In the midday sunlight of upstate New York, I had no way of knowing how cold the night of December 3, 2024, was in South Korea, how dark and long it had been. With a fourteen-hour time difference, martial law in South Korea felt incomprehensible to me, like seeing the future of my homeland. The words martial law, heard while having dinner, communicated something she couldn’t believe without seeing with her own eyes. In the October Restoration of 1972, former President Chung-hee Park imposed martial law to replace democracy with authoritarian rule in South Korea. In 1980, the Gwangju Uprising erupted in resistance to Doo-hwan Chun’s coup and the imposition of martial law, leading to mass killings.