Dozens of shoes lined the street. They are not the type that an office worker would wear, let alone a politician or a priest. They’re athletic, the kind that people in their 20s or 30s use every day. Most of them are very dirty as if they have been trampled on. They were trampled on. For a few minutes, for hours. There are many small sizes for women.
Aside from the shoes — nothing is more disturbing than a shoe without an owner — Seoul police also collected phones, coats, glasses, wigs, rabbit ears and monster masks. They are part of 1,500 kilos of items strewn across the network of alleys where 156 people died during Halloween celebrations in Itaewon District. Before they were picked up, an elderly man, the owner of a jewelry store right in the alley where most of the people died, spread a mat early Monday morning, two days after what happened. On it he arranged bowls with rice, spoons, chopsticks, fruit plate and two candles. He lit it and then knelt on the sidewalk and bowed low until his forehead touched the ground. He apologized to the dead. He managed to perform his ritual for a few minutes before a police officer approached him. He had to go. Other police officers arrived. He explained why he had to do this. Why was it a duty? He demanded that they let him do it. There was no point, he had to get up. Previously, she had cried convulsively on an officer’s shoulder as if her granddaughter had died that night.
Last Friday I walked very close to this alley. I used to live just 5 minutes from there, now about 15, but I walk around the area a lot. Itaewon is my neighborhood, I moved nine years ago, same as Seoul. I spent more time there than in the neighborhood where I grew up in Bogotá. Itaewon appears in three of the seven books I’ve written. Topophilia, Psychogeography. With these words some explain the intense relationship we have with certain places. It’s true that I hardly walk these streets at night anymore. The reason: too many people. But that Friday, when I came back, I was at a party that overlooked the alley and exit number one of the subway, crowded with people when the emergency services arrived on the day of the tragedy. Then I went to Mama Kim. Its official name is Grand Old Prey and it is one of the few bars that have survived from old Itaewon. It was opened in 1973 by a Korean woman and her gringo husband. Only country music can be heard. Previously, many American soldiers were stationed at the Yongsan military base a few blocks away. Now they hardly see each other. After almost 70 years in the middle of Seoul, they finally left the city.
Itaewon begins with the walls surrounding the base and ends with one of the largest mosques in North Asia. In between there are countless bars, old tailor shops, restaurants with dishes that are only available there. Uzbek, Nigerian food. Foreigners and Koreans have crossed paths on these roads forever. Not many dared to go there before the 1988 Olympics. For several generations, the name Itaewon was synonymous with danger. Soldiers, fights, prostitutes, drugs, the occasional death. But for others it meant freedom. It’s still one of the few neighborhoods in the city, if not in the country, where being gay isn’t taboo. Through Itaewon came rock and then rap. In the early 1980s, Itaewon was the only neighborhood where people dared to dress differently, women with trousers and short hair, men with accessories. Only there can a transgender bar coexist alongside a halal butcher shop. It’s more than a geographic space, it’s a mental space. It is a necessary laboratory for a country with few immigrants and too many social constraints. That’s why people from all over the world, not just Seoul, come to Itaewon.
When I left Mama Kim late, there were still many people on the street. Saturday will be worse, I thought. That’s why I stayed at home. Around 11 p.m., the emergency notifications that the government sends out in the event of a disaster began to appear on mobile phones. One after the other. Shortly thereafter, the sirens could be heard. One after the other. The videos started circulating. My wife and I went to sleep with 50 dead in our heads. The next day we woke up with Triple. Two thirds of them women. It was more difficult for her to get out of the mountain of people that was crushing her.
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The following Monday I walked through Itaewon to get to the alley. In a small square, the official altar was almost ready. As with wakes, one avoided making noise and raised one’s voice. The silence magnified everything. The main street dividing the neighborhood in two was still closed and only police buses were waiting. The same cop who was late who turned down the previous 11 calls for help. The first was at 6:34 p.m. Saturday, four hours before several people stumbled, fell to the ground and others fell on top of them in a domino effect that left them trapped. So it wasn’t a rush. Nobody could move. According to the Seoul Subway, 130,000 people used Itaewon station that night.
Vigil this Saturday in Seoul to commemorate the victims of Halloween night. KIM HONG-JI (Portal)
As I got closer, I began to hear the clatter of a wooden instrument accompanying Buddhist chants. At exit one of the station, 10 paces from the alley, an improvised altar had been set up. Flowers, open liquor bottles like in Korean funeral rituals, handwritten notes. Three monks tried to use their voices to comfort those of us who were gathered there under a cloudless autumn sky.
My wife still doesn’t dare and I don’t know if she can. He has lived in Itaewon since 2006, when the neighborhood still wore its rugged glory. He fears that glory will return like a thick shadow and will be the excuse to completely wipe out what remains of ancient Itaewon. So that the big chains occupy the streets and with them comes uniformity. The streets where he accompanied his friends to buy hip-hop in the early 2000s were not yet closed at night. He soon lost his fear and the reward was priceless. The first time he tasted Indian food was precisely in a restaurant in this deadly alley. Many years ago there was also B1, a small electronic music club that he frequented, where he realized that nightlife had a value far beyond drinks and fun. Like them, like so many Koreans, the young people who died that night went to Itaewon to free themselves for a few hours from the social pressure that grips and homogenizes them, to verify that it is a different species to live and to be with others.
I came back on Wednesday. The official altar was already open. Guarded by officers, with free coffee, with free flowers. The sun pierced through the yellow leaves of the ginkgo trees and made the day unbearably beautiful. I continued straight ahead and went to the other altar, the one for the people. The monks weren’t there but it had grown and crowded and was beginning to occupy the main street. Liquor bottles were now accompanied by cookies, yogurts and rice cakes. Drinks and food for the deceased. And more and more flowers. And more and more notes. Also photos of foreigners. Among the 26 who died that night, five were born in Iran.
At the street altar, I thought of writing part of a Robert Liddell Lowe poem on a post-it and leaving it with hundreds of others. I couldn’t, my hands were shaking. I copy it here: “This radiant sorrow is all I have of you / Who left before a wave left.”
Andres Felipe Solano is a Colombian writer and journalist. Author of Save me or Joe Luis, among others.
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