Korea (14 page)

It was about nine o’clock, cold, still raining, and the people of Naju had clearly seen very few foreigners. I was stared at from every doorway. People would nudge each other and point at me. Girls would squeal and put the palms of their hands to their mouths, the classic expression of shy terror and bewilderment. It
was not a cruel or mocking curiosity: the people who saw me, and who had never seen such a lumbering and hairy creature before—a head taller than most Koreans, pale and ghostly skinned, and covered with a primeval fur—were amazed. They had seen such creatures on television; now here was a real live one, and in their town, too. (Having said that, it has been reported that Koreans with blue eyes and light-coloured hair have been seen in both Namwon and Sunchon, cities where Hendrick Hamel and his party of shipwrecked Dutch sailors spent some years. Naju was one of the towns in which they had spent time en route to Seoul—my journey through Korea, it may be remembered, was designed to follow their approximate route—and it is entirely possible that genetic relics of the Dutchmen’s passage may still be found. I had imagined that a man who was a little taller than normal and had blue eyes and sandy hair might be living in Naju somewhere; but the locals’ reaction to me suggested that such a signal was totally alien—the collapse, I realized, of my small theory. The Dutchmen must have behaved themselves, or else their stock was too insubstantial and has vanished in the wash of the twelve generations since their wreck.)

But it turned out I was not the only Westerner in town, anyway. I was mooching along a lane, looking for a
bulgoki-jip
, a restaurant serving the barbecued beef for which this part of the peninsula is famous, when I glanced into a bookshop. There, standing at the back in animated conversation with the owner, were two white men in long raincoats. I opened the door, and they looked up at the jangling of the bell, their faces portraits of blank astonishment. ‘What…’ they both spluttered, and then I told them what I was doing, and we all marched off to dinner. ‘Simon,’ said the taller of the pair, ‘my name is Elder Harper and this’—he pointed to his friend, a small, blond boy who looked about eighteen—‘is Elder Cran’. They were both missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mormons.

With no disrespect meant to its followers, I have never been
able to be terribly enthusiastic about the Mormon church. Logically I have to suppose there is not much to choose between prophets being crucified and rising from the dead in Palestine, sitting under trees and gaining self-knowledge in northern India, or finding golden plates at the top of hills in upstate New York and then urging followers to walk across America to found Salt Lake City. Faith—in matters like these and in leaders like these—is what powers a religion along; a moral code, having precious little to do with legend or leadership, is what actually makes it worthwhile; and Mormon’s moral code is certainly not to be sneezed at, even if it is a trifle too strict for many tastes.

Mormon leaders I have come to know in Hong Kong in recent years have suggested their church is making a ‘big push’ in the Orient; the effort that Elders Harper (Eric, from Arizona) and Cran (Michael, from New York) were making in Naju was presumably part of the push. They were the foot soldiers of a new battle for converts being directed from Salt Lake City, and like all foot soldiers, they were having to suffer for victory.

We sat on the floor of a small café, eating
bulgoki
and
kimchi
and rice and most of the about twenty side dishes this particular café had to offer, and I drank a large bottle of O.B. beer, and listened to them talk. They had been together in Naju for the last month. Eric Harper was the elder, at twenty-three. Michael Cran, who looked no more than a child, was twenty-one. Both wore identical blue suits and white shirts; each had his name and station in the church on a plastic tag on his lapel. They lived in the Mormon House on the outskirts of town with one other American—the leader of their little cell—and a Korean, to help with the language.

‘I was sent out here to do missionary work ten months ago. I learned a little Korean at headquarters in Salt Lake, then I came out to Taegu to polish it up, then I was assigned here.’ Elder Harper exuded doctrinal self-confidence, like the better kind of car salesman. ‘I’d sure love to have you come over to the Mormon House. But we don’t allow any strangers to come in. I’m really sorry about that. You’ve been staying with the Catholics? They’re
much easier, aren’t they? I sometimes envy them. They make life so easy. But then a hard life can mean better rewards, can’t it?’

Elder Cran seemed not quite so convinced. He had only been in town for four weeks, spoke very little Korean, and was a little homesick. ‘It’s been three months since I left home. We aren’t allowed to see any newspapers or magazines. Tell me what’s been going on back home. I saw the cover of a copy of
Time
magazine the other day. But the church doesn’t like us to get distracted by the news. I miss it, I must say.

‘Still, we must be doing a good thing. We were in that store trying to persuade them to take copies of the Book of Mormon and stock it. We’ve had it printed in
hangul
, you know. He wasn’t too keen. It’s a challenge, all right. How many converts have I made? Well, that’s difficult to answer. Not many, that’s for sure. How do I tell if I’ve had a good day? Well, I guess if it feels good, it must be good.

‘But I like Korea, that’s for sure. I always wanted to come to a country like this. South Africa, that’s the kind of country I like. Strong, knows what it wants, good police and troops. Korea’s like that. They like American power. They’re pretty conservative. Strong regimes are just what I like. So Korea’s a good place.’

We talked in this vein, Harper the self-assured, Cran the uncertain, for a couple of hours. ‘Sure wish I could join you in a beer. Not allowed. No coffee or tea either.’ The church hierarchy hadn’t taken a position on the acceptability of the two types of tea offered in all Korean restaurants—the
poricha
, or toasted-barley tea, and the
oksusucha
, made from corn—glasses of which are set down without asking the moment you walk in. ‘So we stick with water. No stimulants. That’s the word around here.’

We left, and as the pair walked me back to my hotel I came to the uncomfortable realization that we—the café, the hotel, and the lanes in between—were right in the middle of a red-light area. Scores of dingy little bars, all with English names and the strange tautology ‘Room-Salon’ in neon above the door, beckoned to us. Girls licked their lips and pouted and I, eager to see what it was all about, hastened back to where I could drop
the elders off. ‘Disgusting, this,’ said Elder Cran, the man who liked conservative regimes. ‘So debased. Surprising, I find it. Do you have this sort of thing in London? I guess you do.’

The pair left when I turned into my hotel doorway. ‘We’ll be back tomorrow to go to the
mogyoktang
. You have one in your hotel. It’s the one we always use. We have to come—no choice—there aren’t any baths in our house.’ And they pointed to the door of the public bathhouse, steam pouring from it into the cold night air and a few pinkish Koreans walking out, hurrying home before they caught cold.

I waited until they had gone, then walked quickly back up the road to the Room-Salon with what I thought were the prettiest pair of girls. They were all in pairs, usually one standing at the doorway, the other sitting at a table, her short skirt pulled as high up along her thigh as the law and decency allowed. I found one pair that seemed particularly seductive and went inside. The door was slid shut behind me, and one of the girls asked simply: ‘
Maekju?
’ and when I said yes, three large bottles of O.B., and a plate of peanuts and toasted seaweed squares were placed on the table, and the girls got down to business.

It was a brothel, of course, of the very coarsest kind. The girls, on close inspection, were slatternly, but they giggled a lot and had fun trying to teach me some Korean. I liked the phrase ‘
I shipaloma
,’ which has to do with carnality and whoredom, but in which order I could not be sure. I was told never to use it in polite society. I told them one or two choicer phrases in English and then went hard at it trying to convince them that Texas was not in England. Yes it was, they kept saying. ‘Diana. Queen in Texas. Texas
yong guk
.’ Then, it being quite hot in the airless little room, I took off my windcheater, whereupon one of the girls, the perkier of the two, started, with beguiling gentleness, to pluck at the hairs on my forearm, saying all the while to her companion, ‘Gorilla! Gorilla!’ and laughing. She had never seen anything quite like it. Her friend, who was rather thin, laughed a lot and slopped more beer into the glasses. My girlfriend, who had long hair and a degree of buxomness rarely seen in Korea,
turned up the cassette recorder, pulled down the blinds, and asked me to dance with her. Sheena Easton, a pretty girl herself who I remembered came from Glasgow and had been turned into a star on the BBC, belted out some dire song, and the Korean girl, who said her name was Anna, danced slowly around the floor, pressing her body tightly against mine and after a minute took my hand and pressed it to her back to prove that she was not wearing any panties.

Then, in quick succession, three things happened. Anna, emboldened by the beer, or perhaps overcome with the doubtful magic of dancing with a gorilla, thrust her hand down the front of my shirt and felt every last detail of my chest. I, emboldened by the beer, and perhaps overcome by dancing with a girl who had wanted me to know she wasn’t wearing any panties, thrust my hand down the front of her dress. She was not wearing a bra, and I had a glorious moment feeling her very substantial breasts and feeling their nipples stiffen to my touch.

And then a man walked in. I took my hand away. She took hers away. There were some ill-tempered words muttered by all three of the Koreans in the room, and from somewhere a bill appeared under my nose, and I was asked to pay about twenty American dollars—six or so for the beer and fourteen or so for the seaweed.
Anju, anju
, the girl kept saying, explaining as best she could—and through tears, for she seemed to know she was in some kind of trouble—that the
anju
, the salty appetizers that always come with beer in Korea, were very expensive. And then the doors were opened, and it was suggested that I might like to leave. The cold air pierced me like a knife, and I staggered, somewhat morose and bad-tempered, back to my bed, alone.

The following morning I was up at dawn, having slept like a log. The sun was rising into a sky of the clearest eggshell blue. My socks were quite dry. My pack felt lighter than it had for days. I stopped at a stall and bought oranges, chocolate, and a carton of milk and stepped out for the long haul to the city of Kwangju, the capital of the province of South Cholla, and a place that will
always be linked—not merely in Korea, but all around the politically conscious world—with the memory of a most savage tragedy. The city of Kwangju, where the face of modern Korean politics was changed for all time by the most terrible of massacres.

Dusk was coming on when I arrived on the outskirts of Kwangju. The warm, still air was drenched with the scent of early jasmine, and the sky was alive with flights of early swallows. But it was far from being a scene of total pastoral peace: every ninety seconds—I timed the intervals when they seemed so regular—the whole earth shook, the magnolias and cherry trees trembled, and a thick, pounding roar sounded from off to the west. Artillery practice, someone said.

And then the swallows vanished from the sky, and fighter planes screamed low overhead, deafening and maddening all life below. Army trucks, endless convoys of heavy green monsters with their headlights on and with helmeted, masked, and rifle-carrying soldiers standing alert on the back, growled slowly along the roads. The booming of the artillery was endless. Kwangju seemed like a city on the edge of war.

I should have had some early clue as I walked there, through the brilliant morning and the warm, sultry afternoon. Within five miles of Naju the road suddenly widened to perhaps five times its normal width and stretched straight as an arrow for three full miles, with yellow markings and arrows painted on its surface. It was an emergency airfield runway. There are many such in Korea, just as there are in Switzerland, which—like Korea also—has secreted high explosive charges deep inside its bridges and tunnels against invasion and the threat of war. Korea’s emergency airfields are used regularly, often to the intense chagrin of motorists: only the day before I had read an announcement in a newspaper saying that the main Seoul-to-Pusan expressway would be closed the next day for six hours so that air force fighters could use it as a landing site. In the interests of national security, the traffic that normally thunders along the country’s main artery would have to do as best it could on the country roads.

This runway had clearly been used the night before. Uniformed men were clearing away strings of landing lights from the cabbage fields on either side of the field; and scores of massive steel barricades, the black-and-yellow tiger-striped objects that,
as I have said before, have unwittingly become one symbol of modern Korea, were being wheeled back onto the taxiways, closing off the strip to unfriendly craft. I suddenly felt insignificantly tiny, walking across this huge frozen ocean of concrete. The sun reflected up from the cement, glaring hotly. I found I had to stop every mile to eat a biscuit and drink a sip of water; perhaps, as a result of my frolic in the Room-Salon, I had become spectacularly unfit, or else an airfield runway is a deceptively exhausting thing along which to walk. Either way, it was a trying couple of hours, especially since passing police cars eyed me oddly, and I wondered if I was not, in fact, allowed to be there at all.

It was altogether much more comfortable to be back on the old road—still Route 1, my diversion now being complete—no matter its narrowness and its congestion. The drivers were still friendly, often stopping to encourage me or offering me lifts (which I feel bound to say I declined, though on steep hillsides I did so with very marked reluctance) and food and drink.

It might perhaps seem, in view of their immense hospitality, rather churlish to remark critically on Koreans’ driving. But my strong impression then on the road to Kwangju—and it was an impression that didn’t alter very much en route—was that the Korean driver is a very dangerous animal indeed, a beast totally without understanding of speed, pathologically incapable of steering, utterly ignorant of the width of his vehicle, and eternally forgetful of such luxuries as the brakes and mirrors with which his car is invariably equipped. He knows only one device, and that is the horn, on which he seems to spend most of his time sitting, if not standing.

So a Korean road is a noisy place: horns blare, tyres screech, car bodies carom and ricochet off each other with wild abandon. On my first day I watched two buses sideswipe each other; between Naju and Kwangju I watched a truck overcook a bend and shed at least a hundred thousand bottles of Coca-Cola, all of which shattered, fertilizing half a dozen
pyong
of grass verge with their strange chemistry; and every day I would see wrecked cars
nestling down ravines, in culverts, up trees, and halfway through bridge abutments; and ambulances raced this way and that, sirens sounding, bells ringing. I had seen similarly execrable driving once before, in Turkey; and once in Iran I came upon two buses that had collided head-on and watched forty bodies being carried out onto the sand. But those, in a way, were one-off spectaculars: here in Korea, the sound of wrenching metal and splintering glass was like a bass continuo, and if you managed your day without getting or giving a dent, or at least a fright, then you were both lucky and statistically unusual.

(I have hired cars on four occasions in Korea. None has been a great success. Once, on Cheju Island, two tyres blew out in the first half hour, and the car, duly retreaded, would only steer to the left and insisted on describing large anti-clockwise circles in the road. Another time, in Kyongju, a farmer drove his tractor-a three-wheeled microtractor that disrespectful souls call a ‘rice rocket’—into the side of my car while I was parked and demolished both doors and windows. On a third occasion thick black smoke poured out of the steering column, and when I tried to remove the key the plastic surrounding had melted, welding the engine permanently on. And with the last car, we went over a bump at a modest speed, and a door opened and flew off. Having detailed that I am no great fan of the Korean driver, nor of the cars that are given to rental companies, at the risk of diverting from the main topic, it is only fair to add for the record the peculiarly Korean style of Article 2 of the General Principles of Our Company, as written on the back of the form from one of the firms from whom I had rented a car: ‘…we shall operate this business on the principle of
Kindness
, and shall make our best Efforts to provide Safety and Convenience to the Renter, with the Service devoted to the Renter in the Spirit of Trust and Sincerity.’

This was on the form handed to me by the pretty girl whose car had smoke pouring from its steering column. She seemed near tears when I told her of the vehicle’s fate, and she bowed many times and then offered to pay for the whole thing herself.)

Route I turned north after the runway and crossed a range of hills that were higher and longer than any I had crossed so far. By now it was a hot day, and I was exhausted when I reached the top. I sat down to rest by a railway embankment overlooking the next valley. The peace was profound and quite lovely. I had come well away from the road, and the only sounds I could hear were birdsong and the distant desperation of a baby goat crying for its mother. The earth was warm, the grass was moist and fresh and the palest of greens, the embankment was covered with newly blooming forsythia and wild cherry. Down in the valley below, the roofs of the houses presented a many-coloured chequerboard, orange and blue and yellow, above the whitewash of the walls. Once in a while a small local train hummed past-for this was not the main line but a branch line to places like Hwasun and Polgyo, a line for the nearby farmers and smallholders, not for the businessmen bound between Seoul and Pusan—and its passengers waved pleasantly at me. I lay back in the sweet-smelling grass, serenely pleased with life, and slept contentedly for a while in the afternoon sun.

Most of the rest of the journey was downhill. I could see another runway off to my left, and a cloud of air force jets, tiny as gnats, were wheeling above it. In the first village through which I passed an elderly woman was trying in vain to get a sack of potatoes up onto her head and asked me to help. Once I had settled it—and it must have weighed fifty pounds, at least—on the small plait of straw that served as a cushion between scalp and spuds, she stood erect and tripped along quite merrily, singing to herself and waving her thanks. If I had seemed foreign to her, she clearly had not minded in the slightest. Nor had she seemed to mind the burden, which would have broken the backs of most healthy adult males.

Her village was a pretty little place, twenty or so cottages grouped round a dusty little square, each one home to a family of hardscrabble farmers who eked a living from the nearby rice fields or in the apple orchards. One aspect of the village was unusual, though it made it prettier still: many of the houses had
thatched roofs, thick mats of straw curled over the gable ends, tied down with twine, and weighted with stones. President Park Chung-hee, who did more than most Korean presidents to raise the national morale and self-esteem, decreed that thatched roofs were a stigma of underdevelopment and ordered a nationwide campaign to replace thatch with tile. In the rest of the country most thatch has gone; but here, down in Cholla, where they are said to loathe the government with vigour and venom, a lot of it has stayed, both as a defiant symbol of Cholla independence and because it is warm, cheap, and handsome. And it provides a home for harvest mice, which Koreans regard with affection and as a sign of good luck.

The night before I had been listening to the BBC World Service, and through the scratchy reception—sunspots, as usual!—had listened to a documentary—a radio portrait, it had been called—about Korea. It was nothing very substantial—a thirty-minute recital of political problems and assorted economic miracles. I didn’t remember much, although one statistic stood out: by the end of the century, one of those interviewed had said, every Korean would enjoy a standard of living equivalent to that of the British middle classes today (an achievement that some cynical Britons would find rather less than staggering). I was in the old lady’s village when I remembered this remark, and I noted in my book that I doubted it very much.

I doubted it because of a strong impression I had been forming from all my visits to Korea, and particularly from my visits to the countryside. The life of the urban Korean was changing with unprecedented rapidity, without a doubt; but out here, far from the influences of city life, the ancient, Confucian rhythms were being preserved—and the economic simplicities that went with them. Poor villages—no one ever hungry but no one with a compact-disc player, either—are strung along the length and breadth of Korea, and within them are hundreds of thousands of ordinary Koreans for whom the goal of middle-class British life is not only unattainable but also profoundly undesirable. It would be condescending to say that the Koreans are a people who
admire what some writers about India call the ‘dignity of poverty’. Quite the reverse: the Koreans are an ambitious, hardworking people, perhaps more hardworking than any I have ever encountered and ever will. They want to improve their lot. They want, desperately, to improve their children’s lot. They will work all the hours God gives them to provide a good education for their offspring—no sacrifice is too much for a Korean father to make, no hours too long for a Korean mother to work, if only the child is well educated, is given a better chance, a better series of opportunities.

But at the same time there are those Koreans, both old and young—and the fact that young Koreans are included is important—who have as a conscious ambition a desire to preserve the essence of their lives and are thoughtful enough to care to resist the seductive charms of change. I mentioned that when I arrived in Mokpo, it reminded me of a small Greenland fishing village I had once seen. It reminded me in more ways than one. It was in that Arctic town, ten years or so ago, that I first encountered the keenness of young Greenlanders to resist the devilry of the modern and preserve the simpler delights of the old. The Koreans—not all of them, by a long chalk, but many—seem to feel the same way. They know that Seoul is only a few hours away and that there is chromium and glass and glitter and money and power there, and they appreciate the magnetism of it all. But they know also that what they have in these small villages—and yes, they also have electricity and direct-dial telephones, and I know one man in a thatched cottage who keeps a facsimile machine next to his
kimchi
pots—is as worth preserving as the modern world is worth exploring. Perhaps, I thought, I would meet someone along the road who would explain it more succinctly. For now, all I knew was that a laudable—if barely audible—radio documentary purporting to present the nature of a country’s soul had inadvertently succeeded in missing its very essence.

As I left the village I saw a clothes-line strung between two of the gently uptilted gable ends. It was a perfectly ordinary
clothes-line, hung with perfectly ordinary clothes—until I looked a little more closely. Hanging from it, from left to right, were, according to my notes, ‘Shirt, trousers (blue), shirt, fish, vest, underpants, two fish, skirt, trousers (brown), fish, octopus, vest, shirt, fish, vest, vest.’

And then I hauled up another long hill, and there, smoking gently in the evening sun was the great southwestern city of Kwangju.

The Dutch sailors had not bothered to call at Kwangju; they spent the fourth night of their odyssey twenty miles to the west, in Changsong (that, at least, seems to be the town nearest in pronunciation to the place Hamel calls ‘Sang-siang’). Today’s guidebooks do not exactly paint an alluring portrait of Kwangju: ‘Kwangju…is a low-key city,’ reports one; ‘the entire area is remote…the city boasts two universities, three newspapers and three radio stations’ is all that can be found in another. The fifth-largest city in Korea, a sprawling, rough-hewn giant of a place, it remains perhaps one of the better-known Korean cities outside the capital. And I felt compelled to walk there, even though the sailors had not, because of its unique standing in the country’s modern history.

The reason for its fame or, more properly, its notoriety, stems from a week of events that started on the evening of Saturday 17 May 1980 on the campus of Chonnam University, which nestles in the shadow of a mighty range of hills on the north side of town.

It is worth remarking on the context. Six months before, on 26 October 1979, President Park Chung-hee had been assassinated in a
kisaeng
house in Seoul by his Director of Central Intelligence, Kim Tae-kyu. (There had been a famously lovely singer at the
kisaeng
house—the Korean equivalent of, though rather less proper than, the geisha house—that night, performing for President Park. But after the sudden interruption to her cabaret she mysteriously vanished from the city, and when she reappeared six months later, she had, unaccountably, no memory of where she had been nor any recollection of the events that
were said to have taken place during her last performance. There was talk about brainwashing, and the girl became something of a cult singer for a while.)