Editor's Note

In late 1998, we watched with mixed emotions the television coverage from Phnom Penh of Khmer Rouge leaders Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea being greeted with handshakes and smiles by Cambodia’s prime minister, Hun Sen. The two elderly revolutionaries arrived in the city by military helicopter following their surrender to the government, officially ending more than thirty years of civil war. If the two looked surprisingly genial and meek for criminals against humanity, it was even more disconcerting to hear them speak. Reporters asked the two whether they felt any remorse for devastating their country and killing more than two million civilians—mostly by execution and starvation in slave-labor camps. “Yes, sorry,” Khieu Samphan said as he departed in order to check into a hotel in Phnom Penh. “And we ask our compatriots to forget the past so our nation can concentrate on the future. Let bygones be bygones.” Refusing to accept responsibility for the genocide, Nuon Chea added, “Let’s consider that an old issue.” “Yes,” repeated Khieu Samphan, “we must forget the past.”

The last two decades have seen the collapse of a number of authoritarian regimes around the world. In the aftermath, citizens of newly democratized countries must often face a test similar to that occurring in Cambodia: how to understand and articulate a national past that may have included various forms of state-sponsored terror and oppression. But a decision to “let bygones be bygones” is particularly difficult when the truth has been suppressed or manipulated for a long period and the “official” versions of people’s lives endure unamended. It is natural, of course, to want to forget painful memories, but traumas, as guest editor Susie Jie Young Kim says, “leave a trace: a mnemonic site.” Until the truth is told, national and individual traumas persist in the very heart of the present and ineluctably affect future generations.

The fiftieth and twentieth anniversaries of two of the most traumatic events in the recent history of Korea are marked by the publication of The Wounded Season: the civil war, which began on June 25, 1950, and resulted in the partitioning of the country into North and South; and the Kwangju Uprising, which began on May 18, 1980, and radicalized a large portion of the population into exposing the ruthlessness and greed of the junta that had come to power the year before. The world knows the military history of the Korean War, but the conflict’s impact on the psyches of individuals, families, and communities is fundamental to another set of stories altogether—another history that endures in the memories of people who lived through the conflict. Even more dramatic is the case of the Kwangju Uprising, the truth about which was kept from the Korean people for over a decade by the men responsible for its bloody course. The uprising began in the capital city of South Cholla Province the day after General Chun Doo Hwan imposed martial law on the nation, arrested opposition leaders, and banned all political activities. The citizens of Kwangju held anti-government demonstrations that raged for ten days, until Chun sent soldiers, paratroopers, tanks, and helicopter gunships into the city. Officials claimed that 200 civilians died, but local people have always insisted the number is closer to 2,000.

The Korean stories collected in The Wounded Season exemplify the way fiction writers are able to give a voice to those who have been silenced or censored. Writers can articulate “counter-memories,” as Kim calls them in her overview essay, and in doing so their works make indelible those truths that authoritarian regimes attempt to erase. Powerfully told stories enable people to resolve the painful contradictions that result from suppressed memories, and by telling the truth, they create a way for healing to begin.

Written by some of that country’s most accomplished authors, the Korean stories in The Wounded Season depict people whose lives are grievously altered by events and then further harmed by inauthentic but officially accepted versions of what has happened to them. The characters include a doctor who may have committed a murder during the Korean War; an unemployed...