Volume 48, Number 3 · February 22, 2001
The Heroes of Kwangju
By James Fenton
Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age
by Lee Jai-eui, translated from the Korean by Kap Su Seol and Nick Mamatas
UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 172 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen
edited by Henry Scott-Stokesand Lee Jai-eui, with a foreword by President Kim Dae-jung
M.E. Sharpe, 239 pp., $37.50; $10.95 (paper)
For ten days in May 1980 the capital of South Cholla province in South Korea, Kwangju, was the scene of a bloody uprising. The last full day of the uprising, Monday, May 26, was my own first full day as a reporter in South Korea, and I spent it in and around Kwangju, a city supposedly sealed off from the rest of the world. Why I was allowed in, I still do not know; either I was very lucky in meeting a persuasive and determined taxi driver who wished for personal or political reasons to visit the uprising himself, or I was being used by the secret police in order to insert one of their own observers or operatives. At the time, either explanation seemed possible. I was nervous and distrustful of those around me, and quite unsure how to proceed.
Review, 3427 words
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