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Kim Hyun-kyung, who kept a journal of the events of the Gwangju Democratization Movement. Her journal is now referred to as the “Gwangju Anne Frank diary.”
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Kim Hyun-kyung kept a record in civilian militia’s situation room during the events of the Gwangju Democratization Movement
“I’m so ashamed I can’t face the sun.” Kim Hyun-kyung, a 59-year-old Seoul resident who serves as an Army lieutenant colonel in the reserves, offered this description of the grim mood within the South Jeolla Provincial Office the day before the martial law forces came in. Only 20 years old at the time, she was a third-year student of political science and international relations at Chonnam National University. The citizen militia had taken over the office after the airborne troops’ retreat, and she had been assigned to the situation room, where she was in charge of street broadcasting, reading statements, and preparing documents. Kim filled the pages of a college notebook with her experiences over those 10 intense days in May 1980. Around half of the 40 or so pages recount events from the situation room where the militia leadership operated in South Jeolla Provincial Office. “I couldn’t write anything down during the daytime, when I was busy finding out where there had been battles, how many bodies there were, and whether ambulances had been summoned. I would go to a friend or relative’s house shortly before curfew and try to write down the important events of the day before lying down to sleep.” She wrote her details in a code only she could decipher to ensure that nobody else would suffer if she was arrested. For particularly sensitive parts, she used a system that converted the 24 consonants in the Korean alphabet into a mixture of numbers and lower-case Roman alphabet letters. By removing letters periodically and switching the order, she devised a system nobody else would understand. “The people next to me said not to even ask for their names. Nobody could believe what was going on, with the poison needle incident inside of the provincial office [due to the activities of plainclothes martial law forces]. So the idea of keeping a record was unthinkable. [. . .]” Kim, who had kept a journal since her elementary school days, felt that someone should leave a record from the front lines of history. The record she shared after 39 years of keeping it in storage recalled the story of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who wrote a diary of her family’s experiences hiding out in Nazi-controlled Amsterdam. Constantly threatened with arrest and death In its tiny script, the “Gwangju Anne Frank diary” describes the author’s personal experiences with demonstrations and the activities of the citizen militia leadership. “I was threatened with arrest two or three times when I joined the demonstrators only to be chased off by the martial law forces. The bathroom at my family’s home on Chungjang Road was too cramped, so I survived by hiding in a wardrobe in the living room, and I got through another crisis when the female Buddhists trimming water parsley at Gwaneum Temple in front of Gwangju Theater gave me a pair of loose-fitting work pants to wear,” she recalled. She also recounted an anecdote from when she joined the situation room: a first-year student from her department kept entreating her to leave, insisting she would die if she stayed at the office, but she held her ground. In addition to memos describing statements from the demonstrations, Kim vividly described her anticipation at the news that the US had sent two aircraft carriers, her fears of the martial law forces storming in, the resolution of the citizen militia members, the heated conflicts between those in favor of cutting losses and those who supported fighting on, and the dedication of the women who carried around rice balls to provide food. Kim ventured into the office on the morning of May 23 – the day the citizen militia leadership was created – when she heard a call for university students to assemble. Over the next four days, she traveled back and forth between the situation room and planning room, performing duties such as street broadcasting, statement reading, and document preparation. As the martial law forces’ entry into the building loomed, the leadership made an announcement on the evening of May 26 calling on the younger and female students to “return home and share the truth about us.” Several passages of the journal express Kim’s feelings of disappointment and shame after tearfully leaving the office building. “I’m embarrassed, so embarrassed that I can’t face the sun,” she wrote. “I feel guilty, so guilty I can’t raise by head up as a walk. I am brought to tears by the landscape I did not forsake.” Kim managed to evade arrest when the office fell, and her journal survived with her. “It may be there wasn’t anything in the student council or group records from when I was going around with older students I was close with,” she remembered. Went on to pursue a career in the military In a city where hostility toward the martial law forces ran high, Kim made the rare decision to apply to become a female military officer. Influenced by an older brother who was in the Marines, she had long dreamed of becoming an officer in the military. The interviewer asked her if she had demonstrated in 1980. She hesitated, and then said, “All of the Gwangju citizens demonstrated at the time.” In 1983, she was commissioned with outstanding scores. When the service women branch was discontinued in 1990, she returned to intelligence, becoming the first service woman to head the frontline corps intelligence battalion and serving as an intelligence staff officer for the division. In 2012, she completed a more than three-decade long career in the military as a lieutenant colonel. Following her discharge, she received a doctorate from Kyonggi University in 2016 for a study on ideas for increasing South Korean women’s participation in national defense. “It was difficult to focus too much attention on Gwangju while I was in the Army,” she said. “It’s very painful to see the distortions of May 1980, which have become extreme these days. I’d like to offer my support in piecing together the truth by sharing the pure longings and actions of individual people at the time,” she added. By Ahn Kwan-ok, Gwangju correspondent Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]
