Korean Weltschmerz

It was the mid-1990s. It was the first time that I ever went to Korea by myself. It was right after college graduation, and I hadn’t been back to Korea since I had left when I was nine years old. Since my family didn’t go to church, I hadn’t even had a lot of contact with Korean Americans while growing up.

But there is something akin to a pilgrimage for a Korean American in wanting to visit Korea as an adult — a desire to validate some part of the identity, an unexplained hollowness that yearns to be filled. Looking back, this is probably pretty common for someone who has lived his entire life as a minority, an outlier, an exception surrounded by the dominant homogenous sea of the majority, no matter how accepted and welcomed you might have been.

Something happened on that flight that has remained with me for the rest of my life. It was one of those experiences that makes little impression at first, but the indentation deepens in your psychic landscape as you mature and get older. An elderly gentleman was sitting next to me on the 15-hour flight. I was in the aisle seat, and he was in the middle seat.

He was a Korean man in his late 50s or 60s, small, kempt and dignified. His manner was elegant, and his speech was kind and quiet. He asked me a few questions over the in-flight meals, which got us talking — nothing too deep, just casual conversation, the type that you have with a stranger forced close by the confined space of a plane.

Towards the end of the flight, however, he said something odd. He said, in the same casual conversational manner that he had been using, that he was going to kill himself when he got to Seoul. He will check himself into a hotel, drink two bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and then take pills to end his own life.

All I remember is just nodding my head, not saying anything to that astounding, matter-of-fact confession that an elderly man had made to a young man he just met. That was it. I didn’t ask him any follow-up questions or express any concerns. His words didn’t really register with me. He might as well have been shouting into a dark tunnel without an echo. When the flight ended, we deplaned and never saw each other again.

Except that I relive the moment now and wonder. I wonder why he told me. I wonder what he expected me to say. Was he expecting some words of comfort or blanket assurances that everything would be alright? Was he just angling for an opportunity to tell his story to someone without any investment in the narrative? Why was I so uncaring? I have no idea what happened to him.

As I now approach what his age must have been, however, that casual conversation about death reminds me of the quote from Erick Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front:” “We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial — I believe we are lost.”

I now realize that’s who he was. He was lost. He was old, crude, sorrowful and superficial, even when speaking about his own death, raging against the world to someone young, foolish, ignorant, who was trying to find his own way. I am not trying to be cruel. I am just now realizing that much of the society that surrounds me feels old, crude, sorrowful and superficial, all the more so when juxtaposed against death. The only thing holding it back is the hope of the young, foolish and ignorant who are trying to find their own way in a world where the old ways don’t work anymore.

Perhaps the recent Itaewon tragedy is triggering these reflections. I was in Seoul when the Itaewon tragedy occured. Although I wasn’t anywhere near the site, I could feel the immediate rumblings of the event. It felt like a psychic earthquake. The physical epicenter might have been Itaewon, but the mental epicenter seemed to be the collective Weltschmerz that the Korean society seems to suffer both as a legacy and privilege. Maybe that’s what “han” is.

Post-Itaewon, there have been two huge weekend candlelight vigils. I now see these vigils differently. I no longer see them as political protests per se against one side or another. Rather, I see them as collective cries by Korean youth against a society that feels old, crude, sorrowful and superficial in an uncaring way that commodifies their lives.

I hear the voices of the young raging, raging against the dying of the light that is their only hope to find their way. Cruel, random deaths, especially of the young — whether inside a sinking ferry or crushed inside a narrow alley — bring these reflections into sharper, more sorrowful relief. I hope that they care more than I did back on that plane.