Korea (19 page)

(One problem unforeseen by King Sejong was the difficulty
of writing
hangul
on a typewriter. The various syllables of Korean words—the first consonant, say, then the vowel, and then the third consonant—are grouped together in a specifically stylized manner. The first part of the word
kamsa hamnida—
‘thank you’—is broken up into the syllables
kam
and
sa
; the syllable
kam
is made up of the first consonant,
k
,
, which is written on the left; the vowel,
a
,
, which is put to the immediate right of the
; and the final consonant,
m
,
, which is put below the first two:
.
Sa
is similarly done, and easily, thus
. The other syllables are constructed likewise, but with one very confusing difference, in that
ham
is actually written
hap
,
, but the
p
is pronounced like an
m. Ni
and
da
are less complicated because of their being made up of only two letters. The final version of the word is thus
. As you can see, to type the syllable
kam
,
, involves both lowering the font and backspacing; in the one word this operation has to be performed twice. In some words—such as the word ‘telescope’,
man won gyon
, or
—every syllable is constructed with three letters, with the last and sometimes the intermediate ones positioned in a way that is highly inconvenient for the typist. There is no suggestion it is more complicated than Chinese; but when compared with Devanagri, or Urdu (despite its being written from right to left), with the knitting-like Burmese or the spaghetti-like Tamil, Korean is very trying. The benevolent king, whose statue sits in benign invigilation over the Toksu Palace in Seoul, on a
hangul
-covered plinth, could not have been expected to know the trouble he would cause for the Remingtons and Olivettis of this world.)

And thus armed with my smattering of
hangul
I scanned the road signs. I was dreadfully slow at first, but was nonetheless determined to keep walking while I tried to read. In the early afternoon the frustrations were enormous: by the time I had managed to twist my eyes and brain around the complexities of a Sokwang-ju or a Ssangtae-ri, the junctions by which I might have reached these villages were long past. But slowly I managed some degree of fluency. And as the sun began to slope down
towards the hills—a welcome relief, for it had been a very hot day, and sweat was running from beneath my hat and down my neck—I saw the name I wanted. I recognized the
as
o
; I just managed to get the
as
jung
; and I had by now become accustomed to
, or
ri
. Ojung-ri, carved on a granite post, and a number 5. Five kilometres, I guessed, up this stony path that led through the paddies and the groves of young bamboo, and into the mountains proper.