Korea (31 page)

Mae-young, my friend who had climbed with me on Halla-san, had telephoned while I was away. She had been in Vancouver and had planned to come back to Korea for a few days. If I
promised not to walk so fast as I apparently had on Cheju-do, could she come on down? Two days later she was in Puyo, eager to hear of my various adventures. It was good to see her again—her good cheer of our days on Cheju was still in full spate, and she made good friends with the artist Miss Ko and came with me up to Chonggak-sa to see the mountain nuns and to learn a little of how her own Buddhism had gone awry during her years of work and Westernization. ‘Very stimulating,’ she said, as we climbed down the hillside after listening to the young abbess for more than an hour. ‘I envy them their life.’ Did the nun, I wondered, not in fact envy her? Did she not wish that she could travel away from a remote mountain, albeit a very beautiful one, to places like Vancouver and Hong Kong? ‘No, she has no desire. She knows about the world. She thinks her duty is to make her own small part of it as good as possible and not concern herself with visiting the rest. There is too little time to be wasted travelling far from home.’ I felt that both of us had been taken down a peg or two.

Once Mae-young had gone again, I walked northeast for thirty miles and eventually came to the Kum River again where the Dutch had crossed it, at the other old Paekche capital of Kongju. This was a livelier town than Puyo, a bustling little place, with an assortment of fine Victorian churches and colleges, an excellent
yogwan
where I stayed for two contented nights, and any number of little cafés and bars. I went to see the remarkable tomb of the twenty-fifth Paekche king Muryong—a tomb that was only discovered in 1971 and that had been quite undisturbed since the monarch was buried and his tomb sealed in
AD
523. Thousands of pieces of jewellery and pottery brought from the tomb were said to be displayed at the Kongju museum, but I felt suddenly and unaccountably weary of all this history and embarked for the countryside again. I was going through a period of feeling happier walking than stopping, and as I set out and clanged my way across the great iron bridge that spans the Kum-gang, I confess I felt more in my element again.

The countryside ahead was rich and prosperous and hilly, and
the village houses were coloured gaily in chartreuse and violet, tangerine and royal blue. From the tops of the schools and barns flew the three-leaved green-and-white flag. This was a part of Korea where the nationwide self-help movement known as
Saemaul Undong
was particularly strong.

Saemaul Undong
, or the New Community Movement, is the reason there are so few thatched roofs in Korea and why so few old men wear horsehair hats and why one sees so few young girls playing on the traditional swings and seesaws that all villages sported only a decade or so ago.
Saemaul Undong
is the reason why Korean villages are, by and large, clean and well-furnished places with electricity supplies and big schools and warehouses and grain elevators and clean wells and perhaps piped water and sanitation and multi-coloured tiles on the roofs of the houses, new and old.
Saemaul Undong
is the driving force behind all those cement trucks rushing along the country lanes, behind the telephone linesmen who are installing new lines on Sunday afternoons, behind the endless rows of polythene-covered greenhouses that are built each season to warm the strawberries or the asparagus or the okra and other city food from which the farmers now make so much of their money.
Saemaul Undong
is the line of modern tractors, the chugging ‘rice rockets’, the new bridges and spillways and culverts and irrigation channels.
Saemaul Undong
is run from a massive office you see on the road to Seoul Airport and, with its flags and songs and legions of eager acolytes, is at once a mightily efficient grass-roots political organization and a self-perpetuating memorial to its creator, President Park Chung-hee.

It was begun in 1971 after President Park and his colleagues realized, as the government now says, that the gap between the circumstances of Korea’s farmers and its urban citizenry had become unacceptably wide. The movement, based heavily on propaganda, was launched ‘to cultivate positive attitudes in the rural masses, to assist them in gaining confidence in their future, and to train them for more active self-reliance and co-operation’. It began modestly enough—the government provided the
material for village houses to be repaired, experts provided advice, and the farmers did the work themselves. It was extended into co-operative efforts on a larger scale—irrigation channels and roads and bridges were built by entire villages, and everyone began to learn about organization and co-operation. And then group farming projects started—collectively owned factories and marketing facilities—the principles of the kibbutz had spread to Korea.

On one level it appears to have worked magnificently: rural life in Korea seems to have improved beyond all imagination, and the gap between the urban and rural masses has narrowed (although that between urban rich and rural poor has widened hugely). Romantics can argue that some of the essence of Korea has been lost in the process of its modernization; and I—having seen the relict beauty of those few villages in remote corners of the country where permission has been granted to keep out the
Saemaul Undong
organizers—count myself among the romantics. Something very tangible has been gained, no doubt; something evanescent, something mysterious and spiritual has been lost. But most important of all, the
Saemaul Undong
has enabled a strong and powerful central government to extend its tentacles deep into the fabric of the country’s rural society, and when, one afternoon on my way north from Kongju, I saw a group of policemen with guns moving out along the levees towards a remote hamlet on the distant skyline, I wondered if the
Saemaul
movement was all that much of a benefit.

There were ten men, all of them heavily armed with rifles and submachine guns; they had parked their police cruisers on the roadway and were moving out on foot. The flags of the New Community Movement fluttered from the houses through which they passed. What were they looking for? Whom did they seek? What wayward foe of the government would find himself in custody tonight? When would his family learn of his fate? With what specific crime would he be charged?

Of course it was entirely possible that the man they wanted was a heavily armed bank robber, a dangerously criminal clone
of Bonnie or Clyde. But I doubted it. Bank robbers, armed criminals, drug smugglers, syndicate bosses—these were not the stuff of Korean criminality. Far more likely that the state was moving against one who had once moved against the state, and likely, too, that the green-and-white flags that more usually marked economic good fortune and self-reliant triumphs were this time indicating the presence of a telltale, of a village spy, of a neighbourhood watch gone bad, and that a movement perhaps conceived with good intent had ended up as part of the apparatus of a state that is all-powerful, all-suspicious, and not at all benign.

I shuddered as I watched the men fan out and walked on northward. I walked on towards the city and away from the flags and the uniquely Korean social experiment they were said to represent.

There can be few Americans who would voluntarily give up their citizenship and exchange it instead for citizenship of the Republic of Korea. Few enough people anywhere, indeed, would wish to renounce the national allegiance of their birth and assume the nationality of another place—save, of course, those who wish to become citizens of the new nations that, like the United States or Canada or Australia, have been built almost entirely from immigrants, and save those who have chosen to flee from repressive societies and regimes to enjoy a life of liberty in some more progressive nation far from home.

But to go from the free, wealthy and developed West to the less free, less wealthy and less developed East, and to go for ever, with all the old rights renounced and with all the new customs adopted—this kind of move is an eccentric and unusual one,
undertaken only after great thought and often by unusual and fascinating people. I have a dear friend, an Englishman who chose twenty years ago to become a citizen of India and endure poverty and discrimination and restriction: he now lives contentedly in Bombay, never regretting his decision, refusing to show any envy or sadness when, on arriving for a holiday in London, he is made to stand in the aliens’ line at the airport and is asked brusquely how long he plans to stay in the land of his birth and whether he has enough money to support himself. I have met a handful of Britons and Canadians and Americans who have been officially assimilated into China for many years and have endured revolutions and turbulences they can never have foreseen. There are runaway spies who now live in strange luxury in Moscow and East Berlin. A few romantics still follow Gauguin’s path into the blue Pacific, and go as seriously ‘troppo’ as to acquire a new passport along with the ‘sleeping dictionary’ with which they provided themselves on arrival. And there are, of course, many millions of long-term rootless residents dotted around the globe—the great cheerless crowd of ‘expats’—who exercise their fading memories on frozen and time-warped images of home and order their amahs and bearers about with age-induced ferocity and incivility. All these we know.

But those who reject the West purposely, to satisfy a spiritual and intellectual yearning to become part of the East, are rare birds indeed. Over the years, as I have wandered around forlorn corners of the globe, I have enjoyed seeking such people out and have listened with fascination as they explained their reasons for having taken the fateful step.

Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek romantic whose
Writings from Japan
is one of the classics of what one might call truly disinterested travel literature, summed it all up. Hearn wrote scores of elegant essays from the East that now seem to be what so much other writing is accidentally or carelessly not—almost wholly free from the taint of his own patriotism. Hearn managed this simply because he had no patriotism and owed no allegiance to any nation but only to himself. He summed up what my new
Bombay-wallah friend and perhaps what those Britons who have buried themselves deep inside the fabric of China were all searching for—the reason for their having come and settled in for life. He used the Japanese word
kokoro—
‘the heart of things’: Lafcadio Hearn searched for
kokoro
, and his writings testify to his having found it, to a greater degree than most.

My friend in India is searching for the
kokoro
of Maharashtra, and Carl Ferris Miller, whom I met one Sunday afternoon in a tiny seaside town called Chollipo, is an old man evidently searching for the
kokoro
of his beloved Korea.

Ferris Miller, as he is generally known, who was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, some seventy-odd years ago, became a Korean citizen in 1977. Like most of those ‘old contemptibles’ who chose to settle here, he came in 1945 with the American navy. He came officially to help reconstruct the country after years of Japanese occupation; he came less officially to help gather intelligence (he had studied chemistry at university, which may or may not have helped); he came unofficially to dabble his toes in the muddied waters of the battered and bruised postwar society. And he fell in love with the place, instantly.

It was, he says now, a real and hopeless love, and it began when he was on the troop train that brought him, ship-weary and innocent, from the southeastern port of Pusan to the northwestern port of Inchon. (His train would have passed through the city of Chonan, which lent a pleasant symmetry to my hearing of his story, since, as I shall shortly explain, it was at Chonan railway station that I first set out to meet him.) He stayed with the navy for six years, and then escaped to Japan when the Communist forces invaded. Once the UN forces had secured for themselves the city of Pusan, Ferris Miller was brought back and went north with the advancing forces when they recaptured Seoul. Then he caught hepatitis and was flown back to Japan—a prudent enough move, since Seoul was recaptured by the Reds once more, so he would in any case have had to move again. Finally, in 1953, he returned to Seoul yet again, and took up a residence that he was determined should endure. He stayed with
the army for a while, then joined the Bank of Korea, and then retired to play on the vibrantly
sportif
Seoul stock exchange. He has lived in Korea ever since. He never married, but he adopted a son, with whom (and with whose wife and children) he now lives, enjoying a life of blameless contentment.

He will not easily forget renouncing his American citizenship. ‘I went along to the embassy and explained. They didn’t try to talk me out of it. They were very decent about it. I handed over my passport, and I signed a form, and that was that. Someone shook my hand and wished me well, and I walked out of the office. I was back in a week with my Korean passport, applying for a visa to visit the States. I wanted to go back home to Pennsylvania. I knew I’d have to go through all the hassles. It didn’t bother me. I’m not at all sentimental about giving up American citizenship. I had to. I had to take Korea and let Korea take me. It was an affair of the heart. There is no other explanation.’

He had bought a small piece of land on the coast near Chollipo back in the mid-sixties. He needed somewhere to swim, and the Yellow Sea coast is the best by far in northeast Asia. Since the peninsula tilts gently down towards the west, all the beaches are long and have only a very shallow slope; and the tides in what the Koreans call the So-Hae—the West Sea—are the second biggest in the world (after the Bay of Fundy). The combination of long white sand beaches and enormous tides makes the Korean west coast a most amusing place for a swim—and so Ferris Miller had a tiny country cottage built there and visited it most weekends.

And then he started to get interested in flowers and conservation. Koreans, in spite of their professed Confucian closeness to nature and their fondness for animals and plants, have not taken a particularly constructive attitude towards the preservation of their wildlife. True, some creatures—the Manchurian crane and Tristram’s woodpecker among them—are classified as Living National Treasures. In recent years bans on shooting birds everywhere except in the pheasant—and snipe-hunting areas of
Cheju-do have helped bolster the numbers of orioles and hoopoes, wood warblers and kingfishers. The noble animals—the tigers and bears for which the peninsula was once famous—have all but gone; and such is the Korean appetite for any meat that moves that, except for the odd weasel or mouse, Korean forest floors are like vast empty ballrooms, dark and quite silent.

The forests themselves have suffered, too: the Japanese took most of the usable wood to help their war effort, and so at the beginning of each April there is a concerted attempt to persuade everyone in Korea to plant a tree or two, to help the woods regenerate themselves. Pollarded poplars march in battalions along the country roads; there are ginkgo trees and maples that flame magnificently in October; there are London plane trees, seemingly culled straight from Notting Hill and Kensington, on many city streets; there are persimmon trees and ailanthus and sumac, bamboos, pawlonias and fine stands of old bamboo. But these are exceptions and are not often found beyond the national parks and the temple grounds. Out in the countryside proper there are millions of dull acres of pines and firs—good lumber perhaps, but not good trees. The variety suffered under the Japanese, and there has been little enough imaginative concern to reseed the country with any trees other than those of immediate commercial use.

Korea has many wildflowers, though—there are fields full of gentian and azalea, forsythia (which was said to be President Park’s favourite) and cosmos, lavender and lilac and daphne—and the rose of Sharon, which, although not a rose (it is a type of hibiscus), is Korea’s national emblem. The beastly Japanese did their best to destroy it and replace it with their own chrysanthemum, but the rose of Sharon (as in Steinbeck) is a doughty plant and clung to rock and bank, and like Korea itself (for the symbolism is not lost) grows in ever greater profusion.

But Korea commits little effort or money to preserving its plants and animals, and the needs of the economy far outweigh the less strident demands of ecology. Which is why Ferris Miller, who noticed how well the wildflowers grew on the clifftops
above his seaside cottage, decided to teach himself about plant life and devote a sizeable period of his later life to preserving the very best that western Korea could grow.

He bought up more and more land and fenced it off from prying trespassers. He imported—from the distant fields or from far countries—the first of what was to become the biggest Asian collection of magnolia trees. He started to plant the first of the hundreds of ilexes—the hollies—for which, along with the magnolias, the Chollipo Arboretum has become world famous. He imported and ferried in a number of traditional Korean cottages—thatched roofs were all right at Chollipo, no truck there with the modernizing zeal of
Saemaul Undong
—and had them rebuilt among the woods and sculpted landscapes of his paradise. He planted daffodils and crocuses, maples and oaks, plants with wonderful aromas, trees with extraordinarily exotic flowers and fruits—and the result has become a botanic and an aesthetic legend.

I had heard of Ferris Miller on every journey I made to Korea—of this kindly, eccentric old man; this financial wizard who had marshalled the proceeds from his wizardry to improve the stock of Korea’s countryside; of this rather scholarly, rather private man who had devoted his life to this austerely difficult, but unforgettably beautiful and graceful little country thousands of miles from his home. I had long wanted to meet him, and now, having made an arrangement to join a mutual friend at the railway station at Chonan one Friday evening, all seemed set for me to do so.

I had walked all day from Kongju: a young German friend who had accompanied me for the trek dropped out after twenty miles, complaining of sore feet and general exhaustion. The hills between the two towns were severe indeed; and once I reached the village of Hyangjong-ri and the railway line from Pusan swept into view, and my little country road was joined by the great artery of Route I (which I last tramped along down south at Kwangju, where it was a very much smaller road), all the noise and nuisance of the approaches to Seoul began to assert
themselves. So I didn’t blame my friend for catching the bus instead: the miles to Chonan were grim, unpleasing miles, and it was comforting to know that for the diversion west to the coast we would go by car.

George Robinson, a young Englishman who ran a stock-broking office in Seoul and had come to know Ferris Miller both through that and through the very energetic Korea branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (of which Miller was current chairman), had arranged to meet me at the station—he having come south on the express from Seoul at the end of his week’s work. He had brought another chum along from Tokyo; and my one-day walking partner, a writer from Germany, made up the foursome. We took a taxi to where we planned to stay the night, an enormous holiday resort at a spa town called Dogo (and where I had dined once on a disgusting monster known as King Dogo Burger—which, bearing in mind the Korean fondness for munching their way through roast dogs and dog soup, could well, I thought, have been fashioned from somebody’s long-dead Rover). Our stay was brief but wild: we engaged the services of two hostesses from the hotel’s dance floor, who chatted amiably enough in halting English until we left at midnight. At three in the morning, when I was sleeping peacefully, there came a furious hammering at the door of my room. Both girls were there: they had come to minister jointly to my particular needs, and there was no need to pay any more since the paltry sum we had paid for their company on the dance floor would more than compensate them for their services until dawn. They looked eager and excited, and I wished (as I daresay the reader might wish, too) I had said yes. But in fact I decided there and then—and it was an extremely difficult choice, for the girls had been utterly charming—on a course of behaviour that was both prudent and medically responsible. I kissed each girl politely on the cheek, said a regretful
annyong-hee kashipshiyo
, shut the door, and retired for a fitful sleep. I was derided for extreme foolishness at breakfast the next day.

We rented a car—a process that was rather simpler than I have
known before. The Dogo hotel alerted a man in Onyang, a nearby town that, like Dogo, is famous for its thermal springs. The Onyang man turned up with his car half an hour later. He accepted a cash handout of 50,000
won
—about £40 at the current exchange rate—handed over the keys, and told us to telephone him when we had finished with his car. There had been no paperwork. No insurance. No formalities or contract of agreement, no fiduciary bond or handshake. Nothing, in fact, other than the kind of mutual—and perhaps mutually foolish—trust that evaporated elsewhere (except perhaps for some corners of rural Ireland) a long while ago. We drove off to the west, each one of us just then loving Korea for that small and simple act of informal kindness. ‘We like Korea because it retains something that has vanished everywhere else in the world’—that was how a visitor from Osaka once explained his fondness for the place, and with that small act by the Onyang car owner, I could see again precisely what he had meant.