Photo: Chris Schalkx. Retrieved from cntraveler.com

Excerpt from cntraveler.com

Jeju Island occupies a lot of real estate in the Korean mindset. Journeys between Jeju and Seoul comprise the world’s busiest flight route. After three August days in Seoul, I was dripping with stress and sweat, and my family was ready to join the passengers at crowded Gimpo airport, almost all of whom seemed to be headed to the same place.

The dialect spoken in Jeju is one hint of the differences between it and the mainland—in fact, non-natives are referred to as “land people.” But while Jeju is self-governing and separated from the rest of Korea by 50 miles of sea, it also forms an important coda to greater Korea, which starts in the north as a brutal dictatorship and ends in the south as a paradise. Jeju’s history is also difficult to ignore. “That’s where my mom’s family escaped to during the war,” a Korean American friend wrote when I told her I was going to Jeju. “Great times!”

The April 3rd Incident, or the Jeju Uprising, an anti-government revolt that began in 1948, took the lives of an estimated 10 percent of the island’s population, sowing great distrust of the government in Seoul. Jeju may resemble a tropical paradise, but that doesn’t mean the 20th century treated it any less brutally than the rest of Korea. This history tends to make islanders tough and rooted in their own reality, à la the flinty fishmongers and conch divers of Our Blues.