Continuity amid Rupture: Reverberations of Jeju 4.3 (Sasam) in the Household
Continuity amid Rupture: Reverberations of Jeju 4.3 (Sasam) in the Household
by Youjoung (Yuna) Kim
“The house I live in was my mother’s,” Wan-soon samchoon, a woman in her early eighties, said to me as her finger traced the outline of a drawing she had made. It was a spring afternoon in 2023 at her home in Bukchon, a village I was visiting for my dissertation research exploring how women navigate the terrain of recognition and claim-making under the Jeju 4.3 Special Act. I met her through an interlocutor who was a longtime friend of hers. The interlocutor referred to her as samchoon, a vernacular term in the Jeju language used to indicate reverence and familiarity.
Figure 1 is a detailed self-portrait of Wan-soon samchoon in her current house. She is sweeping a garden filled with lilies, daisies, and daffodils. I noticed those flowers near the entrance to her house. It was in 2019 that she first started drawing her life. She began drawing after she met Jude Kang, a documentary director who had been visiting her home in Bukchon. Under Kang’s guidance, Wan-soon samchoon started drawing shapes—lines, circles, squares. Soon she found a way to draw her experiences. These drawings would later form the heart of a documentary titled What Wan-Soon Draws (2024). Since then her drawings have circulated widely within the Jeju community.
When I began visiting her, she would place the drawings before me on a table one by one and offer fragments of narration. There was no fixed order to the drawings, no explanatory frame. Yet over time, I came to sense the delicate interplay of rupture and continuity in the ways households in her life have been undone and reassembled. For instance, many images Wan-soon samchoon has drawn unveil the texture of her everyday: eating a meal with family, attending to fire in a kitchen, and so on. These are small acts but they are held together by deep wounds.
Each wound in its own way is embedded in the history of Jeju 4.3 or Sasam: state-sponsored violence that resulted in more than 30,000 deaths on Jeju Island, South Korea. Between 1947 and 1954, state authorities, first under the US military occupation then under the newly formed South Korean government, carried out this atrocity with the pretext of ridding Korea of communism. Many were accused without evidence of communist leanings. Bukchon, the village where Wan-soon samchoon’s house still stands, was among the most affected, with nearly five hundred residents killed—many of whom were known to her by name and some bound to her by kinship.
Her drawings return to certain spaces that bear the mark of her losses: a thatched house she shared with her younger brother before he passed, a house later consumed by fire amidst the violence; and a temporary shelter where she took refuge with her family during the massacre. These are not mere representations of spaces where she lived. They reveal a lifeworld in which the act of gathering is fragile, at great risk of unraveling. Each image captures a moment of coalescing and its undoing.
In her drawings are also family members who, having lost their lives in the massacre, now dwell in the register of ancestral time. In portraying them as family eating, gathering, or simply present, Wan-soon samchoon animates an intimate world in which the past is not sealed away. The souls of the deceased, drawn as kin, awaken her memories of Korean liberation, of the US military occupation, and of the unresolved grief of Sasam. They are political beings—shaped by, and entangled in, the violent milieus created by cold wars.
In this essay, I consider a few of Wan-soon’s drawings alongside the stories she offers. By interweaving image and narration, I reflect on how, in times of rupture, she comes together with others to household—not simply as an act of dwelling but as an ongoing process of repair. To speak of householding as a verb is to shift our attention from the materialities of shelter toward the ordinary gestures that make return to home possible. In her drawings, Wan-soon revisits the homes and the relations that they held to dwell alongside what remains. Through these returns, I suggest that she attends to the wounds of Sasam and weaves a form of life that exceeds the visible bounds of the present.
To Dwell with Loss
Wan-soon samchoon placed another drawing before me—this time of a thatched house where she spent her early years (Figure 2). Outside the house she drew a tongsi, the Jeju-style outhouse where a black pig resides. It is a detail evocative of a rustic world that once was. Her hand lingered over the small figures seated around a low dining table inside the house. She spoke of those who householded with her.
Her family returned to Jeju from Japan after Korea’s liberation in 1945. In Japan, her parents had run a small factory. A middle child, her sister was six years older and her brother was six years younger than her. With a smile, she recalled a flicker of jealousy she once felt toward her brother for the attention he received. She then added that he died when he was four—during the violence of Sasam. Yet there is no overt depiction or narration of violence in her drawing. Instead, loss appears obliquely: in the delicacy of an outline, in the stillness that settles over the scene, in the empty space that surrounds what was no longer present. The household, as she drew it, is less a structure than a vessel that holds the traces of presence and absence. Her loss is folded into the drawing. At the same time, this drawing reassembles her world—not to recover what has passed but to dwell beside it.
Echoes of Violence
“We are all going to die.” That message, Wan-soon samchoon recalled, was written on a handkerchief found near the old village tree. She shared these words with me while unfolding a drawing that portrayed the home her family lived in before their evacuation during Sasam. In Figure 3, her sister returns from a nearby spring, balancing a water bucket on her back. Wan-soon samchoon depicts herself as a child sitting in the kitchen, eating sweet potatoes while her mother crouches before the hearth, feeding the fire beneath a stone stove. Her younger brother appears lying inside a woven bamboo basket meant for children. Scribbled text beside his image states that he died during the early days of the violence. Just beyond the house are bodies beneath a mound of hay, with only their faces exposed. They represent the fear that had settled over the village at that time.
When I asked why the figures in the drawing are hiding, Wan-soon samchoon paused before answering. In those days, she explained, the young were taken to the eastern edge of the village presumably to be killed. Later, she heard from others that one man, shot in the leg, had managed to crawl back under the cover of night—limping, bloodied, barely alive. He relayed that not enough people had registered and voted for the National Assembly election; people whose names were absent from the rolls were accused of being communist sympathizers. Many were beaten, others shot.
Wan-soon samchoon’s hand moved from the figures in the hay to her younger brother and she continued the story. Her family and others were summoned to the Bukchon school playground. Gunfire rang out. Her mother cried, “Put your head on the ground!” Wan-soon samchoon obeyed. When the shots ceased and she lifted her gaze, her mother was gone. Looking around, she found her mother kneeling with her younger brother clinging to her back. A soldier stood nearby, holding a baton with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Wan-soon samchoon tried to reach them only to realize her hands were wet with blood. Fear seized her then. She screamed to her mother that they should go home. Her three-year-old brother cried out. Without warning, the soldier struck him with a club. Wan-soon samchoon told me her brother died later in her lap at home.
The year was 1950. That moment has never left her, she said. It has returned in dreams, always in fragments. In her drawing, ordinary life and fear appear in a wide tapestry woven together in shades of the mundane to the fearsome. The drawing is not a rendering of a single moment but rather a shifting constellation of scenes: her brother—a child—lying in a cradle and Wan-soon samchoon herself eating beside her mother who tends to the fire. These ordinary actions hold the household together as violence encroaches.
What emerges is not simply a recollection but an insistence on life. In her drawing, her household becomes a site where life continues, threaded through gestures that hold a world together, even in the presence of violence.
Threads of Sustenance
“There will be no home left to return to,” said a military captain on the school playground. “All of your houses were burned.” These were the words Wan-soon samchoon remembered. That night, the villagers slept at the school. The next morning, they were forced to evacuate to Hamdoek, a neighboring village.
As Wan-soon samchoon recounted these events to me, she turned to another drawing (Figure 4): a rendering of her refugee life in Hamdeok. In it she has drawn herself as a young girl preparing garlic while sitting before a hearth where a pot rests above a closed flame. She has also drawn a bundle of dried seaweed roots. A small note explains, “People foraged seaweed roots from the shore to fill their hunger.” Another note reads: “[We] began [our] refugee life in Hamdeok on January 17, 1949.”
For over two months, her family took shelter in a stable of an acquaintance’s house. When the days stretched into weeks and their provisions ran low, her family would make the difficult journey to Bukchon to forage for food. And when spring came, they returned permanently to Bukchon.
Figures 3 and 4 capture this arc of her life. The drawings take us from the familiar confines of her first home to the precariousness of displacement, where the household becomes an ever-shifting, fragile space held together by a single hearth. This hearth is the center around which people gather to take what little sustenance is available. We see that the struggle for survival does not unfold in grand gestures, but through delicate details like the foraging of food made edible by garlic and seaweed. With each stroke of a colored pencil and each figure sketched, Wan-soon samchoon asserts survival in the face of violence.
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For Wan-soon samchoon, households are vessels that carry echoes of the past. Each line and each figure breathe life into lifeworlds that have been excised, reassembling a world that once was and perhaps still is. This world comes alive through the delicate care with which she arranges the figures in her drawings. Her work conjures presence.
It is in this light that I return to Figure 1. The drawing centers on the house: solid, composed, enduring. It does not simply depict a structure but holds within it significant memories, as if it were a metaphor for her mother’s presence. Wan-soon samchoon’s drawings create a place where loss is acknowledged while the enduring bonds of family and home remain intact. In the act of drawing, her world is repaired through reassembly rather than restoration to honor.
Through her drawings, the bonds of family and home are enacted. Each drawing is an invitation to the spirits, her deceased family members, to reenter the space of the living. Even as the violence that once scattered them may have left the spirits unsettled, the act of drawing offers a kind of homecoming. Wan-soon samchoon’s household becomes a site where continuity with the past is sustained through cohabitation. To remember, here, is also to gather—to bring the ancestors home and to make room for their presence within everyday life.
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-2242036) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (No.10521).
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