BUSAN, South Korea — It was an autumn day 31 years ago. I was a high school freshman, excited about the field trip. After taking the train to the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula to the harbor city of Mokpo, my classmates and I boarded a ferry en route to Jeju Island, the same place the Sewol was headed on April 16 when it sank, leaving more than 300 people presumed dead, scores of them schoolchildren.

We were given no information about safety or evacuation procedures. I never saw life vests or lifeboats. The black ocean had its gaping maw wide open before us, but danger was not on our minds. We were young and the big ship was nothing more than a huge playground to us.

The banner hanging over the school gate where we gathered for the trip read, “For the Creation of an Advanced Fatherland.” Chun Doo-hwan, the military dictator at the time, proclaimed his intention to make South Korea an advanced nation every time he spoke, and as a result, this slogan was plastered everywhere.

After a long period of hardship under imperialism, civil war and division, the drive to become a modern nation was something akin to a national religion. Most South Koreans, myself included, believed that the manufacturing and selling of products that the West wanted was our ticket to modernity.