Korea (4 page)

And then the shutter snaps shut and the image, such as it was, halts its meagre progress. After 1953, the year I vaguely recalled as the date of the cease-fire between the two unhappily and perhaps permanently divided Koreas, there is no real image at all. A few names of people and places and events swim in and out of memory—Syngman Rhee, President Park, Koreagate, Kim II Sung, the KAL 007 disaster, Pyongyang, the Rangoon bombing, the green baize tabletop at the town of Panmunjom. But otherwise nothing. Just a distant memory of merciless and pointless fighting, a hazy knowledge of stunning economic miracles having been wrought in the subsequent years, and, pervading everything, a vague and haunting impression of a Korean face as somehow being a face that represents all that is mysterious, impassive, and vaguely frightening about the East.

Ian Fleming’s Oddjob, in the Bond books, was a Korean—because to the most perceptive of Western popular writers, and, later for Hollywood casting directors, the Korean and the Korean face epitomized Asian menace, a face and a persona perfectly designed to induce a sense of fear. And then again, hadn’t I read that the Japanese always used Koreans to guard the very worst of their concentration camps, because Koreans would undertake tasks that even the Japanese might be too squeamish to perform? It might not have been true (though in fact it was), but it was an idea that added to the overall impression—that of an inclement
and menacing place, far away and unknown, a country at eternal war with itself or with others, peopled by strange and unforgiving Orientals, a secret and forbidding country that was probably best kept a secret, filed away and forgotten.

And then, that autumn day in 1985, I travelled there, and stayed for two weeks—the two weeks during which I journeyed down to Ulsan and to that mighty shipyard that first sparked my curiosity. But it was more than mere ships—much more—that changed my perception of Korea.

I had not really wanted to go. It was a last-minute decision, prompted by a characteristic piece of newspaper-office idiocy. One Monday morning an editor came up with the not-unreasonable scheme (from my point of view) that I should fly immediately to Western Australia for a fortnight and from there to Manila, to write essays on Perth (before the America’s Cup) and the Philippines (before the fall of President Marcos). But then, later that afternoon, another, more senior editor discovered that the newspaper’s medical correspondent had flown off to a remote town in northern Japan to interview the ‘world’s oldest man,’ and had taken no less than £7,000 in cash with him, breaking all records and, to the chagrin of the accountants (for on most newspapers these days, accountants hold more sway than editors), all departmental budgets as well.

Down came the predictable ukase: no more foreign trips to be made until the medical correspondent was found, his explanation given, and the cash returned. In vain did I protest that flights had been booked, appointments made in Perth and Fremantle, luggage packed, sobbing families comforted. I railed and I argued. In the end I was told to go to the airport, check in, and call the editor before the chocks were pulled away. I did just that, only to be told that someone else had been asked to write about Perth, and that while I was expected in Manila three weeks hence, would I kindly now go to Seoul instead and write an essay on the country that, someone had just remembered, was planning to stage the Olympic Games in 1988. A hurried change of planes
—no longer Qantas to Perth but British Airways to Amsterdam and KLM to Seoul; an equally hurried change of books (the
Survival Guide to Australia
being dumped in favour of the
Insight Guide to Korea
)—and I was on my way.

It was a wretchedly long flight. I had idly mentioned to a friend in the office that we were probably flying via my old stamping ground of New Delhi, and it was only when I saw that the sun was off the port beam that I realized, cursing my stupidity, that we were in fact headed across the Pole, via Alaska. So I called the friend, collect, from Anchorage Airport, prompting a splendidly surreal argument that revolved around his much-repeated protest to the operator that, ‘No, I won’t accept the call from him in the United States. He’s in India.’ It took a little time before the penny dropped, and by then it was time for the flight to leave again, bound across the Pacific, down to Seoul.

During all those long hours I tried, so far as I recall, to clear my mind of most of the prejudice against Korea, the views instilled in the Gaumonts and the classrooms of old. To an extent I must have succeeded, difficult as it may have been. In any event the conversion, for that is what I underwent during the two weeks that followed, was positively Pauline in its scale and extent. I became, without a doubt, and with extraordinary suddenness, enchanted by what I found.

All the old images suddenly melted and slipped clear away. I became captivated by Korea and the Koreans, and have remained so ever since. I hope that these pages that follow will convey some of the reasons why—reasons that remain, and may remain long after this book is written, a mystery to me. The reader will not want a litany of excuses, of course: but I sometimes find my affection for poor old Korea—this ‘unhappy country’ that so many earlier writers, half a century and more ago, discovered it to be, this ‘difficult and dangerous Kingdom’ that Hendrick Hamel found three centuries before—sometimes I find it hard to explain, even to myself. Hence the journey, and the need to try to understand both Korea and my own reactions to Korea. The journey that I planned, then, and the words that result from
it, will serve me every bit as much as I trust they may serve the reader. For, like all travels, this is as much a journey of self-discovery as the simple discovery of another country and another people. I needed to make the trip—to find out not simply what, and who, and when, but
why
.

For several months I contemplated the best way to journey around the country. I had already driven and flown and taken the railway and the bus over many hundreds or even thousands of miles. Each was pleasant enough a mode of transport, yet each placed strict limits on the kind of Koreans one was able to meet. In a car, of course, you had either your companion or the very occasional hitchhikers—invariably students or drunks or American servicemen eager to get back before their two-day passes expired. The planes, on the other hand, tended to fill with blue-suited businessmen from Hyundai or Gold Star or Daewoo, men who would either read impenetrable documents about the finer points of oil tanker hull assembly or else, and more frequently, test their English on you in sometimes the most excruciating ways.

I once encountered a Mr Jimmy Kim (as his card declared) on a flight to Ulsan: he approached me in the airport lounge and, with neither introductions or queries, announced his apparently rather urgent inquiry. Was the word
slipper
, he asked, generally used in the singular or the plural form? I thought for a moment and then replied that people normally asked for the dog or child to fetch slippers in pairs, at which news Mr Kim suddenly looked crestfallen. I asked him why. He was, he explained sadly, the publisher of a series of English conversation books, and he had just sent his latest masterpiece to press containing a sentence that read: ‘Mrs Park, would you please fetch me my slipper?’ I suggested that one might well explain away the odd construction by saying that Mr Park had only one leg or that the dog had savaged the other shoe, whereupon Mr Kim brightened a little. He then asked for reassurance that another of his sentences was correct. Garlic and sugar, he wondered, they were usually used
in the plural, were they not, as in ‘There are quite a lot of garlics in that soup, Mrs Lee’?

In the end I decided to walk.

I was not accustomed to walking, nor was I very fit. But it was a means of journeying born of a noble tradition: Belloc and Byron and Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor had all walked, and none of them, so far as I could learn from their accounts, had previously been renowned for athleticism nor belonged to any rambling club. Providing I had enough warm clothing, stout boots, and enough money to buy dinner and a bed at an inn each night, the journey could be nothing less than pleasurable. I would see the Korean people at ground level; I could linger where I wanted, go where I wished, stop and start at moments convenient only to myself. I mentioned the idea to friends at home, and they scoffed amiably. I mentioned it to Koreans, who took the Confucian view that to journey long distances alone was highly disagreeable and an almost unhealthy practice. But the more I considered it, the more the idea appealed. The only matters remaining, after buying boots, a rucksack, and an ample supply of adhesive bandage and Kendal Mint Cake, were to choose a route and select a date on which to begin. History provided me with a perfect design.

Korean history is a mysterious subject and like many Eastern histories is as much a mixture of legend and hyperbole as of documented fact. If it is uncertain when the West first became officially aware of Korea’s existence, it is by no means clear when and how Koreans first came to know of the existence of the strange-smelling, pale-skinned ghosts—the
yangnom
—who lived in the vast world beyond the sunset. China, Japan, and Mongolia formed the essential boundaries of Korean geographical knowledge until as late as the sixteenth century; and after two successive and brutal invasions and sieges by the Manchus, the Koreans withdrew into themselves so decisively and effectively that they referred to their land as the Hermit Kingdom, a country deliberately shunning contact with the outside Oriental world and
having virtually no conception of another world in the Occident.

But Roman coins have been found in Korean burial urns, suggesting that traders must have reached Korean shores, bringing at least some form of contact with the Mediterranean civilizations. And the tentative contacts made with the West by the Chinese offered some later links between the Koreans—who sent peacetime envoys to the Peking court—and the cultures of London and Paris and Venice and Madrid. Korean writings of the early sixteenth century refer to people called the ‘Fo-lang-chi’ overrunning the Chinese tributary state of ‘Man-la’—the Portuguese, undoubtedly, who annexed Malacca. A Spaniard, Gregorio de Cespedes, actually served in Korea as chaplain to Hideyoshi’s troops during the Japanese campaign of 1593, but no reference can be found in any Korean source to the appearance of this strange-looking barbarian.

It was some time towards the end of the reign of King Sonjo, around 1606, that a Korean diplomat returned to Seoul from Peking with a map of Europe, offering the first certain, and presumably dismaying, knowledge that there was an advanced and civilized world beyond the great tracts of China. Then again, in 1631 an envoy named Chong Tu-won returned from a mission to the Celestial Kingdom with a collection of Western objects—a musket, a telescope, an alarm clock, a map of the then-known world, and books on astronomy. Thirteen years later still, when the Korean prince Sohyon was taken hostage by the invading Manchus and brought back to China, he met and was befriended by the Jesuit astronomer and mathematician, Adam Schall von Bell, and on his release in 1644 he brought back a number of books on Western science and a posse of Christian servants. (However, Sohyon died mysteriously, possibly of poisoning, just two months after his return to Seoul. It has long been thought that his enthusiasm for Schall’s teachings, his pride in the books and presents he had been given, and his friendship with his Christian butlers proved offensive to the strict Confucian orthodoxy of his royal colleagues. In any case, such influence as he might have brought with him evaporated like
perfume on a stove, and once his servants had been deported back to Peking, it was as though Sohyon, and Schall, had never been.)

But inexorably, events began to move more rapidly. A Dutch sailor named Jan Weltevree was shipwrecked on the Korean coast in 1627 and became a subject of immediate official fascination. In line with the policies of Japan and Korea, he was told he would have to remain exiled on the peninsula and could never return home. Weltevree, a master foundryman, was inducted into the Korean Military Training Command, and spent his career teaching military gunsmiths how to cast cannon, European-style. In such ways—imprisonment and exiledom, diplomacy and wreck—did knowledge seep slowly into this most perversely isolated of states on the Pacific shores.

But then, in 1653, came an event that was to bring Korea firmly to the notice of the Western world, though in truth it must be said it did little to increase Korean enthusiasm for or interest in the West.

The story of the wreck of the Dutch merchant ship the
Sparrowhawk
on the southwestern shores of Cheju Island, and the subsequent adventures of the surviving crew, was something I came across while browsing in a bookshop in the centre of Seoul one wet and dismal November evening. It took me but a few moments to realize that the journey of these Dutch sailors, for reasons both symbolic and practical, would provide the perfect template for my own odyssey through Korea nearly three-and-a-half centuries later.

The
Sparrowhawk
, or more precisely, the
Sperwer
, was a three-masted barque in the service of the Netherlands East India Company. Her crew had come out from Texel in Holland in January 1653 and had arrived at the Dutch naval station in Batavia—today’s Djakarta—and then sailed on to Taiwan. There they transferred to the tiny
Sparrowhawk
, with orders to proceed to the treaty port of Nagasaki, in Japan, where the Dutch had trading rights.

According to the now-famous account of the journey written by the ship’s secretary, Hendrick Hamel (with whose words I have begun this and all other chapters), the vessel set course to the northeast on 30 July. The bill of lading, issued in Formosa, shows the vessel to have carried the kind of exotic cargo that would have delighted Masefield: 20,000 catties (the measurement is still commonly used in China; a catty is equivalent to about 1.3 Ibs) of
putchuk
(better known as costus-root, a gingerlike aromatic root much favoured by the Japanese); the same amount of camphor (listed, oddly, as Borneo camphor—odd since most of the world’s camphor came in those days from a species of cinnamon tree grown in Taiwan, whence the
Sparrowhawk
sailed); 20,000 catties of alum; 92,000 catties of powdered sugar; 300 wild goat skins; 3,000 eland skins; and nearly 20,000 Taiwanese deerskins.