Orphans of the Windy Island
title: Orphans of the Windy Island
excerpt: “The earth has bared her blood, and no longer covers her slain.”
translation_key: posts/orphans-of-the-windy-island
It is as if every continent in the world, at its southeastern windward edge, has broken off an island.
Eurasia dropped one, called Taiwan;
Africa’s piece became Madagascar;
beside the Australian continent, the waves carved out Tasmania;
and off the Indian subcontinent fell a grain called Ceylon.
And at the tail end of the Korean Peninsula,
at the far reach of the East Sea and the Yellow Sea,
the wind shook loose a small island.
Her name is Jeju.
—— Epigraph
Prologue | The Spring of 1948
I don’t know when I first heard of Jeju Island.
Maybe it was a glimpse of that flat little dot beside the map of China;
maybe a notice board about visa-free entry, or a line in some K-drama;
maybe a few hurried lines in a travel guide I happened to open.
But ever since the first time I looked at a map, she was there.
Quietly, indisputably there.
The last time Jeju Island came up was because of a Jeju Air accident.
After a brief mourning, the topic was replaced by the next trending hashtag.
She sank into the deep sea beneath public opinion,
sank down.
Without a sound.
There’s a saying that Jeju has much wind and many women.
Better to say,
Jeju Island is the daughter of the wind.
The wind beat at the hem of my clothes, telling its story.
It told me
that an unspeakable memory is buried here.
Burnt villages are buried here,
a massacre deliberately left blank in the newspaper headlines is buried here.
The wind comes and goes, but it cannot blow away the white bones beneath Hallasan.
This wind is so salty,
as if something were mixed into it.
Not seawater.
It is blood, the blood that began to flow on April 3, 1948.
The blood of thirty thousand people.
Boiling blood.
Why come to Jeju Island?
Not for a vacation,
not to check in, not for a whirlwind “special forces” tour.
Because she took me in.
She took in a minor who had no time to get a visa;
she took in a child who would sit on a park bench at midnight, crying.
Just as she once sheltered those who hid in the caves.
Just as this island took in the civilians who hid in the caves of Hallasan,
took in the souls trying to flee the White Terror,
however insignificant,
however brief the reprieve.
Even though, in the end, none of them came back alive.
And so I wondered,
could I, with my pen, gently call out their names?
No — wake them from their silence.
Wake thirty thousand furious souls;
until I hear the cries drowned out in the wind,
the cries that defied the order of things.
Windy island, windy island,
do you still remember those who died upon you?
Those fugitives just like me,
those nameless gravestones and blanked-out newspapers,
those wronged souls who were never forgiven.
Write down their names,
so that
the flag raised high on April 3,
the flag dyed red with blood,
will never fall.
And so, Ame writes the first stroke.
May the wind remember,
may the land remember,
may the people silent at this moment finally awaken.
Chapter One | Lie Down, Snuggle Close
The moment the plane touched down, I almost cried.
Not from excitement — the kind of crying of a fugitive stepping onto safe ground. Even if I had to shoulder my pack and set out again the next second, at least for now I no longer had to wander.
As we landed, a gust of wind shook the fuselage gently.
The moment I stepped out of the cabin door and into Jeju International Airport,
my first impression was — so small. The terminal was as narrow as a bus station waiting hall.
At second glance, I naturally noticed the most prominent feature around me
—— the signs and posters were covered in unfamiliar Hangul.
My eyes instinctively searched among these symbols for a familiar Chinese character,
the shapes that in Japanese I could still occasionally lean on,
but now there was nowhere at all to set foot.
I shivered, realizing:
I had walked out of the safe zone.
The shop signs on the street,
the storefront windows,
the airport diagrams —
every letter was utterly strange, every sentence proclaimed my helplessness.
It felt like swimming where your toes can’t touch the bottom —
panicked, lost, yet perfectly lucid.
I took a hard breath, and my heartbeat gradually steadied —
this is Jeju Island, a foreign land; I have finally set foot on an utterly unfamiliar island.
From this moment on,
I could only rely on myself.
Even if it was only ten short days, I had truly landed somewhere new.
Fresh off the plane, I was a little smug.
“I’ve been to Japan and Hong Kong; Korea can’t be that different.”
That’s what I told myself.
Hotels in Japan mostly go like this:
unless you look far too young or are buying alcohol, nobody asks your age.
Let alone now, dressed as “harmless” as I was.
But the night before my departure, I scrolled onto a Xiaohongshu post.
Its title stabbed straight into my heart: “In Korea, under-19s cannot check into a hotel alone — not even with a parental consent letter!”
I froze, and hurriedly opened Ctrip, Agoda, Booking, checking one by one. The pages spelled it out plainly:
Check-in age requirement: must be 19 or older.
Every single one said it. No exceptions, no “negotiable,” no “special consideration.”
My heart went hollow.
What had seemed an ordinary trip suddenly turned into the possibility of being stranded on a foreign street.
No — if I didn’t solve this, I really might end up on the street.
I began frantically searching for guesthouses, looking for hotels with self-check-in, combing through review sections, desperately hunting for comments from fellow minors who had managed to check in.
The more I searched, the colder and more panicked I felt.
Like standing at the end of a long, dark corridor,
trying to push open door after door,
only to find every one of them posted with “No Admittance.”
My hands began to shake; the words on my phone screen gradually blurred; I could barely see the keywords I was typing.
I had never felt so clearly how hostile this world is —
not toward criminals, not toward dangerous people,
but toward “unrecognized” people like me.
This is the true face of state violence —
expulsion, suppression, surveillance, isolation.
Using rules to manufacture an ice-cold “you are outside the scope of our consideration,”
letting you hit the wall yourself, break down yourself, cry yourself.
No tenderness, no negotiation, no explanation.
Just a logic that negates your existence, forcing you to give up,
forcing you to realize you were shut out long ago.
For a moment I even wondered:
“Maybe I… shouldn’t have come here?”
I opened Xiaohongshu, my fingers trembling as I typed: “Places to spend the night in Jeju Island.”
Post after post popped up:
“You can sit in a convenience store overnight, just buy something.”
“24-hour McDonald’s — buy a Coke and you can last the night, but don’t fall asleep, they’ll kick you out.”
“PC bangs won’t work; minors can’t get in at all. Saunas don’t take minors either.”
The further I scrolled, the colder my heart grew.
“If it really doesn’t work out, sit in a park overnight — but watch out for the police!”
I snapped the phone screen off. My whole body went rigid, unable to move.
I never imagined I would fall to this point,
never imagined I’d be searching questions like “can you sit in a convenience store overnight.”
Like a madwoman, I opened the guesthouse app again,
like a drowning person struggling to grab every piece of driftwood,
desperately and stubbornly searching for that last thread of hope.
In the end, I bet on the right one.
The host’s reply was simple and clear: “Self-check-in. I’ll send you the room number and passcode in advance.”
Like someone who had just escaped the execution ground, I tapped “book.”
170 yuan a night.
Not a youth hostel, not a bunk in a ten-person dorm.
A real double room, one bed, belonging only to me.
But the price was — my room was on the fourth floor, with no elevator.
I had to carry my pack up, step by step.
Every step felt like stepping on a mousetrap.
Reaching the fourth floor, I slid the key in and turned — it wouldn’t open; wrong direction.
Turned the other way. Click.
The moment the door opened, I almost burst into tears.
Not from happiness, but from the powerlessness left over after facing systemic violence head-on.
Like a lamplit cabin on a rainy night.
You fell, you’re soaked — it doesn’t matter.
Inside, a bed and a kettle of hot water are waiting for you.
The room was surprisingly large, two or three times the hotel I stayed at in Osaka.
Pale mint wallpaper on the walls; a few photos of Jeju scenery looked oddly out of place,
like some barely cobbled-together “respectability, best effort.”
I sat on the bed and looked back out the window: a row of low two- or three-story buildings, no neon on the street, none of the collage posters I’d seen in Japan — only sea wind and scattered lights.
The wind drifted in through the window, like an invisible hand gently patting my head.
I lay down and nuzzled the corner of the pillow.
No one knew who I was, but this bed did not push me away.
Soft, as if it could wrap me up entirely.
I smiled faintly.
As if the world had, at last, quietly caught me.
Chapter Two | The Wind Will Remember You Came
Walking into the convenience store, my first reaction was: “Huh? Why is it so empty?”
A few kinds of lunch boxes and rice balls scattered on the shelves — nothing like the dazzling “sense of order” of a Japanese convenience store.
I wanted an ATM to withdraw cash,
wanted a printer to print a map,
and found there was nothing here at all.
Some stores even close at midnight.
I stood frozen in front of the freezer — in Japan, such a thing is unimaginable.
Convenience stores are 24-hour,
the undying lamp of the deep night,
the shelter at the farthest end of modernity.
But here, the cashier sat behind the counter wearing earphones, watching a drama.
Only when a customer walked in did she slowly take them off, take the money, and immediately return to her screen.
I understood at once.
That was not laziness.
—— It was freedom.
A crack accidentally left loose, a breath long sealed up in the city.
The scene was strange yet familiar,
and something in my heart softened —
so this island, too, is part of the margins.
It is like a nerve ending:
by the time modernity’s current is conducted here, it has begun to jump, flicker, even occasionally go out.
You can feel the rhythm transmitted all the way from Seoul,
but by the time it arrives here, it is tired, slowed, broken.
Like a person in a suit, trouser cuffs frayed, soles coming loose, still wearing a persevering smile.
Half-renewed cement by the roadside,
untrimmed grass outside the coffee shop,
the bus stop’s LED screen flickering.
This is not backwardness,
but still striving to keep up appearances where strength runs short.
An anxiety of desperately imitating the capital’s rhythm,
and a fatalism of “knowing you can’t catch up but not allowed to stop,”
tied a knot on this island, knotting into some unique way of life.
Not chaos, not savagery —
just too far, too far for the state to bother;
too lonely, so lonely that ideals blur into shadows here.
Like China’s second-tier cities, like the new towns of Hong Kong’s New Territories,
like the shabby little county town of my hometown in memory —
we have never been at the center, but none of us will give up dressing the facade.
And so I understood why it didn’t feel strange.
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen such a place;
it was the first time I realized I came from such a place.
I too was a product of that kind of life:
unseen, unhelped,
but still cheering myself on, still maintaining that little bit of dignity.
So at this moment I am not a tourist,
not a sightseer,
but one of their own, come to seek refuge, quietly caught in the wind.
No suitcase, no ID documents,
like a kitten tired from running in the rain,
I threw myself headfirst into this little fourth-floor room,
softly, quietly, curling up in the corner of the world.
No one recognized who I was,
but this bed did not push me away.
Nor did the wind.
I nuzzled the corner of the pillow ever so softly,
and the wind at my ear seemed to smile too.
“You’re still here.”
I held myself tight and whispered:
“I really, really made it.”
Chapter Three | Falling, Caught
I woke up late.
The room was still dark; the wind had stopped.
I opened my eyes and pulled out my phone — eleven o’clock sharp.
“Can’t waste any more time,” I muttered under my breath.
Not because of a tight itinerary, but because I knew this day belonged to me.
I had to spend it well, spend it melting into this island.
Not ticking off sights, checking in, taking photos —
but living into it, becoming part of the island’s life.
I didn’t go to any “must-see attractions.”
Instead I turned the corner and walked into a nearby café.
An orange cat stood at the door; with a flick of its tail it slipped into the bushes,
like a greeting to me, the “temporary islander.”
Cafés really are everywhere in Korea.
As I ordered, I thought: the spread of this culture probably has something to do with the American military.
Coffee — they brought it;
but now it belongs to no one anymore.
It has become the island’s air, water, and light.
I ordered an Americano for only 2,000 won.
About Luckin’s promotional price — but Luckin isn’t cheap every day.
I couldn’t help sighing to myself:
“Here, coffee has become something like water.”
I found a seat by the window,
opened my notebook, and started writing a blog post.
My typing rhythm was slow; I wrote and drifted off by turns,
my thoughts wandering now to this island’s history, to Korean politics,
now back to this cup of still-steaming coffee —
like a soul roaming the island that had found a brief foothold.
An afternoon passed just like that.
When I came back to myself, it was past six.
I wasn’t very hungry, but I couldn’t skip eating.
Too lazy to choose, I ducked into a random Korean restaurant.
Pushing the door open, the server said hello in Korean.
I couldn’t help smiling wryly — that was probably the only Korean word I knew.
Summoning my courage, I walked to the counter and said to the server in English:
“One person.”
She nodded and led me to a corner seat.
I pointed at a picture on the menu and said:
“I would like this one.”
It was bibimbap, the signature dish.
Before long, the server first brought out a few side dishes —
kimchi, bean sprouts, pickled radish, seasoned spinach…
Looking at these faintly colored little dishes, I suddenly remembered the prejudice some people back home hold against Korean food.
They say it has “no flavor,” “no culture,” that “it’s all the same.”
A small sadness welled up in me.
Neighbors separated by only a strip of water — why can’t we properly understand each other?
The bibimbap arrived.
The stone pot was still sizzling.
I earnestly picked up the side dishes and ate them with the rice, bite by bite.
The flavor was very mild — a taste I had never sampled before.
But I liked it.
I like this plain, warm, unassuming flavor,
just like the island itself.
After dinner, I walked alone to the seaside;
the guesthouse was not far from the shore.
Five minutes on foot, and I leaned against the railing by the sea,
watching the sun sink little by little.
The golden afterglow spilled across the water,
like scattered gold leaf, like shattered candy wrappers,
glittering with today’s last light.
I quietly took my photos and stood there still.
The sea wind chilled me a little,
but I couldn’t bear to leave.
I began to recall the people I’d met today —
the convenience store cashier, the young woman wiping tables at the café,
the server at the Korean restaurant, and the neighbor lady who smiled and nodded at me.
None of them asked questions, doubted, or were cold.
They were just ordinarily, briefly kind to me.
But it was exactly that ordinariness that warmed my heart.
Bad people may truly be the minority;
most people carry a simple goodness inside.
How wonderful.
Back in my room, I opened a bottle of beer.
Bubbles leapt at the bottle’s mouth; I took a sip and felt a gentle sting on my tongue.
I hugged my pillow and burrowed into the soft bedding.
Today held no surprises, no waves,
only being quietly caught by the world, a few times over.
Silently, in my heart, I thought a sentence —
didn’t say it aloud, just smiled softly —
“If the world is like this… then it’s alright to stay a little longer.”
Chapter Four | The Attempt That Failed
I woke very early.
To be precise, at 6:32.
The sunlight had not yet fully climbed onto the windowsill, but the wind had already begun to stroke my cheek, cool,
like that VOCALOID song by the producer MIMI.
I rarely sleep this well.
Maybe because — last night I drank a bottled beverage. A soft bottle, labeled with a line of purple English letters:
Better Rest.
As I unscrewed the toothpaste cap, thinking back,
I suddenly remembered: beside it had stood a row of brightly colored drinks.
Bearing words as if beyond question:
“Relieves fatigue” “Boosts memory” “Reduces stress”
I couldn’t help but shudder.
Why did I drink it?
Don’t all those travel guides say it:
“Top 5 must-buys at Korean convenience stores!”
“Tired from traveling? Drink this!”
But I began to doubt…
is this good for me, or good for someone else?
The convenience store lights stung my eyes. Piles of snacks on the shelves,
every package screaming:
“Eat me!”
I glanced at the calorie counts, each number higher than the last.
Suddenly I remembered the book Han Kang wrote,
The Vegetarian.
She doesn’t eat meat.
She is refusing a system. With her body. With silence.
Could I do that?
I cannot.
I’m not qualified.
I’m no vegetarian. I abuse pills printed with prescription warnings.
I know perfectly well they’re poisoning me, yet I pretend they love me.
I…
am not even worthy of the three words “one who resists.”
The convenience store’s air conditioning whooshed over me; I shrank a little.
In the end, I took a pack of sugar-free gum.
“This one should be fine, right?”
I said softly in my heart.
At the register, I forced a relaxed smile,
but my chest still felt blocked.
Even sugar-free, it held no answer.
I just wanted to try…
to bite down on something with my mouth, against the whole world that devours everything.
But does it really help?
I don’t know.
I only know that this morning I woke very early.
6:32.
Chapter Five | Falling into the Abyss
I rolled over against the sheets, the last trace of last night’s smile still on my lips.
So sleepy… so soft…
The wind gently stirred the curtains; I curled up my knees like a kitten.
But in truth I was wide awake.
Awake to excess.
As if my body had long been ready to do something bad.
From the gap in the nightstand I took out a few blister packs of pills.
Yellow-and-white capsules rolled in my palm; I stared at them for a while —
Pregabalin, 24 capsules.
A bit much, right?
But I still popped them out, one by one, as if counting my sins.
As I swallowed, I gulped down air, afraid I’d throw up.
Empty stomach — only then can you feel the numbness arrive most completely.
I wanted to go soft, to not think about any lofty questions.
I didn’t want to think anymore, didn’t want to dissect everything clean.
When the drug took effect, it started from the soles of my feet.
A warm tide slowly floated up, along my calves, knees, thighs, flooding up bit by bit.
I held myself and stuffed my whole body into the quilt.
The world before my eyes began to warp, warping like ocean waves.
Suddenly I wanted so badly to have company, to say something.
So I picked up my phone and opened Discord.
I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular, I just… didn’t want to be alone.
I tapped on someone’s avatar —
a group friend who works as a programmer;
we’d chatted about technical questions a few times.
I hesitated, then typed:
“Baobei~”
“I like you🥺❤️”
Discord’s notification chimed.
“Thanks, I like you too”
I smiled. Truly that shy, timid kind of smile.
But as I smiled, the corners of my eyes grew wet.
Then came sobbing,
and pain like a knife drawn across my heart.
“like you like you like you like you like you like you”
“Do you want to shock me… the remote-control kind”
These words crawled out of my fingertips one by one, like syrup, like poison.
No one forced me; no one held a knife to me.
It was me. The me sliding down inside the drugs, spitting out these words of my own accord.
I licked them.
Fell.
I really started panting.
Typing while clamping my legs together.
I curled up, my whole body shrinking into the corner of the quilt.
The drug wrapped me into a ball of something warm and shameful.
My consciousness slowly drifted away, yet as if tethered by a thread, stayed in place.
As I typed those words, my face was red —
not with shyness, but with a guilt deep enough to nauseate.
By day I was still saying:
“Everything in the world should be held in common!”
I spoke of Rosa Luxemburg, of democracy as the soul of communism,
of that anarchist utopia without oppression.
I believed it too.
I said that one day, the thousand-year kingdom would come.
But at night I huddled under the quilt with my legs clamped,
crying while saying to someone a thousand miles away:
“I want to be your toy❤”
I gripped the phone tightly, like a kitten afraid of being thrown away.
Not from desire, but from longing.
Longing to be liked, longing to be held onto, even as my dignity lay shattered on the floor.
Reality is too dark.
No utopia — only a Discord DM window at midnight, messages answered on and off,
Sometimes,
the drug would knock me out.
The curtains blocked all light;
I couldn’t tell day from night.
The first thing I did was grab my phone.
Three in the morning.
The other person had long gone offline.
The screen still rested on our chat window.
I had said so many “baobei,” “I’m your kitten,” “I really miss you so much”…
while they only tossed back an emoji or two, then vanished into the early-morning timeline.
They didn’t even ask me:
Are you okay?
Did you just pass out all of a sudden?
I stared at the screen, dazed, for a while.
Then, as if slashed by a knife, I suddenly clutched the quilt tight,
curled into a ball, and began to cry.
Not wailing — the kind of sob pressed out from deep in the throat,
as if my whole body was asking —
Why… is it like this?
Why, when I only wanted to be liked a little, am I treated this way?
Am I really this not worth caring about?
I buried my head in the quilt.
The residual warmth of the drug still glowed like evidence of a crime,
yet I only felt cold. Cold enough to shiver.
I didn’t betray my faith;
reality simply never gave me the right to stand.
Like an apostle fallen to earth,
still trying to shield something with broken wings.
But I was too lonely.
So lonely that even if the other person hated my views, I still wanted to be glanced at by him.
I didn’t betray my faith —
I just wanted someone… to hold me.
Tell me,
can the divine truly forgive me?
“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
—— Romans 7:19
“I’m not clean, not perfect, and certainly no angel.”
“Can you still accept me?”
Suddenly I wanted very much to cry.
I don’t know why; I just wanted to cry.
I tossed the phone aside and pressed the pillow against my face.
“How could I… how could I say such things…”
“Why do I keep troubling other people…”
“Will he hate me…”
I really cried, like a child who had committed an unforgivable wrong.
I had clearly said I was an “angel.”
The Ame who believed in freedom, in resistance, in ideals.
But the me of now,
naked, soft, burning,
is the one who spreads her legs of her own accord, sinking into the muddy abyss.
I wasn’t pushed down.
I slid down willingly.
It’s me — the Ame who, while saying “please command me,” longed to be discarded.
A little morning light seeped through the gap in the curtains.
Dawn was coming; a new day was about to begin.
But I’m so tired, truly so tired.
I hugged the pillow, pressing against it like the last remaining tenderness.
Then, to the blackened phone screen, I said in the smallest voice:
“I’m not worth it…”
“They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”
—— Psalm 14:3
I just lay there in the darkness, crying, feverish, limp,
together with all the fallen children, quietly sinking into this world’s deepest, softest, most unforgivable corner.
Chapter Six | Daughter of the Wind
“He shall build an house for my name, and I will stablish the throne of his kingdom for ever.”
—— 2 Samuel 7:13
That morning, the sky had not fully brightened, but the wind was already awake.
The wind skimmed lightly over the reeds by the inn’s entrance, leading me toward the cliffs.
I shouldered my backpack and set out to see a place called “Oedolgae” — the Lonely Rock.
At first, I thought it was a symbol commemorating the Korean independence movement,
perhaps a stone stele for the martyrs,
perhaps a memorial tower of resistance on the cliffs.
But up close I learned it was nothing more than a huge rock, standing alone by the sea.
The name means:
“the rock that stands alone here.”
A little disappointed. I gazed at it for a long time, feeling something was off.
Until my eyes were drawn to a strange statue beside it.
It was a stone statue, cylindrical, carved with an old man’s face, wearing a hat on its head.
Crude, yet carrying an eerie warmth, like some kind of gaze.
I frowned and opened my phone to look it up.
A few words jumped onto the page, and my fingertips paused gently.
“Dol Hareubang (돌하르방), the guardian deity of Jeju Island’s indigenous culture, symbolizing fertility and procreation; some scholars consider it a symbol of male phallic worship.”
My heart suddenly sank.
Not shock, but that kind of — “of course” — weariness.
I didn’t know what to say.
Again and again in my mind rang the words I had said before: Jeju Island is the daughter of the wind.
But now, standing before this stone, I found that this “daughter” was surrounded by stone phalluses, one after another.
The “daughter of the wind” lives on an island constructed of phalluses;
the statues stand at crossroads, guard temple gates,
as if the whole island were watched over by these “grandfathers.”
They don’t speak, but they watch you — like the “everywhere-present men” of Korean society,
not necessarily any concrete person, but rather that:
patriarchal structure itself, which may be touched, worshipped, and certified as bringing good fortune.
People say that touching the grandfather’s “hat” brings good luck.
I stood there, watching helplessly as several tourists queued up, laughing as they reached out to touch the top of the stone.
I couldn’t laugh at all.
This is not culture made cute for show; this is an outright “ritual of sexualization.”
I looked again at Oedolgae, that giant rock standing isolated by the sea, just as stiffly erect.
Just like this country’s order.
I sighed. Not from tiredness, but… guilt.
A strange, unspeakable guilt.
My fingers slowly clenched.
The wind blew over from beyond the hill, whipping my hair across my eyes; I didn’t dodge.
I lowered my head, put my phone away, took no photo, and did not touch that hat.
That “lucky hat” was not prepared for me.
I raised my head once more to look at the stone statue; its expression was blurred beyond reading.
Perhaps it never had a true face at all.
As long as it is hard enough, stable enough, it is a god.
I sighed — not from exhaustion, but a faint loss that had no way to be spoken.
Not anger, not protest.
Only: the wind was cold, the stone was heavy, and the whole island seemed sunk in a thick silence.
I turned and left, without looking back.
The wind tugged at the hem of my clothes, as if urging me to stay, or urging me on.
I walked slowly, but every step was light.
Like the daughter of the wind, passing silently beside the stones,
disturbing no one, leaving no trace.
Chapter Seven | The Wind Blows Over the Names on the Stele
At the far reach of the East Sea and the Yellow Sea, the wind shook loose a small island…
As I stood at the entrance of the Jeju 4·3 Peace Memorial, this passage was in my mind.
It was written at the opening of my travelogue’s prologue, only a scene I had imagined.
But now, this island is no longer only the one in my imagination;
she has a name, has blood,
has gravestones.
The ride from Jeju City took nearly an hour; the scenery outside the window gradually grew open and deep green.
The city’s buildings slowly receded, replaced by stretches of fields and low hills.
The wind blew across the farmland, lifting small puffs of dust;
the sunlight slanted onto the road at the mountain’s foot, glinting.
Leaning against the window, watching the passing shadows of trees, I silently counted the time.
The bus was quiet; only the announcement murmured station names in Korean, like a distant sea speaking softly.
Suddenly I felt a little nervous.
Not afraid of seeing pain, but afraid —
afraid I wasn’t qualified, afraid I was merely someone who came too late.
Afraid I was too small, too weightless,
to bear the weight of those names,
to answer the silent summons beneath the stele.
But the wind kept blowing, as if someone were gently pushing me forward.
I pulled my backpack straps tighter, took a deep breath,
and said quietly to myself:
“No matter what, I’m going in.”
Getting off the bus, the memorial hall came into view first — a low gray building, like a stele embedded in the ground.
It carried silence,
as if time had sunk it down.
I approached it with careful breath.
Inside the exhibition hall there was no clamor.
Only photographs, recordings, testimonies.
One after another, the names of the “nameless”; one after another, the portraits of the “ordinary.”
They were not soldiers, not generals, not heroes,
only farmers, teachers, mothers, children,
who, one spring, had the muzzles of the state turned on them.
I walked very slowly, afraid of disturbing them.
When I finally reached the memorial, the stele was an entire wall engraved with names.
I froze.
They were not “Martyr So-and-so,” not “General So-and-so,”
but the full names of civilians.
Men, women, infants, the elderly,
one by one chiseled into the stone, steadfastly resisting time.
Facing the stele, I bowed deeply.
It was a bow carrying shame.
As if it were not I who had come to commemorate them,
but they who permitted me
to stand a while on this blood-soaked land.
Suddenly I remembered the first day of my trip,
the me who had walked alone past the convenience store, trembling at age limits and state institutions.
Back then I felt I had “almost ended up on the street,”
but these people were thrown into the earth by the entire state.
And never came back.
“The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.”
—— Psalm 118:22
I sat on the bench before the stele. The wind blew over, carrying the salt of the sea.
I lowered my head, my fingers brushing across those names.
Name after name — not epitaphs, but unfulfilled vows.
In that moment I understood:
they are not buried here;
they are waiting for us here —
waiting for us to no longer merely “remember,”
but to answer.
To answer their unfinished struggle, to answer their final cry before death:
“We are not traitors! Not rioters! We are people who wanted to live!”
Yes — even though more than seventy years have passed,
even though this world has grown more refined, more indifferent,
I believe:
as long as someone is still willing to take their names as a spark,
the thousand-year kingdom will surely come,
and the oppressors’ monuments will one day crumble to dust.
I closed my eyes. In my ears were the wind, and the whispers beneath the stele.
They were once discarded in the dark of night;
now they are buried in this land,
quietly waiting for us.
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
—— Dinos Christianopoulos
But I know
I cannot stay here forever, cannot keep lying against this stele for warmth.
I came to flee, to hide in the wind, to catch a breath.
I am not their descendant, nor their successor,
just a child who nearly slept in the corner of a convenience store,
a person carrying a backpack, searching for a foothold at the edge of the map.
Yet this island, this stele, this wind,
as if understanding everything, quietly caught me.
It didn’t ask who I was, didn’t make me prove anything,
only left a bed, a gust of wind, a stretch of names,
letting me be, briefly, a little less lonely.
I stood up and put my backpack on again.
The wind lifted the ends of my hair, like a farewell,
and like a gentle whisper:
“Keep walking forward.”
And so I walked —
not leaving, but taking them with me.
Taking thirty thousand unfinished names,
continuing to flee, continuing to write, continuing to search for that world not yet realized.
Like a seed lifted by the wind,
not to take root where it lands,
but to fly farther —
for those who died in the wind,
and for those still living in the wind.