived in a state of fear for nearly a year after the battle. Soldiers patrolled the streets, keeping a wary eye on the tense, restive city, lest it explode into violence again. Conversations were hushed, and people didn’t dare talk politics outside their own homes. A popular rumor had it that a man from Gwangju had been in a taxi in Seoul. When the driver asked him just what had happened in the city back in May, anyway, the man had truthfully answered – and in response the taxi driver drove him straight to the military police. While that story, as far as I can tell, never happened, it nevertheless resembles the truth – reporters were fired for writing the wrong things, such as that the paratroopers had killed people during the violence, and university students expelled for writing pamphlets about the uprising.

For Chun Doo-Hwan wanted nothing more than for the entire Gwangju Incident – as it came to be known – to go away. He censored all talk about it and his regime moved swiftly to denounce the entire affair as the result of North Korean agitation, an uprising by Communists and hooligans to destabilize the country and turn it over to the Kims in the north. He would go on to proclaim himself President and write a new Constitution for the country in the fall of 1980, and for that he desperately needed popular support. But for Chun, his rocky, unstable regime had already been fatally damaged by the battle in the sleepy southwestern city in May 1980. Although it took years, the echoes of Gwangju carried forward throughout the decade, and eventually – it brought down the Korean dictatorship itself.

* Accordingly, the song is often exploited by the North for propaganda purposes.
** He would also be killed in the final battle.

6/24 – ⅞: Quarantine Daily routine:

0600: Wake up. Read in bed. Or browse Twitter. Y’know, whatever. 

0700: Work out. Gotta keep fit, gotta stay healthy. And it burns off that restless energy.

0800: Shower time! I can take my time, it’s not like I’ve ot anywhere to be.

0900: Breakfast! Usually rice, a sweet, kimchi, and some kind of meat. Today was beef in a kind of thick gravy, rice, kimchi, and almond milk. 

1000 – 1200: Writing time. Working on my Gwangju uprising.

1200-1300: Lunch! Same as breakfast. I had curry yesterday, which was fantastic.

1300 – 1700: Time to goof off, read, watch Netflix, play Origami King on my Switch, etc.

1700: Dinner! Same as lunch. Same as breakfast. I got bibimbap one day, which was exciting.

1800: Stare longingly out the window

1805: Browse reddit, see what I missed.

2000: Start getting ready for bed. Take my time. Clean the room, police up any trash from the day, have a cup of tea.

2100 – 2200: Read in bed before lights out.

Repeat x 14.

I’ll get through this. 

6/25 – 6/27: Quarantine

Sitting here in my hotel overlooking Incheon airport (and the narrow strait to Seoul beyond), counting the airplanes taking off, on day 3 of quarantine. This, despite three negative COVID tests, a fourth upon my arrival, after riding on 3 different planes masked up and sanitized with OTHER people who had multiple negative tests, and vaccinated. The cost (to me)/benefit (to Korea) is one of the most absurd destroyers of value I’ve ever seen in my life (but Kajal is worth it so I will try to minimize my complaints).

Anyway, Korea cares little about costing foreigners thousands in return for reducing by the tiniest of chances the possibility of bringing in a single extra COVID case into the country (which has 600 cases daily), so I thought I’d update my previous post about Korea in the time of corona and talk about the quarantine process. 

I’ve been through Incheon customs 3 times now, so I know the terminal well enough. However, I never reached customs upon debarking – once clear of the jetway, the flood of people (99% Koreans and then my stupid ass) ground quickly to a halt, and I waited in yet another line. This line ground slowly forward for everyone entering the country, as we passed yet another checkpoint. Here, my temperature was taken and my COVID test examined – yes, the same test examined in San Francisco and in Vancouver. This process shouldn’t have taken very long, but I was in the line for perhaps 45 minutes. Eventually, I was waved through once they were satisfied that I (apparently) wasn’t actively spewing coronavirus into the air or something.

From there, I passed to a second health screening, splitting off from the Korean passport holders. The line was really short at this point! I shuffled up to another desk, where a man with a fairly solid grasp of English took all my documents, again, plus the extra ones I’d been given at the last checkpoint 200 yards away. Once again, he pored over them, as well as my Korean address and a contact number to reach me at. The company I (thought I) was contracting with for my quarantine didn’t answer the phone, so instead he took Kajal’s number, since I’d be staying with her in the country. Calling her on my phone, he grilled her. Did she know who I was? Who was she? What was the nature of our relationship? Eventually, he was satisfied that I wouldn’t be a corona-spreading homeless vagrant, and waved me on to the next checkpoint.

This was passport control, at last. I wound through the queue, pretty much alone, and up to the gate, where the customs officers sat in plastic isolation booths. Her eyebrows raised that I came to the country with no long-term visa – what kind of idiot was traveling on a tourist visa at this time? – but she accepted it. She tried to get me to sign a document agreeing to the expensive government quarantine, but I thought I had arranged that with a private company, which advertised cheaper quarantine services. After some discussion, she allowed me to skip that part. I was passed to another holding area, and sat for about 20 minutes until a quarantine officer came to grab me.

I was brought into an office and sat behind a desk, where my photo was taken a few times, my fingerprints taken, and all my documents that I’d accumulated at the three previous checkpoints (plus all the various waypoints on the long road from St. Louis to Incheon before that) were examined once more.

I don’t want to go into details, but the main point of discussion was my quarantine. It was apparently, impossible for me to quarantine anywhere other than at the government facility, since all other facilities were NOT contracting with the government as I thought, but only available to those with longterm visas. Since I was only going to be in the country 8 weeks, I would be required to stay at the Incheon Hyatt. There was a lot of confusion and protests on my part, but I couldn’t get a hold of Enkor, and the officer pressed me to sign the papers, which I eventually felt I had no choice in. 

From there, I was taken out of the area and dumped into the more familiar terminal. My excellent luck with baggage claim continued as my bags rolled off the line just as I arrived (more than 2 hours after landing at this point), and I wrestled them (I brought too many books…) into yet another pen in the main terminal, this one with other foreigners, waiting to be herded along. I was given a red badge of shame, indicating my ultimate destiny in government quarantine, and eventually I was driven with the others to a tour bus just outside the airport (I passed through the same sitting area where I spent my first 6 hours in Korea, two years before, waiting for the EPIK desk to open, before corona, before all my adventures since then), and driven a short mile or so to the Hyatt.

Here we were greeted with a huge flotilla of health workers in full isolation suits (note that anyone who had made it this far has multiple negative tests within the last 3 days), and in the lobby I was taken to some plastic folding tables and filled out more forms for quarantine – a health check, contact data, etc. Everyone, I should note, was at this point very kind. The worker who helped me was a cheerful, chatty young woman with decent English – when I hesitated between Asian and Western food on my quarantine sheet, she pressed me to make a choice, then smiled in approval when I circled Asian. “It’s better, trust me,” she said. The man next to me was from Jordan and spoke hardly any Korean or English (and couldn’t read either alphabet), while I of course speak absolutely no Arabic beyond ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ‎ (and the Shahadah, but neither seemed useful here). I helped him as best I could, to install a quarantine app on our phones – an app to check our own health each day and report any symptoms of covid that might have made it through the formidable phalanx of defenses thus far. I would also note that the gate in Vancouver and Incheon airport had both confirmed that I had installed two other, separate quarantine apps, which the staff here promptly dismissed as out of date and no longer being used. 

We landed at 4. By now, the shadows were long in the lobby and it was rapidly nearing 8 pm. Two by two, each folding table was called up to the front of the lobby to meet more isolation-suited workers, and I of course was in the back of the place. Eventually, though, the Jordanian man and me were called up. The older gentleman behind the table, a doctor with a brusque air of competence and authority about him, efficiently briefed me on quarantine procedures (trash here, mealtimes at these times, don’t go outside, etc, etc,), and then gave me a box of health supplies and sent me to the back of the lobby for another PCR test. After getting one more q-tip shoved up my nose, at last I was free to gather my belongings and lug htem up to the elevator, up to the 10th floor, and into the room in which I have spent the last 3 days. 

It’s not a bad room, but again, I find the whole system to be of seriously dubious benefit. In return for a miniscule reduction in the risk of extra COVID cases coming into a country where the virus is already loose, where there are already myriad internal barriers to its spread (no gatherings larger than 5 permitted, masks, temperature checks between cities, when entering public facilities, etc, etc), the country is throwing hundreds of people who have already tested negative and have only ever been exposed to other people with negative tests into a full two-weeks of isolation, just in case one of us was somehow asymptomatic for that entire time so as to prevent us from entering the country…and joining the other 150,000 people with covid in the country, all at the cost of thousands per person in room and board. Again, it’s costs largely imposed on foreigners, so the ROK government doesn’t give a damn, but it’s also costing Korea in terms of tourism, in lost business, and in the massive amounts of manpower they’re spending. The government obviously thinks it’s worth it – I obviously disagree. 

Oh well. May as well enjoy my vacation while I’ve got it. At least it’ll be a story to tell someday. 

The most famous division on the Korean peninsula today is, of course, the 38th parallel. The line between North and South is so stark that it can be seen from space, and the saber-rattling and defiant threats in Pyongyang frequently transfix the attention of the world. What is less well known is that the Republic of Korea itself is rife with provincialism and mistrust: The inhabitants of Seoul view their more southerly brothers with skepticism, the southeast around Busan is proud and insular, and of course the southwest, Jeolla, dislikes everybody. Not for nothing did Korea spend centuries fractured into its own Three Kingdoms. 

It was that provincialism that Chun Doo-hwan now counted on to save his regime. While he had miscalculated – badly – the average Gwangju citizens’ response to his heavy-handed attempt to suppress the student protests, Jeolla as a whole had long had an antagonistic relationship with the central government, especially with its favorite son languishing in prison still. That antagonism did not exist elsewhere in the republic. So, in the days after the military’s undignified withdrawal from the city, unrest spread across Jeolla – but stayed there. Busan did not rise against the government, nor did Daegu, or Daejeon, or Seoul. And so Chun could breathe a sigh of relief. The militarists did not have the resources to put down an uprising on such a scale in more than one city – if dissidents in Seoul or another provincial capital had followed Gwangju’s example, it might have meant the end of the regime.

As it was, he would need to stress himself thin in order to meet the emergency. The paratroopers were not enough to hold the city, clearly, much less recapture it. The local police were no help at all. So, the outnumbered soldiers pulled back and set up a cordon in the hills around the city, creating roadblocks on the few major highways into the isolated valley. The martial law commander, Gen. So Junyeol, was ordered to string out negotiations with the insurgents, and otherwise he sat tight, waiting for reinforcements. There was only place Chun could find the troops he needed to recapture Gwangju: the DMZ itself. And that would mean dealing with the United States. 

——

More than 7,000 miles from the beleaguered city, a group of the grandest grandees of the administration of US President Jimmy Carter gathered in a quiet room in Washington. The participants included the Deputy Secretary of State, Warren Christopher; Richard Holbrooke, assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser; CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner; Donald Gregg, the NSC’s top intelligence official for Asia and a former CIA Station Chief in Seoul; and U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown. The administration had been following with mounting concern the situation in Gwangju as it spiraled out of control, but frankly Gwangju was one of only a hundred problems besieging the White House that spring. 

This was 1980. The year before, other student activists had overthrown the Shah of Iran, a key US ally in the ongoing cold war with the Soviet Union, and seized the US embassy in Tehran. Three weeks before, Operation Eagle Claw, a secret US effort to rescue the hundreds of hostages trapped there, had ended in humiliating failure as the helicopters burned at Desert One. Domestically, Carter had described the US economy as trapped in a “malaise” and his opponent in the ongoing Presidential election, Ronald Reagan, was hammering him over it up and down the campaign trail. To top matters off, on May 18 – within hours of the students pouring into the streets of Gwangju – a volcano had literally erupted in his backyard, as Mt. St. Helens blew its top in the deadliest eruption in American history. Suffice to say, Carter had a lot on his plate. 

The men at the meeting that morning in May had one priority: the security of the Republic of Korea against any possible invasion from the North. The People’s Republic, crouching on the far side of the 38th parallel, frequently bared its teeth whenever one of the periodic demonstrations of unrest shook the military governments of their southern neighbor. In the past, communist insurgents had crept into the country in efforts to begin guerrilla wars in the myriad Korean mountains and destabilize the regime from within. At times, they had even launched daring commando raids to kidnap the president of the ROK himself. 

So, it was the overriding imperative to maintain the firm front against the North that had dominated most US dealings with Korea over the past six months. While never enthusiastic about Chun, it was the view of many senior officials – such as General John Wickham, commander of US forces in Korea – that it was the dictator or no one, bringing on the kind of chaos that could invite a Northern invasion. Half-hearted attempts to prompt the military towards moderation and democratic reforms inevitably failed when Chun called the US’s bluff – they would never let him be toppled by an internal uprising.

As the slow-motion Chun coup neared its completion on May 17, the CIA and Ambassador William Glaysteen had sent back outraged cables to Washington, reporting on the mounting unrest. They complained “…the military leaders have shown disregard for the constituted authority in the ROK – and for us. We have been presented with a fait accompli suggesting that the military leaders either do not know or do not care about the consequences of treating us in this manner.” What exactly those consequences were was left unspecified. Through the week, Glaysteen had complained about hte military’s increasingly heavy-handed tactics, but at the same time the US watched with mounting concern as the protests became riots and the riots became an uprising.

The Korean military knew well how to manipulate their American partners, as well. On May 18, the morning of the uprising, Lee Hui-sung had told Graysteen that if the rebellion were not swiftly squashed, Korea “would be communized in a manner similar to Vietnam.” Meanwhile, the Korean deputy commander of the US-Korean CFC, met with Gen. Wickham every day. Wickham later said: “General Lew was worried about Gwangju morphing into warfare around the country, and he wanted to tamp it down the best he could. That’s why he and I talked about how to do that with minimal force [and] what’s the best way to do it…The coup leaders were saying we have to suppress this, it’s a threat to our coup.” Finally, as the protests flared on the 21st, leading to the military withdrawal, Graysteen cabled, “The massive insurrection in Kwangju is still out of control and poses an alarming situation for the ROK military who have not faced a similar internal threat for at least two decades…At least 150,000 people are involved.” Clearly, from the US’s perspective, the violence in Jeollanam-do was threatening to destabilize the entire country, and invite a North Korean invasion. Such a thing could never be tolerated.

That, then, was the context as Carter’s advisors met to try to puzzle out an American response. The fundamental problem was this: Chun could not suppress the uprising without more troops, and the only place troops could be got was the DMZ. Those troops could not be moved without the permission of the US military, under the US-Korean alliance, since it directly concerned the joint defense against the North. So the decision became the US’s – if they allowed the move, Chun would certainly crush the rebellion and none too gently. If they did not, the rebellion might topple the entire government and imperil their entire position in the country. Chun was an asshole, they all knew it – but he was the only guy they had.

Defense Secretary Brown was firmly behind Chun. His aide, Nicholas Platt, recalled the meeting: ““There was unrest in Gwangju and the Korean military was moving troops in…We were worried whether they would be able to restore order. There were units that had been moved from the DMZ and we thought that might lessen our ability to deal with the North Koreans.” While Graysteen’s cable had made no mention of the 60+ dead the initial military effort to squash the unrest had left behind, Platt affirmed that those in the meeting were well aware of it – which was information not even the rebels in Gwangju had.

Christopher, the deputy Secrety of State, demurred. He argued that Chun “has done real harm and set the process [of democratization] back.” Secretary of State Muskie agreed, adding, “Chun could be come a liability” and speculating about the US becoming hostage to the clique. The advisors discussed having Chun step down as part of a deal to release the forces needed – but Brown intervened.

“If Chun goes, that will create a vacuum,” Brown said. Chaos at the top. North Korean tanks rolling south again – unacceptable. If the US forcefully backed Chun, he argued, Koreans would fall in line – because “Koreans go with who’s winning.” The dead citizens of Gwangju went unmentioned, as the advisors came to a consensus.

“The first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later. Once order is restored, it was agreed we must press the Korean government, and the military in particular, to allow a greater degree of political freedom to evolve.”

So, Chun would have his support, but to ensure they hadn’t completely sold out to yet another authoritarian strongman, and in a nod to Carter’s “human rights”-based foreign policy, the US would pressure Chun to adopt unspecified democratic reforms at an unspecified later date. And as for the people of Gwangju, well, the US would prefer violence not be employed by all those army troops Chun was asking to move to the area, but at the same time, well…they could look the other way. 

The decision was made. Chun would have his troops. The Americans only asked that he give them time to move reinforcements into the region to make sure that the People’s Republic stayed quiet. 

When an American aircraft carrier was reported entering Korean waters a few days later, some of the rebels in Gwangju took hope. The Americans were coming! Surely the world’s foremost democracy was intervening to put Chun down and support their cause? Those hopes began to fade, however, when the next day, two full divisions of ROK troops pulled out of the border and began making their way south. 

The US would not save Gwangju.

——

With permission granted from the United States, Chun diverted the 20th and part of the 31st Divisions south, to Jeolla. There they joined the other troops on internal security. Most of the regime’s forces had been containing the insurrection to Jeollanam-do – despite the efforts of some of the sinmingun to reach Jeonju or Seoul, none had been able to escape the province. Jeollanam-do, like every Korean province, is surrounded by high, thickly forested mountains, with only a few major highways linking the region to the rest of the peninsula. The intercity buses, the main means of transportation for a population still largely without personal automobiles, proved simplicity itself for the army to blockade. The highways were shut down and Jeolla was entirely isolated from the world – no one other than the regime forces came or went, and the flow of information in both directions became the barest trickle. 

Most of the army surrounded Gwangju itself. The paratroopers had formed a loose ring, concentrating on the mountains to the east and south of the city – nearest the Provincial Hall and the plaza that was the heart of the rebellion. When the reinforcements from the north arrived, the detachment from the 31st Division took over the northwest perimeter, while the 3 regiments of the 20th division – the 60th, 61st, and 62nd – spread out in an arc from west to southeast to northeast. The 20th, particularly the 61st Regiment, would have the primary responsibility for seizing the city, with the paratroopers in support. 

But not right away. Rather than risk a bloody street fight, Gen. So felt that the rebels would have their ardor sapped via siege, letting him clear away all but the hardest of die-hards without a fight. Only once the way had been prepared would he send his men in to recapture the city and stamp out the last embers of resistance. So, from the day the troops were driven out on the 22nd until early in the morning on May 26th, the nearly 3 divisions surrounding Gwangju dug in, blocked the roads, and waited. 

The siege was bloodily enforced – though many of Gwangju’s citizens were unaware of it. For example, one woman caught up in the fighting was Kim Chun-nye, an 18-year old worker in the Ilsin Textile Company. Miss Kim slept most nights in the city, and had done her best to keep her head down and out of trouble the last few days. But Friday, May 23 came, and she needed to return to her hometown of Hwasun – a small village to the southeast of the city. It was not an ordinary weekend – her grandmother had passed, and in the family and elder-centric Korean culture, missing the funeral was unthinkable. 

 No one really knew what was happening – the troops had vanished the day before, and apart from the sporadic gunfire in the hills, all had been quiet as the citizens set about reorganizing their city. She and her dorm mate at the factory, Ko Yong-ja, knew that the busses obviously weren’t running, but with all the telephone lines cut there were no other sources of information. 

Nervous, Chun-nye went to the only authorities she could find, the Citizen’s Army, told them her story, and asked for help getting home. She and Yong-ja were given a small squad of 9 citizen-soldiers as escort, and they ventured into the hills. 

About a kilometer southeast of the city, on the lower slopes of Mudeungsan, the local mountain, the road narrowed in the small village of Chiwon-dong before running over the flank of the mountain to Hwasun. As the truck came into the pass, abruptly the paratroopers opened fire from both sides. Witnesses later reported that the sinmingun stopped the car and raced out, hands in the air, shouting, “Don’t shoot!”, but the soldiers concealed in ambush on both sides of the road did not relent – all 11 people were cut down. Chun-nye and Yong-ja’s bodies were identified by their families five days later, after the end of the siege, and their stories gathered from survivors. 

Later that day, a second bus from the city blundered into the same ambush. A minibus loaded with university and high school students attempted to reach Hwasun from Gwangju. There were fourteen high school boys, proudly but nervously clutching M-1 carbines and two-way radios as young members of the Citizen’s Army, and 4 high-school girls, among them the sixteen-year old Hong Kum-sak. Kum-sak had slipped into Gwangju that morning, with her mother. Her two brothers were students at Chonnam University, and the family was terrified for their safety amidst the chaos. As they wandered the city, searching for the boys – or their bodies – Kum-sak had grown separated from her mother in the chaos of that day. 

As the afternoon wore on, Kum-sak began to trudge home, when the bus, with its load of young ‘soldiers’, rolled by. The boys were laughing and joking with each other, all of them from the same class, friends enjoying the novel camaraderie of soldering. They had ventured into the hills around the city the previous two days to gather wooden planks – for coffins. They offered Kum-sak a ride home when she said she lived in Naju, on the road to Hwasun. With traffic in the city at a standstill otherwise, she accepted. 

Nervously, she made her way to the back of the bus, where she found three female members of the Citizen’s Army. A smiling girl asked her her name, and then introduced herself as Park Hyon-Suk. Kum-sak sat down next to her and the bus roared off. 

She recalled, “When the bus had passed Gwanju stream and neared Chiwŏn-dong, a soldier standing by the side of the road gave a signal to stop. Because we all knew what would happen if we stopped, the vehicle speeded up. With sudden noisy sounds, bullets poured down on the bus. Bullets kept coming down, and someone yelled to turn the bus around. The moment the vehicle was turned around, the driver was hit by a bullet, and he fell forward, bleeding.”

The boy soldiers leapt out of the halted bus and returned fire, but the position was hopeless – these were high schoolers with antique weapons, facing trained paratroopers in cover in the hills surrounding the road. Quickly realizing the same thing, one of the boys said they had no choice but to stop firing and surrender. The young people threw their guns to the ground and raised their arms in the air, one of the girls waving a bloody handkerchief. Kum-sak’s account of what came next is worth quoting at length:

“Usually the bullets were coming from the front and back part of the bus. I, sitting in the far back row, moved to the middle and got under a seat. The deafening sound of guns, the screams begging for life, moaning, and the sound of bullets ricocheting off the back of the bus—such sounds created hellish confusion inside the bus. 

A male student who was shot, his intestines spilling out on the floor of the bus, was saying, “I want to live.” He suddenly closed his eyes and rolled over like he was dead. I closed my eyes and rolled over like I was dead. In a moment the sound of gunfire stopped, and we couldn’t even hear the sound of people moaning. I felt nervous, with pains all over my body, and I opened my eyes. I was bleeding all over, including my right arm and back and sides and thighs. Luckily, I had not been hit directly by bullets, but splinters were all over my body. 

Voices came from nearby. Soldiers said, “Let’s make sure they are all dead.” Three or four soldiers came inside the bus. They nudged people with their boots to see if they were alive or dead. From someone in the back came a voice saying, “I want to live.” After pulling that person out, the soldiers went back in the bus and there was another sound. 

“If you want to survive, don’t be afraid and get up.” And from a person in the front came a moaning sound, begging for life. “Bring him! Let’s make a complete check!” 

I was lying on my back like I was dead, and I was glancing at them sideways. Then suddenly a soldier’s boot kicked me in the side, and it was painful, so I let out a sound. So when they checked if everyone was dead again, an ambulance came and gave me simple first aid. And I was taken into the mountains by a farmer’s tractor.” Laying Claim to the Memory of May, 32-35.

Hong Kum-sak was taken with the only other two survivors, two male students – one already severely injured, one begging for his life – to the local commander. The two males were summarily shot. Hong was kept imprisoned through the summer, finally being released with a warning never to speak of what had happened. She never did share her story until the fall of the dictatorship, years later, and parliamentary investigations into the massacres in Gwangju. 

The next day, Ambassador Glaysteen cabled back to Washington reports of “an armed clash, with ‘dozens’ of casualties, between troops and an armed convoy of diehards outside the city.’ *

The cordon established on the 23rd – most bloodily enforced in the pass to Hwasun – tightened on the 24th. Inside the city, the initial optimistic mood on the 22nd and 23rd, when the soldiers had withdrawn, was turning gradually to fear as the citizens realized how cut off they were. Looking over their barricades, most of the rebel city placed their hopes in either the reasonableness of the regime – never before had the ROK government wantonly massacred an entire city of its subjects – and the intervention of the United States. Jimmy Carter was for human rights, the Americans wouldn’t let their allies the Koreans be slaughtered by the brutes in Seoul. So they whispered encouraging words to each other, but all the while the telephone lines stayed dead and the noose tightened.

Prior to Saturday, the 24th, many people had still been able to slip out of the city on foot, such as Lee Jae-eui, who by now was lying low in the villages in the countryside. But now even that escape avenue was being cut off. 

That Saturday was warm and sunny – it gets hot early in southern Korea, and stays hot and humid all through the summer. Pang Gwang-bom, age 12, was out of school with his friends and was playing in a village reservoir of Wonjae, near the city. The boys were largely unconcerned with politics, and their parents had told them little of the trouble in the city, although they were vaguely aware something big was on. For that day, though, Pang was mostly concerned with splashing and dunking his friends, enjoying the weekend away from Chonnam Middle School. 

As Pang and his friends played, the paratroopers were pulling out of their blocking position near Hwasun and retreating over the mountain to regroup for the coming assault on the city. Perhaps frustrated at the ‘communists’ who had humiliated them and driven them from Korea’s 5th-largest city, perhaps desiring, as some were later overheard, “to teach these Jeollanam rascals a lesson,” or maybe just because they’d grown used to killing, the airborne troops were firing into the houses of Wonjae as they retreated through the city. When the boys heard the gunshots begin, they frantically began to splash their way out of the pond – and caught the wrong sort of attention.

Nine of the ten boys made it. Pang Gwang-bom was last, desperately swimming for a floodgate behind which he hoped to take cover, when the passing troops sprayed machine gun fire at the fleeing middle schoolers. Pang took a bullet to the head. When his father, Pang Tu-hyong, found his body, he embraced his dead eldest son and “rolled on the floor kicking and screaming like the world had collapsed.”**

The latest massacre simply added to the growing body count. Rumor and expectation swirled around the city as Free Gwangju felt the walls closing in around it – “Chun is too weak to come into the city,” “Chun is just biding his time,” “They’re going to reach a settlement soon and it’ll all be over.”

Linda Lewis recorded the scenes as family members combed the hospitals and public places of the central city, looking for their slain loved ones:

“They had the bodies in the gym [Sangmugwan] and were letting family members in to see them. Normal people out today—men in suits, lots of women. M saw lots of her friends (“So-and-so’s daughter died.” —“Oh, no, the one who lives [at] such-and-such?” —“Yes. But wasn’t she young?” — “Yes, only about 3d year middle school.”) And so it went, M picking up bits and pieces all around, and I doing the same. 

I got interviewed for French TV—they were really nice. I got crowds all around me. People saying – tell them how it happened, the first days, what the soldiers did. That is one concern – does the world know what radicalized us? Then point 2 is – tell them we are led by law-abiding people, not gangs roaming the streets. We evidently are big news, and have been. M dragged me over to talk to a blasé CBS cameraman. . . . I had lots of questions for him, but I don’t think he knew shit. No, the rest of the country is not demonstrating. Yes, the US govt is firmly supporting Chun. People clamored to have me ask what the world thought of Kwangju. . . .”

The other concern, other than their isolation and the growing sense of doom, was that the world needed to know what was being done to them. Chun couldn’t just massacre them and get away with it – and he wouldn’t, not if the outside knew. Not if news could get out of Gwangju, out of Jeolla. And so foreigners throughout the city – missionaries, students, Peace Corps volunteers, and most of all, reporters – were besieged with pleas to carry their stories out to the world. “Tell them what’s being done to us!” There was a great worry that they would be written off – as they already were, in the corridors of Washington – as leftist radicals, student agitators, communist agents – and not fundamentally normal citizens of Korea, pushed into rebellion by the brutal violence of the thuggish regime Praetorian guards. 

The same day, May 24th, the Korean army had finalized its plans to re-enter and re-take the city, sharing them with General Wickham (the head of all Allied forces in Korea). Wickham urged restraint, arguing that the Settlement Committees were moderating the people, successfully collecting weapons, and providing the possibility of a peaceful resolution, but the Korean military – that is, General So – countered with the intelligence of the growing split in the committees, the divisions already rending Free Gwangju apart, and that a solid core of diehards would never trust the regime and would never surrender. So said that the citizen demands were “excessive” and that the students were not interested in good-faith negotiations. So, the preparations for the reconquest of Gwangju – codenamed Splendid Holiday – went forward. 

By the 25th, negotiations between the various settlement committees and the army had stalled. The people of Gwangju insisted that the military admit fault for the fighting started on the 18th, and that the citizens had been justified in defending themselves – but the military stuck to the line that the city of Gwangju was full of traitors and rebels, and no apology would be made. Only complete surrender could be accepted. The voluntary disarmament of the sinmingun, still hoping for a peaceful resolution, continued apace. General So judged that by May 27th, he would have filtered out all but the diehardest of diehards, and the situation would be ripe to move in.

The early rumbles came on May 26th, the 9th day of the uprising. Early that morning, the military, in violation of its negotations with the citizens – for what promises could be owed to rebels? – began to creep forward to seize jumping-off positions for the assault on the next morning. A stolen army radio reported that tanks and troops were approaching the heart of the city from the west.

An emergency meeting of the settlement committees was called, and the city leaders rushed out to the incursion, even as the soldiers contemptuously brushed aside the barricades that had been erected during the siege. The delegation pleaded with the soldiers, some citizens even lying down in the street to stop the tanks – nine years before Tiananmen, and not nearly as well remembered – and the committee made a last ditch effort at a peaceful resolution. To no avail. 

That afternoon, one final mass rally was held in front of the Provincial Hall – the last of Free Gwangju, though no one yet knew it. As detailed before, with the rain, the massacres taking place around the outskirts of the city, the desertion of the United States, and the constant pressure, the moderates in Gwangju were dispirited and defeated – most drifted away. In their place was left the hard liners, who rejected the Settlement Committee and now formed the Struggle Committee. They issued one last set of demands – a set obviously impossible for the military to accept:

1. The Choi Kyu-ha interim government holds full responsibility for the current situation and should resign after paying full reparations to the people of Kwangju; 
2. Martial law must be lifted immediately, as it justifies continuing violence against Kwangju;
3. Execute the butcher Chun Doo Hwan in the name of the nation
4. Release dissident leaders and form a national salvation government with them
5. Stop the biased news coverage that distorts the uprising 
6. Our fundamental demand is not just the unconditional release of the arrested insurgents and full compensation, but a real democratic government
7. We will fight to the death if our demands are not met (Hwang Sŏk Yŏng 1985:202–203).

The rally ended at about nine pm the night of the 26th. The warning that the army might attack that night flew around the city, and final efforts were made to dissuade the diehards in the city-center from making a last stand – to no avail. About 200 rebel fighters, most of them high school students and other young people, grimly armed themselves with the handful of weapons not given up and began to fortify the YWCA, the Provincial Office, and a small number of other public buildings. 

As the students prepared for their defiant martyrdom, the citizens of the city held one final, mass funeral for the dead. Linda Lewis was in attendance and I will let her words speak for themselves:

“[Each coffin] had pictures and memorabilia placed on top, so there was some sense of who the victims were. Here, a young student, his high school picture showing him strong and serious; there, a young woman portrayed in hanbok (traditional Korean dress). There were older people too; some pictures showed mature men and women. …Two young sisters, I supposed, were beside their brother’s body, holding each other and reading a bible. A whole family stood together, a middle-aged woman weeping, arms around the casket itself. Men in hemp mourning hats sat on their haunches around the edges of the gym, quietly talking; mothers in white mourning hanbok leaned on each other for support….

A girl in high school uniform spoke, followed by a boy in fatigues, then a young man wrapped in the national flag. Remember the dead. Think of democracy. There were no wild exhortations or radical talk; the scene spoke for itself. Watchers wept. A grandmother behind me pushed at my shoulder to get a better glimpse, and beside me Mother kept gasping, “Omae!” (My goodness!) as she took inventory of the victims. 

For the first time I really felt the dimensions of the tragedy; there before us all was the evidence that all kinds of citizens—young, old, male, female, innocent, and maybe not so innocent—had died. We sang the national anthem, and the service ended with a middle-aged, apparently middle-class man reminding us of the uncertainty of what might happen that night and of how the whole thing would end. Then we all fi­led out, making room for the next group. All the way home, Mother kept dabbing at her eyes. “I can’t help it,” she said. “The tears just keep coming. Think of it! A young mother . . . those students …”

——

Early the next morning, Splendid Holiday started and the Gwangju Uprising reached its bloody conclusion. 

*Glaysteen also frantically cabled about “people’s courts” and “executions” being carried out by communist radicals inside the city. Not one eyewitness reports the same. The most charitable explanation is that Glaysteen was swallowing the regime’s lies hook, line, and sinker – the top US official in Korea at the time being more or less led around by the nose. 

** Later, the elder Pang took to drinking every day, but he never did recover from his son’s death and ultimately ended his days in an insane asylum. 

I’m writing this with a good view out of my hotel window – the smog over Incheon has cleared and I can see all the way to the mainland. Good thing the view is so nice, too, since I’m stuck here for two full weeks without setting foot in the hallway. I can see the jets taking off, and about every minute there’s a distant roar – like someone shifting furniture down the hall or a few floors away – as one of the big airliners goes rumbling into the air, bound for San Francisco or Qatar or Singapore or any of a hundred other cities of the world. 

I thought of yesterday as “the Long Wednesday,” as I passed nearly 24 hours without night due to flying West (and losing most of Thursday in the process, darned International Date Line being what it is). I did most of it with only about 6 hours’ sleep, all told.

Four of those hours were snatched in the San Francisco Airport. There’s a mostly abandoned food court in the international terminal, all the businesses having fled the coronavirus, with long booths that are sort of soft. I shivered most of the night, since I dressed in light, comfortable clothes for the trip and all my heavier things were checked, and SF prefers that its summertime airport conditions resemble the tundra, apparently. My backpack was a decent enough pillow, mostly due to my stuffed tiger, Sunshine (there’s a story there), who was traveling with me. So I slept well enough from about 11 to 3 am Wednesday. 

At 3, I was woken up by a security officer rousting up a homeless man who had been sleeping near me. That had been a bit of a surprise to me. I’d heard that San Francisco has a problem with homelessness, of course, but that problem was starkly visible if you spend even a little time in the airport. While I was waiting for my COVID test, I passed a woman with a shopping cart talking to herself, twice. She was agitated, raging against an invisible interlocutor, who apparently represented the Chinese and vampires (not sure if the vampires were metaphorical or literal), and she wouldn’t have it. Her eyes were alert and active, watching me each time I passed while her mouth continued its uninterrupted stream of verbiage. While I wrote yesterday’s 100 words (it was more than 100 words, as this will be), another man sat in the booth across from mine. He had no bags, but again, a cart full of…well, stuff, and had the same sort of tight, weathered look on his face that the woman did. And when I woke up, the security officer was gently chivvying two other people from their places of rest, offering bus tickets and other inducements to get them to leave the airport. 

Now, I confess, one of my most unChristian impulses is a nervousness around homeless people. My hindbrain doesn’t like the unpredictability – much like a wild animal, when I can’t be sure what someone will do next, I get uneasy. Intellectually, I know this is not at all how Christ would want me to feel towards my brethren,* but emotionally, that’s my first reaction. I am not proud of it. 

So instead, I found myself thinking of causes. Why is there so much homelessness in San Francisco? It is one of the wealthiest cities in America, and one of the most progressive – a political philosophy which has always claimed to care about the weak and vulnerable most of all. And yet, many people are forced to seek shelter in an airport of all places. And, of course, Bay area rents are famously among the highest in the nation – quite possibly the world, then – which can’t help matters. If I were ever foolish enough to get into politics, I think i would make finding a solution for everyone one of my top priorities as Mayor. I wonder what London Breed fills her time with. 

Anyway, the clock ground towards 6 am and the opening of Air Canada’s check in. I bid farewell to my overnight companions – a young man with only a backpack, whose flight had been delayed a day, a young woman and her brother from Nigeria, if I’m any judge of accents, who spent most of the midnight hours watching Little Rascals on her phone, and a Russian man who argued loudly with, well, someone from his home country every two hours or so to liven things up a bit. 

Check in went smoothly, I chatted pleasantly with the gate agent who helped me retrieve my bags to re-check (originally from Tokyo, she loved her last ten years in San Francisco, but was excited for me to reach Incheon as she also loves Korea, despite their resentment towards the Japanese), and was first to the gate (no line at security at 6:15 am! Most pleasant security experience ever). I entertained myself by playing Paper Mario, helping an older woman get her phone onto the airport wifi, and watching people with places to be hurry around.

The Long Wednesday hit part 2 when we boarded and flew to Vancouver. The plane was tiny and mostly empty – I had a row to myself. The morning sun was just hitting most of the northern California mountains, and I spent most of the flight looking out the window, even when it was just clouds. A thousand generations of human beings never saw what the top of a cloud looked like, you know? It seems a waste to just ignore the opportunity. Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Rainier were on the other side of the plane, alas, but I did get to see Portland, Seattle, and Mt. Olympia blazing in the sunlight. Puget Sound and Victoria Island were as beautiful as I’d been told, and Vancouver, nestled in its coastal plain amid the encircling mountains, was of course lovely. 

Vancouver airport was large, beautiful (filled with trees and natural woods inside, so many windows that even indoors it felt like I was wandering a Pacific Northwest forest), and would have been a much more pleasant place to overnight. Drat. I reached my connecting gate, which had a huge line outside it. The first of many lines on the Long Wednesday. 90% of the people in line were Korean, and before we ever were admitted to the gate, we had to hadn over all our documents, including our COVID tests, for the third time (once in Denver, and once – well, twice, in my case – in San Francisco).

When I reached the front, the gate agent, a Korean man improbably named Sunny, took my test, frowned, and vanished back to his companions. I saw three others come over and they all bent over it. A sheen of sweat broke out and I got a little nervous as they argued. I was assured that this test would – I bit back an indignant reaction before I had cause. Eventually, he shuffled back, smiled, and let me into the gate.

Part 3 was a long, 11-hour flight up the Canadian Pacific coast, over the Seward Peninsula and the Bering Sea, and down the Russian and Japanese coasts (skirting far around Nork airspace) to Incheon. I was as comfortable as could be expected – in the central island, an aisle seat and no one next to me, plenty of room – and passed the time with Toy Story 4 (better than I expected), True Grit (actually really good), a two-hour nap, and Wonder Woman 1984 (I didn’t reach the ending but I like Nathan Fillion and DC, I think, does better movies than Marvel because even though they’re not especially well-executed at least DC is willing to take risks and try something new every now and then, unlike Marvel’s Mad Libs style story generation). (Oh, mad libs as in AD-LIB, I JUST figured that out! Wow), and Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age on my Kindle. 

Part IV of the Long Wednesday began when we were wheels-down in Incheon, by my internal clock about midnight, 21 hours after I had woken up in the SFO food court, by the world clock 4 pm Thursday afternoon. It mostly involved lots of forms and lines, which I’ll write about tomorrow since it’s not like I’ll have any new experiences to share. 

*31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Matthew 25:31-46

Day 2:

6/22/21

Well, I have had a doozy of a day, and it’s only 1:30 San Francisco time – 3:30 US central. The moral of the story is that I cannot ever recommend traveling via Air Canada – or during COVID.

Let’s start at the beginning. I woke up from my Denver hotel early and was on the shuttle by 6:30, to make it to the airport in plenty of time for my 9:48 departure. I sat next to Andrew – a scruffy, long-haired young man in a beanie and a denim jacket. He had come from New York, where he saw the Foo Fighters at Madison Square Garden (awesome, was his review), and was headed to visit his uncle in Dallas (hot as balls, he predicted). He wished me safe travels to Korea and Africa beyond when we parted, heading off with his little bag for the Delta desks while I wrestled my massive luggage (I brought too many books, but I’ll be damned if I left more behind) over to the Air Canada desk – which sat silent and deserted. Hm.

Eventually, with some interrogation of the people lounging around the area yielding valuable Clues, my investigation led me to the United desk area (naturally this necessitated dragging my bags up one elevator and down another, because the Denver terminal is Under Construction). I reached the self-help kiosk and happily punched in my verification number.

ERROR

PLEASE SEE ASSOCIATE

Uh oh. 

Now, I only need to write 100 words, because I could go on at some length, but suffice to say Lorraine, the kindly agent, helped me amidst a growing sea of people from 6:50 to 7:50, even while putting out a dozen fires. See, it seems that, while Air Canada had cancelled my KC flight, they had later reinstated it – for Tuesday afternoon. In order to check in for my Denver to SFO flight for Tuesday morning, I FIRST needed to check in Tuesday afternoon – in Kansas City. I helpfully pointed out that this was impossible, and Lorraine agreed, but she was with United, not Air Canada.

While I fruitlessly hacked away at the legions of robots defending any and all human beings at Expedia and Air Canada’s help desks, she bravely sat on hold for me for an hour with a United reservations agent. At last, after an hour, she got through. Amidst the bustling terminal noise, she shouted into her phone:

“No, it’s LAPLANTE! LIMA – ALPHA – PAPA – LIMA – oh. He hung up on me.”

I was sent upstairs, to a purgatory of people shuffling back and forth through a winding sea of queue-tape, eventually reaching a desk with a human. She pointed out that I hadn’t checked in for my KC flight that afternoon and I technically didn’t exist. I helpfully pointed out that this was impossible.

Having persuaded someone of the impossibility of my situation, and showing her the emails that proved this was not a situation I had deliberately engineered as a practical joke (though I haven’t ruled out hte possibility that Air Canada was playing one on me), she said, “I can fix this.” 45 minutes later, she did. In the meantime, I met James (a young man in a plain black tee-shirt, holding a pillow on his small suitcase), who had just missed his connection to Chicago and needed to be rescheduled, and Barbara, a little old woman with snowy white hair and eyes insufficient to the task of reading United’s self-check in screen (I took care of her while I waited). There was also Terri, a middle-aged woman who wrestled 3 enormous bags past me was I waited – she said her husband had the worse end of the deal, he was stuck with 3 crying toddlers while she dealt with customer service. I agreed with her. 
Anyway, in the end, with an hour to go, United came through a travel plan actually possible for human beings to follow, and I raced off to make my flight, now just an hour away. Security at Denver was huuuuge, thousands of humans packed in like cattle through a vast chamber lined with blue-uniformed TSA agents, noisy with the barked directions from the agents, overhead security and flight announcements, the beeps of hte various machines sniffing out the Terrorists In Our Midst, and of course screaming children. I somehow made it through the mess in 30 minutes, raced to the train carrying me to Terminal B (cursed the inconsiderate jerks who kept shoving into the closing doors, delaying our departure by at least 3 minutes), wove around so many slow people and grabbed every moving walkway I could, and panted to a stop at the door just as they were closing up the aircraft. They let me on and I was home free!

Well. After an uneventful flight (the blonde girl next to me snored worse than my father, amusingly), we landed at SFO and I had an hour to make my connection to Vancouver, where I would depart for Seoul the next morning. I made my way to gate B-21 without issue, and rolled up to present my documents.

The woman took my passport, boarding pass, and one of my two negative COVID tests, and looked hard at it. Then she called over her partner. That’s never a good sign.

The two women bent over the test, poring over it, even flipping it over. Then they looked back up at me. “This won’t work.”

“What.”

“THis test. Do you have another?”

I did, but it was no better. “They won’t accept this.”

“What do you mean, Korea won’t accept this? It’s a PCR test, exactly what they require. Both Walgreens and CVS swear their tests are good for international travel.”

“It’s not the type of test, it’s your name.”

“What? Bradley LaPlante, just like my passport and driver’s license.”

“Your passport says Bradley THOMAS LaPlante. Your test has to say Bradley Thomas LaPlante. We can’t let you on this plane.”

Indeed, I did not get on that plane, but remain in San Francisco, even as the plane should be winging its way up the northern California coast. Eventually, we settled on a solution:

The airport offered two COVID tests, both of which they assured me woudl be accepted. I could have my bags held at the gate or I could collect them and recheck them (I had them held), and could catch their next flight to Vancouver – which left at 9:20 tomorrow morning. I’d have to stay the night outside security, since their desk was closed for the day and wouldn’t open until 4:30 am, but I’d get to Vancouver in time for my connection.

So, I shuffled over to yet another queue, waited behind two massive families and ahead of a women frantic that she was going to miss her flight to Paris, and got the test (and paid for it out of pocket, because of course I did).

I waited around for the results, which came soon enough, and will spend the night here before resuming my journey tomorrow.

The best part is, when I got my results? My middle name wasn’t on that test, either.

I made them reprint it.

Day 1 – June 21, 2021

I’m writing this first entry in my new adventure journal from a hotel room in Denver, Colorado, with the sun going down behind the Rockies outside my window. There’s so much to say – why I stopped writing last time (Kajal), why I’m going back to Korea (Kajal), finishing my Gwangju Uprising history (nearly done! I will finish in quarantine!), to say nothing of the hundreds of adventures I’ve had just getting this far (from Mark and Paul helping me move my apartment, to the odyssey of my flight arrangements, to the fiasco that was checking in to my storage locker, to moving my sister, to the complications of my COVID tests…)…naturally I will say none of these things.

My goal is to keep these short and manageable, with longer entries as I can. If I commit to 100 words a day, I can handle that, and build the habit of writing – plus have a daily record!

So, I woke up this morning for the last time in a long while in my parents’ house in Lee’s Summit. A COVID test at noon (to go with my COVID test yesterday – long story), one last lunch with my dad (a dry-rub burger with bacon and pepper jack cheese, crispy fries). Then it was to the airport.

My journey to Yeosu, Korea, is taking 2 and a half weeks, counting quarantine. Initially, I was flying Air Canada – KC to Denver to Vancouver to Seoul. Later, Air Canada added a San Francisco leg to the trip. 

Then rescheduled the KC – Denver leg to come AFTER the Denver – San Francisco leg.

When I pointed out to them that, while this was no doubt an excellent arrangement for an eternal spirit existing at all times and places at once, this would cause problems for mortals bound to the laws of time, like me, they responded by cancelling the KC to Denver flight entirely, while leaving everything else intact.

Rather than beat my head against the hardest of known substances in the universe – the iron and inflexible will of airline bureaucracy – I surrendered by just booking a flight to Denver for the night before. So, tomorrow I’ll schlep all my luggage back to the airport, recheck it, and hopefully relax until I make it to Seoul.

Anyway, point is, today was just a short evening hop over to Denver. The check in and flight was uneventful – the plane was full, so I shuffled my seat so a delightful young family of four could all sit sorta close to each other, and finished reading my history of Scott’s ghastly effort to reach the South Pole (The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard). Delightful. Got to Denver at about 7 pm local, grabbed my two heavy bags (45 pound each, most of my earthly possessions in the world [possibly I should not have packed so many books]) right off the conveyer as I walked up, a small blessing, watched the wheel of my duffel bag, which has seen Hawaii, Guatemala, Spain, Turkey, Mexico, and Korea without incident, crack, a minor curse, and caught a ride with a young man named Kawaji to my hotel. Kawaji was young, a slight, quiet man with very dark skin and a vague foreign accent I couldn’t place. We chatted, about his life in Denver (pleasant), the winters (awful), his family (one sister in town, Martha – going to school to become a nurse), but I never did ask where he was from, since he probably got that a lot. 

Then it was into the hotel, set up in my room, try and check in for my Air Canada flights starting tomorrow morning (more unpleasant surprises! But we can get that later), and then writing this. I shall grab a nice hot shower to recover from my travel and curl up under these big soft sheets, thanking God that at least I’ve got a lovely hotel to stay in and not a wretched tent pitched on the Ross Ice Shelf (with apologies to Robert Falcon Scott).

Day one of the rest of my life is complete!