ANSAN, South Korea — The classrooms where the dead students once studied sit empty, as they have since Danwon High School lost nearly three-quarters of its 11th graders to a ferry disaster a year ago. School cafeteria menus for April 2014 hang on the walls. Desks are piled high with offerings from grieving parents and friends: flowers, favorite snacks and notes.
“Sae-hyeon, this is Dad. I will never forget you,” read one message on a desk bearing the photo of a smiling teenage girl. “I am so sorry that I was not there to save you.”
The name Ansan means “peaceful mountain,” but as this gritty industrial city prepares to mark the anniversary on Thursday of the ferry sinking, it is clear that Ansan is far from finding solace. Instead, it remains frozen in time.
The city of 760,000 still seems bewildered, unsure of whether, or how, to move on after the deaths of 250 students and 11 teachers. Individual suffering still radiates into the community, where a collective, haunting sadness has taken hold. Restaurants, once bustling, have lost about a third of their business; many people feel they should not have fun when so many of their neighbors are in mourning.
TIMELINE
Ferry Disaster in South Korea: A Year Later
The sinking of the ferry Sewol was among South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters and led to criminal convictions, the resignation of the country’s prime minister and the death of the billionaire who owned the ferry.
Among the parents, there is paralyzing grief, but also a rage that makes healing out of the question for now. Yearlong investigations suggest that the tragedy was avoidable, the result of corporate greed and lax government oversight. The families, and their community, live with the memory of some of the children’s last moments, recovered in shaky hand-held cellphone videos that document their panic as they realize the crew’s instructions to remain below deck might have doomed them.
Some say that a type of shared paranoia has set in. Students at the middle school next door to Danwon High School say school leaders have become so anxious about keeping them safe that they have halted all school trips, like the one that the high school students were on when the ferry Sewol sank, and have even banned children from running in the hallways.
“There is talk of recovery, but we are still far from that,” said Ansan’s mayor, Je Jong-geel, who wore a black tie of mourning as his city began a week of events to mark the sinking.
Eom Ji-young lost her 16-year-old daughter in the tragedy.
Like many of the devastated parents, Ms. Eom says she still drinks herself to sleep several nights a week. She took a year off from work to protest against the government and spend time with her remaining child, an 11-year-old son, because of her regrets that her job had kept her from spending more time with her daughter, Park Yae-ji. A year after the sinking, her life is nowhere near normal.
Her son still misses the sister who took care of him while his mother worked; he goes to school, but refuses to leave his bedroom much once he returns. Her husband is one of the fathers who regularly visit the town’s memorial site — with its wall of photos of the children and other victims — to do what they feel they cannot in front of their wives and remaining children. They drink stiff Korean alcohol, then sob on one another’s shoulders.
Ms. Eom has returned to work as a manager of a home-repair store, but she can sometimes barely finish her commute, pulling her car over to the side of the road when sobs overcome her.
What keeps her going are the protests to hold the government accountable for failing to rescue the children — the coast guard did not make a serious effort to reach the trapped students — but also to demand a deeper investigation of the collusive ties between industry and government at the heart of the disaster. Without that, they say, there will be no justice for the children whom they believe were betrayed by the adults who were supposed to protect them.
“ ‘Acceptance’ and ‘healing’ are not in our vocabulary,” said Ms. Eom, 38, a formerly shy woman who has been transformed by the loss of her daughter into a vocal activist. “I have friends who wake up in a panic at night and run all the way to the school to look for their children.”
Video Captures Students on Sinking Ferry
By Footage from Newstapa, Korea Center for Investigative Journalism on April 30, 2014. Photo by South Korean Coast Guard, via Yonhap and Associated Press.
The deaths have become a terrible burden for this city of mainly blue-collar workers an hour southwest of Seoul that was built in the 1980s out of farmland, and where factories today stamp out auto parts and electronics.
Danwon High School has recovered enough that students’ laughter and shouting once again fill the hallways. But the dead children’s absence remains a constant, not only in the silent classrooms dedicated to their memory, but throughout the city.
Outside the school, rows of identical high-rise apartment blocks hang bright yellow banners bearing solemn, often poetic odes to the perished students: “Buds that never blossomed, we will not forget you,” proclaims one.
A few blocks away, above an Internet cafe that the students once frequented, another memorial has sprung up, sponsored by local governments. Called “The Children’s Room,” it is an exhibit of more than 50 photos of the empty bedrooms of the students who died. The intimate look at loss shows beds covered with teddy bears, and desks stacked with books left undisturbed.
The exhibit’s director, Kim Jong-cheon, 42, a filmmaker who lives in Ansan, said the photos showed how each death had ripped a hole not only in a family, but also in the community. He said he had hoped the photos would get the neighborhood, called Gojan 1, talking about the losses, and thus start the healing process.
“This is a wounded community, where everybody knew these children,” he said.
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