Neighbor Angel

Photo by James Lucian

When we first moved into the Golden River Mountain Apartments, we felt we’d been misled. They were indeed apartments, but that was as far as they lived up to their name. Their concrete facades—the ubiquitous beige of everything constructed in 1980s Seoul, discolored by decades of air pollution—could not have been called golden, even under the flattering glow of the late- afternoon sun. Nor did even the highest units afford a view of a mountain or river or anything but vast expanses of drab apartment blocks almost identical to our own, dotted by the occasional vacant lot slated for redevelopment. Technically speaking, we were just a kilometer from the Han River, but to reach it you’d need to navigate a maze of dimly lit underpasses filled with pigeon shit and puddles of mysterious origin. Not that we resented our new home for its deficiencies. We had no illusions about our situation and understood that if the place had been any nicer, we wouldn’t have been able to afford it.

The reason we were on such a tight budget was that Eunji had decided to quit her job at the university and devote herself full time to painting. Privately, I was less than enthusiastic about her decision. It was wonderful for her to be following her heart, and she was obviously talented, but I had no confidence that she had what it would take to ensure success in the fickle and irrational world of art. Even if things worked out for her eventually, our situation in the meantime would be precarious. My job at the logistics company paid barely enough to furnish our current lifestyle, and then there was the matter of the child we were trying to conceive.

Despite my reservations about Eunji’s decision, I was determined to be supportive and make things work. And luckily, with some loans from our families, we were able to scrounge up enough to put down a deposit on a modest two-bedroom unit in the Golden River Mountain Apartments. It was not such a bad place. Despite its grim utilitarian appearance and overall state of disrepair, it was conveniently located within walking distance of Jamsil Station, the confluence of two subway lines and the heart of Seoul’s affluent Songpa ward. And so we optimistically rushed headlong into our new life.

We soon learned that the Golden River Mountain Apartments were more aptly named than we had originally suspected. Our neighborhood had once been a floodplain. Each summer, engorged by the monsoon rains, the Han River would sweep in and reclaim the region. So it had been until the mid-1970s, when dictator-president Park Chung-hee had foreseen in this damp and forgotten riverbank a cure to the capital’s real estate shortage. He had launched an ambitious land readjustment program that involved filling in the floodplain with earth appropriated from a nearby mountain. In the most literal sense, the Golden River Mountain Apartments were situated atop the remains of both a river and a mountain.

The reclamation of Jamsil, like most of Park’s initiatives, was a swift but superficial success. By the time we moved in, the area had become one of the most desirable in Seoul, and many of the original buildings had been replaced with newer luxury towers with facades of glass rather than concrete and crowned with neon-rimmed helicopter pads. Yet some had begun to worry that the district was literally sinking under the burden of its frenetic development, too flimsy to accommodate the weight of the half million residents who now occupied it. The foundations were weak, and some of the buildings were beginning to list like the Tower of Pisa. Local news channels showed footage of residents rolling marbles down their disconcertingly sloped floors. A mountain had been leveled and a river filled in, but what sort of equilibrium had been produced? Eunji and I tried the marble test, but it didn’t roll. We were relieved and maybe a little disappointed...