hankyoreh

Kwon Mi-hwa

Seongju is a madhouse. Farmers who ought to be working in melon fields have come all the way to Seoul to protest. The people of Seongju have turned into impure elements who are being goaded on by outside forces.

By now, we should all be familiar with this kind of spin.

The same labeling happened to elderly farmer Baek Nam-gi and the Catholic Farmer’s Association, and that’s what happened to the elderly women protesting electricity transmission towers in Miryang.

Unless they have some serious connections, ordinary folks who try to voice their opinions are treated like barking dogs and squealing pigs and are muzzled, either by being put in prison or in the hospital.

After being launched at the end of 2015, the Special Sewol Investigative Commission carried out a fact-finding study between Jan. and June 2016 about how to support the victims of the Sewol tragedy. As a community psychologist, I took part in the study.

After the special commission was forced to conclude its activities, it published its comprehensive findings on July 20. South Korea may have an unending series of disasters and catastrophes, but for the first time a government agency has produced a record of the victims’ testimony.

We carried out a qualitative study of the survivors of the Sewol sinking, Danwon High School students, the other victims and their families. A team of psychologists conducted in-depth interviews with 145 people, including the parents of the Danwon students, the grandparents and aunts that have been acting as parents, and their siblings.

Next, we analyzed 46 of those interviews using the Grounded Theory approach for qualitative research. Our analysis of those 46 interviews - each of which lasted from between 1 and 4 hours - ran for 2,300 pages.

From those pages, 536 themes emerged. The language of hope was interwoven with the language of agony.

Though I had always considered myself interested in the Sewol tragedy, even I was surprised by the conclusions reached in our qualitative analysis.

To be honest, I didn’t imagine that these were ordinary people. I thought there was something extraordinary about them - always wearing yellow clothing, marching in parades, shaving their heads and doing 108 bows in the broiling sunshine.

I guessed whether they had some kind of grudge against the government. But all the data pointed to the fact that they were completely ordinary people. The core variable of their experience was "doing what we do as parents/families."

As parents who sent their children to school, they naturally trusted the school and did their best to send their children on a trip organized by the school. Even after the Sewol ferry sank, they did their best to wait, just like any other ordinary parents who trusted the government.

As parents, it was only too natural for them to ask why their children had died. But more than two years later, they still do not have an answer to this question.

So as parents, they naturally took to the streets in search of an answer for this simple question. While they are too sick to get up or even while a cancer is growing in their bodies, they leave their houses once more just because that's what parents do.

The families of the nine people whose bodies have not been recovered are still living at Paengmok Port, the nearest point on land to where the Sewol sank, since April 2014.

Many South Koreans have concluded that these people who are looking for an answer to one simple question are enemies of the state. They are impure elements who are goaded on by outside forces. They are guilty of consuming tax money and sabotaging the South Korean economy. This is ironic, considering that these ordinary people are honestly paying their taxes, and the highly connected are the ones whose salaries are supported by their tax money.

It‘s human nature to blame the victim. Blaming society creates anxiety, since it represents an acknowledgment that you too are exposed to the danger.

In April 2014, quite a few people responded to this anxiety, but in July 2016, just as many people are blaming the victims once again. People are shocked that they are still fighting and wonder if there is something wrong with them.

But the reality is that they are just like us. They are ordinary people like us, who had mostly trusted the connected and powerful people and had believed that their lives would improve if they kept slaving away. They would have kept doing so, if their children had not gone to school one day and come back dead. They would have kept doing so, if their children were not still lost somewhere deep beneath the waves.

For these people, the meaning of life is wrapped up in their simple roles as parents and as family members.

Right now in Seongju, the struggle is continuing from day to day. Right now in the hospital, Baek Nam-gi has been unconscious for eight months after being hit by a water cannon. Right now at Paengmok Port, hope and despair trade places as the situation changes under the sea.

Do you believe that the simple question asked by these ordinary people is a struggle being waged by impure forces? The moment that we believe the spin of the connected and powerful, ordinary people like us become dogs and pigs.

By Jeong An-suk , assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Utah Asia Campus

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]