Courtesy of Elina Volkova
I’ve spent over two decades living here and seen just how good Korea is at the glow-up. It’s a nation that loves looksmaxxing. Things get shiny. Polished. Airbrushed and tucked. From celebrities’ faces to citizens’ ID cards, everything gets cleaned. Including the history. The industries of memory have been working on the national identity with the same clinical precision as is applied to noses and eyelids. Korea remembers itself primarily as a victim while forgetting the moments when it exercised power over others.
On June 23rd 1965, South Korea struck an agreement with Washington to send its troops into Vietnam. They contributed approximately 325,000 troops to the Vietnam War, the second largest foreign military contributor in the conflict. In doing so, they earned an estimated $5 billion dollars. The Miracle on the Han River, the hardworking Koreans in the textile factors, fields, and foreign lands is true. But it would not have likely happened without war. A war that created the country. A war that divided the country. A war that funded the country. All of them demarcated as separate events when, in reality, the nation here is living through one experience. It’s just that we’ve become very good at building monuments to the parts we like and forgetting where we buried the rest."
