Last winter, I held a year-end gathering with middle school friends in Yongsan. Unable to find seats anywhere, we wandered from place to place until we finally found a bar on roughly the fifth floor of a building. The view from the balcony, where I stepped out to clear my head, was nothing short of shocking. Houses on the sloped hillside had been demolished, sprawled before my eyes like ancient stone burial mounds, with only a church building standing alone at the top, glowing in the hazy moonlight. Even I, someone who has lived a life free from religion and normally views churches with indifference, could not help but feel a shiver of mysterious awe. Moments later, I returned to the drinking table, sharing stories over memories of our carefree days 40 years ago, returning to the ordinary. Recently, while having dinner with my graduate school mentor, I learned that what I had seen was Hannam District 3. As that shiver returned, several thoughts came to mind.
During a Property Law class at an American graduate school, I once watched a video about land expropriation. It was a case where a private developer was acquiring land. The villagers facing expropriation formed militias with guns, declaring that this was a home where their grandfathers had lived, that the very chair their grandfather sat in was right there. The company representative responded with a bitter smile, saying he could not understand why they opposed when he was offering more than market price for their homes. In the end, capital won. After carefully removing the cross from the village church, they demolished the village without mercy.
In Professor Jeong Ki-ho's book "Landscape: Traces of Life Left in Space," there is a scene where he introduces various places in Korea to his German mentor. He writes that in the 1980s, to show an honest cross-section of Korean cities, the first place he visited was the hillside neighborhood of Cheongam-dong. The impoverished hillside community spread before them, with coal briquette ash set out from each house and all sorts of daily garbage catching his eye, overlapping repeatedly in his mind with the almost obsessively clean and tidy neighborhoods of Germany. Just as he was regretting bringing his mentor to such a shabby, worn place, his mentor remarked, "Korean people must truly cherish and love their trees."
To the executive in that video, a house was merely something to put a price on. But to those living in those homes, they held value that could not be priced. Unable to distinguish between the two, he could not possibly understand why the villagers took up arms. Perhaps the homes demolished in Hannam District 3 were also like that hillside neighborhood in Cheongam-dong from those days—occupied by people who loved trees, whose walls between homes were not barriers of separation but walls of connection, with modest houses positioned so that front houses would not block the views of those behind.
At some point, Korea became fixated on housing supply. There is a belief that if only housing is supplied, housing problems will be solved at once, fundamentally. In their minds, the law of supply and demand is etched as truth. An obsession with increasing supply to control housing prices. Yet with no suitable land to be found, they are driven to distraction. After twists and turns, when supply plans are announced, local governments and residents rise in opposition. They would have opposed even with consultation, but citing "absence of procedure" because there was not a word of consultation, authorities are helpless under 21st-century Korean democracy.
A few days ago, I returned to that place in Yongsan. Through the shabby barriers, the church was no longer visible. The name of that hill has long been forgotten, now called only by numbers. Soon that hill will be covered by massive apartment buildings. It will overlook the Han River as one of Seoul's most expensive complexes, commanding presence. Those apartments will stand proudly as if nothing happened, despite having destroyed everything accumulated over decades. That era will be forgotten and cannot be undone. All I can do, having made housing my intellectual companion, is simply hope that at least the church's cross may rest in peace.
