hankyoreh

During the long holiday at the beginning of May, which brings a pause to our daily routines, I’ve decided to tell a story I’ve always wanted to share, a story I’ve kept hidden away until now. The story has been on my mind for a long time.

I have close ties to the city of Gwangju, the city where I went to elementary, middle, and high school. Even so, I wasn’t there during the 10 days of the democratization movement and subsequent massacre in May 1980, and during my work as a sociologist and social scientist, I’ve never analyzed those events nor helped shape their narrative. Furthermore, the words I would need to explicate those events seem to be hopelessly trapped inside.

Despite realizing the futility of whatever I might say, I retraced the footsteps through my mental landscape, trying to understand how I’d encountered, or failed to encounter, Gwangju that May. Eventually, I reached a story I’d heard about “Our Teacher.”

Even now, decades later, “Our Teacher” is how my classmates from my first year of high school like to call our homeroom teacher. The government of Syngman Rhee was overthrown in my second year of middle school (Apr. 19, 1960), and then the subsequent government was toppled in a coup led by Park Chung-hee in my third year of middle school (May 16, 1961). In 1962, I passed the national test distributed by the military junta and entered high school.

I became quite attached to my small school (there were just three classes per grade) and my homeroom teacher, the school’s chemistry teacher. One day toward the end of my first year in high school, he showed up to our homeroom meeting after the day’s classes were over with a copy of the O. Henry short story collection “The Last Leaf.” While giving us a reading of “After Twenty Years,” one of the stories in the book, he paused and asked us to imagine what our lives would be like in 20 years.

We were excitedly picturing what we’d be doing 20 years later when someone suggested that we meet after 20 years. As a token of our promise, we resolved to plant a tree the following spring. My classmates and I were split up into different classes the next year, but we still reconvened with our old homeroom teacher that April and planted a bald cypress.

In the spring of 1983, we returned to that bald cypress to keep the promise inspired by “After Twenty Years.” Even though my classmates were living all over the country by that point, more than half of us showed up, and Our Teacher brought along a 20-year-old attendance list and a tape recording of us chattering about how we imagined our lives would be in 20 years.

Amid our boisterous conversation there on the school grounds, one of my old classmates came up to me. “You probably don’t know about this because you weren’t in Gwangju,” she said, before briefly summarizing what had happened on those 10 days in Gwangju in May 1980. Then she told me that Our Teacher had stopped his students from going outside to join the protesters. He’d lain down in the doorway and told the students they’d have to trample over him if they wanted to leave.

On the train heading back to Seoul, I kept pondering the grim words with which my old classmate had ended her story. If not for Our Teacher, she’d said, our beloved Speer Girls’ High School might have been reduced to rubble and many of the students slain. As late as 1983, the “Gwangju Democratization Movement” was a phrase that inspired fear, and the entire incident was swathed in total secrecy.

Between 1976 and 1982, I lived in the dormitory of the East-West Center, on the campus of the University of Hawaii. I generally got my news about the pandemonium in Gwangju in May 1980 over the telephone. I didn’t learn the truth in all its horror until that December, when I sat down with a handful of people in a small secluded meeting room on campus to watch a video tape that had been smuggled out of Korea.

After becoming president the following spring, Chun Doo-hwan visited the US to meet President Ronald Reagan. On his way back home, Chun stopped by the University of Hawaii and planted a commemorative tree, a magnolia, in front of the Center for Korean Studies. A plaque had been set up next to the tree, and during the night, several Koreans who were studying there pulled the plaque out of the ground and flipped it upside down. Such memories overlap in my mind with the story about Our Teacher.

I paused while writing this column to ring up Hyeon-hui, the oldest daughter of Our Teacher. I owed her a phone call anyway, since the first anniversary of her father’s death was coming up, and I transitioned into the story I’d been told all those years ago. She told me that she’d heard the story herself from one of her younger sisters, who’d been in the third year of high school at the time, and that her father had never mentioned it. Then, to my surprise, she dove into an account of what she’d experienced in Gwangju that May.

Hyeon-hui had settled down in Paju with an army doctor she’d married and was working at a community health center. Missing her parents, she and her husband took a week off from work and headed down to Gwangju. But martial law was declared the day after they arrived, which meant that she’d directly witnessed what happened over those 10 days.

Since Hyeon-hui had worked as the narcotics specialist in the pharmaceutical laboratory at Kwangju (Gwangju) Christian Hospital before getting married, she hurried to the hospital — which was overflowing with the wounded — and helped administer narcotics and painkillers while her husband worked in the operating room. It was an awful time: people in hospital gowns who were moving corpses were fired on by martial law forces, and the hospital admitted 150 injured people and declared 15 deaths in a single day. When she finally got home late at night, she recalled that her father had stayed at the school dormitory until the girls went to bed; the two of them didn’t say a single word to each other during those 10 days.

Hyeon-hui got in touch with her younger sister to confirm some of the details of what had happened 40 years ago. The high schools had been ordered to close by that point, and there were only a few dozen students in the dormitory, some from the countryside and others who were studying for the university entrance exam. When these students gathered together and tried to go downtown, Hyeon-hui’s father, who was the school’s vice principal at this time, blocked the dormitory entrance. Hyeon-hui’s sister said the students were forced to turn around because “he actually lay down and told them they’d have to walk over him if they wanted to leave.” According to Hyeon-hui, her sister had concluded the account by noting that their father had been more worried about taking care of the students than about the movement.

This account made me pause and turn the events of Gwangju over in my head. There’s a line in Han Kang’s novel “Human Acts” that goes like this: “A girl in the broad-collared summer uniform of Speer Girls’ High School and another girl in her ordinary clothes were wiping blood-stained faces with a wet towel.” The scene is about girls who’ve gone out to give blood but end up helping collect corpses, and it adds, as an explanatory detail, that “Eun-suk was in the third year at Speer Girls’ High School, just as I’d thought.” After they were turned back by Our Teacher’s fervent appeal, the girls at my school may have helped pick up the corpses, just as in the novel.

While thousands of pages have been written about that May in Gwangju, there are tens of thousands of stories that never made it into those pages. Such is the depth, diversity, and gravity of the sadness, rage, and pain felt by the people of Gwangju. There’s no need to repeat the “story of the masses,” the tale of the 300,000 Gwangju citizens who gathered before the South Jeolla Provincial Office on May 21st, 1980.

While I was wrapping up this column, I was angered to read an article in the news about Chun Doo-hwan dozing off in the trial and once again denying that soldiers in helicopters fired on the protesters during the Gwangju movement. Trying to calm down, I pulled out my copy of “The Social Science of May,” a book written by political scientist Choe Jeong-un in 1999. Choe dedicates a considerable part of his introduction to explaining how upset any social scientist studying the Gwangju Democratization Movement ought to be when they are asked if they’re “one of them” or “if not, what’s your angle?” I emphatically underlined a passage that appeared a little later in the book: “The Gwangju Democratization Movement was not a single incident in our history but an incident that caused our history to begin again and also an incident that caused a new history to begin for each of us.”

As an aside, one reason I haven’t revealed the name of Our Teacher, the man whose pupils remember him as a “legendary teacher,” is from a desire to faithfully represent the life of such a modest man. The other reason is that I don’t want his name to appear on the same page as Chun Doo-hwan.

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By Jo Eun, professor emeritus of sociology at Dongguk University

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