Goyang City, Pyeongnudo

created: 2024.05.01. 11:08 · modified: 2024.05.02. 06:53 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

The other day, my parents told me something interesting, though I can’t remember what we were talking about when it came up: the South Jeolla Provincial Office used to be in Gwangju. I don’t remember whether they were simply telling me where it had once been or wondering whether it was still there, but either way, it surprised me. For as long as I’ve been alive, Gwangju has been a metropolitan city—a top-level local government on par with South Jeolla Province. And looking further back, it seemed more natural for the South and North Jeolla provincial offices to be in Naju or Jeonju, the cities that gave Jeolla its name. But once I thought about it, Gwangju had grown larger than either Jeonju or Naju in modern times, which was presumably why it became a metropolitan city in its own right. In that case, it made sense for the South Jeolla Provincial Office to have been there until just before Gwangju’s elevation.

My parents were right: the South Jeolla Provincial Office used to be in Gwangju, and is now in Muan. Similar things happened elsewhere. I learned that, apart from Incheon and Ulsan, all four of the other metropolitan cities had once housed the provincial offices of the provinces they geographically belonged to. After those cities were elevated, each office moved to another city within its province. It’s a natural progression, but to me it sounded as strange as hearing that the Gyeonggi Provincial Office had once been in Seoul. My parents said my reaction made them feel the generation gap. Haha.

Changes to administrative boundaries are still happening today, and they might make me feel that same distance when I talk to future generations. There have been changes in my lifetime, too, though the only one affecting a place I lived was the division of Ilsan-gu in Goyang into Ilsandong-gu and Ilsanseo-gu. It was listed on the copy of my resident registration record when I got one.

That’s minor, though. A much bigger change may be just around the corner: the creation of Northern Gyeonggi Province. The proposal is to split Gyeonggi Province in two, keeping the name Gyeonggi Province for the south and establishing a new province in the north. Given Gyeonggi’s population and the way the megacity of Seoul divides it, the proposal doesn’t seem all that strange. The problem is the name. “Northern Gyeonggi Province,” or, in full, “Northern Gyeonggi Special Self-Governing Province,” is a provisional name and would be hard to make official: its two-syllable abbreviation would be indistinguishable from that of North Gyeongsang Province. So a naming contest was held, and the results came out today to considerable controversy. The grand-prize winner was “Pyeonghwanuri Special Self-Governing Province.” Just Google that name and you’ll find plenty of complaints, so I won’t go into the controversy here.

Even when a website or app’s UI changes for the better, you can’t help resisting it at first. The names of administrative regions are so familiar that I doubt the public would have liked any replacement. Some said a name made from the first syllables of major cities, as other provinces were named, would have gone over reasonably well. But take the two largest cities in Northern Gyeonggi, Goyang and Namyangju, and you get… Gonam-si? That would have sounded just as unfamiliar.

Even allowing for that, I think this one will be hard to get used to. Pyeonghwanuri Special Self-Governing Province—or Pyeongnudo for short. My hometown would be Goyang City, Pyeongnudo? Hahaha, there’s something really funny about that.

If the trouble with Northern Gyeonggi is that its abbreviation overlaps with North Gyeongsang, maybe we could keep “Gyeonggi” and use a different way to distinguish the two. What if we used “upper” and “lower” instead of “north” and “south”? Wait… shorten “Upper Gyeonggi Province” in Korean and you get Gyeongsang-do again. Would people in the Southern Hemisphere object to the idea that north is “up”? If we called them Gyeonggi Province One and Gyeonggi Province Two, there’d be a dispute over which got to be number one, wouldn’t there? Or we could drop the “Gyeong” from both names and keep only “Gi” (畿), which already means the region around the capital: Southern Gi Province and Northern Gi Province? Would abandoning the name Gyeonggi on both sides incur too great an administrative cost? It’s clearly not an easy problem.

The contest results don’t seem to have settled the name definitively, and it looks like it could still be changed. Whatever name they choose, we’ll go through a period of resistance and eventually get used to it. One day, someone will look at me wide-eyed and ask, “Gyeonggi Province and XX Province used to be one province?”

Talking about my hometown brings something else to mind.

Some cities age with an old-world charm; others simply grow old for lack of any alternative. Some are quickly torn down and remade into new cities.

I think everyone has at least a small wish for their hometown, if no other city, to keep its old appearance for a long time. My hometown of Ilsan is now over thirty years old, and there has long been talk of rebuilding or remodeling its apartment complexes. Gangseon Village Complex 14, where I lived, was reportedly the first in Goyang to receive approval to establish a remodeling association, and it had selected a contractor by early last year. Progress seems to have slowed since then amid disputes over residents’ contributions and other issues, but the sense is that remodeling or rebuilding will happen eventually.

I remember my childhood very happily, and I think living in Ilsan was a big part of that. An apartment complex of just the right size and age; our ground-floor home with its little flower bed. A school five minutes away on foot, and Lake Park right nearby, where even as a small child I could go by myself because I loved plants and trees.

Leaving that Ilsan behind and moving to Seoul when I started middle school was emotionally hard at first. I soon adjusted to Seoul, but the happy memories stayed with me. Once I was in high school and old enough to travel that far on my own, I went back to Ilsan several times, either early on the day I had to return to school* or during vacation. After I got my driver’s license, I started driving there in my parents’ car. Ilsan is still one of my favorite places to drive.

*During the school term, our high school let students leave for a weekend only once a month. We called the Sunday when we returned to school “return-to-school day.”

Honestly, I’ll be very sad if our apartment complex in Ilsan changes. But what can I do? I have to accept the passage of time. Until then, I’ll visit more often and take in the sight of it as much as I can.