Chapter 1 - Episode 1 (2/2)

It has to be a dream.

“…My sister… your mom… hung a sign around her neck… while pointing at your father who was burning…”

A scream to the world.

When people came, filming with cell phones, and reporters gathered, it is said that the mother ran into the fire to embrace her burning husband. The police were dispatched, the father died at the scene, and the mother went to the emergency room but died within a day.

All I did was sleep.

And…

When I woke up, my mom and dad were dead.

“All of them have been punished! Not a single one escaped.”

The emotion in the aunt’s voice took on a harsher tone.

“All eight of them went to juvenile detention. The police, prosecutors, and the media were all tripping over themselves to punish each other. Special investigation team, joint investigation team, they couldn’t get enough of it. The public outrage was terrifying. At first, they tried for six months, but the press got wind of it and lost their minds. They pushed it from six months to ten months to a year, until finally, they settled on two years in juvenile detention. Your homeroom teacher, the school principal, and the superintendent were all fired.”

“…”

Eventually, the parents of all the perpetrators held a joint press conference to apologize to the public. Still, the mob was not yet appeased. The horrifying scene of Seyoung’s parents self-immolating had been captured from countless angles and circulated like wildfire on the internet.

The world couldn’t look away.

Seyoung had even been visited by the president while he was still in is coma. The members of both the ruling and opposition parties were reportedly busy that day. The whole country was in an uproar.

They were ordinary and average,

Because they had nothing, they couldn’t do anything.

In order to light the flame of revenge.

They used their own bodies as kindling.

*****

TL/ED Note: Many criminal cases in Korea can be settled via mediation, and for settlement fee called we’jah’ryou (위자료/solatium), the criminal complaint can be dismissed with the victim’s consent. While it can give the victim the satisfaction and compensation in many minor cases without a lengthy wait, it is a system that can be exploited by the wealthy as well as avaricious victims demanding more than what would be fair.

Many Asian cultures have a macabre tradition of protest suicide. Self-immolation is an especially notorious one such method, the iconic images usually being the Buddhist monks who self-immolate as an extreme form of protest. Korea is no exception, and the method isn’t limited to self-immolation. Most recently, a triathlete in Korea threw herself from a building to protest the abuse she had suffered from her trainers, coaches, and even teammates. It immediately received national attention and brought consequences to those accused, although in life, those complaints were ignored. In other countries, the Arab Spring saw many self-immolation protests that galvanized the protest movement.