July 18, 2019
It’s not like I’ve never visited Seoul. I have visited the major Korean city a number of times with my family on vacation. Just last week, when I was traveling with my roommate, we stayed in Seoul for a few days.
I thought I had begun to grasp the gist of what the city was like.
On our one free day during the conference, a group of delegates decided to brave the hour-long bus ride and sightsee in Seoul. I soon realized, as I looked around at our little group, that I was the only one with basic fluency in Korean – whether they consciously thought it or not, I was going to have to act as an unofficial guide.
With this rather bleak realization running through my head, I looked up to see a Korean delegate walking toward our group. Yes! I thought he is definitely more capable and qualified to be the guide to this unofficial tourist group. He was generous enough to agree, and off we were, in much more capable hands than mine ~
After hearing that shopping was one of the major goals for the day, he led us first to Myeongdong – a few streets of intertwining alley-like roads with street shops galore, mingling with stores. We wandered those streets for a while, and after we had our fill of street-shopping… We headed over to Namdaemun, for essentially the same thing. We had not had our fill of shopping yet!
Following our brief stop for cheese corn dogs (!!!) and a mini photo session, our unofficial tour guide led us over to Cheonggyecheon Stream, a small waterway flowing through the city. It had been renovated under a former South Korea president for recreational purposes and was famous for its clean, fresh water. Seeing the stream brought back an incredibly strong sense of nostalgia – I had definitely been here before! I saw the stream once more, with older and more experienced eyes…
Gwanghwamun Plaza! I had seen this plaza before, numerous times… just in Korean Dramas and other pictures of Korea. It is a very large plaza in the smack middle of the city featuring two of Korea’s most famous figures – King Sejong and Admiral Yi Sun Sin. King Sejong ruled during the last Korean dynasty during the Joseon Era and created the Korean alphabet that is still in use today. Admiral Yi Sun Sin was a war hero, also from the Joseon era, that defeated the Japanese in their first invasion of Korea. At the far end of the plaza was the entrance to Gyeongbukgung, where I had wandered with my hanbok ~
One of the speakers for KASC had been a hyperrealist painter that had given us a very interesting and impassioned lecture. In it, he had discussed the face of King Sejong (in green) and Admiral Yi Sun Sin (in blue). Due to the turbulent history of Korea, there are no portraits of these figures from their own time period – they were all destroyed during the Japanese colonization of Korea. In an interesting choice, the government decided to officialize one face for each of these significant figures and commissioned artists to depict these two Korean heroes. The two artists, like many portrait artists, chose to depict these two figures based on two individuals whom they were familiar with. In this case, in a bout of arrogance – in my opinion – they chose to base their portraits on themselves. And in doing so, they immortalized their own faces as those of Korean heroes. These two artists however, had been pro-Japanese Koreans in the era of colonization – part of the group of individuals who had decided to turn traitor to Korea and benefit off of the horrible conditions that their countrymen suffered under Japanese rule. So on the 1,000 won and 10,000 are the two faces of pro-Japanese traitors who are now forever memorialized as the two greatest heroes in Korean history, one of which became a hero because he defeated a Japanese invasion. Irony is fantastic, isn’t it?
Politics seemed ingrained in almost every facet of Gwanghwamun Plaza. From the entrance, there were more permanent tent structures set up in honor of the victims of the Sewol Ferry Disaster, with their signature yellow ribbon. The Sewol Ferry Disaster is called as such because in 2014, a ferry boat carrying a graduating class of high school students sunk on its way to the students’ graduation trip. There was an enormous degree of controversy associated with this disaster because the government was contemptuously slow to react forcefully and efficiently to the news of this event. It was revealed that the owner of the ship had not properly maintained the ferry, causing it to malfunction. To add insult to injury, the captain of the ship and some of his crew were the first to abandon ship when help finally arrived – leaving most of the high school students to fend for themselves on the sinking vessel. When our family received news of this disaster, it became customary for us to turn on the news every morning, during breakfast. We wanted to see if there would be any survivors. But as the week went on, it was only the body count that increased, and in the end, the mission was abandoned incomplete – to this day, there are still unrecovered bodies from this incident.
In no small part due to the inefficiency of the administration in handling this disaster, President Park Geunhye was the first Korean president to be impeached and thrown out of office after weeks of mass-scale protests and demonstrations in March 2017. During this turbulent time, there were older, more conservative Koreans, a minority, who organized pro-Park demonstrations, illegally, in Gwanghwamun Square. When President Trump visited Korea, the pro-Park protesters dispersed out of respect to the U.S.-ROK alliance. Not losing the opportunity, the Korean government promptly placed rows of large potted trees where the pro-Park demonstrators had been protesting, very neatly preventing future protests on unauthorized land.
In light of the significant events that had taken place in that very plaza, it was a remarkable place to experience first-hand. And even as we were there, there were demonstrations taking place. In particular, there was one sign that was demanding that Trump leaves with the U.S. troops stationed in Korea. And, it was a cultural shock for me, to see riot police standing guard,
Underneath the plaza, there was a museum dedicated to the aforementioned figures of King Sejong and Admiral Yi Sun Sin. After some light-hearted photo-taking, we turned to leave for Insa-dong Street for more – you guessed it! – shopping! But history and politics were not ready to leave us behind…
The street heading to Insa-dong took us right past the Japanese embassy… in the week of one of the worst Korea-Japan relations of recent times. Outside, where the controversial statue of a “comfort woman” stood, there were protesters and a news channel filming the events. Almost as if the weather took pity on us, it began to rain and we rushed to Insa-dong street.
After a little bit of light shopping, we headed back to our campus in Incheon, feet aching and arms sore, but feeling fuller, somehow, like the things we heard and saw became attached to our being.