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The DMZ
On the land people have been unable to enter longest on the Korean peninsula live the greatest number of the peninsula’s endangered animals. Along the line drawn by the armistice of July 27, 1953, there runs a band two hundred fifty kilometers from east to west and four kilometers wide — some nine hundred square kilometers in area, a little larger than Seoul. Within it, 6,168 species have been surveyed. Of the peninsula’s 267 endangered species, 102 have been confirmed in this band. Of the world’s fifteen crane species, seven winter here. There are gorals and musk deer and Asiatic black bears, otters and eagles. There is even talk that tigers may still be in the deep forest.
This fact is always consumed as a beautiful story — the story that when people withdrew, nature returned; that division made an unexpected paradise. I do not want to write this chapter that way. To write it that way would betray everything this book has said so far.
The reason that land was preserved is landmines. The most densely mined area per unit of land in the world is this band and its margins. Cranes come down there not because it is safe but because people cannot enter. So the DMZ is not a nature reserve. It is a wound too dangerous for anyone to touch — a country’s split place, lying open and unhealed for seventy years.
There is a more troubling fact. Those who have studied this place longest worry about peace. Kim Seung-ho, director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute, says the region was protected not by any will to protect the environment but by military confrontation, and that when the confrontation eases, a serious threat will come. Jeong Su-young, who studies its plants, puts it more painfully: removing the landmines is itself destroying the nature. To lift a mine you must dig the earth, and when you dig the earth, what grew on it is gone.
A wound is protecting life, and treating that wound will endanger the life.
I know no more exact paradox of the boundary. And here we must go back to Chapter Four. A living boundary, we said, divides and joins at once. And inside a membrane completely closed, admitting nothing, a cell starves to death. Is the DMZ, then, a refutation? Completely closed, and yet is life not overflowing?
No. The life of the DMZ did not arise because that line is alive. Life pushed into the space people vacated. Life enters any gap from which we have taken our hands. It enters ruins; it enters Chernobyl. That is evidence about the power of life, not a merit of the wall. A crane sitting in a minefield does not make the minefield good.
Life takes root even in a wall. But not because the wall did well.
And yet there was a time when a hole opened in that wall. In the spring of 1991 the World Table Tennis Championships were held in Chiba, Japan. Forty-six years after division, South and North went out as one team. The team was named Korea; on the uniforms was not two national flags but the shape of the peninsula; and on the podium neither the South’s anthem nor the North’s was played, but “Arirang.” In the women’s team event this team beat China. No one had expected it. Hyun Jung-hwa from the South and Ri Bun-hui from the North were on that team.
Twenty-one years later the story was made into a film. Coming out of the theater, I wrote this.
I wept the whole way through the film. Weeping, I thought: why must South and North be split in two, why can we not be one?— 2012, Facebook
Something else hurt me more at the time. Not long before, Ri Bun-hui and Hyun Jung-hwa had tried to meet in China and had not been permitted. Two people who twenty years earlier had stood on the same podium as one team could not now share a cup of tea in a third country. The boundary that had opened had closed again.
And yet that day, weeping, I was also grateful. That at a moment when South and North were plunging toward their worst, that memory had been laid up in advance was strangely a comfort. I remember writing something like this: look, it can be done. It is a possible thing.
A boundary that has once opened cannot have that fact erased. In Chapter Seven I wrote that a person who has crossed once is a little less afraid before the next threshold. A community is the same. Chiba was the first threshold in forty-six years, and after it we knew that this was not an impossible thing.
On the second threshold I too am a small part. I worked for more than six years on the bid committee for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics. At the 2007 IOC session I was suddenly named final presenter, and, afraid my eyes would fail me, I memorized the whole script and rehearsed it silently in my head even while watching television. And we lost. We had lost before that too, so it was two straight defeats. Only on the third attempt did we win the 2018 Games.
Winning the bid was not the end. In the years that followed, as agreements went awry and budgets fell short and public opinion turned cold, I thought more than once: is this what we bid for? And yet the scene that stayed with me longest from those six years on the committee was not in a meeting room. It was 2,018 residents of Gangwon Province forming a choir and singing “Arirang” when the evaluation commission came to the curling venue — and the hundreds of thousands of people lining the road to see off the commission’s bus. Standing before them, I wept, and I made a vow.
And in February 2018, at the opening ceremony of those Games, South and North walked in together. In women’s ice hockey a unified team was formed once again. Twenty-seven years had passed since Chiba.
One thing must not be omitted here. That unified team was not simply beautiful. Several of our own players who had prepared for years lost their place to play because of that decision, and no small number of people were angry about it. I think that anger was right. Opening always has a price, and an opening that does not ask who pays that price is not hospitality. In Chapter Thirteen I said hospitality requires a host. Hospitality is the host giving what is his; giving away what belongs to someone else is not hospitality.
So what we hope for is not a state in which the wall falls and no line remains. In the language of Chapter Four, that is a cell whose membrane has burst. What we hope for is that the line changes from a wall into a membrane. Still dividing, yet sorting each time what shall be let in and when — a line that divides and joins at once.
On the first day of 2018 I went with my family to Imjingak, where a bell is rung at the new year in longing for reunification. And this is what I left on Facebook that day.
At Imjingak, longing for reunification. But the child’s voice is louder than the bell.— January 1, 2018, Facebook
In the photograph I am laughing. I had come to a solemn place and a child was chattering so that the bell was drowned out. At the time I wrote it only because it was funny. Reading it again now, this chapter’s conclusion was already there.
Adults ring the bell. We ring bells, issue statements, hold talks, and break them off. We have done this for seventy years. Over that sound a child’s voice was laid. That child did not know that day what reunification was, and did not know that its own voice had covered the bell.
That child grows up. And inherits this line that we never managed to change into a membrane. What we hand down is finally two things: one unhealed wound, and one memory that it did once open.
In Chapter Twelve I wrote that the price is paid on the inside and the learning harvested on the outside. Before this line that saying becomes a language of time. The price is paid here, in this generation. The learning will be harvested on the side of those not yet inside this circuit — on the side of that child whose voice was louder than the bell. And I can only hope that one day they will see what we never managed to see, and come back with it.
Someone did a similar thing on another divided land. In 1990, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney rewrote Sophocles’s Philoctetes. He called it The Cure at Troy — staging again, upon a land whose peoples had long abandoned each other, the story of going at last to fetch the man who had been abandoned for a wound that would not heal. The chorus of that play sings: history says don’t hope on this side of the grave, but then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme.
I read those words again before this line. Heaney did not say such a thing comes often. He said once in a lifetime. That is enough. The spring of 1991 in Chiba was that once for us.
Handing down the boundary is this book’s final question.
So far we have gone from me to you. We saw the place where a wound becomes a passage, the place where two people dwell within each other, and now we have come to a place a whole community has kept shut for more than half a century. What remains is the direction of time. How do I hand the boundary I have learned to the next person? That is this book’s final part.
Notes for this chapter
National Institute of Ecology survey of biodiversity in the DMZ area (6,168 species) · Ministry of Environment data on endangered species · Interviews with Kim Seung-ho, director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute, and the plant researcher Jeong Su-young — NPR, April 20, 2019 · The unified Korean team at the 41st World Table Tennis Championships (Chiba, 1991) · The film As One (2012) · The 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics and Paralympics · Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes (1990) · The author’s Facebook record (2012, 2018)