A Boy at the D.M.Z.

This year will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the July 27, 1953, armistice that ended the Korean War—an agreement that North Korea recently renounced (they’ve done so more than once). The three-year war left more than a million soldiers dead, including thirty-three thousand Americans and an estimated two million or more civilians, and the Korean peninsula is still bitterly divided between North and South. At this moment of renewed high-pitch tensions, it seems worth noting that all these decades later, the Korean War—which was the first authorized military intervention by the new United Nations Security Council—was an unsolved conflict even before the latest developments: the armistice was never followed by a formal peace. As I write, U.S. and South Korean forces are in a state of high alert over fears that the North, which has nuclear bombs, is planning to launch a missile test.

My earliest memories are from Korea. We moved there in 1959, when I was two, and stayed there until 1961—not so long after the Korean War. I was just a toddler, but was beginning to form a consciousness. I learned to run there, and to swing. My father was a young agricultural adviser with the U.S. government working on foreign-aid projects. His previous posts had been in El Salvador and Haiti. As he explained later on to me, the Korea job involved planting trees along the South Korean side of the D.M.Z.—the demilitarized zone—with North Korea.

What I remember is this: Seoul was a brown, cold city that lay under mud and ice much of the time. A great river looped through it, and there were bare mountains in the distance. Most of the houses were made of wood and stone, and the streets were muddy. Barrels of kimchi, the Korean fermented cabbage, were left outside on sidewalks, and when you went past them in a car the smell filled the air. I always tried to plug my nose to ward it off. (For years afterward, because of that memory, I hated kimchi, but now I love it.)

We lived in a small, bungalow-style house that sat on a high, bare hill overlooking the city. Every day at sundown, one of our maids, an out-of-work opera singer, used to take me to the veranda at the back of the house, the part that overlooked the city, and with me standing beside her she would sing—full-throated, deeply sad songs—while looking out toward the setting sun. On a little table, in a wooden cage, was our family cricket, and my memory is that when she sang, the cricket sang, too.

 Most children, I suppose, don’t learn to run—they simply run, and that’s it—but I have a distinct memory of having to be taught how to run when we were in Korea, and that it was my next-oldest sister, Tina, who taught me. She taught me how to swing, too. Running didn’t come naturally; I was pigeon-toed as a child, so much so that I wore a brace. My mother told me this years later; I have no memory of the brace, just of the running. Along the summit of the hill above our house there was a Buddhist temple, and my mother used to leave me there sometimes with the monks, who babysat me and let me play with the tangerine-shaped wooden pieces of their I Ching.

One day—it was winter and the great river was covered with great patches of ice—there were many airplanes in the sky over the brown city. I watched them roar high overhead, and then men jumped out of the planes and fluttered down into the city on parachutes. Some of them—I saw this with my young eyes from a great distance, but with a clarity that has stayed with me—landed in the brown and white ice-covered stretches of the vast, looping river. I was troubled by this sight, and wondered how those men were going to get out of the water. Someone, probably my Dad, later explained that what I had seen was a military exercise that had gone badly, and that some of those men I had seen fall into the river had died.

Another day, my father took me to the top of the hill, and we looked down and watched the April 19th Revolution of 1960 that led to the resignation and exile of the country’s old, authoritarian President, Syngman Rhee. In various protests, thousands of students charged the Blue House, where the President lived, and were gunned down by the police; at least a hundred and forty were killed, and thousands wounded. The military, however, refused to fire on the students. Rhee resigned, and the C.I.A. flew him and his family out of Korea to Honolulu, where he lived until his death. I don’t remember the students or the police, but my father says that he put me on his shoulders and we watched it together, and saw everything.

I remember my dad taking me to Panmunjom, the village where the armistice was signed, which was then stranded along the D.M.Z. and abandoned. It must have been in the autumn. There was a lot of russet-colored tall grass and bush and an open space that was divided by a fence. My dad took me up some stairs to a lookout tower. There, we stood next to a Korean solider who stood straight and stared out across the open space to another soldier standing in an identical tower, looking back at him. Neither soldier smiled or spoke, and not even the closest soldier acknowledged our presence. I was disturbed by their unspoken hostility and asked my father what was happening. He tried to explain to me what it meant to be someone’s enemy.

As I recall, he told me about the war that had occurred, how Korea had been divided into two, and that these men, both Koreans, were now from two opposing sides of the same country, and hated each other.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Jon Lee Anderson