Moon Child

Guryong village 2022 (from iStock)

Credit to Joss Taylor Olson (jtojoss@yahoo) for brilliant creative writing expertise.

I don’t have a lot of memories of my mother, but there is one evening I remember distinctly.

“You know why our little village is called a ‘Moon Village’?” she asked. The moon was full and bright in the night sky. From where we sat, I could see more of the foothills below where our encampment, Guryong Village, was located.

I couldn’t fathom why our miserable home would have such a pretty name. Looking down at the desolate lean-tos and with my stomach empty from not having been able to eat all day, I responded with a complaint as children often do: “No. I don’t care. I’m hungry. It’s cold.”

She scoffed a bit. I’m sure she was hungry and cold, too. “It’s because we have the best view of the moon!” She stood and lifted me up onto her shoulders. “See, raise your hands. We’re so high up on Mt. Guryong that you can touch the moon!”

“You’re our little Miracle on the Han River,” she’d tell me.

I raised my face up to the moonlight and lifted my hands to the night sky, feeling on top of the world.

“Why do we have to live here?” I asked my grandmother once, after my mother had passed from breast cancer. I was still perpetually hungry. I watched a few roaches scuttle around the ground in front of me. Sometimes they would run over my legs while I sat to talk with her. Sometimes I gave them names based on the bullies I despised.

She motioned for me to follow her. We started walking up the hill where my mother and I used to sit. “It’s because we’re vagrants.”

“What’s a ‘vagrant’?”

When we reached the top of the hill, she asked me to sit next to her. The sun was brutal against our skin when it wasn’t freezing. We had such extreme weather conditions in the Moon Village and no way to deal with them.

“People the government deemed bad and stopping the modernization of our country,” she explained further, “See, we wouldn’t have amazing buildings like that if we didn’t sacrifice and work hard.” She gestured to the office buildings and apartments in the distance.

“We used to live over there,” she pointed in another direction, “where the Olympic Stadium is. We used to live in an apartment there. One day, they announced that we needed to make sacrifices for our country, and forced us to get on a bus, so they could use that land for the stadium. They left us here with nothing. We did what we could to build a village.”

I didn’t understand until much later the larger truth behind such statements. That this was part of a large “social purification” campaign — taught to us today as the “modernization” campaign — to…” make Korea an ‘economically modern’ country with the intent of bidding for the Olympics. The stronger the economy, the more attractive the bid.” This era of development was in fact described in history books as, “The Miracle on the Han River”. The coup de grâce to show the world the fruits of this modernization campaign, that we had fully transformed from a ‘least developed country’ to a ‘developed country’, was the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics.

It was in this modern Korea, no longer ravaged by the war of the 1950s and four previous decades of excruciating Japanese colonization, that there was no place for ‘vagrants’.

She switched to Japanese, which was sometimes easier for her than Korean because of her experience living through the Japanese occupation. “We couldn’t afford to show any weakness to the Westerners coming to visit us. So the government, police, and Chaebols [conglomerate companies like Samsung] — they moved everyone that didn’t fit. That included us, homeless people, children, pro-democracy protestors, students, anyone that spoke up for human rights, labor rights, or otherwise deemed as slowing down economic progress. Anyone the police didn’t like, too. You’re lucky to live here.”

I was appalled. “Lucky?”

“Some people, including your uncle, never survived police encounters. Some families were separated or sent to forced labor camps to support modernization. I bet you don’t even remember him, your uncle, do you? To think I survived Japanese occupation only to outlive my own children in the name of national greed.”

She paused. Sighed. “What place do girls have in economic development? Nobody will care about you. We will all die here.”

I stayed up that night, oscillating between believing and refusing to believe that I had no place in the universe. It’s hard to reject something you’ve been told your whole life is true.

“Why do you have that stupid thing?” my father shouted angrily, throwing a Soju bottle that shattered near me. Roaches scattered. “Get out of here.” He held his head in his hands. I think he was crying.

My grandmother was in pain from cancer, which we did not have the means to treat. Just like mom. I was still hungry. I could never escape the feeling of being hungry.

I held the object in question, a cartoony tiger pin of Hodori, close to me in a moment of stillness before fleeing over broken glass. Ignoring the cuts, I ran on bloody feet to the top of the hill and paused. Hodori was the mascot for the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics. Mom had given me this pin because I was her Miracle on the Han River.

The irony was that all tigers in Korea had been killed during the Japanese occupation. Of this symbol of national pride, only the symbol remained.

I was Mom’s Miracle on the Han River. But the Miracle on the Han River — who was it for?

I stood pensively under the moonlight. Determination filled me as I tightened my grip on the pin. I began to make plans, to run through scenarios, to learn how to escape this system. How to make it better. I would rather die fighting than give up, as I was sure the tigers must have, and do everything in my power to build a world where nobody else had to either.

I had no idea at the time that, in just a few short years, I would attend university in the United States at the age of 13. I had no idea that the entire village would fall under the shadows of the newly built Gangnam Samsung Luxury Apartment Towers. They boasted 70 floors, fully automated apartments, and helipads on the roofs.

I didn’t care. I was hungry. I was cold. We all were.

References to learn more for people interested:

Seoul ‘moon village’ becomes a tourist trap. https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20220926000213.

Miracle on the Han River. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_on_the_Han_River.

Park Chung Hee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung_Hee.

Samsung Tower Place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Tower_Palace.

Seoul’s last remaining slums. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2020-12-17/seoul-s-last-remaining-slum-video.

South Korea covered up mass abuse, killing of ‘vagrants’. https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-crime-2020-tokyo-olympics-busan-olympic-games-43ad81ac09564c90bc6e6b3cd005d73d.

Brother’s Home: South Korea’s 1980s ‘concentration camp’. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52797527.

신자유주의 시대의 무허가 정착지 경관에 대한 비판적 해석 : 강남구 개포동 구룡마을을 사례로. https://academic.naver.com/article.naver?doc_id=79758734.

서울 중계동 백사마을의 건축적 특성 연구. https://academic.naver.com/article.naver?doc_id=176945228.

Are large cats compatible with modern society on the Korean Peninsula? Ecological Restoration. 34 (3): 173–183. doi:10.3368/er.34.3.173. S2CID 88992035.

Hodori. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodori.