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For the vanishing number of Jeju locals who survived the atrocities and are still alive today, the April 3 Incident is a personal tragedy that could not be spoken about in public for decades, for fear of government reprisal. When Jeju writer Hyun Ki Young, who lived through the events, published a fictionalized account in 1979, he was imprisoned and tortured for three days. 
 
The truth about the April 3 Incident—and of similar massacres carried out in the name of democracy before and during the Korean War—would be suppressed for sixty years by successive South Korean regimes, which did not want to jeopardize the country’s legitimacy or its relationship with the United States, regarded by many Koreans as some sort of patron saint. 
 
It’s hard to keep secrets, though, when the dead refuse to stay buried. In 1992, the remains of ten bodies—six men, three women and one child—were found in Darangshi Cave. According to an elderly eye-witness, they had been smoked to death by a deliberate fire, set by zealous anti-Communists.
 
The discovery of Darangshi Cave proved to be a turning point, pulling back the veil on a long-hidden chapter of the Korean War. Shortly after its discovery, the cave was sealed by the South Korean government, which quietly paid for the cremation of its victims. In 2006, in response to pressure from activists and researchers, President Roh Moo Hyun would issue a formal apology for the Korean government’s role in the atrocities. 
 
In 1948, however, South Korea hardly had a military to speak of, having been so recently freed from Japan’s decades-long occupation in 1945. Except for the scuttled remains of that occupation, the impoverished nation owned no weapons, tanks, bombs, or war planes, much less the means to produce them on short notice. The country was occupied by two foreign powers, the US in the South and the USSR in the North. How was such a fledgling military able to target its own people with such ruthless force? 

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As a spectacle, the kut was beautiful and deeply moving. As a spiritual experience, it was unsettling and uncanny—as one would expect from a ceremony which delivers messages from beings who no longer exist in this dimension. Anyone tempted to dismiss the kut as an expensive and elaborate con should experience one first. Viewing everything through a rational and dualistic perspective can be quite a limiting experience, indeed.
 
After the kut, I visited Jeju eight more times for research. With every trip, I was able to gather more details and stories about Jeju and about the April 3 Incident. I also learned more about native Korean spirituality, in particular about shamanism. For whatever reason, Korea—more specifically, the Korean psyche—has long provided fertile grounds for religion. Most of the major transplanted spiritual systems have flourished on the Korean peninsula, from the Buddhism that arrived from India in the fourth century to the Chinese Confucianism that rose to favor during the Joseon Period, to the European Christianity that entered the Hermit Kingdom in the late 1800s. Undergirding all these imports, like an unshakable foundation, is Korean shamanism (muism), which has colored every transplanted belief system with unmistakably Korean hues. 
 
Put simply, shamanism is a spiritual practice in which its practitioners deliberately enter altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with entities in other worlds or dimensions—spirits, gods, or deceased ancestors. While some shamans use mind-altering substances, others use drum beat, meditation or dance to enter the ecstatic trance-state where such communion becomes possible. Korea is one of a handful of contemporary cultures where shamanism is not only indigenous, but has been continuously practiced since before the country became a modern nation, thousands of years ago. 
 
In addition to reading widely on the subject, I took how-to workshops on shamanism with anthropologist, author, and shamanic researcher Hank Wesselman at the Esalen Institute. While there are general similarities in the way shamanism is approached around world, the practice resists attempts to harden it into orthodoxy. The more I learned about shamanism, the deeper my respect grew for the genuine advocates of this spiritual practice. Of course, there are fake shamans, just as there are fakes in every spiritual tradition. According to Professor Wesselman, the test to determine whether a shaman’s work is genuine is quite simple: Does it produce results? Is it miraculous?
 
Every encounter I’ve had with a genuine shaman has easily passed that test.

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On September 28, 1945, the United States established a military government in Korea. The Japanese flag was pulled down and replaced by an American one. Lieutenant General John R. Hodge of the US Armed Forces was named the Lieutenant Governor General of Korea. 

Major Thurman Stout would be appointed Chief Administrator of Jeju Island. Stout appointed law, intelligence, public affairs, property management, and medical officers, who all reported to him. Many of his appointees were former Japanese collaborators, loathed and distrusted by locals.
 
On March 1, 1947, police forces under direct orders of the US Military Government opened fire on a Jeju crowd that had begun booing because a child was kicked by a mounted policeman’s horse. Six people were killed by these shots, including a pregnant woman and a child. On March 10, ninety-five percent of the workers in Jeju joined a strike to protest the shootings. Colonel James Casteel, who was dispatched to investigate the incident, determined as a result that “ninety percent of Jeju residents have a leftist hue to them.”
 
Two thousand and five hundred Jeju residents were jailed for participating in the strike, most of them sentenced without due process. Some detainees were even tortured to death. Mobilized by this gross miscarriage of justice, the Jeju Chapter of the South Korean Labor Party, a Communist group, organized an attack on police stations on April 3, 1948, protesting the strong-arm tactics of the US government. 
 
In response, the US military would fortify Jeju with additional troops and ships, while producing a propaganda film called “May Day on Cheju-Do.” A nonsensical, disjointed montage, the black-and-white clip opens with a shot of an American plane, cuts to a burning village, and shows soldiers setting up machine guns on the perimeter of a village. Images of a dead woman are interspersed with footage of stern American soldiers, villagers examining makeshift spears, scared Korean children, and huge American war ships. The film closes with overhead footage of a burning village.
 
The US offered this film as “proof” that Communist insurgents were swarming over Jeju and had burned down a village—despite the findings of Nationalist General Kim Ik Rahl, who discovered that the arson had been committed by an extreme right-wing youth group. The US Counter Intelligence Corps ignored General Kim’s findings and ordered the Korean constabulary forces to arrest as many suspects as possible. General Kim was dismissed from his post and replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Pak Chin-Kyung, who arrested 4,000 citizens in six weeks, many of whom would be tortured or executed without trial. Pak would later be shot by a subordinate on June 18, 1948.
 
Tensions on Jeju were running high that summer, as it became clear that the US, with UN backing, would force South Korea to hold elections on May 10, despite the objections of Korea’s top political leaders—with the notable exception of Rhee Syng Man—who rightly feared that a separate election would destroy their chances for reunification. On May 10, many Jeju residents fled to Mt. Halla to hide rather than vote in what they considered to be rigged elections. The elections on Jeju were declared null and void. Despite similarly low voter turnout in many parts of South Korea, Rhee Syng Man would be declared president of South Korea on July 20, 1948.
 
Irritated by the unruly populace, the US government sent Colonel Rothwell Brown, commander of the 20th regiment, to Jeju to commence crackdown operations. On November 17, 1948, President Rhee Syng Man would declare martial law on Jeju, while a four-month “scorched earth strategy” was launched against civilian targets. As similar waves of violence washed over other parts of South Korea, a group of Communist sympathizers would go to North Korea to beg for aid against this unwarranted aggression.
 
All of these military exercises preceded the official start of the Korean War in 1950, when, aided by China, North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel to occupy Seoul. The standard textbook explanation for the Korean War is that the conflict started because of that unanticipated and unprovoked invasion. It is interesting to compare the different names each side has for that conflict. In the US, the Korean War is nicknamed The Forgotten War. In South Korea, it is called Six-Two-Five, the day after North Korean’s invasion of Seoul. North Korea calls it The Fatherland Liberation War, which started with their entry into Seoul to capture “bandit traitor” Rhee Syng Man. The Chinese, on their part, call the conflict, “The War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.”
 
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The United States has never acknowledged its role as one of the primary architects behind the April 3 Incident. Whether through carelessness, ignorance, apathy, or a deadly combination thereof, the US Military Government in Korea not only aided and abetted war crimes against the people of Jeju, but was directly responsible for them, as operational control of the Korean constabulary forces all lay with the US Military. 
 
The case against the US will be evident to any English-speaker who visits the Jeju Peace Park Monument. The information presented at the museum requires several visits to digest. A myriad of displays sets the historical context and draws out the timelines for the various events that took place on Jeju prior to the Korean War. In a letter to President Rhee Syng-man, Brigadier General William L. Roberts, chief of the US military advisory group that issued orders to the Korean constabulary, praised the actions of 9th Regiment Commander Song You-chan, who spearheaded the scorched-earth operation, “Song displayed excellent powers of command.”
 
Starting in November 1948, sleepy, backwater Jeju Island would serve as the rehearsal ground for the same scorched-earth strategy that the US would use in its devastation of North Korea two years later and in Vietnam twenty years later. Designed to prevent the enemy from gaining access to anything useful, the strategy is akin to throwing a grenade onto an anthill to exterminate the ants. In the case of Jeju, more than 25,000 civilians would be killed in the effort to rout a rag-tag, poorly armed group of some 500 insurgents—many of whom only joined the rebellion after their homes had been burned and their families killed. In the US, napalm conjures images of terrified Vietnamese children running naked from burning villages. However, it was in Japan and on the Korean Peninsula that the US first tested and extensively deployed that fiery weapon of terror, invented by Harvard chemists. More than 16,000 tons of napalm were dropped on Japan, while the Korean Peninsula received more than 32,000 tons. (Vietnam, a staggering amount, almost 400,000 tons). Winston Churchill would denounce the indiscriminate American use of napalm, which severely burnt and asphyxiated its human victims, as “very cruel.”
 
The strategy of the US military on Jeju, rubber-stamped by President Rhee Syng Man, lacked any shred of moral nuance: Destroy all suspected Communist enclaves and anyone who could aid and abet them. Mountain villagers were dubbed “guerilla insurgents” as people were forcibly removed from their homes. Anyone found more than five kilometres from the coastline was shot. Residents of seaside villages were forced to build fortifications that reached a combined length of 150 kilometres. Thirty-nine thousand homes on Jeju were destroyed. A total of 109 villages, the bulk of them on Mt. Halla, were torched or fire-bombed. These “Vanished Villages,” as they are now known, were erased from memory. They simply ceased to exist.
 
In recognition of Jeju’s unique heritage and history, the island was granted some measure of political autonomy in 2006. Jeju Island is the Republic of Korea’s only “Special Self-Governing Province,” with different visa requirements and business regulations from the rest of the country. Almost 200 daily flights occur between Jeju Airport and Seoul’s Gimpo Airport, the world’s busiest air route. More than 15 million tourists visited Jeju in 2019. Most of them go for the scenery, knowing nothing of the innocent blood that was spilled on that landscape.

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When I first began working on this story, my greatest concern was whether I possessed enough authority to tell it. How could I, a Korean-American raised in America, who had spent only one year of infancy in Korea, tell a story about historical events that experts on the subject have devoted entire careers to untangling?
 
I tried to allay my concerns by studying as much as I could about Korean history. I took courses in shamanism and learned to scuba dive, so that I could witness firsthand the underwater world of the haenyeo. I even became more Korean in my everyday life, studying the language, cooking the food, and immersing myself in the culture that was my birthright. 
 
Still, despite more than three years of intensive research, I knew I could never claim to be truly and authentically Korean. Who was I to presume that I could tell this tale, which insisted on being told? It is a distinctly Asian trait, to wonder if one is worthy of a task. Westerners rarely seem troubled by such anxiety, especially in the stories they freely authorize themselves to tell. In addition to concerns about cultural appropriation (was I Korean enough?), I worried about whether my writing was culturally appropriate (was the story Korean enough?). Then there was the question of audience. Who did this story belong to? Who was the intended audience? The victims, who needed to be remembered? Or the living, who needed to know? 
 
One of the monks I interviewed on my first visit, Jin Oo of Buphwasa Temple, helped me answer those questions with some unsolicited writing advice. When I revealed that I was working on a novel in English based on the 4.3 Incident, he told me not to let my assumptions get in the way of the truth. Let Jeju speak for herself, he advised. Listen to what Jeju has to tell you. 
 
I had no idea what he meant at the time, but with each visit to Jeju, his cryptic message began to make more sense. Years of research and study were required to correct the biases that originally distorted my story in subtle ways. Raised in America by parents who refused to talk about their war trauma, I had been schooled and steeped in myths about the land of the free and the home of the brave. The USA always saved the day, whether from the evils of Communism or from some other form of tyranny. When I first learned about the appalling actions of the US Military Government during the April 3 Incident, the truth was hard to digest. But as I dug deeper, I learned that the US military’s behavior on Jeju wasn’t out of the ordinary at all. In fact, it followed an all-too-familiar playbook, especially in the Pacific, one that has been repeated time and again in different parts of the world. 
 
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When I began this story, I was writing for myself, to understand what happened. By the time I finished, I understood that the story needed to be shared. As a writer, I had to approach this task with humility, sincerity, and a sense of deep responsibility. To that end, I apologize for any errors in the way I’ve portrayed the characters and their historical circumstances. I have tried my best not to insert any modern or Western assumptions into the minds of my Korean characters. I have also tried to be as accurate as possible in the depiction of actual historical events and real people.
 
Considered by some linguists to be a language of its own, the Jeju dialect is on the verge of extinction. While I have incorporated Jeju expressions and terms whenever possible, I have also used Korean words from the mainland. Even in 1948 Jeju islanders were used to mixing mainland Korean with their island’s private tongue, though not to the extent practiced today. 
 
Creative license was exercised, of course, mostly for the scenery. The massacre that caused the mountain to bleed—called Arirang Gekeo by locals--most likely took place at a village called Sang Hyo Ri. I changed the setting of that massacre to the fictitious “Cloud House Farm,” locating it near the scenic Yeongshil Pass and the 500 Generals. Junja’s village, Lonely Rock Village, lies below that pass, on one of Jeju’s most spectacular stretches of coastline. A popular setting in many Korean dramas, Lonely Rock is one of my favorite places to take a walk. 
 
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My first meeting with the Jeju shaman proved eerily prophetic on several fronts. I would be moving to another country, she said, a prediction that would be repeated by an American clairvoyant a couple months later and realized in January 2017, when my family and I emigrated to New Zealand.  The shaman also warned me that multiple deaths were forthcoming, in a short period of time, a prediction that proved devastatingly true. As her final piece of advice, she cautioned me to be circumspect with my words. Don’t be too direct with the truth, she said. Be roundabout in how you speak. She gestured with her hands, curving her palms around an invisible cup.
 
As if to illustrate what she meant, the Jeju shaman never told me that her own death was imminent. Lee Young Sook, Jeju native and shaman, passed away two years after our first meeting. By that time, I was calling her Imo, or Auntie.

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Shortly before my father died, I asked him about his childhood on Jeju. While I had always known that my father spent part of his childhood on the island before moving to Seoul, I had only recently learned from his sister that they lived there during the April 3 Incident. Despite their impoverished circumstances, my father had always described Jeju as one of the happiest times of his life. 
 
As he sat in bed, I told him about the story I was working on and about everything I had learned. Had he witnessed or heard anything while he was an 11-year-old school boy?
 
My father’s face remained blank at first, as if he didn’t understand what I was saying. Then his face crumpled, as if I had struck him. He shook his head, covering his face with his hands as he began to sob. I couldn’t tell whether he didn’t want to know or if he didn’t want to remember. He would continue weeping until he finally fell asleep. Two weeks later, he would pass, in the presence of Buddhist caretakers, loving friends, and myself, at Enso House on Whidbey Island, Washington.