We Will See at the Top

​

In 2009, in the prospective redevelopment area of
Hwigyeong-dong Dongdaemun-gu, chunks of affections
that people had discarded were scattered everywhere.
At the same time, heaps of construction materials for
urban development—an attempt to erase these affections
altogether and build up again from scratch—were piling
up. Photo albums of children, wedding portraits, and
furniture formed a mountain alongside mountains of sand,
cement, and steel bars.

Images of mountains were ubiquitous in Hwigyeongdong.
There were mountains in a painting hanging in the
barbershop, in the sculpture carved into a front gate, and
in a photo from the picture-frame store. Among these,
Baekdusan Mountain was predominant. Baekdusan
Mountain, a place that comes up in conversations about
patriotism at the neighborhood sulguk [“hangover soup”]
diner, is a place that is largely “someone else’s” land, and
yet it is still the sacred mountain of the Korean people and
the origin of Gojoseon, the first kingdom in Korean history.
And at the same time, it is a place that we need to defend
in order to counter China’s “Northeast Project”1 and a place
that we are supposed to climb at least once during our
lifetimes.

After all of this was swept away by urban development, the
heap of cement formed a mountain where an apartment
building was under construction. At its top, the puddle
for mixing cement with water made a believable volcano
crater. With some rain water, it became something that
ironically resembled Choenji [Baekdusan’s caldera] even
more. The people’s hollow nationalist dreams were swept
away on a daily basis and replaced by the soaring myth of
development. The only thing that resembled the forms of
the past residents’ affections was the cement Baekdusan
Mountain. Of course, that disappeared in short order, too.