When the kid in the front row at the rally bit off the tip of his little finger and wrote KIM DAE JUNG in blood on his fancy white ski jacket, I think that was the first time I ever really felt like a foreign correspondent. I mean, here was something really fucking foreign.
It wasn’t even an act of desperate protest. Opposition candidate Kim Dae Jung hadn’t lost the Korean presidential election yet. KDJ was just giving a small pep talk to a group of well-wishers—half a million of them. They spread in every direction out over the horizon, packed flank to flank and butt to loin, all standing at attention in a freezing Seoul drizzle with serious, purposeful expressions on their mugs.
When a Korean political candidate does a little stumping, a little flesh pressing, a little baby kissing, he puts on a sour face, mounts a platform, and stares at the crowd. He’s surrounded by Samoan-size bodyguards, his chap-sae, or goons, (literally, “trapped birds”). A couple of the goons hold an inch-thick Plexiglas shield in front of the candidate’s face. The shield has handles bolted on both ends like a see-through tea tray. The crowd shouts the candidate’s name for half an hour, then the candidate yells at the crowd. Korean sounds like ack-ack fire, every syllable has a primary accent: YO-YO CAMP STOVE HAM HOCK DIP STICK DUCK SOUP HAT RACK PING-PONG!!!! If the candidate pauses, the crowd responds in unison with a rhymed slogan or with a precise fifteen seconds of waving little paper Korean flags. There’s no frenzy in this, no mob hysteria, and it’s not a drill or an exercise.
I’d never seen spontaneous regimentation before. And I don’t hope to see it again. I was standing on the platform, a couple of goons away from “the DJ,” as the foreign reporters call Kim Dae Jung. And I was looking at this multitude, and I was thinking, “Oh, no, they really do all look alike”—the same Blackglama hair, the same high-boned pie-plate face, the same tea-stain complexion, the same sharp-focused look in one million identical anthracite eyes. They are a strange northern people who came to this mountain peninsula an ice age ago and have kept their bloodlines intact through a thousand invasions. Their language is unrelated to Chinese or Japanese, closer, in fact, to Finnish and Hungarian. They don’t like anyone who isn’t Korean, and they don’t like each other all that much, either. They’re hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, “the Irish of Asia.”
There was a very un-Irish order to that crowd, however, an order beyond my comprehension—like nuclear fission. There is order to everything in Korea. They call it kibun, which means, to the extent it can be translated, “harmonious understanding.” Everything in Korea is orderly, except when it isn’t—like nuclear fission.
The speech ended, and every single person in that audience pushed forward to be with Kim Dae Jung. I looked down from the platform and saw the kid in the front row wiggle out of his white parka. He was a normal-looking kid (but in Korea everybody is normal looking). He had a sign reading, in garbled English, MR. KIM DJ ONLY BECOME THE 1ST PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD on one side and the same, I guess, in Korean on the other. Then, with a can-do smile, he nipped the digit and began his calligraphy.
The DJ, in a goon envelope, descended to meet his chanting admirers. I tried, without goons, to follow him. I was cross-body-blocked and stiff-armed and went down in a second. I was a one-man zone defense against a football team of 500,000. Squat, rock-hard Korean bodies surrounded me in three dimensions. I was squeezed and heaved and, most of all, overwhelmed by the amazing stink of kimchi, the garlic and hot-pepper sauerkraut that’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner in Korea. Its odor rises from this nation of 40 million in a miasma of eyeglass-fogging kimchi breath, throat-searing kimchi burps, and terrible, pants-splitting kimchi farts.
I came to the surface of the crowd and went under again like a toddler in surf. I was squashed and tumbled. My foot came out of my shoe. My pocket was picked. Finally, I was expelled from the mass with one collective shove and kick.
This is what Koreans are like when they’re happy.
And the Koreans were very happy with their first presidential election in sixteen years. They voted like the dickens—an 89.2 percent turnout. But I couldn’t get any of them to tell me why. What was this election supposed to be about?
Practically everybody running for president was named Kim. There was Kim Dae Jung, the opposition front-runner; Kim Young Sam (“Kim: The Sequel”), also the opposition front-runner; and Kim Jong Pil (“Kim: The Early Years”), the opposition straggler. Plus there was the non-Kim candidate, Roh Tae Woo (pronounced “No Tay Ooh” and called “Just Say No” by the foreign press corps). Roh was handpicked by the military dictatorship that’s been running South Korea since 1971.
Everybody knew Roh was going to win because Kim the DJ and Kim the Sequel had promised to unite antigovernment opposition behind one candidate, but then they forgot and spent most of the campaign bickering with each other. And Roh was going to win anyway because he had the constituency that votes with M-16s. (When these boys make their voices heard in the marketplace of ideas, you’d better listen up.) So the election wasn’t about winning.
And the election wasn’t about political party allegiance, either. The parties were apparently named at random by pulling two slips of paper out of a hat containing a selection of six words. The Peace and Democracy Party, Democratic Justice Party, Reunification Democratic Party, and New Democratic Republican Party all fielded candidates. If I were a hardworking journalist with a keen eye for detail, I’d sift through my notes now and tell you what Kim belonged to which. But that would be a waste of everybody’s time. A Korean political party exists solely to boost the fortunes of its founding candidate and has the average life span of a trout-stream mayfly hatch.
Campaign promises? Kims 1-2-3 promised to promote freedom of expression, work for reunification of North and South, fight corruption, improve the country’s god-awful human rights record, raise living standards, and lower taxes. But then that fascist pig Roh Tae Woo went out and promised to do the same and lots more of it. Nobody, Kim or un-Kim, said too much about Korea’s near absence of social-security programs, the $140-a-month minimum wage, the seventy-two-hour workweek, or the fact that it’s illegal to have an independent labor union. Kim Dae Jung is supposed to be the big liberal in the bunch. When interviewed by a Canadian business magazine, the DJ, that feisty champion of the common man, was quoted as saying, “Of course we want to advocate some social welfare, but we do not want to be excessive … If trade unions advocate extreme or radical demands, the law must prohibit this.” So the election wasn’t about campaign promises.
Why was everybody voting so hard? The only answer I could get from Koreans was “democracy.”
“What’s this election all about?” I asked.
“Democracy,” they answered.
“But what is democracy?” I said.
“Good.”
“Yes, of course, but why exactly?”
“Is more democratic that way!”
Well, this is heartening to those of us who prefer a democratic system. But I still don’t know what they’re talking about. “Korea must have democracy,” my Korean friends told me. “Democracy is very good for Korea.” “Korean people want very much democracy.”
I guess democracy is something that if you’re going to be really up-to-date, you just can’t do without—like a compact disc player. (Actual South Korean experience with democracy, by the way, consists of one thirteen-month period between the April 1960 overthrow of strongman Syngman Rhee and the May 1961 military coup by General Park Chung-hee.)
On election day I cruised Seoul with an old friend from the Marcos-overthrow democracy fad in the Philippines, photographer John Giannini. It was supposed to be a national holiday, but the Koreans went to work just the same, the way they do six days a week, starting before dawn and stopping who knows when. Rush hour doesn’t even begin until seven p.m.
Traffic in Seoul is a 50 mph gridlock with nobody getting anywhere and everybody driving like hell. The sidewalks are endless rugby scrums. Elbowing your way through a crowd is Korean for “excuse me.” The city is as gray as a parking garage and cleaner than a living room. People stoop and pick up any piece of litter they see. You can spend twenty minutes in an agony of embarrassment trying to figure out what to do with a cigarette butt. And they yell at you if you cross against the light. Everything is made of concrete and glass and seems unrelentingly modern, at first glance. But many buildings have no central heating, and the smell of kerosene stoves pours out of every shop door, mixing with kimchi fumes, car smoke, sewer funk, and the stink of industry. It’s a tough, homely stench, the way America’s ethnic factory towns must have smelled seventy-five years ago (though with regular cabbage instead of kimchi).
Giannini and I tried to find the slums of Seoul, but the best we could do was a cramped, rough-hewn neighborhood with spotless, bicycle-wide streets. Every resident was working—hauling, stacking, hawking, welding, making things in sheds no larger than doghouses. Come back in a few years, and each shed will be another Hyundai Corporation. We felt like big, pale drones in the hive of the worker bees.
The voting was just what every journalist dreads, quiet and well organized. There were no Philippine riots, Salvadoran shoot-’em-ups, Haitian baton-twirler machete attacks, or puddles of Chicagoan sleaze running out from under the voting booths. People were standing patiently in line, holding their signature seals, their chops, at the ready. Poll watchers from each candidate’s party sat to one side, rigid on a row of straight-backed chairs. A reporter who could make an interesting paragraph out of this would get that special Pulitzer they give out for keeping readers awake during discussions of civic virtue. Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam said there was massive vote fraud. But if there was, it was serious, orderly, Korean massive vote fraud.
Giannini and I did see one fellow getting roughed up by a crowd outside a polling place. We shoved people, in the Korean manner, until we found someone who spoke English. He told us the fellow being kicked and punched was a suspected government agent. The police came, punched and kicked the fellow some more, and hauled him off. It was certainly the first time I’d ever seen police arrest somebody on suspicion of being a government agent. But that’s Korea.
We went out in the country to find people voting in authentic traditional funny clothes. But this, too, was a bore. So we gave up and went to a restaurant—a few floor mats and a kerosene heater in a tent beside the Han River.
The Han is as wide as the Hudson, and its valley is as beautiful as a Hudson River School painting—but more serious, with a gray wash over it. The Koreans are serious about fun, too, thank God. They’re perfectly capable of a three-hour lunch, and so are Giannini and I. We ordered dozens of bowls of pickles, garlics, red peppers, and hot sauces and dozens of plates of spiced fish and vegetables and great big bottles of OB beer and mixed it all with kimchi so strong it would have sent a Mexican screaming from the room with tongue in flames. By the time we drove, weaving, back to Seoul, you could have used our breath to clean your oven.
After the votes were counted, the Koreans were not very happy with their first presidential election in sixteen years. Most citizens responded in the Korean way, by going to work in the morning. But some student radical types decided they’d found a big vote fraud in a ward, or gu, office in the Kuro industrial district in southern Seoul.
As usual, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Korea has an infinite capacity to make me feel dumb. This is a whole nation of people who did their homework on Friday night. Even when they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re doing so much of it that they’re still going to get an A.
Anyway, the student radicals discovered a locked ballot box under a stack of bread and milk in a truck leaving the Kuro gu compound. Local officials gave some lame excuse about how the ballot box had to go to a special vote-counting place, and how the bread and milk truck just happened to be headed that way, and how they’d covered the ballot box to keep the votes from getting cold … The students were having none of it. They invaded the five-story Kuro gu building, took the local officials hostage, and called for one of those massive violent student demonstrations for which Korea is justly famous.
The way famous, massive, violent Korean student demonstrations work is that the students get a sound truck, turn the volume up to Mötley Crüe, and take turns screaming at themselves. Violent student demonstrators sit around cross-legged in an appreciative half circle and, between screams, holler “Dok chae tado! Dok chae tado! Dok chae tado!” which means “Smash the dictatorship.” The chant is punctuated with unnerving, blackshirtish synchronized karate chops.
This can go on for days, and at Kuro it did.
Meanwhile, extraviolent student demonstrators were breaking paving stones into handy projectiles, filling soju rice-wine-bottle kerosene bombs, building desk-and-filing-cabinet barricades in the Kuro gu doorways, and pulling apart some nearby scaffolding to make quarter staves out of iron pipe. A line of command had been created, and all defense preparations were taking place behind a row of stick-wielding young malcontents.
Lack of press freedom in Korea is one of the big student gripes. But the students don’t like actual reporters any better than the government does, at least not American reporters. The radicals—in counterfeit New Balance shoes, Levi’s knockoffs, and unlicensed Madonna T-shirts—are much given to denouncing American dominance of Korean culture. It took a lot of arguing to get past these ding-dongs. One pair, a dog-faced, grousing fat girl in glasses and a weedy, mouthy, fever-eyed boy, were almost as obnoxious as my girlfriend and I were twenty years ago at the march on the Pentagon. However, they had some oddly Korean priorities. “Don’t you step on bushes!” shouted the fat girl as I made my way into the building that they were tearing to shreds.
Inside, firebombs were parked neatly in crates, stones were gathered in tidy piles, more lengths of pipe were laid in evenly spaced rows to booby-trap the stairs, and additional barricades were being carefully constructed on the landings.
Looking down from the roof, I saw little groups of students break away from the chanting and form themselves into squads, squatting in formation. They dok chae tadoed for a while then quick-marched to the front lines around the Kuro gu compound, where each was given an assigned position and his own firebomb to sit patiently beside. Demonstrators continued to arrive, bringing boxes of food, fruit juice, and cigarettes.
You had to admire the students’ industry and organization, if not their common sense. The Kuro gu building faced a spike-fenced courtyard with only one narrow gate to the street. There was no way out the back of the place except through the upper-story windows or off the roof. And right next door, completely overshadowing the scene, was a huge police station. Four thousand policemen gathered there that evening, in their distinctive Darth Vader outfits—black gas masks, Nazi helmets, and stiff olive-drab pants and jackets stuffed with protective padding.
The government assault came on Friday morning, two days after the election. It was well under way by the time I arrived at eight a.m. You go to cover a Korean riot story looking more like a Martian than a Woodward or a Bernstein. You wear heavy clothes for protection from the cold and rocks, good running shoes, a hardhat or motorcycle helmet marked PRESS in English and Korean, and the best gas mask you can find on the black market. (It’s illegal for civilians to buy them in Korea.)
Korean riot police use the pepper gas developed during the Vietnam War, which is fast becoming a favorite with busy dictators everywhere. I’d been hit with the stuff before, in Panama, but the Koreans lay it on in lavish doses, until the air is a milkshake of minuscule caustic particles. Pepper gas can raise blisters on exposed skin. Any contact with a mucous membrane produces the same sensation as probing a canker sore with a hot sewing needle. The tiniest amount in your eyes and your eyelids lock shut in blind agony. Breathing it is like inhaling fish bones, and the curl-up-and-die cough quickly turns to vomiting. Pepper gas is probably the only thing on earth more powerful than kimchi.
There was street fighting going on all around Kuro gu, in an orderly way, of course. First the Darth Vader cops form a line with shields interlocked. Then the students run up and throw firebombs at them. The police respond with a volley of pepper-gas rifle grenades. The students throw stones. The police fire pepper gas again and then charge.
The police hardly ever catch a student. That would disturb the kibun of the set-piece battle. Instead, there’s a squad of volunteers from the police ranks called “grabbers.” The grabbers dress in down-filled L.L. Bean–type parkas, jeans, Nikes, and white motorcycle helmets. They carry hippie-tourist-style canvas shoulder bags filled with tear-gas grenades, and swing long batons that look like hiking staffs. Their jackets are all in pleasant shades of beige and baby blue, color coordinated by squadrons. With gas masks in place, the grabbers look like a bunch of mentally unbalanced freelance writers for Outside magazine.
The grabbers huddle behind the riot police. As soon as the students break ranks, the grabbers spring out and do their grabbing, beating the shit out of anyone they lay hands on. The beaten students are then led away. Student demonstrators are not often formally arrested in Korea. They are just “led away.” What happens to them next is, I hear, even less fun than getting caught in a Kim Dae Jung rally.
Being out in no-man’s-land between the students and the police isn’t much fun either. Pepper gas grenades were flying through the air, and stones were racketing on the top of my hard hat; plus there was this creepy xxx video rubber-fetish thing all over my face. No gas mask is fully effective against the pepper-gas clouds, and mine looked as if it dated back to the Crimean War. Inside it, I was coughing and weeping and thoroughly panicked, and outside it, barely visible through the scratched and fogged-over eyepieces, was the world’s only mayhem with choreography. I had stumbled onstage in mid-performance of some overenthusiastic Asian production of West Side Story.
Back at Kuro gu itself, the police had retaken the courtyard and the first four stories of the building, but the students were still holding the top floor and roof.
The students don’t wear gas masks. They put on those little Dr. Dan and Nurse Nancy cotton face things, and they smear toothpaste on their skin, but otherwise they riot unprotected. The police in the courtyard were firing salvos of gas grenades, twenty at a time, into the fifth-floor windows and onto the roof. The gas bursts looked like albino fireworks. The police also have armored cars with gun turrets that shoot small pepper-gas canisters at hundreds of rounds a minute. Two of these had been set in flanking positions and were raking the rooftop. That the students could even stand in this maelstrom was a testament to Koreanness. But they were not only standing; they were fighting like sons of bitches.
The barricades in the stairwells had been set on fire, and columns of ash were rising above the building. I could see blurred hand-to-hand action inside as windows shattered and pipes and batons flashed. The students were raining everything they could lift on the police. The “Irish confetti” was dancing off upraised shields and bouncing and ricocheting all around in the courtyard. Two fire trucks had been brought through the gate, and their extension ladders were thrust as near to the roof as even a Korean would dare.
A couple of overbrave firemen went scurrying topside in a smoke of stones. The adrenaline-zany kids fended off water blasts with their protest placards and with ordinary umbrellas, the fabric tearing from the spokes in seconds. A stray gas grenade slammed into one of the extension ladders, inspiring vivid gestures from the fireman to his colleagues below.
The otherwise modern cement Kuro gu office was topped, Burger King fashion, with a mansard roof of traditional tiles. When the students ran out of stones and bottles, they began pulling loose these fat parentheses of baked clay and sailing them out over the courtyard. Weighing ten pounds apiece and coming from fifty feet in the air, they had the impact of small mortar shells. If you kept your eye on the trajectories, you could move out of the way in time. But to stop watching the sky for even ten seconds was curtains. I saw six or seven cops carried away, heads lolling and blood running out from under their helmets. I turned a shoulder to the building to write that in my notebook, and half a tile flew past me so close I felt the wind through the fly of my Levi’s 501s. If I’d been standing one inch to the south, I’d be writing this in soprano.
About 8:45 the police cleared the top floor and the grabbers—or “white-skull police,” as the students call them—appeared at the windows waving victoriously. But the cops below were slow on the uptake, and the grabbers got hit with another round of gas.
The students on the roof kept at it. One wild young fool spent the entire battle balanced on the roof tiles, dancing back and forth, chased by streams of water from fire hoses and ducking the gas grenades fired at his head. Every time a grenade missed he’d bow grandly to the police. It’s not enough that these guys are better than we are at making cars, ships, TVs, stereos, cameras, computers, steel, and binoculars; now they’re building a better Berkeley and Kent State.
The final assault came about nine a.m. There was one double door to the roof, and only four grabbers could get through it at a time. Photographer Tony Suau, with whom I’d covered the Aquino-Marcos election, was standing right behind the first wave. He said the grabbers were obviously scared. And the first four who charged out were flung back inside, bruised and bleeding. But the grabbers persisted, four by four, until they secured the doorway. Then a hundred of them pushed outside.
From the ground it was a Punch and Judy show. The down-bulked grabbers in their helmets and masks were visible only from the chest up behind the mansard parapets. They were thrashing maniacally with their long batons. You could tell when they got a student down—suddenly a stick would be moving in a single arc with burlesque speed: wack-a-wack-a-wack-a-wack-a-wack. I saw the bowing kid pulled from his perch and given the Mrs. Punch treatment.
One section of the roof was raised half a story above the other. A dozen determined students held out here, throwing folding chairs, bricks, and roof tiles. For a few last seconds their silhouettes were etched in heroic silliness against the sky.
The paved Kuro gu courtyard had been turned into a gravel pit by the battle. Inside the building the air was a mud of smoke and gas. Fires were still burning in some corners, and water from the fire hoses ran in rivulets down the stairs. The police were making the students carry out their wounded. Several were unconscious, and one girl, wrapped in a blanket, had a hand’s breadth of skull laid open and a bad, bloodless look to her face.
The students were swollen and red from the gas. They stumbled around, dazed and stupid. The cops were gathering them in Kuro gu’s larger rooms, making them prostrate themselves, obeisant like Moslems in prayer but more tightly hunched—children trying to make themselves disappear. These balled-up figures were packed into perfect squares of one hundred. The grabbers strolled over every now and then and gave the kids a few kicks for good measure.
The building had been fought over inch by inch. Every stick of furniture was destroyed, every breakable thing was broken. This was Korea, however—the bathrooms were still spotless.
About one hundred hostages, including several children, were released. They looked thoroughly sick. Nobody seemed interested in them. (According to the next day’s official report, twenty-four policemen and forty students were seriously injured. One thousand and five students and student-allied radicals were “led away.”)
The captured students were made to “elephant walk” down the stairs and into the courtyard, bodies bowed double, one hand on the waistband of the student ahead. Kicks and swats hurried them along. I noticed the dog-faced girl stumbling by, with glasses missing and a big shiner.
Then the mommy riot began. A dozen middle-aged women arrived at the police lines. They shoved their plump bodies against the riot shields and screeched, “You murderers!” and “Where is my son?!” and “I hate this country!” Then they fell into brief faints, tore their hair, wept, screeched some more, and went into other histrionics—enough for a French actress on a farewell tour. This is not how my mother would have behaved. She would have been there yelling, “Keep the bum!”
That night, the journalists who’d covered the Kuro gu riot—having showered and dumped our gas-soaked clothing in hotel hallways—had a long, well-lubricated dinner. Between the blowing of gas-scalded noses and the wiping of gas-curried eyes, we discussed Korean democracy. As I recall, the discussion went something like this:
“What the fuck?”
“Beats the shit out of me.”
“Yo, waitress, more whiskey.”
When the dinner was over, I went with two photographers, Greg Davis and Tom Haley, for a little constitutional up the hill to Myongdong Cathedral, a few blocks from the restaurant. About a hundred students with the usual rock piles and firebombs were sitting-in up there for no reason anyone was very clear about.
The students had blocked the street on the hilltop in front of the church and weren’t going to let us through. “Democracy! Free press!” said Davis, as we flashed our credentials.
“No free press!” shouted student number 30. They’d all given themselves numbers, which they wore pinned to their chests.
“No democracy?” said Davis.
“No democracy!” shouted 30.
Then, out of the gloom, appeared a pair of American preppies, he in tweeds and a necktie, she in a plaid skirt and stadium coat. “Hi!” the boy said brightly. “We’re from the International Human Rights Law Group. We’re here to observe Korean democracy.”
“Ask number 30 about that,” said Davis.
Down at the bottom of the hill, riot police were forming up, shield-to-shield, grenade launchers loaded.
“Yeah, you little fuck,” I said to number 30. “What do you think about getting democratically hammered, about half a minute from now?”
The members of the International Human Rights Law Group gasped to hear someone speaking to a genuine Korean like that, right in the middle of Korea’s first presidential elections in sixteen years. But then they caught a look at the advancing police. The Law Group took off like surprised mice.
Haley, Davis, and I were too slow. We could hear the grenades being fired, half a dozen of them, KA-CHUNK/CHUNK/CHUNK/CHUNK/CHUNK/CHUNK. “Incoming!!!” yelled Haley, the last thing he’d be able to say for half an hour. The grenades burst just above our heads.
We ran screaming down an alley, slamming into walls and garbage cans, coughing and gagging, a scum of tears running down our sightless faces. After two hundred yards we collapsed, bent over in pained hacking and gasps. A group of Korean men, earnestly merry with drink, were coming up the other way. They stopped in front of our little spectacle. The lead fellow bowed and said, “You Americans yes what do you think about Korean democracy?”
“Awwwwk ugch ugch ugch,” said Haley.
But the Koreans were not making a joke. “What do you think about Korean democracy?” said their leader, gravely.
“Tastes terrible!” said Davis.
They hustled us into a storefront café and bought us a great many large bottles of OB beer. We sat there sneezing and weeping and coughing. They sat there asking, “What do you think about Korean democracy?”
That turned out to be all the English they knew.