Korean Studies Internet Discussion List
KOREAN STUDIES REVIEW
Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. By Linda S. Lewis, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, Center of Korean Studies, University of Hawai’i, 2002. xxii + 189 pages. ISBN 0-8248-2543-8, paper. Pb. $19.95. Bibliog. illus. (Hawai’i Studies on Korea)
reviewed by J. E. Hoare
President of the British Association for Korean Studies[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 6.2 (July 2003): 165-167. Acta Koreana is published by Academia Koreana of Keimyung University.]
I first visited the South Chŏlla capital, Kwangju, in autumn 1981, when the scars of May 1980 were still strong. The British Council had organised an art exhibition in the city, part of an attempt to show that Britain made no distinction between the various parts of South Korea. Yet coming from the British Embassy in Seoul one knew that there was one topic that there was no point in raising with the bureaucrats, journalists and academics on whom calls had been arranged. May 1980 was a taboo subject, and remained so for many years. Even in 1985, when we attended an academic conference in the brand new international hotel constructed below Mount Mudung, nobody mentioned the past. But of course we knew and they knew that something terrible had happened at Kwangju between 18 and 29 May 1980. What had begun as a fairly standard student demonstration, not at all uncommon in the confused period that followed the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in October 1979, developed into an outburst of pent-up rage and frustration, not just at current political developments, but also at what was seen as the systematic discrimination against Kwangju and against the whole Honam region. The authorities, shocked at what they claimed to see as open rebellion, smashed it with massive force. Perhaps, like the Beijing authorities nine years later, they were particularly concerned by the involvement of workers as well as students. Many were killed, others went missing, never to be found. Many others were put on trial, including Park Chung Hee’s most successful opponent, Kim Dae Jung, Chŏlla’s own political favourite son, who was sentenced to death for fomenting a rebellion that took place while he was already in prison. He survived, however, and the memory of Kwangju would become an important rallying point for the forces of democracy in South Korea, whose ultimate triumph would be his election as president in 1997.
Linda Lewis was in Kwangju during May 1980. Having gone to Korea first in 1970 as a Peace Corps volunteer, when she had worked in North Chŏlla province, she returned in the late 1970s to carry out fieldwork for a PhD. Her topic was the role of judges in civil disputes, and she chose Kwangju as the place to do this. In this short book, she attempts to come to terms with what happened then and how Kwangju has remained at the forefront of South Korean politics ever since. The first section retells the story of what happened in Kwangju during those days in May 1980. The narrative is a mixture of personal history, based on a journal that she kept at the time, and accounts based on a wide range of material. This includes eyewitness accounts, later testimony by victims or their relatives, and some of the literature that has emerged on Kwangju. To some extent, she is here going over old ground, since she published an earlier version in Donald Clark’s edited volume, The Kwangju Uprising: Shadows over the Regime in South Korea (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1988), though she is able to paint a more comprehensive picture, drawing on new material published since the late 1980s. She also spends some time examining aspects of the United States’ role in Kwangju, as perceived by an American citizen who was not privy to official views. It is clear that she finds the United States’ behaviour hard to accept. She clearly believes that if the United States’ military commander had intervened, it would have been possible to prevent the killings and repression that followed the uprising. Yet United States’ action seems to have been confined to a somewhat bizarre warning issued on 21 May 1980 to the North Koreans not to intervene.
At the end of the first part of the book, she includes a short section in which she looks at the question of how many actually died during May 1980, concluding, sensibly, that it is an irrelevant question. As she frames the question, is it any less of a tragedy if only 189 died instead of 190? To which the only answer, as in Beijing or Rangoon nearly a decade later, is obviously no. But she also points out that the damage, whether physical or mental lingers on in those who did not die, or, in the case of family members, might not have actually been present. All have suffered, and some continue to do so.
The second part is a short account of how the Kwangju issue was handled in President Chun Doo Hwan’s Fifth Republic. Although Chun would deny when on trial in the mid-1990s that he had any responsibility for what happened in Kwangju in May 1980, this was not a topic to be raised during his presidency. Yet it would not go away. The military attempted a whitewash in 1985. This claimed that it was ‘impure elements’ that had attacked young soldiers going about their duties, essentially repeating themes used at the time to justify the suppression and the means of suppression, satisfying nobody. Only with the ‘civilianisation’ of the government following Kim Young Sam’s presidency could something approaching a real enquiry begin. Even that, however, did not make the issue go away.
Yet in her third section, in which she examines the ‘memory of Kwangju’, and how this has changed over time, Lewis shows that what enquiries cannot do, time and new circumstances may begin. This I found the most interesting and original section of the book. Drawing on observations made on her frequent visits to Korea since 1980, she shows how the commemoration of Kwangju has gradually shifted from something that belonged to those who had been directly involved towards a government-dominated occasion, almost more celebration than commemoration. Partly this is due to the passage of time, and the deaths of many of those involved, partly it is because of the change brought about by the election of Kim Dae Jung and the ‘triumph’ of democratisation that this is seen to represent. She shows how, as time passed, different groups tried to take over the running of the annual commemorative ceremony, and also how this was integrated into traditional practices for honouring the dead. By 1998, she concludes, the Kwangju commemoration had become more a civic festival, complete with mascot (!), rather than the symbol of anti-government protest that it had been during the 1980s and early 1990s. It remains to be seen whether this is the final stage, or whether Kwangju and what it represents will mutate even further as South Korea goes further down the democracy path.
The illustrations are well-chosen, but a map would have been useful in helping to show the physical setting in which both the original political drama and its long aftermath have taken place.
Citation:
Hoare, J. E. 2006
Review of Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (2002)
Korean Studies Review 2006, no. 05
Electronic file: http://koreaweb.ws/ks/ksr/ksr06-05.htm