Blame and Repercussions and Your Favorite Sport

May 20, 2010
It’s an interesting time to live 30 miles from the DMZ. A two or three-hour bike ride would find me staring down the collected barrels of the world’s 4th largest standing army, headed by a deified dictator who is something like a paranoid 13-year-old Saddam Hussein in a Muppet costume. Today is a more-than-typically hazy and warm one. Newly-sprouted leaves and fading azaleas fidget in the breeze and filtered sunlight. Half an hour ago the results of a report by an international panel were released, blaming North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean ship on March 26th. Forty-six soldiers were lost or killed.
I live northeast of Seoul, in a valley considered rural though clusters of 30-storey high-rises dominate the view in every direction. A river runs through town, home to herons, egrets, broken umbrellas, rubber sandals and plastic bags. South Korea has the 22nd-highest population density in the world (USA comes in at 178th) so land is at a premium. With hardly enough space for the living, the dead have been relegated to the steep hillsides, beneath meticulously landscaped cemeteries they’re quite unable to appreciate. My apartment is a 20-minute walk from the school where I teach 800 uniform-clad middle-schoolers a week to repeat after me, that “Jaemin’s favorite sport is basketball. He plays it three times a week. Sujin can play piano. Sujin can’t play the violin” and so on. Once the soul-shatteringly cold winter ended, I explored some back alleys and paths in my neighborhood and found a trail along the ridgeline which I could use as a scenic route to school, adding only 25 more minutes to the walk. The trail climbs immediately up through the low terraces of a cemetery. Shiny black granite blocks stand next to weathered marble statues like mournful kings, and grass-covered burial mounds separate small monoliths on the backs of fierce-looking turtles. Gaudy plastic flowers stick out of small granite vases, and, in the beginning of this month, faded in comparison with the forsythia and azaleas bursting like carnival spirits from the ground.
Five minutes from my apartment, in the woods behind the cemetery, is a concrete bunker; an underground tunnel with a weed-choked entrance and a spiderweb-choked interior. A friend and I crouched through the entrance one cold night after a heavy, wet snow. With soju on our breaths and headlamps on our heads we entered the tunnel. About fifty feet long and three feet wide, the tunnel ended in a small square area with windows cut in the concrete at ground-level. War would be fought from insect-eye-view. Facing north, of course. There are, that I’ve seen, at least three of these bunkers within fifteen minutes of my apartment. The 75th infantry is about a mile away, and when I hike up Cheolmasan I can sometimes hear drilling and firing practice echoing up from the valley. There are often cammo-clad soldiers at the bus stop and payphones outside my building. They look hardly any older than my middle-school students. Jaemin can run. Jaemin can shoot. Jaemin can fight.
North Korea has emphatically denied any responsibility for the sinking of the Cheonan, and has threatened “all out war” if punished. I’m not sure what this means exactly, but today the students passed notes and doodled on their textbooks and dozed and repeated after me just as they always do. One of the Korean teachers seems worried, because her two sons are currently serving their compulsory two years in the military. The others seem slightly worried, but in a back-of-their-minds, other-things-are-more-important (like conferences with parents, grading, discipline issues) kind of way. A lot of people seem to be brushing this aside as another instance of strutting and blustering which will fade as surely as the bright pinks and purples of the azaleas are doing. I’m not scared or worried; in fact I’m going camping tomorrow on Cheolmasan, from where I can see Kim Jong Il’s mountains. I’ll take my cues from the people around me, though without a shared language that might be difficult. For now it’s just another interesting moment in a country with many such interesting moments.