The workplace is crazy, not the workers: In Soo Chun's suicide and memorial

A former Korean custodian, In Soo Chun, self-immolated on Red Square at UW on October 30 last year.

I was only several feet away inside a building while him pouring gasoline all over himself and lit himself alive. My co-worker walked into the office and was completely in shock. He said to me, "there was a man on fire outside." I could not believe it. We walked out and saw helicopters and firetrucks and knew it was probably true. I learned about his story a year after from his coworkers. They said In Soo Chun was a hard-working man but was facing arbitrary transfers from the manager and was eventually terminated by the custodian services two months prior to his death.

There was no explanation from the UW administration or the media except that he was perhaps a "troubled man." His death left a ton of questions for people who witnessed the traumatic event, for his coworkers, for this public institution. The workers and us planned this memorial for him--not only to remember him but also to seek answer to the questions he left for us. Right now, workers on campus are still facing the same workplace harassment and unjust labor practices he faced. We were all wondering, who is gonna be the next among us to go crazy?

Some people walked by and said we were not being respectful for politicizing his death. While i understand that processing death and trauma can be a very private matter, I also believe that it's the individualization of the process that aggravate the degrees of grief and trauma. I've experienced the pain of suicide from someone I was very intimate with. And I wish there were someone to explain to me why people would decide to take their own lives away all of a sudden. I wrapped myself in a limbo and nothing had really resolved during those years. The individual process of grieving almost pushed me to the edge of killing myself, might as well. If I didn't devote my energy into writing, into studying psychology, understanding mental illness, I would not be able to recover from that trauma then.

That's why I think, it was important for us to gather the community, together seek answers for In Soo Chun's death. We would probably never be able to find them, because suicide is such a psychologically complex behavior by its own. But the meaning of this incident for us is concrete. The community that this event brought together was concrete. Even though I did not have chance to get to know this man, I would like to honor him with the actions against injustice on this campus where he chose to die.


In Soo Chun Memorial Video

On Seattle Times