Everybody Love Everybody

This past weekend was absolutely amazing. I was touched and challenged both physically (I climbed a mountain on Saturday) and emotionally (I listened to a survivor of the No Gun Ri massacre).

So on Thursday, I went to the DMZ. The overall experience was actually really disappointing because the conference room (which is like the main attraction) was closed. Also the ridiculous amount of propaganda on the tour really left a bad taste in my moth. Everything that was said basically consisted of "South Korea is wonderful and North Korea is FULL OF EVIL BARBARIANS THAT WILL EAT YOUR CHILDREN AND RAPE YOUR DAUGHTERS IF GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY." For example, our tour guide was describing the discovery of a bunch of tunnels from North Korea to South Korea by saying "Yes the North and South were engaged in reunification talks when a South Korean soldier discovered the tunnels which is typical of the North Koreans' duplicitous negotiation style." Obviously this statement was made in far more broken less fluent english but the sentiment was pretty much the same. I was shocked by the fact that such blatantly pejorative language is so normalized within South Korean society that it could find its way onto an official tour.

However, by far the worst part though was that you weren't allowed to take pictures ANYWHERE. My poor little tourists heart almost broke at that realization. I saw this really obnoxious british man try and take a picture and one of the South Korean soldiers came up to him made him show him the picture and then deleted it from his digital camera. Here's a picture with me, my roommate Sunny, love of my life Anna and one of the Korean soldiers haha:




The same day that we went to the DMZ we also saw this railroad station that was built for when trains can travel from North to South Korea (and vice versa) which obviously is very symbolic for Koreans. As a foreigner the two things that struck me most about the station was 1) If it were function that would be amazing for people wanting to travel as you could literally take a train all the way from South Korea to Portugal 2) that train station is a colossal waste of money as there is no near future in which relations between the North and the South will have improved enough for travel to resume between the two countries. In general reunification is extremely important to all Koreans. Most Koreans that I have met here of all ages dream of a day in which the two regions will be one nation again and think that reunification is inevitable. More importantly, there are families that have been separated since the close of the Korean War. However, I feel as though the result of unification will only be disaster. While South Korea has experienced amazing economic development, North Korea has remained a developing nation in which large segments of the population are malnourished and do not receive adequate education. Seoul, which is pretty much where all South Koreans want to be, is so incredibly Americanized that it is completely saturated with the same ugly materialism that is such a large part of America. In contrast, North Korea is still largely rural and it's people are conditioned to value the state and their leader more highly than anything else. Essentially you have two societies in which the underlying ideology is completely incompatible. In my opinion, I think that if reunification actually happened, Korean society would probably fall apart. All that could possibly happen would be an underclass of uneducated and disadvantaged people would be added to South Korea. Nationalistic passion aside, people don't share and when it comes down to sacrificing individual comfort for someone you don't know that fact isn't going to magically change.

On Friday, my heart broke. I don't know how else to explain. I can only think of a handful of other times when I have felt such intense sadness. We went to the village in Hwanggan-myeon where the Gun Ri Incident took place. What occurred was, for still unclear reasons, U.S. soldiers killed between 150-400 Korean refugees, most of which were the elderly, women, or children. By the way, the U.S. government official stance is "What befell civilians in the vicinity of No Gun Ri in late July 1950 was a tragic and deeply regrettable accompaniment to a war." There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the details of the incident (mostly around the actual number of civilians killed and the journalistic techniques of those who originally broke the story). But I think that it is significant that there has been none concerning whether or not the incident actually occurred.

While we were there we were able to meet with one of the survivors whose account of what happened was face melting. He was about 14 years old in 1950 and was being escorted by South by U.S. soldiers along with his mother and younger sister. They were told to wait, with other villagers, on a train track. Eventually while they were waiting American planes flew overhead and began dropping bombs onto the villagers. Immediately after that all hell broke loose as people and oxen (they still used them to carry stuff back then) were either on the ground wounded/dying or trying to flee. Meanwhile, the U.S. soldiers opened fire on them. The survivor (he said his name but I couldn't pronounce it or attempt to spell it) and his family ran and hid in some bushes until they were spotted by a soldier who told them to move underneath the train tracks to the bridge underneath. I should point out now that all of this is taking place in the summer time and trust me it is SO FREAKING HOT HERE IN THE SUMMER. Seriously, the humidity alone is bananas. So obviously being crammed under a bridge (see pictures) in the summer is far from comfortable. In fact, even standing out there taking pictures and listening to this man talk was pretty unbearable. Anyways, so he and his family were crammed in with a bunch of other refugees underneath this bridge. They were then told that they were going to be shot and if they wanted to try and run away, they would be spared if they could make it. At this point, all of the people who could run fast, which was mostly men (excluding the elderly), ran off into the woods and the ones who didn't get shot made it. So the majority of the people who were left under the bridge were either women, children, or old people. Many people begged for their lives, in particular he mentioned a group of school teachers who begged the soldiers in Japanese (most of the soldiers had previously been stationed in Japan and knew far more Japanese than Korean) to let them live to no avail. Then they opened fire. He passed out and woke up the next morning to the realization that he had been shot (non-fatally) and when he tried to tell his mom that he had been hit, he realized she was dead. In fact, the only reason why he and his sister survived was because his mother had covered them with her body and as a result gotten shot in the back of the head and in the back multiple times. More importantly because her corpse was covering them when the soldiers went back through to make sure everyone was dead they missed the two children because they were under a dead body. He said that his last memories of his mother were of her saying a buddhist prayer for the souls of her children, clearly already having accepted her own death as inevitable. In the pictures of the bridge that I'm putting up of the bridge, the white triangular markings are spots were there are bullets lodged into the cement from the shooting.


There is so much more that he said that I want to write but in a way hearing his account made me feel too much. For starters, I instantaneously and unconsciously exempted myself from having to feel any guilt. I definitely felt the whole "Omg Americans are so horrible" but at the same time, I felt and continue to feel somehow exempt from 'that' america. It's like whenever I hear about something like that, Americans massacring innocent people in third world nations it's like 'hey, it wasn't that long ago that they were stringing black people up on trees.' I think that lynching in particular came to mind because a couple of days ago I was watching Nas's "Be a Nigger Too" video in which there is a lynching scene at the end (my assessment being Nas uses shock value to cover up the fact that he is a completely charisma-less, boring and uncreative artist). But at the end of the day that's not enough. It's not enough to try and insulate myself from other people's suffering because I belong to a historically oppressed group as well in spite of the fact that I really haven't suffered to the same extent. I could insert the typical protestant 'im the worst, most ungrateful sinner' speech here but really we all pretty much suck equally. I'm working on a poem about the incident, I have about a stanza and a bunch of images in my head. But that's really not enough either. I just pray that one day I will know what is.

On Saturday, we climbed a mountain. Not fun. The thing that is crazy though is that all the Koreans on the mountain seemed to treat it like going to the park. There were literally people who brought their small kids with them to climb this 5 km mountain, which doesn't sound like a lot but was so incredibly hard. After we climbed the mountain we visited this really pretty Buddhist temple which was interesting and at one point had one of the largest Buddhist statues in Asia. I wanted to take so many pictures (I did actually take a lot) but at the same time there were monks walking around praying and performing their monk-ly duties so I felt kind of awkward/disrespectful.

Overall, the combination of the Buddhist chants and the beautiful sculptures was really impressive. I think that the West has a very voyeuristic relationship with Buddhism. While I was at the temple there was this huge group of people, all of whom were white, who were participating in a temple 'homestay.' This homestay consists of a bunch of foreigners purchasing the opportunity to stay in a temple for a short period of time (i think about 24hrs) and wear gray monk robes. The benefit of this is that it allows you to 'authentically' experience Buddhism without having to do anything pesky like giving up all your worldly possessions. All that to say, westerns will pretty much buy anything and the trick for the rest of the world is just to figure out how to sell it.