ABSTRACT
One of my most vivid memories of May 1980 concerns a phone call from my New York Times colleague Shim Jae Hoon. I received the call—from somewhere outside Kwangju—early in the evening of May 21 to my room in the Chosun Hotel in Seoul. Jae had left Seoul at 5 A.M. that day, heading for Kwangju, riding in a hired car with our friend Phillippe Pons of Le Monde. The two of them had just come out of Kwangju, reached a nearby town, and then found a hotel (in fact it was a brothel, they discovered) with a phone that worked. This was Jae's first call to me after leaving the city. As he read out his notes, his voice shot up into a falsetto. I scribbled frantically.
