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THE BROKEN SHIP
“What’s the captain doing?”
In the last minute of consciousness a drowning person, it is said, will have a clear thought that is a mix of acceptance and disbelief. This is how I die.… But this is ridiculous, I can’t leave like this.
So it must have been as the Sewol ferry sank. In the flailing panic, I am drowning.… But I was supposed to have been on yesterday’s ferry.
Most of the dead were teenagers. They had been trusting even as the foul water moved over their cabin floors. But I waited like the man said.… I have exams.… Daddy.
Over three hundred died that spring morning in 2014. The last minutes were staggered over two hours, from the moment the overloaded ship tilted to when it rolled over and sank with cruel grace.
Most people were in the cafeteria when that accident happened. Some were on deck, smoking.
Senior crew rushed to the bridge where Third Mate Park had been directing helmsman Cho. She was crying. They called the vessel traffic service and, several times, the ship’s owners. For reasons of culture and character nobody knew to take charge. The vessel-traffic serviceman in nearby Jindo Island instructed that passengers be told to put on life jackets and extra clothing. Communications Officer Kang went on the intercom and announced that everyone should remain in their cabins. It would be dangerous to move along the listing bulkheads. If people jumped into the sea the cold and currents would take them.
“Nonsense!” a student shouts when he hears this.2
“I want to get off. I mean it,” says another. A minute later, the same message. Don’t move.
“What? Hurry! Save us!”
“Are we going to die?”
“We’re going to make news with this,” says a boy, being brave.
“This is going to be a lot of fun if we get it onto our Facebook.”
The stay-put announcement comes again.
“Should I call Mom? Mom, this looks like the end of me.”
The children, all from the same school, put on life jackets. One gives his to a classmate.
“What about you?”
A boy shouts he doesn’t want to die. “I still have lots of animation movies I haven’t watched yet.”
“What’s the captain doing?”
Captain Lee, who has rushed to the bridge in his underpants, asks when the rescue will arrive. The man in Jindo says he has to decide whether they should abandon ship, that a rescue crew will be there in ten minutes. Two crew members drink beer to calm themselves.
The heroes that day are not on the bridge. Passenger Kim Hong-gyeong leads a group of passengers who hoist twenty trapped students to safety with curtains and fire hoses. Cho Dae-seob hands out life jackets to fellow students and helps the girls out first. Five-year-old Kwon Hyeok-gyu puts his life vest on his little sister Ji-yeon and goes to find their parents. A student, Park Ho-jin, sees her crying alone and carries her out of the ship.
English teacher Nam Yun-cheol and some crew stay aboard to help. Their bodies are recovered later by divers. Park Ji-young, twenty-one, says she’ll leave when the other passengers are all out; so do Kim Ki-woong and his fiancée, Jung Hyun-sun. Cashier Yang Dae-hong texts his wife, “The ship has tilted too much. There is money saved in the Suhyup bank account. Use that for our older kid’s college tuition. I have to go save the kids. I can’t talk anymore. Bye.”
Forty minutes after the accident, Captain Lee issues the order to abandon ship. He is one of the first off. He doesn’t tell his rescuers who he is.
Of all the images, one of the most searing is of the water lapping at the windows of the last cabins still above the surface. At one in the afternoon, there are two or three flashes of light, reflecting movement behind one of the windows: someone, probably a schoolboy, is attacking it with a chair. But it doesn’t break. Such is the impact of the constant coverage of the disaster that millions of Koreans go to bed trying to smash that window, then turn to face the oncoming water, unable to bear what follows.
For the Koreans, this tragedy is a metaphor: Throughout history they had ignored the sea around their peninsula and chose instead to crouch in valleys away from the world. Then the South Koreans defied history and took to the sea as traders and in their rush to make money, cut corners and trampled over one another. The broken ship is our greedy country. It has cost us our innocents.
“As an adult in this society I feel great remorse and responsibility for this accident,” the actor Choi Min-soo told an interviewer.
For Kang Min-kyu, the deputy head of the school most of the victims attended, the agony was overwhelming. “Surviving alone is too painful when two hundred lives are unaccounted for,” he wrote after being rescued. “I take full responsibility.” His body was later found hanging from a tree near the gymnasium on Jindo Island where the families were camped out waiting for news.
Such was the disgust at the familiar corruption and incompetence that oozed out when the surface was scratched—illegal overloading, embezzlement by the family who owned the vessel, failure of regulators, absence of safety training, lack of leadership, cowardice, the botched rescue—that public anger boiled over. Like a matador turning a bull, the presidential office tried to direct it at the crew and criminalize their incompetence. The court obliged and found Captain Lee guilty of gross negligence, equated it with murder, and gave him thirty-six years. Chief Engineer Park Gi-ho was found guilty of murder for leaving an injured mate and given thirty years. Thirteen other crew members were given sentences of between five and twenty years.
The tragedy froze the nation. As they did in old Korea when a king died, artists cancelled performances, officials postponed festivals, and people stopped shopping and eating out. Those in the public eye who wanted to carry on with their lives had to do so carefully. When the teenage son of a candidate in the Seoul mayoral race criticized victims’ families for throwing bottles of water at the prime minister—“This nation is uncivilized because the people are uncivilized,” he wrote—his father had to come out and apologize.
In early May, Children’s Day came and went, followed two days later by Parents’ Day, when children typically give their moms and dads red carnations. On the seawall at Jindo’s Paengmok Port, which had become a mass of yellow ribbons, two signs read: “Come home, Kang-min. Dad needs you to pin a carnation on his chest” and “I miss you, my son. Your Mom also needs you to pin a carnation on her chest.”
Parents came to the lapping shore and tossed flowers into the sea. At that time every teenager in Korea would have queued to give a red carnation to those bereaved parents.
After the tragedy, the Koreans turned on themselves with disdain. The story of their development is not that of a bucolic people who just became hairdressers and bankers. The life left behind was harsh. The old Confucian culture was oppressive and, as it changed, rapid development created its own rough edges. The Koreans are an impatient people and yearn to be as good as they imagine advanced peoples to be. But they are too hard on themselves when their country falls short in their own eyes.
For Korea is a work in progress and her story is not about falling short.
Copyright © 2017 by Michael Breen
