Magic, anxiety, and modern Korean life

• Published date: 11 March 2023
• Publication title: The Korea Times

Life in 20th century Korea was a trip. The land bore witness to foreign invasion, the devastation of civil war, and the upheaval of rapid urbanization ordered by men in military uniforms. Rice fields gave way to apartments, bicycles to Sonatas. It was a whirlwind of ideological change, physical transformation, and compressed time. And, it worked. Modern South Korea is an economic and cultural powerhouse deserving of every accolade it receives.

More has been written about that era than any other period of Korean history. Those one hundred years in which everything happened: Everything the people wanted, and everything they didn't want; everything they had dreamed of, and much that they could never have imagined. It was a time of intense transformation. The rapid change was even more pronounced and traumatic because of what preceded it. Life is defined more by contrasts than sameness.

The slow past

The slow meandering centuries of the Goryeo Kingdom (918-1392) and Joseon Kingdom (1392-1897) breathed in-time with the seasons. The sun and the moon kept to their regular schedules. Spring followed winter. King followed king. The people lived, but in the history books they were not yet sovereign. History was told through royal genealogy; everything else revolved around that stable center. The palaces were home to the Korean nucleus: the repository of Korean genetic information, culture, and power. They were the control center.

The Goryeo capital was Gaesong. It was alive with noise, commerce, and the clattering of Mongolian horse hooves ferrying Korean princes to Beijing to marry young Khan princesses of the Yuan Dynasty. In the mid-14th century, Queen Noguk became the last ethnic Mongolian to be part of the Korean royal family. Yi Seong-gye then overthrew the Goryeo and shifted the center to what is now Seoul. Buddhism gave way to Neo-Confucianism and a new set of centuries slowly began unfolding. The scholars debated abstract principles; the slaves toiled the fields; women gave birth to children; grandfathers passed away. The waves crashed, the rains came. The sun warmed everyone up again. And such was Korean life.

And yet despite the largely unrivaled longevity of these two remarkable Korean kingdoms, as is ever the case, things fall apart. The center cannot hold.

Blood on the mountains

The twentieth century in Korea was not one of stony sleep but rather a vortex of passionate intensity. Blood ran down the mountains as quickly as skyscrapers grew alongside the Han...