My friend Jiyoung picked me up at my hotel in Seoul on a chilly evening in mid-November 2024 to drive us to Dongducheon, a small city about 15 miles south of the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Contrary to its name, the 160-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide buffer strip between North and South Korea is the most militarized border in the world, threaded with land mines, fences, and surveillance systems.
I climbed into the front seat of her white Chevy Spark, and we snaked our way through the winding streets of Insadong, clogged with tourists and traditional food vendors, into the tangle of rush hour traffic, past a slew of Paris Baguettes and billboard ads for miracle skincare products. It’s easy to forget the violence of the war against this backdrop. South Korea’s global image today is that of an economic and cultural powerhouse, the land of Samsung and Squid Game, K-beauty and K-pop. But if you look beyond the glittering mass-mediated veneer, you can see the war’s imprint everywhere in Korea. It would become glaringly obvious once we got to Dongducheon.
We were on our way to visit the Joint Committee to Stop the Demolition of Dongducheon’s Old STD Management Center, an activist group representing 64 civic organizations. They’d been fighting for two years to preserve one of the facilities that the government operated from the 1960s through the 1990s. The name “STD Management Center” is deceiving, because its purpose was never public health. It was a jail for Korean women who had been accused of infecting American G.I.s, a state apparatus for safeguarding the U.S. military. The city of Dongducheon has plans to develop the area around Soyosan, or Mt. Soyo, for tourism, but the Joint Committee has argued that the building is “a living historical site that vividly demonstrates how state power and militarism oppressed women’s bodies and distorted the lives of an entire city.”
When the U.S. military occupied southern Korea in 1945, they inherited the colonial infrastructure established by the Japanese, including that of the brothel system, but the sex trade for Americans really flourished in the aftermath of the Korean War. The Mutual Defense Treaty Between the United States and the Republic of Korea, ratified in 1954, granted the U.S. “the right to dispose United States land, air and sea forces in and about the territory of the Republic of Korea.” An ecosystem of bars, brothels, nightclubs, and other services exclusively for Americans sprouted up around the 175 U.S. military bases and installations.
South Korea’s global image today is that of an economic and cultural powerhouse, the land of Samsung and Squid Game, K-beauty and K-pop. But if you look beyond the glittering mass-mediated veneer, you can see the war’s imprint everywhere in Korea.
Koreans call these entertainment districts gijichon, (camptowns); American soldiers call them “the Ville.” As many as one out of 10 residents of Gyeonggi Province worked in prostitution, according to sociologist Na Young Lee, many of them local girls and women who had lost one or both parents during the war. What they gained in income, they lost in freedom. After taking an advance from club owners to rent and furnish a room, and after sending earnings to siblings and disabled or widowed parents from their 20 percent commission, gijichon workers accumulated insurmountable debts that shackled them to their workplaces.
The business owners that got rich from this model sent the money they generated to educate their children in Seoul rather than back into the Dongducheon economy. The closure and consolidation of four of the five bases in the 1990s and early 2000s further blighted the city.
Jiyoung and I arrived at our destination and pulled into the Soyosan parking lot. Three middle-aged women, including co-organizers Hee Shin Choi and Jeong-Ae Ahn Kim, greeted us warmly, then walked us past the bathrooms and vending machines to their tent blocking the path to the STD Management Center. They had held vigil here for 78 consecutive days. Inside, two women were preparing tea and snacks as others arrived — about 30 in total would gather that night.
Hee Shin said that she wanted to show me the detention center before it got too dark. Several members of the group filed out behind Jiyoung and me, and we turned on our flashlights as we followed Hee Shin up the slope. The hillside was overgrown and slightly rocky, and my footing was precarious in the dwindling twilight. Soon, the crumbling, graffiti-covered building came into view. When it first opened in 1973, it was surrounded by such thick forest that passersby couldn’t see the structure. It was colloquially known as the Monkey House, named after the way in which the women screeched to get out, the way in which they resembled monkeys because their bodies went limp and their arms hung down by their sides after they got powerful drug injections.
As Katharine Moon’s groundbreaking book Sex Among Allies shows, Park Chung Hee’s 1961-1979 military dictatorship took a more active role in regulating the sex industry for U.S. troops in Korea by policing the women whom the ROK government licensed as “entertainment hostesses.” They created the STD Control Centers in response to the U.S. military’s demands to curb the rampant infection rate among American troops, deploying both Korean and U.S. military police to round up the women for forced testing.
The women who died from penicillin overdoses were buried in a nearby cemetery for ireum eopneun saram, the “people with no names.”
During the years that the STD Control Centers operated, high-ranking U.S. military officials also exerted pressure on local businesses to control their employees. The U.S. Army’s deputy commander of installations, for example, wrote letters to club owners in Dongducheon in which he named and blamed the women, as if they were vectors of disease and not people who had first been infected by U.S. service members.
It has been determined by the Civil-Military Operations Divisions that between 4 April and 2 May 1987, a total of 7 cases of venereal disease among US soldiers originated in your establishment … The women involved were: …
The deputy commander then threatened disciplinary action against the club owner if the “condition [was] not corrected … within 30 days,” and the letter was copied to local officials, including the mayor of Dongducheon and the director of the Soyosan V.D. Control Center, a.k.a. the Monkey House.
Once inside the Monkey House, health officials administered pelvic exams, tested for infection, and injected the women with antibiotics regardless of whether they consented, were allergic to the medicine, or in fact worked as “entertainment hostesses” in the bars and brothels that served the U.S. military. The women who died from penicillin overdoses were buried in a nearby cemetery for ireum eopneun saram, the “people with no names.” Hee Shin explained that many gijichon workers had used fake I.D.s because they were underage or hiding the source of their income from their families.
The egregious human rights abuses of “STD control,” especially the practices employed in this center, were the most damning evidence in a 2022 South Korean Supreme Court ruling that determined that the government had acted as a pimp for the U.S. military, according to Jeong-Ae, who led the class action lawsuit. The 40 such facilities operating throughout the country gradually closed in the 1990s and early 2000s, as the demography and geography of the sex industry for Americans changed. All of them were eventually demolished, except for this one, the last material evidence of the U.S.-ROK alliance’s systematic abuse of women and girls.
Although I’d seen photos of the building in newspapers, it looked much more eerie in person, illuminated by flashlights and surrounded by concertina wire. When did they put this up? Hee Shin asked about the wire. It hadn’t been there the last time she came, just a few days ago. A man from our group tried to push down a section of it with his foot so we could climb over it, and a chorus of women’s voices called out “Joshim haeyo! Be careful!” It wasn’t worth the risk.
If you ask a city official about it, I imagine they would tell you that the barrier was erected as a public safety measure, because the dilapidated building is unsafe to occupy, but my gut feeling is that its real purpose is to stop the flow of witnesses. As with the term “STD Control Center,” “public safety” hides the truth about what went on within these walls.
Some of the organizers and committee members hail from elsewhere but are deeply committed to the project’s mission, said Hee Shin, who has lived her whole life in Dongducheon. Others, like herself, have a personal stake in preservation. “For a long time, it felt as though we were forced to feel ashamed of living here … The women I know, who are now elderly grandmothers, were simply good-hearted people who lived fiercely during those difficult times,” she said. “The center must become a space where the stories of these women are told.”
As of this writing, it is day 611 of the encampment, a testament to the fighting spirit of the people I met in Dongducheon. Their demands to preserve the building are part of a struggle that reaches more than 30 years into the past. Last October, they commemorated the thirty-third anniversary of the death of Yun Geum-i, a gijichon woman murdered by an American soldier. Her slaying tapped into a collective rage over the structural violence of U.S. military domination, and ignited a movement—the gijichon women’s movement—that, decade by decade, has sought accountability for abuses perpetrated in the name of national security.
In the decade after Yun’s murder, former gijichon women began to speak publicly about their experiences; in the decade after that, they filed lawsuits against the government; and in this decade, they have won a Supreme Court case against the ROK. The majority of South Koreans still look upon the women with shame, or won’t look at them at all, but the gijichon women have refused to go back into hiding — last year, they filed a lawsuit against the U.S. military. The fight over the Monkey House has “entered a new phase,” according to the South Korean news media. President Lee Jae Myung has said that “preservation is desirable,” the nation’s Ministry of Gender Equality and Family has issued a formal apology to the former gijichon women, and city officials are in talks with the Joint Committee to come to a resolution.
In the meantime, I wait for a victory. I imagine a future in which the Monkey House is not just a reminder of Dongducheon’s inglorious past, but a monument to the slain women who worked under false identities to avoid their family’s shame, to the girls whose souls we can honor even if we don’t know their names, to the grandmothers who have been brave enough to stand up to the most powerful military in the world, to the people who show up day after day, decade after decade, so that all of us can live in the light.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War and Haunting the Korean Diaspora. She is currently a professor of Sociology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and a New America ASU Future Security Fellow.
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