Author recalls Seoul Metro's Green Line as a city within a city in the '90s

Jeffrey Miller's personal essay, published Thursday in The Korea Times, recalls the chaotic vitality of Seoul Metro's Line 2 in the early 1990s, when vendors sold umbrellas and cassette tapes between train cars and the pulse of the city itself seemed to run underground.

For Korean-Americans who came of age during Seoul's rapid modernization, Miller's account documents a vanishing urban culture — one the modern subway's efficient sterility has largely erased.

Miller moved to Seoul's Jamsil neighborhood in 1990, riding Line 2 daily from Sincheon Station — now called Jamsilsaenae Station — to a teaching job in Gangnam, a 10-minute commute, he wrote in The Korea Times. At the time, Seoul Metro ran only four lines: 1, 2, 3 and 4.

The essay describes an underground world thick with commerce. Vendors moved between cars selling umbrellas, socks, cassette tapes and maps to rush-hour commuters pressed shoulder to shoulder. "Back in 1990, the subway was raw, noisy and gloriously alive — a living cross-section of the city itself," Miller said. "Its faces, its voices, the faint mingled scents of a thousand mornings still echo in my memory."

Not all memories were lyrical. Miller recalled once boarding a service train pulled out of regular circulation — an error he made by failing to check the destination sign — and missing a deadline as a result.

The essay's most vivid scene unfolds in August 1992, when 20,000 couples married in a mass ceremony officiated by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church. The newlyweds, representing 131 nations, crowded Sports Complex Station after the ceremony. Miller, then a Line 2 regular, found himself briefly absorbed into the procession — a moment he said paralleled the kind of historic spectacle chronicled in Don DeLillo's novel "Mao II," which also references the 1992 ceremony.

Turning to the present, Miller wrote that today's Seoul Metro is "efficient, clean, modern to the core" — with wider seats, quieter rides and tap-based fare payment. "Yet somewhere in the hum of perfection, something human has gone missing," he said.

Miller, whose novels include "War Remains" and "No Way Out," opens the essay with Ezra Pound's 1913 imagist poem "In a Station of the Metro" — "The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals on a wet, black bough" — a frame for the thousands of faces that appeared and vanished on Seoul's Green Line during his two years beneath the city.