Every Time I Fill the Gas Tank, I Think of Kim Jong-Il

[dr_pretentious]

All the pregnancy books advise that, once you really get into the third trimester, you should keep your gas tank at least half full at all times. You never know when you might have to take off for the hospital, or some urgent visit to a specialist, or whatever, and in most parts of the country half a tank is enough to be sure that you'll be able to get there without imperiling your baby by stopping for gas. So, okay, we always have at least a half-full gas tank.

Half a tank of gas is also enough to get you from Yongsan Garrison, where my family was stationed in Seoul, down the peninsula to Pusan, where the Navy would have been waiting to evacuate us if North Korea had invaded South Korea back in 1987. One of the first things we learned about life on Yongsan was that having less than half a tank of gas in your car was a ticketing offense--everyone was required to be ready, at all times, to participate in a mass evacuation. I was seventeen, and a licensed driver, so I got instructions on where to report in case I was needed to drive people out of there. "We would need every vehicle, and every driver," the orientation guy said. "It might be necessary to separate you from your family. Getting everybody out might require that you drive a car full of other people's children." This scenario was both irresistible to imagine and impossible to imagine. Although the army base where we lived was in the middle of the South Korean capital, it was also within artillery range of the Demilitarized Zone. I pictured massive traffic jams, explosions, family partings of the kind I'd only seen in black and white movies about World War II, you know, the kinds of scenes that play out at train stations in Paris, like the flashbacks in Casablanca. And I suppose it might have gone that way. It was the year before the Olympics were in Seoul, and there was a week when Kim Jong-Il threatened to invade if Pyongyang didn't get to host the yacht races because, of course, the two Koreas were really one country. It was the year of South Korea's first presidential election, and nobody knew whether the outgoing dictator might not change his mind at the last minute about wanting to be the first leader of his country to leave office alive more than he wanted to stay in office a little longer. Not infrequently, tear gas drifted to our part of town from the student riots in Myongdong Square.

I'd say it was a surreal time to be an American in Seoul, but I wonder whether there's ever been a non-surreal time to be any sort of person in Seoul since the partition of the country. No doubt it's surreal for the U.S. Army families who are there right now. I wonder how long that year of my life will need to compost in my unconscious before fiction starts growing out of it.

All that year, I pined after my boyfriend back in the States. Nobody had much patience with my teenage pining. "After all," they said, "it's not as if you're someday going to marry some guy you dated in high school." The joke's on them. Twenty years later, here that same old boyfriend is, driving me to midwife appointments in the week before our child's due date, and remembering frequently to top off the gas tank.

Comments

[sppeterson.livejournal.com]

I was in Korea in '87 too! Up on the border though, pretending that we weren't violating the rules of the DMZ with all our heavy weapons hidden in the forts.

At the time, North Korea's military was so played up that we thought we'd mainly serve as speed bumps in case of an invasion. But, in retrospect, I doubt even a full scale invasion would have made it very far. The fact that Seoul was in arty range of the North was always pretty scary though.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

The DMZ is such a perfect study in the absurd results you get when you inscribe the larger absurdities of the Cold War in a landscape. I made the obligatory pilgrimage up to the DMZ, with the bus passing those miles and miles of concrete pylons spaced to serve as tank traps. And I got the official tour, with the guide's tale of the dueling flags on the negotiators' tables, and the telescopic viewing of the Potemkin village. The only other place I've been that had its craziness as perfectly expressed in artifacts and architecture was Berlin, but I didn't get there until many years after the wall came down. By then, Berlin's craziness had quirked around into a relaxed, self-conscious collective irony--something less pointed but more real than the Panmunjom official guide's attempts at laughing off the North. I can only imagine how weird it must have been to spend a whole tour of duty up there.

Our downstairs neighbor in Yongsan spent a lot of time in the DMZ doing something mysterious and classified that had to do with finding infiltration tunnels, but of course he wasn't allowed to say what or where in any detail. He had been (or maybe still was--I don't remember for sure) a Green Beret, and he liked making jokes about demolitions. One night the Seoul Olympic Committee sponsored a big fireworks display for the pre-anniversary of the opening ceremonies, to get the city counting down the days to its big international debut...but nobody thought to announce to the folks who lived on post that there were going to be fireworks. So right around the dinner hour, when explosions started going off, our neighborhood got very nervous. My father phoned around for information, and once he figured out out what was going on, he gave my sister and me the go-ahead to watch the fireworks. When we got out onto the balcony, we discovered our downstairs neighbor had told his kids to hide in their apartment's innermost closet, he'd gathered up all his guns, and he was readying himself to make some kind of last stand on the porch.