"I want to go back!" - to when?

The most famous scene from the movie "Peppermint candy", without doubt, is the scene where YoungHo screams "I want to go back" in front of a fast coming train. This scene is the very first of the journey that we take on the backwards train. Why is YoungHo driven mad to this point of suicide? Where does he want to return to? Well, we are taken back into various points in his life starting from his suicide in 1999 spring: 1999 Spring ("Camera"), 1994 Summer ("Life is Beautiful"), 1987 Spring ("Confession"), 1984 Fall ("Prayer"), 1980 May ("Visit"), 1979 Fall ("Picnic"). As we take the trip back in his life, we also go through societal situations at the time and how they affect YoungHo's life.

So would YoungHo go back twenty years to 1979 fall where the train track 'starts'? What about his fatalistic stare up at the train track? Would he go back to that one time where he was free of his (psychosomatic) leg injury?

The peace and happiness of sentimental YoungHo with Sunim, peppermint candy, and the flowers are set in 1979 fall, when Park Chung-Hee was assassinated. Why 'start' the trip there? Why end the movie there? The death of Park was to many people the hope for a better future, the start of a new society. Retrospectively, though, our attention is drawn to and lingered on YoungHo's fatalistic stare up at the fateful track where he will take his life in 20 years. Would things have been different if he returned back to this point?

What about the fateful night in 1980 May when YoungHo's problems all seem to have started from? The night he is shot in his right leg, forever crippling him. The night he shoots an innocent student on her way back home across the train tracks. The night of GwangJu Massacre. Ever since then, YoungHo's psychosomatic limp comes back to haunt him whenever he needs to face his past and his loss of Sunim/dreams/hopes. Would things have been different if he returned back to this fateful night?

I don't think so. Just as trains can only run in their track, things for him were simply 'fated' to be so. I think that is why Young Ho's screaming in front of the train seems so much more futile. He can't go back, and even if he could, nothing will change the course of the train. At the very beginning of the movie, we are taken into the very first scene of the movie on the backward-train through a long, dark tunnel. But we don't start from one end of the tunnel to the next. We start midway. In the midst of the financial crisis, in the midst of social turmoil, in the midst of the problems. What if we took the train forward? Would we come through to the other side? History shows us that indeed the tunnel ends. (Well... financially at least.) And what had seemed like a never-ending tunnel was in fact much shorter than all the world had expected it to be.