Interview by David Shaffer.Redevelopment Sounds Death Knell for Seobang Market

By Isaiah Winters

“This is right where my father died,” my friend MK said abruptly, pointing down to a nondescript patch of alley pavement in Punghyang-dong. His father’s heart had stopped there just a few minutes short of arriving at his cozy, two-story jutaek (주택), which is where we were headed that day. With keys jangling, MK pushed open the front door, laid us each out a pair of house slippers, and headed straight for the kitchen.

“Beer?” he asked, the now-open fridge thrumming to life as if brand new. We sat on his front stoop and clinked cups, reminiscing about his childhood there and forecasting the major life changes staring us both in the face. In MK’s case, his first child – a daughter – will have been born by the time you read this.

Short but sinewy with an enviably thick head of jet-black hair, MK is a scatterbrained ex-Marine with an obsession for recording everything, sometimes wielding as many as four devices at once. “It’s because I didn’t record my parents enough,” he reasoned. “That’s why I wanted to bring you here today. Seobang Market will also soon be gone.”

Beginning this December, redevelopment is indeed set to claim what was once Gwangju’s third-largest traditional market. Dating back to 1966, Seobang Market specialized in selling rice and acted as the gateway for grains coming into Gwangju from rural Damyang. As the city began to urbanize around the market in the 1970s, it transitioned from rice to retail, becoming the market we now know.¹

Only a modest handful of vendors remain in and around the market’s periphery today, with even fewer having any links to the market’s early days. The sellers stay not because business is profitable, but because they can’t afford to close. [IW1] For them, the market’s demise has been a decades-long doom loop they’ve anticipated and even planned their long-overdue retirements around.

One store owner we spoke to said she’d close up shop in December. Her store, which sells mainly kitchenware, is located at the healthiest juncture of the market, making her a mainstay of the local community. A spry 70-something with a thick head of wavy white hair, she talked our ear off about the market’s extensive history. Most intriguing were the hand-painted signs above her shop, which she reckoned were about 50 years old.

Another such local is MK’s uncle, the elderly proprietor of a dry-cleaner’s at the corner of a five-way intersection midway between the jutaek and the market. On our way from the former to the latter, we stopped by to say hello and were immediately sent back out to the nearest convenience store to get ourselves some more beers with said uncle’s generous 10,000-won bill in hand. We felt like kids on a candy run.

With cold beers cracked and evening mosquitoes abuzz, we talked. His uncle said he’d been in the same shop for some 30 years, adding, “Me, I’ll retire when redevelopment starts.” Here he abruptly swatted at the nearest mosquito, which happened to be on the side of MK’s head. Despite this, the two carried on their conversation as if the funniest thing I’d seen all week hadn’t just happened.

“Today, the only young people here are foreigners,” his uncle continued, referencing the mostly Vietnamese workers being housed in the area. Our stroll that day had taken place mostly during the workday, so we hadn’t seen any such foreigners around – only the elderly and stray cats. Earlier, while winding our way through the area’s many hilly, twisted, and sometimes suffocatingly tight back alleys, we’d encountered a 60-something lady who asked how to escape the amnesia-inducing maze of back alleys. We had the same question.

As we went from alley to alley, we managed to film and photograph quite a few empty homes. A local couple we met along the way estimated that 80 percent of homes in the area were vacant and now served merely as investment properties bought up by outsiders hoping to benefit from payouts and future housing priority once redevelopment began. The remaining 20 percent were said to be occupied by penniless retirees with nowhere else to go – plus more cats.

MK and his sister are in a sort of hybrid category of non-resident inheritors. MK still visits his childhood jutaek every few weeks to air it out and reflect. It’s still brimming with everything that once made it a home, from stacks of bedding and family photo albums to a gamut of functioning appliances. The thought of sorting through everything seemed daunting. I can now empathize more with people who often throw up their hands and just let everything get bulldozed.

With a newborn on the way, I can’t imagine MK will find the time to salvage much. Rather than hold on to the physical past, he may be taking a more modern approach by simply digitizing it. Capturing glimpses of the analog world and uploading them to the internet grants his parents and childhood home a form of digital immortality that’s better than nothing. Similarly, this article helps reserve a little online resting place for Punghyang-dong and Seobang Market. It’s the least we camera fumblers can do.

Source

^[1] Lim, S. (n.d.). 서방시장 [Seobang Market]. Digital Gwangju Cultural Encyclopedia.  https://www.grandculture.net/gwangju/index/GC60002527

Photographs by Isaiah Winters.

The Author Born and raised in Chino, California, Isaiah Winters is a pixel-stained wretch who loves writing about Gwangju and Honam, warts and all. He’s grateful to have written for the Gwangju News for over six years. More of his unique finds can be seen on Instagram @d.p.r.kwangju and YouTube at Lost in Honam.

Photograph by Isaiah Winters