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The first piece of writing I ever read on Korea had to have been P.J. O\u2019Rourke\u2019s \u201cSeoul Brothers,\u201d originally published in Rolling Stone<\/em> in 1988. O\u2019Rourke, whose work in many ways inspired me to get into writing myself, back then had the beat of the troubled parts of the world; I first read this particular article in a collection called Holidays in Hell<\/em>. It opens as follows: \u201cWhen the kid in the front row at the rally bit off the tip of his little finger and wrote KIM DAE JUNG in blood on his fancy white ski jacket \u2014 I think that was the first time I ever really felt like a foreign correspondent. I mean, here was something really fucking foreign<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n
O\u2019Rourke had come to Korea to cover the turmoil around the country\u2019s first free direct presidential election. A Korean friend of mine, an economist as well as a fan The Economist<\/em>, remembers opening up that magazine some time ago and reading an article which began with words like, \u201cSouth Korea, which became a democracy in 1987\u2026\u201d \u2014 words which startled her. She on one level knew, of course, that her homeland held its first genuinely democratic (or close-enough) elections in that relatively recent-sounding year, but it\u2019s one thing to know it, and quite another to have it plainly stated back at you as an acknowledged fact by a respected international news outlet.<\/p>\n
History remembers Kim Dae-jung as an icon of Korean democracy, but despite having proven inspirational enough in December of 1987 to get his supporters writing his name in their own blood, he wouldn\u2019t win the presidency until 1998. He ran against the late Kim Young-sam, who would serve as President first, from 1993 to 1998, and they both lost to Roh Tae-woo, President from 1988 to 1993, though rumors of vote fraud swirled around his victory fast enough that O\u2019Rourke had the opportunity to don a helmet against the hail of thrown stones and a ventilator mask against the tear gas (which seems to have constituted a basic element of Seoul\u2019s atmosphere in the 1980s) and make his way into a ward office occupied by enraged student radicals and under siege by the police.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n