Korea (6 page)

Now I was really ready. So I returned to Kimpo’s domestic air terminal, bought myself a single ticket for Cheju Island, and waited as flight after flight took off, filled to the brim with honeymoon couples bound for the warm wildernesses of the south. I wondered if I would ever get on a plane—the airline seemed puzzled about how to handle someone travelling alone. But, as I was to discover a dozen times a day from that moment
on, there was always someone happy to oblige an Englishman. ‘
Meeguk saram?
’ they would inquire, asking if I was an American. ‘
Anio
,’ I would say brightly, ‘
Yong guk saram
.’ No, I’m English. And anxious faces would break into broad smiles, and someone would always come up with a mysterious phrase that instantly put me on my best behaviour. I have no idea to this day which schoolbook taught it to them, but someone would invariably say, in tones of some gravity, ‘English—an
English gentleman
,’ and whatever problem I had mentioned would instantly disappear.

So on this occasion, the first, the formula worked a treat.

‘
Mian hamnida
—excuse me, but when may I get on a plane to Cheju-do?’

‘
Meeguk saram
?’

‘
Anio, yong guk saram
.’

‘Ah, an
English gentleman
. Please, have this seat. Next flight. Ten minutes.
Annyong-hee kashipshiyo!
’

And thus bidden Godspeed, and having presented identifications galore (travellers inside Korea are required to show passports or papers at every verse end, so troubled are the authorities that infiltrating Northerners might wander freely about), I boarded the plane for the south. They had put me right at the very back of the aircraft, and I had an interesting chat with a man who confessed to being a Korean version of a sky marshal and had a very large and wicked gun hidden under his jacket, which he was nonetheless quite happy to show me, demonstrating how he would try to stop a hijacker, should one be so foolish as to try.

The flight took fifty minutes—a journey by air that took Mr Hamel ten days by horse and would take me, on Shanks’s pony, rather more than a month. I stepped off the plane into a fierce westerly Cheju Island gale that nearly swept the Akubra from my head. So the journey begins, I thought to myself; and, like Hamel when he heard of the orders to remove his party to Seoul, ‘I knew not whether to Rejoyce, or be Troubled.’ I found my way to an hotel and slept my last night in luxury before beginning the long march northwards, up to the border.

The monument to Hendrick Hamel—my starting point—stood squat, ugly, looking out of place and very Bauhaus, on a windy hillside of short and springy grass a hundred feet above the sea. It was built of concrete blocks and had the legend ‘Hamel kinyombi’ engraved in
hangul
at the top. A plaque recording the efforts of various philanthropies—such as the Borneo Sumatra Trading Company Ltd and one Carel H. Pappenheim—that were responsible for its construction was weathering nicely in the rain on one side; and on the other, a plaque recorded the wreck of the
Sparrowhawk
and the consequent writing of ‘the first description of Korea ever published in the West’. This, then, undistinguished a structure though it might be, was as much a memorial to a book as to a shipwreck—a pleasant symmetry, I
thought, as I hitched my pack onto my shoulders, turned my back on the sea, dug my stick firmly into the turf, switched on my tape recorder, and took the first step to the north.

I was at a village called Mosulpo, a pretty affair of blue—and orange-roofed cottages that huddled out of the wind in the shadow of a huge basalt cliff at the southwest tip of Cheju-do. (The island’s name, given by mainlanders, is memorably prosaic:
che
means ‘across’ or ‘over there’,
ju
means ‘district’, and
do
means, in this instance, ‘island’—hence Cheju-do is ‘the island district over there’). The locals either fished or farmed, and one might have supposed, being so far away from the realities of the Korean politics (and that is one reason why so many peninsular Koreans come to Cheju on holiday, removing themselves from the tensions prompted by the proximity of the North and the DMZ), that there would be no sign of the more distressingly martial side of life. But even down here the military were all around. High up on the cliff—my notebook records it, as though I were a birdwatcher, as my very first sighting—were two men quite obviously from the US Army. They were wearing full combat gear—packs, rifles, gas masks, rain capes, heavy boots, helmets—and when I spotted them they were gaily abseiling down the sheer basalt face. The first to get back to solid earth—a large man with more muscles than seemed decent—came over to me.

‘You ’murican?’ he inquired, in an accent indubitably from south of the Mason-Dixon line. I confessed that I was not. He spoke in a machine-gun staccato. ‘Limey, huh? How’re ya doin’? Goddamn shit hole of a place this is, Korea. You like it?—shit, you must be crazy. Come over ’n’ see us at the camp. We’ll set you right. I can tell you a thing or two about this place. Nothin’ else to do in this place ’cept get seriously drunk. No pussy. No pussy for miles. Nothin’. Come over ’n’ see us.’ And with that he left to retrieve his friend, who was shouting anxiously and appeared to be stuck on his rock.

I hauled up a steady rise along the flanks of the cliff, and was soon, puffing like a pug engine, in open country. It was just like
the West of Ireland, like Connemara or Donegal. There were dry stone walls between the little fields, and there was cotton grass, and the green shoots of new barley, and a dusting of bright yellow from the spring meadows of rape. Curlews were singing, and early swallows swooped low over the little rivers. A steady, soughing wind riffled the moorland grasses, and over to my right a ragged line of foam showed where the land tilted down, via a narrow paludal plain, to its drowning in the sea. The weather was very Irish, too; there was a thin grey mist, through which a milky sun shone fitfully, and occasionally great gusts of cool and pleasant dampness whirled down from the sky. It was refreshing, exhilarating weather—perfect, had I been a professional walker, for a marathon.

But on this first day I was not planning more than the gentlest of hikes. ‘Wearing in my boots,’ was how I excused myself. A friend in Hong Kong had given me the name of a young Cantonese man, Lawrence, who ran a hotel at Sogwipo—a honeymoon hotel, the friend had said with a knowing leer. So I kept to a more easterly track than Hamel’s men had done, and by nightfall I had reached the outskirts of the village and had found the hotel. It looked like an immense inverted jelly mould—it had been designed by a firm of Hawaiian architects—standing on the clifftop overlooking the southern sea. Lawrence was waiting for me. ‘You really did walk here?’ he asked, incredulous. He was a plumpish young man with a disagreeable pallor of grey on yellow, and he made it abundantly clear that he found it unpleasant even to have to walk across a room. ‘You know the Chinese. Just lie in bed and make money, that’s us.’

His business was, indeed, honeymoons. I had seen dozens of young couples speeding by in taxis already that day (and the plane from Seoul had been three-quarters filled with them, nervous youngsters holding hands and clearly having little idea what to say to each other). The island is to Korean couples what the Adirondacks are to New Yorkers and the Channel Islands to Britons—with one significant exception. As it is well-nigh impossible for a Korean to obtain a passport (the well-worn
excuse offered by the government being the need to conserve foreign exchange, the actual reason being far more complex and steeped in a political paranoia that I will discuss later), it is almost unthinkable for any Korean to travel abroad. (A businessman may, but he is obliged to hand his passport back to the government when he resigns or retires—the privilege of overseas ventures belonging more properly to his company than to him as an individual. Confucian respect for elders, however, allows passports to be kept by people over fifty, and soon, the government promises, by those over forty-five.) So most Korean couples, be they wealthy or working class, have almost no hope of spending their postmarital holiday anywhere abroad—no basking in the Balinese sun for them, unlike their Japanese or Hong Kong counterparts. The only serious trans-ocean adventure open to them is thus a journey to Cheju, the island ‘over there’. And so over there, by the tens of thousands, they flock. The Adirondacks and the Channel Islands may generally prove to be a convenient magnet for the less well-off in the West: Cheju is for everyone, with the entire spectrum of a generation there beginning its first, halting experiments in living and sleeping together.

Seven out of ten of the couples that Lawrence sees in his hotel—he reckons he sees some 36,000 a year (and to gauge the scale of this cottage industry one must note that his is but one of ten first-class honeymoon hotels on Cheju, and there are any number of meaner inns for the Korean
Lumpenproletariat
)—are brought together by professional matchmakers. Lawrence was not altogether approving. ‘I suppose it’s my hotelier’s greed, really. You see these wretched matchmakers sitting in the hotel coffee shops up in Seoul, with the groom’s family on one side, the bride’s on the other, and no one eating a thing. Oh yes, the matchmaker herself does; she’s not nervous at all. She’ll have chocolate cakes—they’re usually pretty fat, these old Korean women. But everyone else is scared stiff, and if they order one cup of coffee each, for the afternoon, we’re lucky. The young boy and girl probably only have a glass of water. They don’t
know what to say or do. They just sit there, looking at the table, fidgeting, looking at the backs of their hands. I’ve known café managers wanting to tear their hair out on a Saturday afternoon—every table full, seven people to a table, and no one eating anything! The manager’s lucky if he can pay one waitress’s wages for the day. Wretched women. Bane of my life.’

Usually the youngsters meet three times: once in a Seoul (or Pusan or Taegu or Inchon or wherever) coffee shop, for that initial encounter under their parents’ gaze; once at a formal dinner in one of the prospective in-laws’ homes; and once, if they’re particularly bold, on their own at a cinema or in a park or, if she’s lucky to have found a young man rich enough, in the prospective groom’s new car. (By this stage, if the arrangement has ‘taken’, the matchmaker gets her money, invariably from the parents of the bride: 5 million
won
in many cases—£3,000—and often a great deal more. In weddings arranged among the
yangban
, those who like to think of themselves as the relics of the Korean nobility, or in weddings where the prospective husband is a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant and is thus an excellent catch, the bride’s parents are commonly supposed to offer him ‘three keys’ as an inducement: a key to a new car, a key to a new apartment, and a key to the new office in which to practise his calling. Finding a suitable husband for your daughter is thus a tall order for even the most fortunate of today’s Koreans.)

The reason is a mathematical consequence of war and of the peculiar marrying habits of the Korean people. There is a custom of sorts that decrees that a girl should marry a man about four years older than herself, once he has done his compulsory stint with one of the arms of the Korean military. Girls born in the mid-1950s were the first to discover that there was a problem: when it was their turn to marry, in the late 1970s (they were then in their early twenties), they looked around for men who were then in their mid—to late twenties—born, in other words, in 1952 or 1953. But thanks to the travails of the Korean War, almost no children were conceived or born in those years, and the girls in the class of ’56, as it were, found they had to look for
younger men. Like locusts, they descended on men born in 1954 and 1955, meaning that the girls poised for matrimonial bliss in the years below them suffered from what might vulgarly be termed a knock-on effect. There have, in consequence of the war, been many thousands of girls anxiously pursuing a very much reduced pool of men of the desirable age, meaning that, in order to win a traditionally suitable spouse, girls—or, rather, their parents—have to resort to extortion, bribery, and emotional grand larceny on a mighty scale. Hence the matchmakers, and hence the sobering fact that no Korean matchmaker who nailed up her shingle since the Panmunjom cease-fire was signed has ever gone to bed hungry.

The union thus arranged, it has to be sanctified and then consummated. The service in a wedding hall (everything rented by the hour—the wedding dress, the music cassettes, the videotape, the formal Korean
hangbok
the pair wear for a photograph that is taken against an acrylic painting of a traditional background) is, except for the more devout families, perfunctory and rather mechanical, and it culminates in the pair flying off, with unimaginative inevitability, to Cheju. Once island-bound, they place themselves in the hands of one of a small army of professional icebreakers, like the ever-beaming, ever-genial, and very small Mr Chu, who has worked in Lawrence’s hotel since it opened, and who, when we met, claimed to have been vicariously responsible ‘for the deflowering of more virgins than any man in Asia’.

‘It is a challenge just to get these people to talk to each other. They come down here quite tired, very tense, very shy. But I have worked out a formula, and it seems to produce results.

‘In the spring season we may get two hundred couples down in a night. They’ll be here for two nights, perhaps three if their husbands have very kindly employers. Usually, though, the husband has just finished his military service, and he’s now in his first job and he doesn’t want to spoil his work record. So he’s keen to get back to his desk. It means we don’t have much time.

‘So I get them all down to the disco—they’ll have had notes
under the door telling them when to come down. We give them trays full of trinkets—loving ducks [the Asian equivalent of turtle doves], bath salts, heart-shaped cakes, and small bottles of
insam
extract, as a bit of a joke for the boys [
insam
is better known as ginseng, and the extract, a sweetish red liquid, is said to be heap good magic for a troublesome libido].

‘We play the only games they can all be certain of knowing—the games they played at school. It’s all very nostalgic for them; the men are all about twenty-six or so, the women twenty-two, and they won’t have played the games for ten years or more. But then I introduce slightly erotic forfeits—I get the girl to confess which film star she likes and why, or I get her to massage the boy’s neck, or I get the boy to drink ten sips of
soju
, so he gets a little drunk, and then I get him to sing
Arirang
or some song they all know, so they get a bit teary. By midnight they’re all in quite a sentimental mood, and the bolder couples slip away up to their rooms.

‘But there are always the problem cases. There are the girls who fall asleep at the bar because they’ve had such a long day, what with getting up at five to put on all that makeup. And there are the boys who are quite terrified of what they’ve got to do next, and they just want to stay together in the bar and get drunk. But slowly we push them all out, and by one o’clock we lock up downstairs, and take a look around to make sure no one’s lingering by the indoor waterfalls [of which the hotel has many, as well as lots of pools stuffed with sluggish, barely mobile, and very fat old carp].

‘Then, once we know they’re all in their rooms, we all go back to the office for a drink. We have a saying for what happens next. We say we’re “waiting for the earthquake”.’

The next morning the young couples, who did not appear at all sheepish, emerged and tucked into their fish and seaweed and
kimchi
breakfasts. Hundreds of taxi drivers were on hand—each man in uniform, each advertising the fact that he carried a prodigious amount of colour film and a camera, and each keen to take the new Mr and Mrs Park or Mr and Mrs Kim or Mr and Mrs Lee on a whirlwind tour of the island. The important thing
from this moment on was to go everywhere and be seen to have been everywhere, hence the cameras and the self-promoting Cartier-Bressons
manqués
who, sad to say, had each found his career prospects so limited (as he would recount in the car) that he had been forced to take this menial job of taxi driving in order to support wife, children, and family dog. The couple wouldn’t care: all they needed—and they really
needed
it—was a photographic record of the honeymoon, to fulfil the Confucian desire
to be seen to be doing the right thing
and to have proof of having done it for the elders back home.