From 1996 to 2004, May 18 Revisited: Part III

Journal Entry – 040516:1208 – Near provincial Office - The atmosphere is much more festival than 8 years ago. This time the street is divided into three sections, running down [Kumnamno] from the circle fountain. The first section is primarily anti-[Iraq] war, anti-U.S. and remember Kwangju and 5/18. But the other two sections include protests against GM [genetically modified] foods, tables for disabled rights, various youth groups, cotton candy, balloon animals, etc. Half a dozen places have different music playing, not to mention the two samulnori bands dancing up and down the street. They are still setting up the main stage, there are [regular] police, only three buses of riot police, parked in front of the provincial office. This year is the 24th anniversary, and the theme is “Peace and Solidarity,” or at least that is what is on the bulk of the posters. The anti-U.S. art also has a pro-unification section, with more positive [than negative] images. No woodblock prints of slaughter like in 1996 [I have three of these, one hanging at my home, the other two being stored]. The noise ebbs and flows as the samulnori groups weave and twist their ways up and down the street, and off onto the side streets. … Taped to the ground in the middle of the street is a giant outline map of a unified Korea… there is also a paper-crane booth over in the protest section. There is no sign of stress or tension… they are testing the main stage speakers with cheesy pop music. It drowns out most of the other sounds and adds to the general atmosphere of party. A few more people are arriving, but the bulk of the young are over on the shopping streets, even with many shops closed [it is Sunday]…

Journal Entry – 040516:1247 – Sitting - There are three more buses of riot police in reserve, not just the three in front of the Provincial Office, and the backdrop of the main stage has an American flag with the [red] stripes dripping blood, Bush in a [military] helmet in the middle and pictures of the Iraqi prisoner abuse [this was later removed and replaced with a stylized picture of demonstrating youth]. Fits right in with the impression that U.S. forces are all bad all the time… In the distance, on one of the back streets, the samulnori drums sound like thunder…

Journal Entry – 040516:1930 – On Kumnamno - It is a party atmosphere, a carnival rather than a time of mourning or anger. There is little sense of the sadness, remembrance, bitterness or anger of the past. The change in government has brought about a significant change in the 5/18 memorial, and whether that is good or bad I cannot tell. There is no sense of real or [directly] passed-on history. The silence of the past 24 years seems to have buried the pain, joy, victory and defeat of 1980, and along with the sons and daughters of he “revolution” who were disinterred from Mangwoldong and moved to the new cemetery, so the deep dark history, the pain and suffering of Kwangju of 1980 seems transplanted, and where once there was anger, now there is celebration. But celebration of what? Has there been justice? Has anything really changed since 1996/1997 [when I was there and when the economic crisis hit]? Has the Kim Dae Jung victory in December 1997 really removed the stains of the past, or simply caused them to be overlooked, pushed ever further back into the darkness of memories better left behind? And is that a bad thing? Or is it part of the normal process, that history changes, becomes a tool of the present, and the present is a time of social upheaval, of political shifts, a time when the military is no longer a political player, no longer a source of influence and power? Or is it a tragedy and a betrayal of the thousands who rose up, who risked their lives to bring about a freedom that is today taken for granted? On the street are not the people in their [early and] mid-40s, the students of 1980, but instead are the high school students, not even born in 1980. And the university students too who weren’t even born then, for the most part. It is a memorial created, directed and acted by a generation with no memory of May 18, 1980. A generation that has non known dictatorship, not known a police state, and may have only the vaguest memory of the student protests in the early 1990s, when every spring teargas and rocks filled the air of a city still feeling under-represented, ignored, and even discriminated against, a city without a [true] sense of collective pride and joy, but a city wit a collective sense of victimization, which for most, after May 18, was best dealt with by pushing it far down beneath “everyday’ life. The victory was not theirs for the taking, so why risk it [again]? Even the students protested more from a sense of duty than any true ideology or real sense of positive change. Hey were protests “against,” but not “for” anything…