Recollections of remarkable Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon

A general view of the public memorial for late Seoul mayor Park Won-soon in Seoul on July 11, 2020. AFP

By Emanuel Pastreich

Deaths of two leaders left Korean society divided

2020-07-12 17:13 | Politics

Mayor Park Won-Soon stands out in my memory among the many politicians that I have met during my 12 years in Korea. Granted the limits imposed by current political systems, he tried to practice what he believed. He believed that the mayor should serve as the first among equals and he took his relations with other public servants seriously.

At meetings and public events he made every effort to engage people while treating them as his equal. I was impressed by his ability to put down everything at a second's notice and listen carefully to what citizens, or government officials, told him.

He gave authority to those around him to make decisions on their own and he respected their opinions.

He was also a scholar of sorts. He spent endless hours studying the specifics of policy, of sewer systems, plans for apartments, and the condition of roads to a degree that most politicians would farm out to others. There were tremendous piles of city plans on his desk. I heard that he was up late at night going over the details of plans across the city.

But Mayor Park was not just concerned about buildings and roads, water pipes and renewable energy. He wanted to understand Seoul from within. He tried to set up programs to create villages within the city wherein citizens could be economically and politically self-sufficient.

He encouraged people to gather together at the Seoul Citizens' Center he helped establish in the basement beneath City Hall for meetings. He launched numerous campaigns to allow citizens to present their opinions, and their perspectives, their photographs and drawings. He even arranged for citizens to hold concerts and to stand on a platform in the basement and present their ideas.

The Seoul Citizens' Center made it possible for any citizen to set up an event where like-minded people could gather for a discussion on contemporary issues. There were also spaces for cultural events, and even a space for weddings.

I was fond of the cafe where I enjoyed drinking free-trade coffee and talking with the forward-thinking people who gathered there. I also was fond of the store that sold products made by small factories and individuals in Seoul. My children loved running around on the cushions lined up against the wall, or touring the exhibitions of images and sounds of Seoul.

Although I knew much about Mayor Park and his work as a human rights lawyer, and a leader in the NGO world, I first met him when he invited me to give a talk at the book club that he held monthly at city hall. I had breakfast with him and an about 80 public servants at this event in 2014.

I discussed my recent book "A Republic of Korea that Koreans do not know about" and made suggestions about what Seoul could be. Park gave me complete freedom to talk about my ideas and even let me distribute my "Made in Seoul" declaration in which I advocated for a vibrant local economy.

Park sat next to me and immediately launched into a discussion of the content of my book when I arrived for that event at around 7:30 a.m. He had clearly read the book with great care and he gave concrete examples of how he hoped to implement certain ideas about culture in Seoul.

He was extremely effective at drawing me into a conversation by dint of his passion and at the same time he suggested a concrete plan for implementation. That conversation was not just small talk but led directly to a series of discussions with citizens groups and public officials concerning policy, media and the participation of citizens in policy.

That he approached a foreigner about such ideas was most remarkable.

After breakfast, Park sat with me on of the halls in the Citizen's center and we spoke about urban culture and the potential of Seoul with about 60 government officials. Most of those present were there because they were sincerely interested in the topic. Some were high-ranking, most were there because they cared.

There was no sense of hierarchy or formality in the open discussion. Neither Park nor I were lecturing. We led a discussion and allowed the participants to present their ideas. That was Park at his best.

He took great interest Seoul's history. He set up a bookstore in the basement of the Citizens' Center that provided a broad variety of materials on how Seoul has evolved over the past 500 years. He enjoyed talking about Seoul's past and considered his work as mayor as part of a long historical process.

Park deep interest in history made him unusual among progressive politicians. He took a serious interest in how Seoul had been governed from ancient times, and even during the colonial period, or during the Park Chung Hee era. He saw there was much to be learned from Seoul's past in terms of urban design and administration.

He broad understanding of what Seoul has been, what it is today, and what it can be, was central to his planning for the future.

His efforts to make Seoul great without tearing anything down, without building anything new, stood in marked contrast to the previous mayors Lee Myungbak and Oh Se-hoon, who made their mark on the city by flattening the small stores that once filled Seoul and constructing flashy and expensive buildings that had no organic relationship with the surrounding neighborhoods ― but depended on funding from investment banks.

Many people explained to me that Park had been able to address many difficult problems in local politics not because of his ties to the rich and powerful, but rather because he had such detailed knowledge of local issues. He was an unusual politician in that for him it was not a game of personalities and factions, but rather a constructive process that demanded precise understanding of people's concrete daily conditions.

I was struggling with a group of academics and NGO members to establish the Asia Institute as a central think tank in Seoul at the time. Although we had a broad following, and we held seminars regularly, we had been turned down repeatedly by various ministries when we tried to incorporate because we did not have a large endowment and we did not have powerful backers.

The Asia Institute runs seminars in English and Korean that are open to the public. We encouraged high school students to serve as presenters and to discuss issues as a means of encouraging active engagement in policy. Our internship director Young Collyer (배희경) worked tirelessly to organize substantial discussions for high school and college students. We held two or three seminars a month at the time.

Park immediately recognized the value of the Asia Institute as a think tank that provided citizens a chance to participate in policy discussions. He knew why we did not want to be dependent on external funding and he vowed to support us. Park was also deeply committed to climate change, almost uniquely among Korean politicians. He was fully behind our many seminars on environment issues.

He supported our efforts at the Asia Institute in part because of his commitment to alternative education in Korea and his belief in the critical role of education in the formulation of democratic principles in the minds of citizens.

Park went out of his way to encourage us and after long negotiations. The Seoul Metropolitan Department of Education approved us as a think tank. I learned later that we were the first think tank for citizens the Department of Education had approved.

Park combined a deep interest in ordinary citizens' lives with a fascination with art, music and writing. He wrote articles and books on culture, history and policy and he read with great interest what citizens wrote to him.

There was a time late at night, 10 p.m. and 12.30 a.m., when you could write to Mayor Park by email, and later by Kakao, and he would often respond immediately, sometimes in considerable detail. It was not simply that he was accessible to concerned citizens. He was engaged, he was committed and he was inspiring.

I remember when Marc Shell, professor of English literature at Harvard, visited Seoul for a seminar introducing his book "Islandology." I asked Park if he had time and he immediately set up a meeting. He made time. We spent an hour discussing why islands become such problems in international relations and how to understand the role of islands in historical and cultural context. Park was deeply engaged in the conversation with Shell and clearly had done his homework. He did not see the meeting as a means of scoring political points, or obtaining publicity. Park was driven above everything else by a deep intellectual curiosity.

The last time we spoke at length was two years ago when he wrote the preface for my most recent Korean book "A greater Republic of Korea." He read the manuscript and provided an insightful preface. Park had a remarkable ability to combine a personal relationship with individuals with a deep concern for the lives of ordinary citizens. He leaves an impressive political legacy that will be hard to match.