BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL/SEOUL
WORLD
ONE WORD TORE CHOI JOUNG-JOO’S WORLD APART.
He first heard about crowd trouble in Seoul’s nightlife district of Itaewon on evening news bulletins, but it was a call from his wife that made panic set in. Their 21-year-old daughter, Yujin, had set off to celebrate Halloween in Itaewon on Oct. 29, 2022, with a friend, who had phoned to tearfully explain that as the melee grew denser she had lost grip of Yujin’s hand and consciousness soon after.
“After she woke, she had received a call from Yujin’s phone but there was no sound,” recalls Choi. “So she thought that maybe Yujin was injured.”
Choi met Yujin’s friend in front of Seoul’s Hanyang University Hospital at 1:30 a.m. “There were lots of reporters and TV cameras,” Choi tells TIME, standing before an unofficial memorial outside Seoul city hall for the 159 victims of the Itaewon crush. “There were dead bodies and a lot of confusion.”
After hours of fruitless searching, Choi received a call from a policewoman. Then came that fated, hated word. “I just heard her say ‘unfortunately . . .’ and I don’t remember anything after that.”
Yujin was a performance-studies sophomore at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, though she had deferred her studies because of the pandemic, returning to South Korea where, in the grimmest of irony, she believed she’d be safer than in New York.
“She loved writing, acting, and music,” says Choi, 54, a media executive. “She played the violin and was just a very positive, outgoing person.”
No father should have to bury his only child, but Choi says the actions of South Korean authorities in the year since have only compounded his sense of grief and loss. While apologies have been issued, nobody has taken responsibility for the disaster, which occurred when an estimated 100,000 revelers converged on a narrow, 45-m alley that linked a high street metro-station entrance with another street packed with bars and restaurants.
“[Officials] try to make it the victims’ own fault,” says Choi. “If they didn’t go there, they wouldn’t have died.”
DODGING OFFICIAL RESPONSIBILITYis sadly all too common in South Korea, where politically appointed officials are protected by an entrenched hierarchical culture. In July, 14 people died when over a dozen vehicles including a bus
