By Lee Jun-youb
April is the cruelest month, and three years ago it had the cruelest day for South Korean teenagers. Although ten million candles have finally raised the sunken boat from the sea after 1,089 days, the presidential impeachment trial has not unveiled truths that could soothe the spirits of the 304 dead, 172 survivors and a nation in mourning.
On my first ballot in 2012, I voted for former President Park Geun-hye. I was politically apathetic then, and I voted with filial piety. Along with 51.6 percent of the Koreans, my parents voted for Park as they still romanticize the decades-long economic boom under Park’s military dictator father, Park Chung-hee. He was assassinated in 1979 when his daughter was my age, five years after his wife was assassinated during an attempt on his life.
The economy roared on after his death, but with the premonition that the “Miracle on the Han River” was a mirage. For the past two decades, my family has lived in Gangnam’s Sampoong apartments, next to the Sampoong Department Store that buried more than 500 people in its 1995 collapse. A year before when I was four, a bridge across Seoul collapsed out of the blue. Like the Sewol, the causes of the department store and bridge disasters were a combination of illegal redesigns, overloading and lax government oversight. The largest of the four Asian tigers turned out to be a paper tiger.
Within two years of the Sampoong collapse, my nouveau riche family moved to the eponymous apartment. Within a decade of the fall, a high-end apartment opened on the graveyard. “As a survivor, absence of a memorial at the site disheartens me,” Sampoong survivor Choe Myeong-seok said in an interview marking the decennial of the collapse in 2005. He was one of the three survivors who persisted for more than ten days in the rubble.
The sea is crueler than land, and no one escaped from Sewol after it capsized around the time President Park called the Coast Guard. Although Korea’s Neo-Confucian norms demand three years of mourning by sons for the passing of their parents, bereaved parents had barely grieved for a year before a right wing civic group paid North Korean defectors $20,000 to stage demonstrations against Sewol parents who lost 250 teenagers.
In a classical folk tale beloved by both Koreas, a 16-year-old daughter, “Simcheong,” offers herself to be sacrificed on a sea voyage in exchange for 300 bags of rice offered to Buddha to restore her father’s vision. The Yellow Sea that embraced Simcheong and the Sewol is fed by the Han River, which dissects Seoul. Countless bodies still flow down this river, as Seoul’s luminescent bridges are hotspots for suicides. The suicide rate has tripled since my parents’ generation while our incomes also tripled, and Korea now suffers from the second highest suicide rate in the world.
Meanwhile, candles and yellow ribbons commemorating the Sewol will continue to circle the square at the heart of Seoul. The “children of Sewol” were born in 1997 during the Asian financial crisis catalyzed by decades of crony capitalism, and the rising generation will not let the unholy alliance of business and politics sink the truth.
Lee Jun-youb is a freelance journalist and literary translator based in Seoul. His writings have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and OZY Media. He has written the travel essay "Paran naleul dalida" published by Sigonsa. Write to junyoub@stanford.edu.