ABSTRACT
Monday morning, May 26, 1980: I am at the Hwasung exit from the expressway, twelve kilometers south of Kwangju—at this time a beleaguered city. This is where cars, including my taxi, have to stop. Riding a rented bicycle, I mingle with pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists commuting between Hwasung and Kwangju. There are young people, mothers with infants strapped to their backs, old women dressed in the traditional wide skirts and balancing huge bundles on their heads, and occasionally old men with parched brown skin, sporting black cylindrical straw hats—as if straight from a picture book of the old Korea.
