Content warning: this article contains graphic and disturbing images.

It’s 2002, and the world is at peace. The world is at peace, insofar as it’s not crumbling to pieces. The ghosts of global wars are dissipating, and we’re now post-modern, no longer under the influence of ideology, and we’re moving forward; now we are at leisure to deal with religious disputes, the ethics of the media, the protection of privacy, and demonstrations of individual will – disregard, for the moment, the war on terror (or the war of terror, if you prefer). What is terrorism, after all, if not a violent confrontation of the issues swept under the bed, kept like so many Molotov cocktails thrown by enraged students – soon we will be confronting the unequal distribution of wealth, soon there shall be equal marriage, soon we will dream of human rights, and lies.

It’s 2002, and two Korean girls, 14 years old, are found crushed by a caterpillar track. The drivers turn out to be from the US Army base installed in Korea. US Forces Korea is a form of Western aid against the North Korean threat, representing amity between the US and the South. The case of the two dead girls becomes a scandal, one taken up in a US court-martial; verdict: not guilty. I’m not interested in the context, the statistics, the evidence, or even the reactions. I am not interested in anything that requires the article ‘the.’ I’ll spare you details, around which hang intricate issues that are less than historical, more than political. The details are filled with pitfalls instead of footholds.

Around 2012, Psy hits the mark with Gangnam Style, and shortly a controversy is roused over an anti-American rap he performed in 2004. An online petition goes up against Obama shaking Psy’s hand.

In 2008, when I simply labelled myself a Korean, I was often asked whether I was from the North or the South. I am a Korean. Thirteen hours ago — that is, April 5th, 2014 — I stumbled across an article titled “North Korea tells world ‘wait and see’ on new nuclear test” on the New York Daily News website. The aftermath of the Korean War continues to be tightly focused on the North Korean government and their nuclear threats, overshadowing the story of the two girls, and Psy’s defence on his actions.

You will undoubtedly have seen ‘them’ through newspaper articles and video clips. How will you see me? In naked truth, severely honest, stripped of good faith, discarding sophistication and civility – see me. You will see a Korean, a woman, a youth, and you will file me accordingly within your index. The index is a compound product of your personal experience and the news articles you’ve read. I see your index, made of labelled boxes, running down your spine. And then you’ll think – a refugee, a tourist, an immigrant, an illegal alien, an international student: of course.

Based on the questions that usually get asked, I construe that one’s interpretation always pivots around, and is formed in relation to, the piece of land one stands on. You will consider how long I will be staying here, how long I have been here, what I make of this place, what I find likeable/dislikeable about you, here, now. I will ponder how different/similar here is from there, where I am from, my people, my place, my time. We will circle around our nativity, the ‘mother country’ and the ‘place of origin’, that mythical location that exercises such a strong claim over us.

A narrative weaves itself through the historical continuum that connects the Korean War, two girls’ death, the Iraq War, and a singer’s fame and infamy. This narrative is held together by a wavering connection that exists only as long as one looks for it. I claim that there is a narrative. I claim that I have ability to select what I consider relevant details, and still be true to the reality of the matter. You, with your own idiosyncratic index of the world – venturing out from your place of origin, your particular perspective – you will have to decide how valid my claim is.

I am writing a story. My story has a grandfather, whose youth was spent in the Korean War. Now his health is dissipating. He looks up to the Western ways as new ways – for new ways are always the right ways, new women always more dangerous than the old ones – and he says, “The US military is a gang of benevolent protectors, they are a gift of generosity, they are here because the Korean army is ineffectual.” But then an intoxicated US pilot falls out of the sky during a training session. The wings of the jet span the entirety of blue sky. The jet crashes into a school, maiming many, killing two. Lying incontinent in his sickroom, the grandfather hears the news. He hears the crying gulls of his hometown. He thinks of the swallows of the old days (the birds that brought welcome visitors), and of the swallowtail suits twirled by Western aristocrats.

What I would like to convey is that his belief in protection is shattered. I borrow from historicity for my purpose. I am more interested in the simulation of plausibility than in accuracy. Here, what’s important is being true to emotional affect, but not necessarily to fact. Consequently, I tweak the story of two girls to suit the theme. I say the theme is the freedom of birds in flight.

Suppose what is real is also true; suppose what is subjectively experienced is more true, more immediately real, more just-so without dispute, compared to mere reiteration or statistics.

Consider the famous axiom: facts are malleable. Facts are rigid only within a given context. Suppose, then, I told you a story. An American jet strays off course during training. The Osan Air Base identifies the pilot, and speculating states that the pilot of this jet was subject to severe mood swings. A thorough investigation reveals the full extent of the pilot’s troubled psyche. The jet swerves to a school lot, crashes, and two boys are crushed under its debris.

Is this story believable? Will you believe me if I tell you this was an actual event that took place in my country? Or, will you believe me if I tell you this is a fabrication that borrows elements from what really took place? What if I tell you about the repercussions the supposed event caused in Korean society? What if you were an avid follower of news media, and had a sense that you’d already heard of all this before – a sense of déjà vu, a sense that something like this had happened? Or what if you’ve never heard of anything like this, and what if you have to take my word for it?

‘Two unfortunate girls involved in unusual traffic accident’, the headline says. An American tank was involved in an accident. An unfortunate circumstance. The shape and length of the road impeded vision. There was momentary trouble with the radio signal. Communications with the commander were disturbed, and the driver had been deprived of sleep, the training was needlessly excessive and everyone was tired. Two girls, on their way to meet friends, were a hazard not assessed in time. With the bulk of a tank, any delay, however short, is deadly. This was another day, like any other. Everyone was caught off guard. The investigation of the accident was complicated by the bureaucratic hair-splitting. The US determined that a court-martial under their jurisdiction was the proper course. There was no disputing it. Those involved in the accident were members of the US Army. Consider the long-term diplomatic relations. A certain political party slandered the US-Korean joint investigation as “a proof of incompetence and submission.” They said it was an inappropriate behaviour that grossly abused the sorrow of the victim’s family. And for what? A power game.

‘Brutal invasion, lack of respect – two blooming lives (aged only 15) cut short’, says the headline. An American tank sadistically chased two defenceless girls with malignant intent. The girls were going to town to celebrate a friend’s birthday. They must have heard the noise of the tank, and have been fully aware of its approach. A discarded shoe is found nearby, hinting that the girls ran wildly to the site where their mutilated bodies were found. Other tanks had no trouble negotiating the road during the earlier morning’s procession. The driver: a suspicious character. No one wants to discuss him. The communication between the driver and the commander had been relaxed, even jokey. A photograph of a discarded snack-wrapper on the investigation site: the US investigators showing disrespect for the victims. The government is reluctant to share the outcome of the investigation with the public. A brutal loss of life, suffered by two innocent Korean girls within Korean territory, and yet we have no right to judge the case.

Here, I have not lied. I have not altered with intention. I merely reported, with different emphasis on details, and the details happened to present a particular version of the story.

Now then, as an outsider, how will you determine which version is truer than the other? Suppose that I backed up my story with references; how will you tell if those references are not biased, not fabricated, not overtly selective on facts? How do you measure the plausibility of my story?

You cannot expect the innate truth-value of the story to shine through. Within my shabby umbrella of understanding, the disciples of History rely on an ethic of honesty. That is to say, they have to be able to assert with confidence that among this rubble, among these corrupted memories, that we can eventually access the Truth, through patience and through the application of wit and logic and the warmth of an affinity that unites us all as human beings. There, I successfully isolated why I always feel alienated in that discipline.

The ethic of honesty rolls well on the tongue. It is as it should be. Yet I am also familiar with the ethics of dishonesty, such as the Mentor’s The Conscience of a Hacker, a well-known manifesto, hailed as the trade ethic by The Pirate Bay swindlers of recent generations. You can cheat and lie to a moral standard, as long as you are serious when you announce that you are going to lie, and stand by your announcement. What is unethical is perhaps not to lie, but to betray. It is unethical if you make the facts unreliable.

I am writing creative nonfiction. This statement is a verified truth. As I report this, I am protesting my good faith, my transparent honesty, and my sincere investment in the ideas that are, presumably, going to be put forward. I am apologising that what follows is an assertion, based on my subjective perspective, which will be relevant to the events I listed so far. I am telling you that this will not be a neatly bound academic product, but will be a query, astutely construed and assiduously constructed. It will be a dissection of the unconscious, a vivisection of the still-throbbing, elusive workings of the truth that is ‘just-so’.

But you should be wary. You feel slightly queasy at this point, because when I say “I am writing creative nonfiction,” I am stating the obvious. And why would I need to do that? You know that if I persist on typing one word after another, I can turn a paragraph into a propaganda of a thousand words, selling an empty tin for a price. When you reach this particular thought, perhaps you will pause and doubt. I am not being straightforward. I am not wholeheartedly behind this. You are getting mixed signals about my sincerity.

When I was in intermediate, I was walking down the hill with my friend, who had wide-eyes and soft contours, and who I liked – secretly – to tease. There was a half-wall on the slope. The wall separated two parking spaces, and I pointed at it and told her it was haunted. One frosty winter day, when the snow was piled high above that wall, which was of some width, two small children played there. One of them pushed the mass of snow, and the other one, who was young enough to be buried alive, was buried alive. It’s true, I said. I heard it from my friend, who knew the mother of the children.

My friend told me to stop; she couldn’t stand how scared it made her. The content itself wasn’t so terrifying. She was terrified because I insisted. Our lengthy friendship compelled her to credit my claims.

A few years before that, when I was in primary, a friend told me not to play with a girl with eczema, making it out as a leprosy that would rub off. The very next day, the girl with eczema greeted me on the street. Caught between the fear of being caught in company with the marked one and the fear of social disgrace, and cowardly enough not to face her, I broke off into a run, which she first interpreted as a game of chase. I didn’t know her, but the rumour about her eczema came directly from a friend, a trusted source. This was the same friend who could get good grades, who could drag me around arm-in-arm. The confrontation with the reality seemed to crystallize the friend’s assertion, like the facts of war: heard-but-not-believed until you see a refugee walk down the plank, down-trodden, looking miserable, like a drowned mouse with hay stuck to its fur; and then you think of the horrors, of infection, of the need to study the foreign face, and of the need to survey your own thoughts.

And what would you do – you, who isn’t my friend? Would you fledge your belief, you who is reading this, you who haven’t seen me face-to-face?

I’m telling you two girls died in 2002. I’m telling you it was a US tank that ran them over. I can either tell you it was an accident, or tell you it was a violation. I can tell you that Koreans are still living in daily horror of the Korean War, or I can tell you that Koreans resent having someone else’s army still hanging around the Korean territory when the war is clearly over; I can tell you I’m enraged that Americans fail to see where their newfound entertainment, Psy, where his anti-American rap was coming from, or I can tell you I’m cynical about Psy’s flimsy excuse for his anti-American rap. I can tell you that none of it matters, because all of this is just fictional story that is historically grounded, or I can tell you that it matters, because there are the girls, and the girls’ grieving family.

I am neither lying, nor revealing, when I am writing. This act of writing cannot be a quest just because I delve into a query, as if one has a god-given right to that stone quarry named A Topical Issue. Writing a story is only different to journalistic writing. One form is considered more sober, is credited with a joyful companionship – a companion to the breakfast table, to armchair, to a sombre bust of Pallas Athena on the bookshelf. The other form is often frivolous.

I never professed myself to be the protector of my culture, and nor is it my place to liberate hidden truth from recesses, to protest that it is so, just-so, projecting a shade of my belief as the confirmed belief. I’m not insinuating anything, except that if a tragedy involving two girls happened, it had certain emotional implications; that the arguments put forward by the journalists have no greater significance than the creative works that walk around the issue. The event had the complications of historicity, because it happened between-countries and between-peoples and between a period of war and a period of peace, and because people willingly read feud into a funeral.

Does it not suffice that people willingly read, and that the aesthetes should judge the value of the story based on good telling? During a certain temporality, under specific circumstances, this may have happened just-so, and it's true to you as long as you listen.