An American in Seoul recently confessed to me that when he first came to the city, he woke up terrified one morning, hearing a man shrieking in a hair-raising voice, “Sa-tan! Sa-tan!” Momentarily, he thought he had awoken in a haunted house and shuddered in horror. Later, he found that it was the voice of a laundryman collecting and delivering laundry in his apartment building. He also realized that what he had heard was not “Sa-tan!” but “se-tak (laundry)!” Hearing his nightmarish but humorous recollections, I laughed heartily. 

When it comes to haunted houses, we imagine a bleak, isolated house with squeaky doors and floors. In that sense, Korea’s modern-day apartment buildings are virtually uninhabitable for ghosts. Nevertheless, we are still enthralled by stories of haunted houses. The motif of “haunted houses” has always been a favorite of moviegoers, and Hollywood has produced a plethora of chilling haunted house movies, including Vincent Price’s “House on Haunted Hill,” “The Amityville Horror” and “The Others,” to name but a few.

According to Wikipedia, a haunted house is “a house or other building often perceived as being inhabited by disembodied spirits of the deceased who may have been former residents or were familiar with the property.” How, then, does a house become haunted? The online encyclopedia explains, “Parapsychologists attribute haunting to the spirits of the dead and the effect of violent or tragic events in the building’s past such as murder, accidental death or suicide.” If so, a house becomes haunted when the ghosts in it are preoccupied with what happened in the past and harbor resentment and grudges.

I have often thought that South Korea would also end up being a haunted place if we are not free from the burdens of the past. That is, if we are too preoccupied with the past or could not shake off “the effect of violent and tragic events” in our country’s past, we will ultimately end up with revengeful ghosts and our whole country would become a gigantic haunted place.

Unfortunately in today’s Korean society, there are a great number of people who are haunted by the specters of the past. Some people seem to be under the illusion that they still live the 1940s and thus have to hunt down pro-Japanese people in our society. Others seem to believe that they still live in the 1970s and 1980s under the military dictatorship and thus need to fight for democracy and topple the dictatorial government. Indeed, in our society there are many people who are resentful and revengeful because they cannot shake off “the effect of violent and tragic events” of the past.

As a result, it is not going too far to say that contemporary Korean society has become a haunted place swarming with spiteful specters. For example, today’s South Korea is seriously plagued by the acute condition of bipolar antagonism between the left and the right, progressives and conservatives, or socialists and capitalists, just as it was right after the division of the country and during the Korean War. Such antagonism, which is rampant in our society, reveals how preoccupied we are with the past.

The recent confrontation among Koreans over high school history textbooks is a good example. Radical people in our society seem to be haunted by the specters of the past, preoccupied by the misguided thought that our history has been all wrong from the beginning because they believe it to be manipulated by the privileged, pro-Japanese and pro-American people.

The problem is that such antagonism kindles hatred, and hatred eventually fosters terrorism. Describing the nature of terrorism, Frederick Forsyth writes in “Avengers”: “The hatred came first, then the cause, then the target, then the methods and finally the self-justification.” Indeed, we often disguise and justify our hatred by making it look like justice or the grand cause. Deep down, however, it is nothing but blind hatred that prompts us to antagonize those who are better than us or different from us.

Instead of remaining hopelessly haunted by the past, we should move toward the future. Look at the brightly smiling young people in the streets of today’s South Korea. They are the future generation that will lead this country. But look at us, the older generation on the verge of extinction. Every day we exhibit hatred and stage factional brawls in front of young people and try to brainwash them into becoming ideological warriors.

Only old people, who do not have a future, feed on past memories. Sometimes they look back on the good old days. Other times, they live with feelings of remorse, regretting their past mistakes. But young people live on hopes and dreams, constantly trying to soar into the future. We cannot let our children inherit a haunted house of spiteful ghosts. We should provide them with a bright future, not the bleak past of dead bones.

By Kim Seong-kon

Kim Seong-kon is a professor of English at Seoul National University and president of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. ― Ed.