Eom Ji-young, center, mother of Park Yae-ji, a 16-year-old victim of the sunken Sewol ferry accident, holds a portrait of her daughter at a crematorium in Suwon, South Korea. (Woohae Cho/The New York Times)
Ansan, South Korea:
The cluttered store next to the gate of Danwon High School in the drab industrial city of Ansan is jammed with school necessities. White gym uniforms hang in the window, behind dusty glass. Pens and pencils are sorted neatly into cubbyholes, and a freezer full of ice cream sits outside as a lure for passing students.
But much of the space in the tiny shop is devoted to perhaps its most important item: rows and rows of history and math and English-language workbooks for South Korea's grueling university entrance exams. Now, Kim In-jea, the store's co-owner, doubts that he will sell many of the 11th-grade books, and he does not expect even to stock the 12th-grade versions next year.
The students who would have bought them went on a class trip, and most will never return.
Nearly three quarters of Danwon's 11th-graders died two weeks ago in the sinking of a ferry that ranks as one of the country's deadliest disasters in recent decades.
"I've seen these kids grow up. I know each of their faces," said Kim, 57, who lives nearby and said seven of his neighbors had lost their children. "To say that this neighborhood feels empty would be an understatement. This neighborhood feels like a morgue."
The loss has been a blow to the country more commonly known for its economic prowess and pop culture exports. But the tragedy has hit especially hard in Gojan 1, the run-down working-class district surrounding the school. Each of the low-slung brick apartment buildings, residents say, was home to at least three or four students who perished.
Gojan 1 is normally alive with the bustle of teenagers doing what they do - crowding the local Internet cafe to play computer games or heading in chattering groups to Wongojan Public Library to study or to the after-school "cram" classes ubiquitous in South Korea.
Now, residents describe a mournful stillness, punctuated by the seemingly endless arrival of long funeral processions paying their last respects at the children's school. There have been 156 funerals so far. On Sunday alone there were 30, most for the students who went down with the ferry.
The pall has radiated out into Ansan, a port city an hour southwest of Seoul where factories stamp out auto parts and electronics, and where the landscape is dominated by rows of identical apartment blocks. The city of 763,000 people, those who live here say, has been suffocating in grief since the accident apparently claimed the lives of 250 of its children.
Hospitals had been filled with most of the 75 surviving students, until almost all of them went home this week. The hospitals had also been filled with the dead: In South Korea, hospitals often double as funeral homes, and late last week, the rooms for wakes were so crowded with ferry victims that some families had to wait a day for a spot.
At a temporary memorial built in a gym, the victims' photos were displayed on a wall covered with yellow and white flowers. Mourners waited up to 90 minutes in a line that snaked for blocks down a sidewalk and back and forth across the yard of a nearby elementary school. On Tuesday, the memorial moved to a permanent site in a city park.
"An entire grade at a high school was wiped out," said Kim Hee-kyeum, the vice governor of Gyeonggi province, where Ansan is located, and whose provincial government has stepped in to help overwhelmed city officials. "It is not just the 250 lost students. It is their surviving classmates, their parents, friends, neighborhoods, the entire city. It will take a long time to overcome this nightmare."
For now, the funeral processions - caravans of cars and buses led by a black hearse bedecked with flowers - offer the rawest expressions of the community's grief.
One of those processions carried Park Yae-ji, whose relatives remember her as a cheerful, mature 16-year-old who helped her working mother raise her younger brother.
On a drizzly, gray morning this week, Yae-ji returned for the final time to Danwon High School, following a Korean custom in which the dead are taken to the various places where they spent their lives, including homes and workplaces.
Her mother, Eom Ji-young, 37, stoic for much of the funeral, lost her composure at the sight of white chrysanthemums laid on Yae-ji's desk, collapsing in sobs. Of the nearly 30 other desks in the classroom, all but two were decorated with white bouquets, which are given to the dead.
Teachers lined the corridors, heads bowed. Officials said there were so many funerals that the teachers had to stand like that almost all day. As Yae-ji's family left, another hearse was already waiting outside.
The students in other grades have returned to school after more than a week, and have been present for many of the grim last visits.
They are being taught how to cope with the loss of schoolmates by "art psychologists," who use painting, drawing and other art forms to help students express their sorrow, city and provincial officials said. School has not yet restarted for the 11th-graders who remain, including the 13 who chose not to attend the class trip, and officials say they have not set a date to begin.
The bodies of 81 students have not yet been recovered, probably guaranteeing that the school will continue to host grieving families for some time to come.
Yae-ji's mother is relieved, at least, to have her daughter's body back, to give her a proper funeral.
At the wake, a projector showed photographs that spanned her brief life: an infant held by beaming young parents, a small girl with bright eyes sitting barefoot in a go-cart, a young woman with long black hair and fashionable black glasses who had grown to stand shoulder to shoulder with her mother.
Eom, who seemed dazed by her ordeal, pulled out a smartphone at one point to show her final conversation with her daughter, via an instant messaging service. Tenderly stroking the screen with her finger, she reread each of the messages that her daughter had sent from the ferry as it departed from Incheon for an overnight ride to the resort island of Jeju.
"Mom, doing well so don't worry," she wrote. "Good night!"
Eom's reply, "Have a good time," was never opened, a sign that Yae-ji did not turn her phone on again. The ferry sank the next morning.
After visiting Danwon on Sunday, the family began Yae-ji's final journey, driving to a large, factory-like crematorium. After they relinquished the girl's body, Eom crumpled to the floor.
"What am I going to do without my baby?" she cried, clutching her own mother. "Mom, tell me what I should do!"
Even Yae-ji's father, Park Sang-woo, 41, a factory worker and former South Korean special forces member who had kept a firm grip on himself, broke into sobs. The couple's only other child, 10-year-old son Seon-hwan, stroked his father's back.
Similar scenes were being repeated throughout the crematorium, which hosted 16 families of Danwon High School students that day. The crematorium's director, Lee Jae-lin, said all the agony was wearing on his employees, whom he said he would send for psychological counseling once the last funeral was completed.
"Bidding farewell to one child is hard enough," Lee said. "How do you bid farewell to 250?"
But much of the space in the tiny shop is devoted to perhaps its most important item: rows and rows of history and math and English-language workbooks for South Korea's grueling university entrance exams. Now, Kim In-jea, the store's co-owner, doubts that he will sell many of the 11th-grade books, and he does not expect even to stock the 12th-grade versions next year.
The students who would have bought them went on a class trip, and most will never return.
Nearly three quarters of Danwon's 11th-graders died two weeks ago in the sinking of a ferry that ranks as one of the country's deadliest disasters in recent decades.
"I've seen these kids grow up. I know each of their faces," said Kim, 57, who lives nearby and said seven of his neighbors had lost their children. "To say that this neighborhood feels empty would be an understatement. This neighborhood feels like a morgue."
The loss has been a blow to the country more commonly known for its economic prowess and pop culture exports. But the tragedy has hit especially hard in Gojan 1, the run-down working-class district surrounding the school. Each of the low-slung brick apartment buildings, residents say, was home to at least three or four students who perished.
Gojan 1 is normally alive with the bustle of teenagers doing what they do - crowding the local Internet cafe to play computer games or heading in chattering groups to Wongojan Public Library to study or to the after-school "cram" classes ubiquitous in South Korea.
Now, residents describe a mournful stillness, punctuated by the seemingly endless arrival of long funeral processions paying their last respects at the children's school. There have been 156 funerals so far. On Sunday alone there were 30, most for the students who went down with the ferry.
The pall has radiated out into Ansan, a port city an hour southwest of Seoul where factories stamp out auto parts and electronics, and where the landscape is dominated by rows of identical apartment blocks. The city of 763,000 people, those who live here say, has been suffocating in grief since the accident apparently claimed the lives of 250 of its children.
Hospitals had been filled with most of the 75 surviving students, until almost all of them went home this week. The hospitals had also been filled with the dead: In South Korea, hospitals often double as funeral homes, and late last week, the rooms for wakes were so crowded with ferry victims that some families had to wait a day for a spot.
At a temporary memorial built in a gym, the victims' photos were displayed on a wall covered with yellow and white flowers. Mourners waited up to 90 minutes in a line that snaked for blocks down a sidewalk and back and forth across the yard of a nearby elementary school. On Tuesday, the memorial moved to a permanent site in a city park.
"An entire grade at a high school was wiped out," said Kim Hee-kyeum, the vice governor of Gyeonggi province, where Ansan is located, and whose provincial government has stepped in to help overwhelmed city officials. "It is not just the 250 lost students. It is their surviving classmates, their parents, friends, neighborhoods, the entire city. It will take a long time to overcome this nightmare."
For now, the funeral processions - caravans of cars and buses led by a black hearse bedecked with flowers - offer the rawest expressions of the community's grief.
One of those processions carried Park Yae-ji, whose relatives remember her as a cheerful, mature 16-year-old who helped her working mother raise her younger brother.
On a drizzly, gray morning this week, Yae-ji returned for the final time to Danwon High School, following a Korean custom in which the dead are taken to the various places where they spent their lives, including homes and workplaces.
Her mother, Eom Ji-young, 37, stoic for much of the funeral, lost her composure at the sight of white chrysanthemums laid on Yae-ji's desk, collapsing in sobs. Of the nearly 30 other desks in the classroom, all but two were decorated with white bouquets, which are given to the dead.
Teachers lined the corridors, heads bowed. Officials said there were so many funerals that the teachers had to stand like that almost all day. As Yae-ji's family left, another hearse was already waiting outside.
The students in other grades have returned to school after more than a week, and have been present for many of the grim last visits.
They are being taught how to cope with the loss of schoolmates by "art psychologists," who use painting, drawing and other art forms to help students express their sorrow, city and provincial officials said. School has not yet restarted for the 11th-graders who remain, including the 13 who chose not to attend the class trip, and officials say they have not set a date to begin.
The bodies of 81 students have not yet been recovered, probably guaranteeing that the school will continue to host grieving families for some time to come.
Yae-ji's mother is relieved, at least, to have her daughter's body back, to give her a proper funeral.
At the wake, a projector showed photographs that spanned her brief life: an infant held by beaming young parents, a small girl with bright eyes sitting barefoot in a go-cart, a young woman with long black hair and fashionable black glasses who had grown to stand shoulder to shoulder with her mother.
Eom, who seemed dazed by her ordeal, pulled out a smartphone at one point to show her final conversation with her daughter, via an instant messaging service. Tenderly stroking the screen with her finger, she reread each of the messages that her daughter had sent from the ferry as it departed from Incheon for an overnight ride to the resort island of Jeju.
"Mom, doing well so don't worry," she wrote. "Good night!"
Eom's reply, "Have a good time," was never opened, a sign that Yae-ji did not turn her phone on again. The ferry sank the next morning.
After visiting Danwon on Sunday, the family began Yae-ji's final journey, driving to a large, factory-like crematorium. After they relinquished the girl's body, Eom crumpled to the floor.
"What am I going to do without my baby?" she cried, clutching her own mother. "Mom, tell me what I should do!"
Even Yae-ji's father, Park Sang-woo, 41, a factory worker and former South Korean special forces member who had kept a firm grip on himself, broke into sobs. The couple's only other child, 10-year-old son Seon-hwan, stroked his father's back.
Similar scenes were being repeated throughout the crematorium, which hosted 16 families of Danwon High School students that day. The crematorium's director, Lee Jae-lin, said all the agony was wearing on his employees, whom he said he would send for psychological counseling once the last funeral was completed.
"Bidding farewell to one child is hard enough," Lee said. "How do you bid farewell to 250?"
© 2014, The New York Times News Service
Track Latest News Live on NDTV.com and get news updates from India and around the world
