With the 2018 Winter Olympics, in Pyeongchang, approaching, E. Tammy Kim writes about how South Korea has evolved since the country hosted the Summer Games, in 1988.
In 1986, two years before Seoul, South Korea, hosted the Summer
Olympics, the filmmaker Kim Dong-won embedded himself with the people of
Sanggye-dong, a neighborhood of rickety, low-lying homes that had found
itself along the relay route of the Olympic torch. The Games were a
wildly ambitious venture for such a poor country, and a fit of
quick-build construction and “beautification” was under way. In
Sanggye-dong, dozens of households faced immediate eviction; the
government sent in men to drag them out. Kim’s short documentary of
their struggle, “The Sanggye-dong Olympics,” depicts the toll of what
the art historian Sohl Lee has called “the nation’s presumed
‘international début.’ ”
The 1988 Games took place in a time of social and political upheaval in
South Korea. Mass protests, especially on college campuses, had recently
forced the military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, to acknowledge the torture
of political prisoners and to allow a direct Presidential election to go
forward. Korean democracy activists, who otherwise considered the
financial cost of the Olympics unconscionable, reluctantly embraced the
Games for their effect on the regime. As a Times editorial from the
era
explained,
“Mr. Chun has cause now to be more reasonable. He desperately seeks
success for the Olympics in his country next year and the legitimacy the
games will confer.”
This month, South Korea will again host an
Olympics .
The nation is very different from what it was thirty years ago, but some
stories remain the same. In the lead-up to these Games—which will be
held in Pyeongchang, eighty miles east of Seoul—Gariwang Mountain, known
for its wild ginseng and old-growth yew, birch, and cherry trees, was
razed and carved out to accommodate a new ski course. When a
fleet of Hyundai bulldozers arrived to begin the work, in 2014,
environmentalists and residents of the area, most of them poor, held
demonstrations against the government of the President at the time, Park
Geun-hye. “In an instant, I lost my home, and got only ninety-two
hundred dollars in compensation,” Koh Chun-rang, a
seventy-seven-year-old resident, told a reporter at the time. Two years
later, Park was impeached, after revelations of widespread corruption in
her Administration provoked mass
protests.
Moon Jae-in, a member of the liberal Democratic Party and a human-rights
attorney, was elected to replace her. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was
elected President of the United States, and entered office as North
Korea accelerated its missile program. A South Korean Olympics was once
again invested with political meaning.
During the opening ceremonies this week, athletes from North and South
Korea will march behind the Unification Flag—a Twitter-blue silhouette
of the peninsula against a white field—and the folk tune “Arirang” will
play from the loudspeakers in place of either country’s national anthem.
