Gurye

The term “Yŏsun Killings” refers to a prewar atrocity in which the US-allied South Korean forces killed numerous civilians who were accused of being either communists or communist sympathizers in the cities that had been occupied by rebels in the southwestern part of South Korea. As one of the sites of these atrocities, Gurye became the first town in South Korea to erect a public memorial in 2006 for the victims of the Yŏsun Killings. Gurye presents a case that demonstrates how democratized South Korea has continued to negotiate a strong legacy of anticommunism, even at its subversive memorial sites. In a land that has long muted the memories of an old atrocity, suppressed mourners in Gurye are still struggling to reclaim their fundamental yet long-deprived rights to mourn the loss of their loved ones.

Epilogue

How would the reunification of two Koreans impact the case of memorializing the Korean War? The unified land of Korea itself will present a unique memorial site of the Korean War that is filled with cacophonous sets of objects, rituals, and bodies. Such a site will provoke us to witness many ironic puzzles of memories: one’s oppressive ideology could be another’s legitimate saga; victims at a memorial on one side could be recalled as perpetrators in a memorial on the other side; and heroes of one site could be villains of the other. Surely, the unified land of Korea will increase the chances that we will see not only the enmeshed lines among victims, heroes, and perpetrators of both war realities, but also our acts of remembering themselves. It will become a revived palimpsest that invites us to uncover complex layers of memories that conflict with one another and thus are not wrapped up merely with the narrative in hegemony. In these ways, the reunification of the two Koreas potentially will transform the Korean Peninsula from a topography of terror into a subversive platform of empathic mourning.

The Jeju April 3 Peace Park

The Jeju April 3 Peace Park was built in 2008 to commemorate the South Korean state’s atrocities toward civilians on Jeju Island before and during the Korean War. Situated in the distinctive local context of remembering, the park reveals its unique ability to manifest long-suppressed trauma through the meanings of both indigenous spirituality and materiality. A national commemorative event has activated the park even further to become a liberating theater of mourning for suppressed mourners. While it inevitably embraces the conventional aesthetics and rituals of the official commemoration, the park simultaneously facilitates the empathic recollection of the tragic event at the uncanny moments of symbolic work that have been mediated through such uncustomary media as mourners’ bodies, improvised props, and local dialects.

Proscription of Mourning

The proscription of mourning is the most pertinent characteristic of the Korean War memories. It has been caused by battlefield realities of the war (many unaccounted deaths of civilians), an ideologically charged memory process, fear-riddled bodies under censorship, and the convention of testimonial practices that mimics perpetrators’ epistemology. Although South Korea has recently opened up many memorial sites for suppressed mourners, the proscription of mourning nonetheless has been persistent and thus has continued to create an impasse of remembering. As a breakthrough of such an impasse, this chapter calls for emphatic mourning that reenacts survivors’ reflexive acts of witnessing their incommunicable trauma. Likewise, a memorial is reframed as a potential theater of empathic mourning that carries out an intangible process of the symbolic world through unorthodox signifiers such as bodies, nonverbal gestures, oralities, and even evanescent occurrences.

Reenacting Survivors’ Bodies in the No Gun Ri Peace Park

The No Gun Ri Peace Park was built in 2012 to honor civilian victims of the No Gun Ri Killings, a wartime atrocity committed by US troops. Survivors and victims’ families had been silenced until Associated Press journalists published their story in 1999 and subsequently earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for Investigative Reporting. As a durable war mnemonic in a public site, the park is now performing the critical roles that survivors and victims’ families once carried: witnessing, performing, and transferring trauma to others. This chapter explores not only how the park reenacts survivors’ bodies in communicating a traumatic event that most visitors did not experience directly, but also how it—as a newly constructed sign—negotiates meanings of the No Gun Ri Bridge, the original site of the killings that is located adjacent to the park.

Introduction

This book is not about the Korean War itself. Rather, it is about communicating trauma in the process of constructing memories of the Korean War. My primary impulse to write this book stemmed from a reflexive awareness that I have an irresistible affinity with this war. I am drawn to the Korean War because I have visceral and psychological connections to this conflict through the bodies and minds of my loved ones who survived the war. As one who belongs to what Marianne Hirsch would call “the generation of postmemory,” I willingly pair my academic inquisitions about memory process with the subject of the Korean War since I am better positioned to articulate my questions about trauma, empathy, and memorials within this particular context. I do not necessarily have more abilities than others to witness the complex memories of this conflict, yet I am highly provoked to persistently reimagine it. I argue that postmemory could be an epistemologically advantageous site where one is able to glimpse how the texture of trauma is momentarily manifested in the multifaceted, cross-sectional, and dialogical interactions between survivors and past events, between survivors and the generation of postmemory, and between the generation of postmemory and past events.