Korea (29 page)

Nowhere is this better reflected than in Puyo’s most memorably dispiriting memorial, a place called the Rock of Falling Flowers. (Another Puyo monument known as the Paekche
Pagoda can also compete for the honours: when Puyo was captured by the Chinese in
AD
660, the victorious general had a calligrapher carve a brief history of his triumph onto the side of the pagoda. The characters have come to be regarded as forming a classic of elegant Chinese literature, but the Puyo people immediately thought of it as a blot on the corporate escutcheon and, as soon as the Chinese had gone away, promptly buried the entire pagoda. However, an American dug the pagoda up again in 1890, and now it stands in a park in the centre of town, National Treasure Number 9, and a humiliation of which the Puyo people are now—given my theory about revelling and wallowing in misery—truly proud.)

I went to the Rock of Falling Flowers on a warm late-Sunday afternoon, having spent a tedious hour looking at interminable rows of celadon pots at the Puyo branch of the National Museum, a modern structure of great ugliness built beside my hotel.

To reach it I paid my 900
won
to enter the park that crowns the summit of Puso-san, the hill around which Puyo is built, and which causes the Kum River to make a brief sideways lunge on its way south. Like the Thames as it passes through Oxford, the Kum changes its name as it passes through Puyo and around the base of Puso-san: it is known here not as the Isis but as Paengmagang, or White Horse River, because the conquering Chinese general was forced to go fishing for a dragon that was known to lurk in the deeps, and to use the head of a white horse as bait. (The powerfully shamanistic symbol of the horse’s head did the trick: said dragon was hooked, whereupon General Su dispatched him with a blow of his sword and marched his troops across the stream to conquer the remainder of Paekche territory.)

The park’s maze of footpaths was crowded with ordinary Koreans enjoying the sun, the warm smell of pine needles, and the slightly sultry breeze that blew up from the river. There were quarters of old men in their pale silk
hangbok
, baggy, ankle-length trousers called
paji
, and
chogori
shirts, all fastened with strings and ribbons; there were women in their more vividly coloured
chima chogori
; young girls in their best Western dresses; soldiers in
uniforms, and student-cadets in their curious jungly camouflage—Korea on a holiday afternoon is like the
paseo
on an evening in Barcelona, everyone kitted up to the nines to show off to the neighbours.

At the hill’s summit are the various Paekche relics—exquisite little pavilions and shrines and temples that were used by the great kings for the ceremonials that accompanied their kinghood.
Yongil-lu
, the Pavilion for Greeting the Sun, is as lovely as any and stands facing east on the site where the monarchs would traditionally watch the morning sun rising over their lands;
Songwol-tae
, or Seeing the Moon Go Home Tower, faces west, for precisely the opposite reason. Most of the pavilions are open to the elements, have two floors, and are made of massive oak timbers the bosses of which have been carved and painted into extraordinary figures; the mansard roofs are tiled and have elaborately carved and chased antefixes; there are finial plates and a gablet and false rafters—the whole of each pavilion painted and lacquered in deep reds, sky blues, yellow, gold, black: a Korean pavilion is at once fantastical and serene—great fun to see, not at all serious, and yet despite its apparent frivolity, possessed of a profound beauty and inner meaning.

I passed the summit of the mountain, which then rather abruptly fell away to the river, glittering in the early evening sun. To my right was a well—the Chinese characters called it the Kum River Great Water Supply Raise Water Place; below me and also slightly to the right down a flight of granite steps was a much smaller Raise Water Place, a tiny spring that trickled from the mountainside by a temple called
Koran-sa
. It takes its name from a medicinal herb, the
koran-cho
, which grows beside the water; the herb was used by the old Paekche kings as a guarantee that a particular pitcher of water did come from this particular, very pure spring—a sprig of
koran-cho
was placed in each vessel, a sixth-century version of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

And then I came to the Rock of Falling Flowers, the saddest memorial in town, and for that reason above all, the most popular.
It is a bluff, a hundred feet or so below the Seeing the Moon Go Home Tower, and is reached by steps cut into the mountainside. Old ladies had set up stalls under pine trees beside the path and were selling balloons and tins of orange juice and wooden snakes. At the top of the bluff is a small pavilion, and knots of people—many carrying balloons, tins of orange juice and wooden snakes—were having their pictures taken or were gazing down the sheer rock face into the fast-moving waters of the White Horse River two hundred feet below. A fence prevented them from falling.

Whether or not a fence existed in
AD
660 is not known. The last of the Paekche kings chose the mountaintop as the site of his last stand, trying in vain to beat off a joint attack that had been mounted against him by the armies of Shilla and T’ang China, the latter led by the dragon-catching general, Su Ting-fang. The king’s courtiers were around him as Su’s forces steadily advanced from the eastern hills. But when it became clear that his position was hopeless, and he and all his followers were likely to become prisoners of the Chinese, his women made a collective decision to commit suicide. They leaped in the hundreds from the top of the bluff and died on the sharp rocks or in the waters below.

It is said that three thousand of the Paekche women died—more than the Jews who killed themselves at Masada, more than the Japanese soldiers who threw themselves off the cliffs of Saipan. And it is when you see the prettily dressed Korean women of today that the image becomes so aptly macabre: it is easy to imagine their colourful dresses billowing up as the figures tumbled through space: from a distance a waterfall of rainbow-coloured petals would be falling down the cliff face—hence the Rock of Falling Flowers,
Nakhwa-am
.

I had my doubts. I spent a few moments at the top of the bluff, watching the young boys lean dangerously out into space, pretending to push their girlfriends the way the Paekche women had gone thirteen hundred years before. And then I went down more stone stairs to the ferry station beside
Koran-sa
and bought myself a beer and sat in the prow of a skiff that swept its way
slowly, with the stream, back to town. I lingered briefly at the base of the
Nakhwa-am
and wondered if the legend could be true. I thought the bodies would bounce or be caught up in the many ash and willow trees that sprouted from fissures in the face. Few enough would make it all the way to the river, and fewer still would be dead. But their dresses probably would billow and flare, and there would be flashes of colour as the women twisted and tumbled through the air. Three thousand of them? But still, who cared? It was a good and adequately said little tale, just the sort of thing the descendants of Paekche would like.

There was by now one other man in the youth hostel, a small and rather taciturn man named Mr Sung. Ten years before he had lived in Baltimore, and took a job working on the General Motors assembly line in nearby Dundalk. Dundalk, it turned out, was a place with which I had a more than nodding acquaintance, since over the years I had lived in the United States I had taken various cars and motorbikes to Dundalk port for passage to Liverpool. Mr Sung had come to Puyo with little enough idea that he would find someone at his breakfast table who could name the streets and bars of Dundalk, Maryland, and perhaps because of this he quickly became a friend and guide-companion, though not so intimate as to permit the use of his first names, which were Kwang Ok.

He persuaded the hostel owner to reduce the price of the room. He found me the most erotically pleasing
saunatang
in town. He took me to the best
bulgoki-jip
in Puyo, and we feasted more than once on beef and oysters and cucumber
kimchi
and quails’ eggs and pickled garlic—the robust fare of the Korean countryside, so magnificently different from the insipidly elegant toy food eaten in Japan. Mr Sung loathed Japan with a passion. ‘I wouldn’t eat
sushi
if it was the only food left on earth,’ he once declared.

He also introduced me to a girl. I was never quite certain of his relationship with Miss Ko, a pretty artist who rented a shop near the entrance to the National Museum and did a modest
trade in calligraphers’ brushes, ink pads, pieces of lacquer-covered driftwood, and pots of polished basalt. Miss Ko displayed a skittishly filial affection for Mr Sung, which suggested that he might have been a distant uncle; he behaved as though he were intensely proud of Miss Ko, almost as though he were trying to advertise the remarkable charms of Korean womanhood to this idiot stranger who had blown into town.

And Miss Ko Seouk-young was, by any standards, a remarkable young woman. She was extremely attractive and dressed very eccentrically, with a large straw hat plumped on her head. She drove a large car very fast and daringly. She painted with great skill, and her sculptures and framed sketches were all around her shop, but she did not want to sell any of them. She ate and drank with great gusto, her favourite tipple being a foul concoction that she called a
soju
cocktail, which included
soju
, 7-Up and slices of cucumber. ‘If ever I go to your country, I give it to barman to make,’ she threatened.

I liked her, which was either what Mr Sung had wanted or else he didn’t object; he was so impassive about it I never knew if I was poaching and he was being polite. But he appeared quite content when, one sunny afternoon, Miss Ko suggested that she take me up to Chonggak-sa, a small nunnery in the hills south of Puyo. She drove very well along a perilous mountain trail I would be reluctant to tackle, and an hour after starting we drew up below a vast mass of cherry blossom, at one of the most exquisite temples in all Korea.

Only four nuns lived there, grey-robed and shaven-headed in the T’ang Chinese style. On this afternoon eight women from a nearby village had walked up for a visit, and the temple’s tiny living room was filled with the recumbent forms of the ladies taking their siestas. A few sat quietly, hulling strawberries or peeling apples for afternoon tea. They all scattered when we arrived and sat around by the walls, watching with fascination the nuns’ courtesies towards me.

I was asked to remove my shoes and sit cross-legged on the floor. A small black lacquer table was set before me, with tiny
rice cakes, slices of orange and apple, fresh strawberries (which Koreans grow under plastic sheets, endless tubes of which extend over all the fields in these parts), and a fist-size pottery cup filled with fragrant pine liqueur that tasted like an unusually strong retsina. The abbess introduced herself as Lee Seunim—Lee Soon Woo in the days, ten years ago, before she made the decision to take the Buddhist equivalent of holy orders.

She was tall and well built and graceful to a fault. Her hair was shaved down to a fine stubble—every full moon the women shaved again, she said, and it would be a full moon next night, so she had to travel down to the valley to buy razor blades. It would provide a welcome interlude—her life and that of her three colleagues could be austere, especially in the winter when the temple might be cut off for weeks, as it had been until very recently, by the ice and blowing snow. Even now the women were chopping the wood for the next winter’s fires—this past winter had exhausted their stock, and there was no man about to help with the heavy work of replenishing it.

The routines of temple life at Chonggak-sa were much the same as those at Paekyang-sa or in any other Chogye temple, and involved long hours of study and meditation, hard work, simple food, and little by way of entertainment. The women, who like Miss Lee were all in their mid-thirties, were intelligent and well informed about the condition of the modern world. They were all philosophy graduates from various universities across the country, and their evenings, I imagined, were spent in constructive contemplation of mankind’s follies.

Their temple was something like a common room at a small but excellent country college, perched high up among the cherry blossoms, with the tinkling sound of the wind chimes at the Buddha hall a few yards above us and the murmur of a stream a few yards below. The old temple dog snored gently in the sun. I could hear two of the nuns talking softly as they chopped the chunks of wood for the next cold season. The ladies from the valley muttered among themselves. And then, among all this heaven-sent peace, came the bang.

It was a loud double thud, like a sudden clap of thunder, that sounded from somewhere up in the sky, stopping us all in mid-conversation. The dog woke with a start and raised its head with an expression of canine perplexity. The sound of chopping wood halted. The birds stopped singing. Only the wind chimes and the stream were oblivious to the interruption. And then, after a self-conscious pause, everything resumed, and the dog stretched itself and lay down once more, and work and talk began again. ‘Pay no attention,’ said Miss Lee, glancing at her watch. ‘It’s only the Blackbird.’

An American surveillance plane had just raced across the mountain chain. It was made by Lockheed—how very alien that name sounded up here!—and it was ten miles high above us, hurtling along at twenty miles a minute. The thunderclaps had been its supersonic bangs as it tore northwards to the borderline, where the pilot’s duties called for him to point his radars at the northern armies and make sure they were staying put for another peaceful day.

‘You have to get used to it up here,’ the young abbess said, rather wistfully. ‘If we were in Seoul, we wouldn’t give it a thought. Down here, where it is so peaceful, it sounds much worse. It reminds us of things that have nothing to do with Buddhism—and not much to do with Korea, either. I used to find it a very sad sound. Every afternoon at three we heard it. It was very confusing during meditation—it set you thinking about things that had nothing to do with the
hwadu
we had been set. But now it seems part of the natural order. It has a certain Zen quality about it, too. It is a reminder of the frailty of our state, and of our existence. Just like the cherry blossoms; you know that although we appreciate their loveliness we mourn their existence because we know of their coming extinction. Well, the explosion we hear every afternoon is the same, in a way; we hear it, and it reminds us that all is not as perfect or as stable and secure as it looks. It is easy to become lulled into feeling that all is right with the world—just look at the view! Listen to the sounds! Smell the air! But then—bang!—and you remember
the imperfection of it all. So this is how I have made use of the American jet. I doubt if the pilot thinks of it the same way.’