Korea (11 page)

The supreme orders of classification are included in a trinity known as the Objects and Sites with Historic and Artistic Value. The first of these are the
kukbo
, the National Treasures, of which at last count there were 206—castles, palaces, Buddhas, tombs and memorials, all of the very best quality and the most venerable antiquity. Next, rather more prosaic sounding, are the
pomul
, the Treasured Things, of which there were 734 listed in the 1958 reclassification—old village guardian stones, pots and pans of various dynasties and kingdoms, and temple bells and celadon vases. Third, there are the
sajok
, the Historic Sites—battlefields (such as where Admiral Yi was killed at Noryangjin), landing places (such as where MacArthur came ashore at Inchon), the grounds of old palace complexes, and long-ruined temples.

Below this esteemed series come five lesser levels. There are 5 Scenic Sites; there are 120 items officially designated as Folklore Material; there are 12 Historic Places of Beauty; and there are 72 Intangible Cultural Assets and Living National Treasures—my own favourite classification, which includes aged but nonetheless indisputably living men like Mr Kim Tong-yon, who, in a ‘culturally intangible’ way, makes bamboo baskets in Tamyang town. He has a number, which he will show you on request, and he is delighted to have been informed that he cannot be done away with (because he is an Intangible Cultural Asset) except on the specific instructions of the government. (Mr Kim’s baskets
belong later in the story: they are remarkably pretty and complicated affairs, which he has been making for sixty years. He doubtless deserves his status and the popular adulation it brings in its train.)

The final category, which brings the total number of cultural assets in Korea to well over a thousand, is the one that holds the 235 Natural Protected Resources. Trees, flowers, birds and wild animals (of which there are precious few in Korea, for reasons I will discuss later) are on the list in huge numbers, and so is one domesticated animal—the
Chindo-kae
.

To the stranger who happens across one of the many breeding kennels on Chindo, the Chindo dog may just seem a pretty little animal, a feisty, protective little ball of fur and teeth. But it would be unwise to forget that it is Natural Protected Resource Number 225, and thus subject to the rigours of the law. In order to protect the dog from itself (which means, of course, from its ever forging meaningful relationships with dogs of less impeccable family backgrounds and with sullied gene pools) and to protect it from Koreans (who, as like as not, would boil the dog up in a stew and serve it with onions and garlic—of which, too, more later), one is expressly forbidden to take any dog off the island.

The Chindo Great Bridge (built by Hyundai, a small-scale version of that mighty Korean-built bridge that links Penang Island with the Malaysian mainland) has armed guards at both ends. Their ostensible purpose is to prevent any North Korean spies getting on or off the island, but when they open the boot of your car and peer into the boxes on the back seat, they’ll tell you with a grin that they are actually out hunting for contraband
Chindo-kae
, and woe betide you if you happen to have smuggled one out. I had once entertained a pleasant fantasy of walking the length of Korea with a little off-white dog by my side and was saddened to learn of the restriction and that my dream was not to be.

We arrived at Mokpo with a rush. The ferryboat rounded a headland, scattered some small fishing boats, bumped through a
white-capped tide race, and there, suddenly, like a new slide flashed onto the screen, was the town, a cluster of houses ranged at the base of a steep little mountain. It looked to me exactly like a little Greenland town called Sükkertoppen, a dusting of sugary white crystals on the hill, a village of little dockyard cranes and bobbing masts down at sea level, a fresco of small old houses hugging the contours in between. I half expected to see Greenland fishermen—indeed, the Koreans were none too different in appearance, and those in oilskins looked, at first glance, as though they could well do their fishing in Disko Bay or the Davis Strait. An anthropologist could have made more of the connection; for me it simply offered a powerful blast of déjà vu.

Seagulls mewed and wheeled in the sky above the nets; the streets were lined with small fish tanks from which old women sold the smaller fry from the boats; the ground, when I stepped off the ferry, was slippery with fish oil and guts and scales. The whole place smelled of cold halibut oil and
yontan
smoke, and there was a gritty dust in the wind. I snapped on my pack, said my farewells to the honeymoon couple—the poor girl could barely keep her eyes open—and strode off to the north.

The town thinned out, and away from the sea and out of the wind it grew pleasantly warm. The sun came out, lighting up the meadows and the little lakes, putting everyone in a good mood. Koreans are very quick to change their moods, I had always found (dangerously quick, one might say in other circumstances); today they waved and smiled at me, and every car that passed, and particularly every bus, honked its horn, gave the double-finger V-for-victory sign—the Korean equivalent of thumbs-up—and cheered at my strange but apparently praiseworthy effort. Quite a few cars going the same way stopped and offered me a lift. I learned the polite rote: ‘
Gwen chan sumnida!
’ I would wave back (No thanks!), ‘
Panmunjom kkaji goro kamnida
’ (I prefer to walk all the way to Panmunjom). And they would whistle with amazement, ‘
Panmunjom, chong mal?!
’ and offer sweets and chocolate, anything they had, to help me on my way. (The gift that came most often was a small can of mandarin orange juice called Sac
Sac, a most peculiar drink full of the uncrushed sacs of juice that the drivers seemed to think would most refresh a perspiring
yangnom
, as the Koreans rather impolitely call a Westerner. I became positively addicted to the stuff as the journey progressed.) That day, in the sunshine, it seemed that there were no more hospitable people on earth.

I was making for a village called Illo, and for a Korean family that my friend Oh Kyoung-sook had said were distant friends of hers and would be sure to put up a stranger for the night. I was a little apprehensive: Father McGlinchey had also given me a string of Irish addresses, of people he knew in the province of Chollanam-do, where I would be walking for the next few days. ‘Cholla people have the reputation of being absolute
bastards
,’ he had said. ‘They say the Cholla people are lazy, parochial and boring—and not at all hospitable either. I don’t say that, other Koreans do. See if you like them. I always find them okay, although they absolutely hate the government in Seoul. They’re a bolshy lot, as far as the government is concerned. But don’t let me put you off. If you like them, fine. If not, have these addresses. They’ll look after you, for sure.’

But, tempting as it might have been to spend time with the Irish, I did actually want to meet Cholla people, obstinate and inhospitable though they might well be. So I dug out the address of Mr Kim Jung Jin and quickened my pace a little to be sure of arriving well before dark.

The two Cholla provinces are the rice centres of Korea, and here, on this warm, early spring day, the farmers were out ploughing or planting the paddy. Last year’s stalks peeked above the water like thousands of moustaches neatly trimmed by the autumn harvesters. This year’s new plants—transplanted from smaller seedling beds—were being dibbled into the thick mud by small posses of women, each woman bent double, her skirts hitched up around her waist, her feet and legs quite bare, and a straw hat jammed on her head to protect her from the glare of the sun. The men—bare armed, bare legged and splattered with mud—worked the ploughs, the oxen pulling the single share of
fire-hardened wood and the new earth almost bursting from beneath the old with exuberant ease. Now that the last frosts had gone, the earth seemed to
need
to be worked—maybe it was the energy and might of the oxen, maybe it was the eagerness of the farmers to get on with their growing season—but everything here seemed to be happening so fast, so enthusiastically. In other countries where I had seen people plant and harvest rice—India, northern Luzon, Burma, China—there was always a sense of laziness to the rhythm, a comfortable sense of languor, as though everyone knew the sun and rain would do the trick, the rice would grow, the granaries would fill, and no hurry was required. Here in Chollanam-do, there was a factorylike urgency to it all: Pull that plough! Turn that wheel! Plant that seedling! Dig that furrow! I found it almost exhausting to watch.

I had been on National Route Number I ever since I left Mokpo, but now, as the sun began to slant down behind the poplars on my left, I had to leave it for the country road that my map said went to Illo. I crossed the railway line a couple of times—smart-looking diesel trains hurtled past me, the blue one bound for local destinations, the red-and-white ones bound for the big cities of the North. (National Route I, which I planned to follow intermittently, led all the way to Seoul and beyond, to Pyongyang and the Manchurian border. Three hundred miles north of where I stood, at this junction with the lesser road, it would be cut by a pair of fences, the most impregnable and most heavily defended in the world.)

It was late afternoon when I reached the turning to Illo Town. Two motorcycle policemen were waiting there, directing traffic to stop for a caravan of long black limousines that shot along the highway and turned up to a government building on the skyline. Local government leaders, the police explained. I asked directions to Saint Gertrude’s Church, beside which Mr Kim and his family were said to live. The usual enquiry: Was I American? No, English, and a broad beam spread across the policeman’s face. ‘I am take you,’ he said with immense pride, and pointed to his pillion seat. It was an order rather than an offer. I got aboard
with some difficulty; my pack weighed innumerable pounds and my standing on one leg trying to wrestle the other over the back of the motorcycle turned into a performance that would have won me a place in the Royal Ballet. But eventually I was on, whereupon the policeman turned on his blue flashing light and we roared off down into town, scattering people and chickens on every side.

I found the house—small, two-storeyed, with a bright blue roof and a balcony. It was deserted and neighbours pointed to the number seven on my wristwatch; by seven, it seemed clear, the Kims would arrive home. There was nothing for it but to wait, and so I contented myself sitting on the steps of the nearby church, eating strawberries in the early evening sun and watching two middle-aged Korean men playing tennis. They were, I soon realized, excellent players. They hit hard and true, and their brown arms and legs, muscles taut as hawser wire, gleamed with fine sweat. They never said a word to each other. They just grunted with their exertion as they played, machinelike in their accuracy and speed, absolutely matched in their excellence. I became more fascinated as their game went on, rally after rally, never a ball lost or a shot missed, the net unmoved, the fault lines untouched, exchange after exchange after exchange. Their excellence was hypnotic—boring even, since there were no spectacular errors or misjudgements to upset the balance of their play.

Having seen the rice planters working so hard earlier in the day, and now watching these tennis players competing in so deadly a fashion and with such silent, bloodless determination, I found myself thinking—tangential though the thought might at first seem—about the extraordinary success of every one of Korea’s recent ambitions. How triumphant the country had become from utter ruin in the 1950s to the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 1980s! And much of that success, I fancied, had come about because of the sheer will-power and concentrated effort that the Korean people apply to any venture they undertake—they play tennis hard, well, and to win; they
build ships night and day, at lower prices and in greater numbers to beat the competition; they work their fields at an exhausting pace to make quite certain their fellow people want for nothing in their diet, and so that the nation has to import nothing—no food, anyway—from abroad.

My mind, lulled by the long metronomic thud of the players’ rallies, pursued the thought a little further. A year or so before I had been saying my farewells to a friend who was changing trains in Irkutsk, in Siberia. It was well after lunch on a bleak day in deepest midwinter, bitterly cold and snowing hard. The express from Novosibirsk to Khabarovsk arrived exactly on time, rumbling out of the greyish gloom, snowflakes glistening in the yellow glare of its headlights. As it creaked to a halt amid a sudden smell of hot iron and warm oil and steam, a dozen burly women rushed from a hut beside the rails and, using heavy iron crowbars six feet long, set about prising the enormous blocks of accumulated grey ice from between the bogies of the carriages. With huge crashes like the calving of small glaciers, the ice fell away and the wheels, hitherto hidden in the ice, looked like wheels again, ready to convey the express on to its next Siberian city.

The women, all smoking tiny, sweet-smelling Russian cigarettes, finished their task just at the moment the guard waved his flag and blew his whistle, and the train began to move on eastward once again. Not a second had been lost; with great efficiency and zeal the huge trans-Siberian monster had been kept in running order, kept well greased and fuelled and equipped to do battle with the worst weather the world can hurl at any means of transport anywhere. And I thought back then to Nikita Khrushchev, and the bullying remark he once made to the then American vice-president, Richard Nixon: We will bury you, he had said. We will bury you. And now, looking at this simple Siberian scene, with its mixture of great determination, of absolute obedience to duty no matter how irksome and difficult, of oblivion to difficulty, to cold, to pain—I thought: My God, they will, you know. These Russians—and I realized, of course, that I was making a none-too-reasonable and even sentimental judgement
on all Russians merely on the evidence presented by a dozen Siberian labourers—these Russians have the capacity and the ability to do
anything they wish
. Nothing can stop a people as determined as this. No strikes. No arguments. No grumbling unwillingness to work. Utter ruthlessness, obstinacy and will-power, all directed to the good of the state. They can bury anyone they want.