Notes from a Native Tourist

Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from Entrance of the Gamcheon Culture Village, 2018, by Christopher95 (Wikimedia Commons), Korean Grandmother and Baby, 1945, by Don O’Brien (Wikimedia Commons), and screenshot of television screen from episode 1 of Answer Me 1988, 2015.

I was taking an undergraduate Korean language class when I first read Son Chang-sup’s 1953 short story “Rainy Days” (비오는 날). Narrated during the Korean War by Won-gu, a college student haunted by two friends who had fled south only to face more hardships, the story begins with two curious metaphors. “On a rainy day like this,” the first sentences read, “Won-gu’s heart became unbearably heavy[;] he could see the dreary life led by Dong-wook and his sister float in his mind as if on a screen. . . .  Their dark room in the dilapidating wooden shanty loomed gloomily behind the curtain of rain.” 

In the class, there were many diasporic Koreans and also a few non-Korean students. All of us had little experience reading and writing formally in Hangeul. Usually, I was bored by the articles assigned by our conservative male teacher, who repeatedly asked the female students when we would marry. But “Rainy Days” engrossed me from the start. I was transfixed by the metaphor of a film screen followed directly by the theatrical metaphor of a curtain of rain. The writer seemed to have sequenced these metaphors one after the other deliberately, as though to say something about memory and history as productions of some kind. Of what, I didn’t know, but I liked that Son left readers awash in Won-gu’s inability to forget the past. 

At that point in college, I had begun casually asking my halmeoni to recount her memories of the War. I was fascinated by how foreign the Korea she knew felt from the one I’d grown up visiting. While I did not have the words for it at the time, I was starting to become acquainted with two contradictory sensations. On the one hand, I felt a vast distance from a history I could barely imagine, and on the other, I felt that, thanks to my grandmother’s loud and animated narrations, I could see, touch, hear, smell, and taste that which she had with my own body. The opening metaphors in “Rainy Days,” likening memories to images projected on a screen—far away, across the distance of spectatorship, yet simultaneously so close as to feel palpable, just on the other side of water—captured these contradictory sensations for me.  

The summer after I graduated college, I went to the largest film set in South Korea with my grandparents. I was staying at their farm in Gunbuk, a rural town near my grandmother’s hometown in the county of Haman, South Gyeongsang Province. When I learned that Suncheon Open Film Set was only an hour away from their farm, I begged my grandparents to take me before the monsoon shut us indoors. “We could make a day of it,” I said. Suncheon, the largest city of South Jeolla Province, was also home to Suncheonman Bay Ecological Park, a wetland reserve famous for its vast reedbed. “It’s about eight thousand years old, and one of the top five wetlands in the world!” I read aloud from the official website of the Korea Tourism Organization. Shaking their heads at my enthusiasm, my grandparents agreed to go. Halmu put on her raffia hat, gifted to her by my aunt from Australia, and Halbu his baseball cap, embroidered with the letter of my American high school. I sat excitedly in the backseat like a kid, occasionally resurrecting my adult voice to tell Halmu to stop speeding. 

There was so much of Korea I wanted to explore: I was, you see, a native tourist. Though my sister and I were born in Seoul, we had grown up as international students in the US, returning once each year. In our limited time together, our family never did much sightseeing. I’d started wandering the country on my own as I got older, looking up English guides for foreign tourists and young parents’ blogs on Naver. Even before arriving at my grandparents’ that June, I had visited the city of Gyeongju with my mother, watching a pansori performance at Bomun Lake, learning the names of the first idol groups formed in 1939—the Jeogori Sisters and Arirang Boys—at the K-Pop Museum. Going to such cultural sites was, like reading literature, a way for me to feel closer to the land I’d been displaced from, to feel less like a visitor and more like a descendant of a long, long history.

Suncheon Open Film Set spans an acre and a half of 200 buildings replicating three historic settings: a village in Suncheon in the 1950s; a hillside shantytown in Seoul in the 1960s; and the urban outskirts of the capital in the 1970s. When we pulled into the parking lot, my harabeoji said, “You girls go without me. I’ll nap in the car with the AC on. I don’t need to walk through what I’ve already seen.” Halmu laughed and chimed in with one of her signature expressions, “안봐도 비디오다” (Even if I don’t look, it’s like a video I’ve already seen). Born in 1936 and 1940, respectively, my grandparents had grown up in rural villages like Suncheon in the ’50s. As the country industrialized after the armistice, they had lived in remote areas near the Korean Demilitarized Zone as my grandfather trained Korean Army infantry in numerous military bases, and after putting their children through college in Seoul, they had retired back in the countryside. The set would take about two hours to walk through in its entirety, and Halmu and I agreed to start without him. 

Beginning with our walk from the parking lot to the entrance, the drama set felt like a K-drama theme park. Hung on the stone wall leading to the ticket booth were giant banners of the 30 plus television series and films that had been shot on the set since its construction in 2006, including the Reply series (2012–2016); Bread, Love, and Dreams (2010); A Werewolf Boy (2012); Oasis (2023); Youth of May (2021); Different Dreams (2019); Happy Home (2016); Inspiring Generation (2014); Light and Shadow (2011–12); Giant (2010); and Love and Ambition (2006). The set entrance itself was an enormous replica of a TV from the 1960s: two long antennae sticking out from the top, dial knobs on the side. In place of a screen was a gap large enough to fit a ticket booth in the center for visitors to enter and exit on either side. To enter the drama set was to literally step into an outsized TV from the past.

Across the threshold, middle-aged women in tour groups, couples on dates, and students in uniforms walked around, snapping photos in front of the varied facades, taking advantage of the June sun. The section directly across from the entrance recreated a shopping district of the 1970s. Handsome giwa roofs framed picturesque brick and pastel storefronts, including a newspaper distributor, barbershop, dressmaker, rice cake store, butcher’s, shoemaker’s, Western-style bakery, tailor, photo studio, and a claw machine room. Seeing the other visitors take selfies in front of these facades, I followed suit, picking out my favorites as backdrops: Milky Way Manhwa, the pink comic book shop with sliding doors; the bakery with lace curtains, its sign spelling “cake” with a “ㄱ” instead of a “ㅋ,” the old-fashioned way. There was a storybook charm to these storefronts, with their quaint Hangeul signs bearing kitschy names and illustrations.

Over a hundred drama sets have been built in South Korea since the first iteration of the Korean Wave in the early 2000s. Drama sets provide vivid outdoor backdrops in film and television production because they reconstruct built environments at life-size scale. These can range from palace grounds from premodern dynasties to bygone villages erased by postwar urbanization. According to local media and blog reviews, Suncheon Open Film Set is a popular place for ordinary Koreans—parents with young children, middle-aged and retired folks, couples, and students—to visit as they would a major park. In the fall of 2016, the major television network Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation aired a 10-minute program on the drama set as part of its show on local specialties across the country, Jeonguk Shidae (The Era of Everywhere). “Travel back in time at Suncheon Open Film Set!” closed the announcer after a walk-through of the set. “For the elderly tired of aging, it offers memories; for the fresh-faced youth, a novel experience. Here is a place full of heartwarming stories and romance.”

In Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place (2018), geographer Youjeong Oh identifies three categories of set visitors, from both within South Korea and overseas: group tourists, drama-inspired tourists, and celebrity fans. “Group tourists” are led by travel agency guides who dispense detailed knowledge about the sets (such as the drama scenes that were shot at specific locations on those sets). “Drama-inspired tourists” are avid fans who have deep familiarity with particular dramas and who may have visited the shooting locations so many times that they may not even need a tour guide to navigate and interact with the set. Oh’s third category, “celebrity fans,” may not be interested in any one particular drama set so much as any place where they can “inhal[e] the same air” as their beloved stars. 

Having grown up on American TV in an effort to “catch up” to my US-born peers, I was neither a domestic nor foreign drama tourist. I had learned about Suncheon Open Film Set serendipitously. While walking through a crowded subway station in Seoul, I noticed an exhibition of travel destinations throughout the country. It was a small collection of landscape photographs on easels, mostly saturated images of sunsets at national parks. Among these, a photo of a couple cosplaying in old-fashioned uniforms caught my eye. In front of a hill crammed with tumbledown houses, a woman, dressed in a girls’ school uniform from the 1980s, was pretending to ride a rusty bicycle. Holding the bicycle upright from the rear was a man in an outdated military uniform, which, perhaps because it looked so similar to those worn by conscripts today, lacked the former’s vintage charm. 

Still, the light in the photo made everything pastel, as if through a Retro filter on Instagram. I was drawn to that quality of light, softer and milkier than the high contrast in the photos of the national parks. I was intrigued, too, by that hill of drab roofs. What were these shacks, built like real dwellings but devoid of residents? Why was this couple posing in front of it, dressed in period clothing? 

That fall, I was set to start graduate school in creative nonfiction. Just then, I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I knew only that I was less interested in “pure” nonfiction than in creative nonfiction, with its implicit premise that all truths are constructed, manipulated, or mediated. The photo alluded to an insight I was on my way toward realizing: that Korean history, like all histories with a capital H, is an ever-shifting simulacrum, its silences saying just as much about the realities it has sought to configure as its spectacular evocations.

Our first stop indoors was a high school classroom where visitors could pay a few thousand won to rent high school uniforms to wear while on set. “세일라복이다!” (The sailor suit!) Halmu exclaimed in recognition. Next to a green chalkboard and rows of small wooden desks were racks filled with three decades of style: the all-black, military style of the colonial era; the navy “sailor” uniform of the 1970s, with its striped flap collar, long sash, and pleated skirt; and the white-and-gingham pattern of the early 2000s, with its oversized bowtie. I rented the sailor uniform, throwing in socks so I could trade my sandals for the worn black loafers. As if by wearing the uniform that Halmu recognized, I would be more equipped to travel back in time here. 

But in my brief moments alone in the changing stall, I was confronted by my own past. I remembered the one and only time I wore a Korean school uniform. I was on break from boarding school in the US, bored and lonely while visiting my parents in Busan. Theirs was one of the oldest apartments in the city, built on the site of a former Japanese colonial prison. The buildings were painted a pastel pink, matching the sakura trees lining the main road. The prettiest pictures from my childhood are from when those flowers were in bloom. My sister and I stand in front of the sakuras, the petals arcing over our small bodies as we slurped juice in matching pink sandals in a warmer spring or hugged each other in matching fur boots in a colder start to the year.

When I decided to research Busan Prison for a Korean history class in graduate school, I would learn that inmates were physically punished and forced to labor for the Japanese military even after independence activists secured the ban of flogging in 1920. That, at the outbreak of the War in 1950, thousands of inmates were massacred en masse, a truth that did not come to light until investigation by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in 2009. Though the metal bars that framed most windows were supposed to be for the security of the current residents, I had often tried to imagine that history as I looked down from my parents’ third-floor kitchen, the cry of what always sounded like thousands of cicadas erupting from the ground.

One afternoon, I walked to the uniform store in the neighborhood, the one where my sister and I had attended a year of middle school before moving back to the US. Whenever my sister reunited with her old friends, I’d see them in their mandatory haircuts and junior high school uniforms: a button-down blouse with a checkered bow and matching skirt in summer, a cropped navy blazer with a thin black ribbon at the collar and a pleated gray skirt in winter. I knew how privileged we were to be able to go to school in Miguk, which literally means “beautiful country.” At the same time, I longed to look like my peers here, because they had been the first peers I’d ever had.

I asked the shopkeeper for the Daeshin Girls’ School uniform. Staring at my reflection in the fitting room mirror, I felt my alienation disappear for a brief second. I glimpsed a version of myself who fit in, who looked Korean-Korean and not the in-between of Korean and American, because I was not an immigrant, but an international student. I took a selfie to send to my American friends. Years later, when I moved back to Seoul as an adult, I would learn that many Korean adults dress up in their former school uniforms as a way to celebrate April Fools’ Day. 

Based on her ethnography of drama sets throughout the country, Oh argues that what drama sets offer drama tourists is the opportunity to transition from distant spectatorship to physical immersion in the world of the drama. Dressing up in costumes worn on the show and re-enacting scenes with key props, drama tourists can, in the carefully controlled environment of a set, imagine that “the drama is still going on.” 

When the spectacle—the virtual fantasy projected on the screen—fails to materialize in the reality of the set, drama tourists are let down. One tourist who visited a set that replicated the kingdom of Goryeo (37 BC–668 AD) complained to Oh, “The set does not look as spectacular as in the drama. I was a bit disillusioned by the much smaller size and the crude back view. We found that the elaborate facade is merely a wooden wall with nothing at all behind it.” Unmediated by the screen and its ability to enlarge objects, Oh explains, the set on its own can be too close to reality to be of value to the drama tourist.

But I wanted real life and its “crude back view,” not spectacular fantasy. The next section of the Open Film Set was a reconstruction of the 1960s daldongne (literally: moon village), separated from the two other sections by a sloped path. To enter, I walked up stone steps that became steeper and narrower the farther uphill I got. The boxy shanties, some wood, some concrete, were roofed over with rusty sheets of corrugated steel. I ducked to enter the few dwellings with tiny courtyards lined with earthenware jars and hiked up my uniform skirt to climb into the single room of one low-ceilinged home. I tried to imagine families living here, in this space not even a fraction of any dorm room I’d encountered. The lone window was an opaque square, with wire netting crudely stretched over it. I remembered a phrase from a short story I had translated, Kim Ae-ran’s “Thirty,” that calls the window a literal “breathing hole.”

I was struck by how little information there was on daldongne, beginning with what they are: shantytowns built on the steep slopes of the mountains that fill the country, believed to have gotten their name from their nearness to moonlight. There were no signs informing visitors, even briefly, about the long history of daldongne: how they originated from the colonial era, when rural Koreans moved to the city looking for work and formed shantytowns by hills and streams, without authorization from the Japanese government. How this particular daldongne in Seoul’s Bongchun-dong, on the skirts of Gwanaksan Mountain, was settled by the urban poor in the 1960s and ’70s, when the city government forcibly removed residents of illegal shacks in the city center to carry out its development projects. How in the 1980s and ’90s, it was demolished in the name of redevelopment, as was the fate of most daldongne throughout the country. There were no signs explaining that it was a 1980 hit drama called Daldongne that first spread the peculiar name of these hillside slums, a phenomenon subsequently cemented by the drama The Moon of Seoul (1994). 

I was sensitive to this dearth of information because of my experiences as a student of Korean history, where I’d often felt like I was learning a litany of loss: loss of sovereignty to the Japanese empire for 35 years; loss of a united peninsula to USSR and US-orchestrated division; loss, in the south after it came under occupation by the United States Army Military Government in Korea barely a month after independence, of a Korean People’s Republic formed by a grassroots movement for democracy; loss of so much life, human and nonhuman, a loss that reverberates to this day across generations and geopolitical boundaries. In a present when the War still has yet to end, I confronted the tension between the Open Film Set’s self-advertisement as a site of national importance and its dearth of education about the national history it reconstructs and profits from. 

When Halmu and her family returned to Haman after months of living as refugees, they found that everything had been turned to ashes: her school and church, government offices, all the villagers’ homes. During the Battle of Haman, the US Army and United Nations Command had fired bombs, napalm, rockets, and machine guns. The second floor of the two-story house Halmu’s mother had bought for her oldest son’s marriage had collapsed. Only a gristmill and, miraculously, a single room on the first floor remained. Halmu and her mother, father, and two brothers would live in that single room together for a while. 

In the black ruins of an incinerated town, Halmu recalls one source of color: the crops on her parents’ farm. During the months that she and her family had fled, living on scraps like most refugees, all the barley on their fields had ripened. The thick autumn rains following the evacuation of soldiers on both sides had helped the stalks grow so heavy, Halmu says they looked like they were about to drop to the earth. Every time she recalls this memory, my grandmother enunciates one of the many Korean words for yellow, “누렇다” (nureota), in dialect, pressing down on the “nu” as if to sound the weight that the golden plants had had to carry as they matured amidst violence. 

As a diasporic Korean, I felt I had no such memories of my own through which to claim belonging to the land. But by the end of our tour of Suncheon Open Film Set, that was starting to change. Before we left the daldongne section of the set, I asked my grandmother to take pictures of me in front of the shacks. Like the woman in the subway exhibition photo, I wanted to remember myself here, but perhaps for a different reason than hers. Instead of nostalgia for what the set represented, I had curiosity about its untold histories. As I looked up at my grandmother’s phone camera, I noticed barbed wire lacing the makeshift fence. Later I would learn that the film set stood on the site of a former military base—that of the 95th Regiment of the Korean Army. I wished the set had made obvious that if it were not for the War, there may not have been refugees to create daldongne in the first place.

Before we moved on to Suncheon’s 8,000-year-old bay, where in summer, migratory birds like the black-crowned night heron and the Eurasian kingfisher flock to the reeds, we came to our last stop at the drama set: the “Music Room of Memory.” It was impossible to miss, because you could hear old 1970s hits blasting through the speakers from the alley outside. Its facade was decorated with bright orange and green tiles, and the window display showed an acoustic guitar and old vinyl records of Dolly Parton and, for some reason, Brahms.

It was a humble, one-room discotheque with laminate floors and plain wooden benches. A small disco ball and floor mirror scattered color from Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling, while two small TV screens played karaoke videos as if to help you remember lyrics you had forgotten. On one wall was a large whiteboard labeled “Scribble Once,” but it was clearly not enough space: every wall in the room was covered with pale yellow and blue Post-it notes where visitors had signed their names and dated their visit. Others had marked the graying walls directly,  taking their Sharpies over and between old movie posters. It seemed as though everyone had wanted to record their own memory, in the music room of memory. 

When Halmu and I walked in, there were already a few ajummas dancing to the music. They smiled giddily from beneath their summer hats, their gem-studded sneakers sparkling as they shimmied to the thump-thump of the music. With their cross-body bags held securely to their waists, they took pictures of one another, laughing loudly as if they hadn’t allowed themselves to be silly in a while. Halmu and I joined the ajummas, throwing our hands in the air. Halmu, in her bright fuschia blouse and designer capris, pointed her fingers this way and that, swaying her hips. Her lipsticked mouth blossomed in laughter, and her eyes, which had dimmed earlier on at the sight of the dilapidated houses in the first section of the set (“Our country was so poor back then,” she’d repeated mournfully), lit up. 

My initial assumption that Halmu would need my encouragement to keep dancing was quickly broken. It didn’t matter that when Western-style dance halls were first built in the wake of the War, Halmu—already a working mother by then—had never gone. For all the history that she has lived through, Halmu is one of the most playful people I have ever met. She danced with an easy delight, circling her hands while shuffling and laughing as I spun her around. I was glad to see her take off her heavy Louis Vuitton handbag, the one she always stuffed with extra water bottles and tangerines whenever she went out, a habit I associate with her experience of hunger as a child in wartime.

When I took out my phone to photograph Halmu’s contagious smile, I caught one of the other ajummas taking a selfie in the floor mirror, grinning as she rolled her shoulders. In that moment, I was struck by how all of us—my grandmother, the middle-aged ajummas, and I—wanted to remember ourselves like this. I wanted to remember the feeling of stepping it out in the sailor uniform with the white sash, the folds of my navy skirt turning with my short summer haircut. I wanted to remember how, in this fake discotheque that was a product of the present as much as it was of the past, I no longer felt like a tourist in my native land. Instead, I felt like I was my grandmother’s granddaughter, both of us feeling safe enough to dance in the present, which is perhaps the only real time we have. 

In the summer after I finished graduate school, I visited the Sudoguksan Museum of Housing and Living, a museum in the city of Incheon dedicated to the social history of daldongne. I learned all that I have shared about moon villages here and much, much more. Today, years after studying Korean in college, I am still learning about the living history of these structures: how, thanks to re-slummification, gentrification, and uneven urban redevelopment in the 21st century, daldongne continue to exist in almost all the districts of Korea’s largest cities like Seoul, Busan, and Daegu. How, while some have become international tourist destinations—like Busan’s Gamcheon Culture Village, which had been originally settled by refugees—or trendy cafe hotspots with elevators gliding over the steep slopes, many continue to house the urban dispossessed who rise early and return late from work while the moon is still up. 

Recently, I went to my first neighborhood walking tour in Seoul, organized by the Third Voice Institute, an organization devoted to uplifting migrants and diasporic minorities who often “fall through the cracks of the [South Korean] nation-state.” The tour took place in Daerim-dong, a neighborhood in the Yeongdeungpo-gu district of Seoul that houses migrant workers from several countries, including China, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines. I learned not only that Daerim-dong has a fascinating social history—including residents organizing against the 2017 blockbuster Midnight Runners’ racist representation of the neighborhood’s Korean Chinese population—but also that this history is constantly evolving. The first stop of the tour was a corner broker’s office; our guide had wanted to show the oversized map of the neighborhood hung on its facade. When we arrived, however, the map was gone. It had been replaced by a poster on property values rising due to anticipated redevelopment. 

As we walked through Daerim-dong, moored to the voice of our sociology student guide as we waded through the sights and sounds of non-Korean languages and produce, I began to question the primacy of the Korean who is native, implicit in the notion of the “native tourist.” I remembered walking through Suncheon Open Film Set, with its ahistorical yet nostalgic atmosphere. Here is a place full of heartwarming stories and romance, the announcer of Jeonguk Shidae, the local TV program, had advertised. While that particular presentation of history had gaps, I had been able to move through them in the presence of my grandparents’ memories and, unexpectedly, my own. In the process, I began to see myself more clearly as no longer a native tourist but as a diasporic writer of memory and history, sifting the overlaps between these eternally evolving productions. Ə 

Julie Moon with her grandmother in front of the "Music Room of Memory," at the Suncheon Open Film Set