When I was a child in South Korea, I remember receiving a bread-shaped piggy bank at school every year throughout my six years of elementary school. We were encouraged to save coins in it to help North Korean children who were starving. As a child, I genuinely believed that every coin I carefully put into that piggy bank would reach those children.
I grew up in the early 2000s, when images of inter-Korean dialogue were frequently shown on television. I remember seeing the leaders of North and South Korea meeting and shaking hands, as well as news about South Korea sending food aid to North Korea. At the time, I naturally believed that this was what the future looked like: we would help each other, move toward peace, and eventually reunify. In fact, South Korea did provide large-scale food assistance during this period, including an agreement in 2000 to provide 300,000 tons of rice and 200,000 tons of corn to North Korea. There were also documented fundraising campaigns in the early 2000s in which South Korean elementary school students collected coins to help North Korean children.
But as I grew older, the political atmosphere changed, and so did my understanding of the relationship between the two Koreas. The simple pattern I had learned as a child, help → peace → reunification, no longer seemed so simple or inevitable. I began to wonder where those carefully collected coins actually went and, more importantly, why reunification had been presented to us as such a natural conclusion.
At least in the education I remember receiving, we were not presented with many different possibilities for the future of the Korean Peninsula. Reunification was treated almost as the obvious destination. There is even a famous Korean children's song called Our Wish, whose central phrase, “Our wish is reunification,” is repeated again and again. For many Korean students of my generation, the idea of reunification was not something we first encountered as adults through politics. It was something repeated to us from childhood.
Last week in my Visual Language class, we learned about protest art. My professor introduced Teeter-Totter Wall, a project by architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello. Their work explores the U.S.-Mexico border by transforming the wall from something that separates people into something that creates an interaction between people on both sides. Something about the work resonated deeply with me. It made me think that I would like to create social commentary in a similarly peaceful and thoughtful way, one that can raise a difficult question without simply attacking someone.
That experience became the starting point for this week's Pattern assignment.
The idea behind my project is:
“Peace cannot be achieved through gaslighting or unrequited love.”
I use the word gaslighting here intentionally and personally, to describe how the future I remember being taught as a child felt less like a question and more like a predetermined answer. Looking back, I wish coexistence had also been presented to us as something we were allowed to imagine: What if North and South Korea remained separate countries but learned to coexist peacefully?
I can understand why reunification occupied such a powerful place in the minds of older generations. The Korean War ended with the 1953 armistice, and for people closer to the division itself, it may have been difficult to imagine that the separation would last for generations. Even the 2000 inter-Korean joint declaration explicitly described peaceful reunification as a shared objective. But I grew up much later, and my experience of that idea is different.
For me, reunification gradually changed from something that seemed inevitable into something I wanted to question.
And that is where pattern became important.
For six years of elementary school, I repeated the same small action: receive a piggy bank, collect coins, and believe that helping would lead toward peace. At the same time, the larger cultural message around me repeated another pattern:
help → peace → reunification → help → peace → reunification
When something is repeated enough, it can begin to feel natural. It can even begin to feel inevitable.