Yin Yang Tattoo (9 page)

Koreans are proud of their country's many achievements and quick to boast of their inclusion in world rankings of all stripes, but one top placement they don't go out of their way to publicise is Korea's regular inclusion among the world's top five most dangerous nations for drivers.

Two terrifying hours into the trip and the sun was almost up, the pre-dawn light on the road signs telling us we were nearly half-way to Kwangju. We were barely moving, which could only mean one thing. In traffic this dense travelling this close together, accidents were as catastrophic as they were commonplace. Closing my eyes and reclining the seat I tried to get some sleep, my thoughts crowded by a sense of dread at what lay along the highway, and other worries that refused to go away. Maybe it would only be a breakdown; and maybe I was not involved in what might be an assignment from hell.

I woke to the realisation that traffic was beginning to pick up pace. I tried hard to keep my eyes closed but morbid curiosity won out just in time for me to see a yellow taxi concertinaed to half its length between the back of a 20-ton truck and the front of an express bus. Six feet from me a young man's dead eyes stared from the front passenger seat. Behind him a slender arm, a woman's watch on the wrist, hung limp from the crumpled window frame, blood dripping from carefully-tended fingernails to pool on the ground below. As we passed, a fireman casually threw a blanket over them. I didn't want to think about what that guy saw in his nightmares.

Lee drove on without comment. He had hardly said a word since Seoul, and now conversation seemed almost out of place. Soon the flow regained its normal mad momentum and, as there was no slow lane, nowhere to seek safer passage, we had no option but to join in the fray.

We were still about twenty miles short of Kwangju when Lee pulled off the highway and soon afterwards we swung under a shiny metal archway so new that it was absent of signage. A freshly-paved two lane road flew arrow-straight to a building the size of an aircraft hangar, an isolated man-made island in a sea of rice paddies. In its car park sat six K-N Group buses angled nose-first together in sets of three, like giant sergeant's stripes.

As Lee led me towards an entrance I noticed there were no markings anywhere on the new building. Inside it was another large, industrial-looking structure, single-storeyed with a sloping, corrugated roof, and on the far side, cut in half like a full-sized architect's model. Behind it the hangar's vast walls were one giant, soft-focus mural backdrop of brown rice fields and jagged Korean mountains, almost completely bare of trees. I couldn't remember mountains like that anywhere near the hangar, and South Korea's peaks were all thickly clad from decades of reafforestation since the Korean War.

I turned to Lee. ‘What's going on?'

‘Let's get your equipment.'

He walked out past two men in K-N uniforms handing out simple denim jackets, red neckerchiefs and what looked like small, gold-and-red badges, to a grinning line of men and women with the round, sun-burnished faces of country farm folk.

Whether they realise it or not, tourists to the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea experience a bewildering array of citizen actors playing out bizarre roles in a social experiment of Orwellian bleakness.

Swallow the propaganda and North Korea is a land of great joy, of uniform, unshakeable faith in the doctrine of
Juche
, or ‘self-reliance', of deep national pride in their stance as resolute isolationists, dependent lackeys to no-one. It is a complete crock of shit.

The abject misery of the Northerner is as plain as the eyes on the actors' faces. The eyes of ordinary people forced to role-play as happy citizens, coerced into feigning blissful contentedness in a land portrayed, however implausibly, as a workers' paradise.

I once watched ‘real' actors on a film set at a North Korean movie studio, their unchanging wooden ex„pressions, even in front of a rolling camera, giving the game away. One look at the expensive film camera explained why. Since only the take-up spool was moving, the tool at the centre of the charade obviously had no film in it.

On another visit to the North I witnessed the resigned look of a department store ‘shopper' as she surrendered to the store assistant a gaudy sweater that she had just seemingly bought in front of me, her role as a contented consumer suspended until the next foreign visitor ventured onto the painstakingly-directed stage that was Pyongyang Number One Department Store.

The same numbed pain afflicted the eyes of the middle-aged student in the vast Peoples' Library. Open on his desk was an arid tome on the effects of global weather patterns on the rainforests of Brazil. Referring to the text with painstaking attention, he printed in his notebook with a blunt pencil in a childish hand:
Where are you going yesterday? I go to the movies with my good friend Mr Park.

Three hundred miles to the south, unselfconscious tanned faces laughed loud while they compared badges and, with fat fingers callused from years of farming the land, struggled to fit them to lapels. No matter how blurred they were by decades of prosperity and freedom, the roots these people shared with their northern cousins were instantly recognisable. Where a Northerner's gaunt face would be clouded by a mix of reticence, resignation and fear, these plump-featured southern farm folks bubbled with the humour and curiosity that marked them as a parallel family strand a half-century distinct from their benighted brothers and cousins in the North.

I wondered what story was spun to explain their presence here, dressed as North Koreans and sporting lapel badges bearing the face of the dead Great Leader, instigator of the fratricidal Korean War, and sworn enemy of the South. It would not be too difficult. Tell them they are extras in a documentary film, slip them a few readies and the promise of a decent group meal and
soju
by the crate. It was the ‘why' that really bothered me. Why would K-N Group have me here, in provincial South Korea, photographing a mock-up of a North Korean textile factory, phoney North Koreans and all?

I had a tripod and two lights set up when Schwartz arrived swinging an attaché case, cabin luggage tag flickering from its handle. I had suffered a pre-dawn death race on the highway to hell while Schwartz flew down, thirty minutes in the air, the biggest threat to his wellbeing presented by the in-flight coffee.

‘What's the story here, Schwartz?'

‘Are you ready to get to work?'

‘Photographing a fake factory filled with phoney North Koreans wearing Kim Il-sung badges?'

‘Do what you have been hired to do, and maybe you'll get to pick up that cheque.'

Maybe?

‘My job fee's got nothing to do with you – '

‘I don't give a shit what you're making here because I could buy and sell you twice over, Brodie, but if you don't do the job right do you really think Chang's office will sign off on your fee?'

He turned his back on me and I fished out my colour meter and toured the hangar. For the moment, dealing with a nightmarish blend of artificial light sources was a welcome diversion only interrupted by the scream of high-performance engines that shook the entire building. Through an open door I saw a low-flying jet fighter, delta wings reflecting in the water-filled rice fields.

From then, relief from the din of the fighters was fleeting and momentary. Every few minutes one and sometimes two jets screamed overhead, closing down conversation and jangling nerves. The warehouse had to be directly in line with the final approach path of a military airfield.

For four hours I struggled to get giggly sturdy South Korean farm folk to look like downtrodden under-fed North Korean factory workers, an impossible task that called upon every professional trick I could muster. I populated foregrounds with the skinniest people in the building. I made compositions and camera angles draw the onlooker to one or two sharp faces, and used a restricted depth of field to push other subjects out of focus. A critical viewer might commend artful use of focal planes to accentuate my subjects, when in reality I was burying giveaway details in the background blur.

In a business where making the most of every given situation is the norm, I was in new territory, and didn't like it one bit. Tuning my equipment to show an ugly portrait subject in the best possible light, or letting dense shadow hide the run-down machinery in the background of a factory shot was one thing, but save for the contrived con that was advertising, in my line of photography, portraying a completely fictitious environment as reality was unexplored territory.

I worked against rising unease that threatened to push me over the edge into full-blown panic. These photographs had to be part of a scam of proportions I could only guess at. I was thousands of miles from home, up to my ears in debt – and the job that I had hoped would save me now threatened to sink me for good.

‘Everything OK?' It was Schwartz, standing right beside me.

‘Exactly what am I doing here?'

‘Your job.'

‘Since when was major-league fraud in the job description? I don't need this.'

‘We both know exactly how badly you need the money.'

What did he know about my finances?

‘I've still got a return ticket to London, and right now I'm inclined to use it.'

The electronic trill of a mobile phone made him turn away and dip into his jacket pocket.

‘Yoboseyo.' Pause. ‘Yessir, everything's going fine, on schedule and we just finished the last shot.'
‘We'
. I liked that. He looked at me and turned his back again, moving away a few paces, lowering his voice. It had to be Chang on the other end. He must have spoken to Schwartz in English, making replying in Korean an unthinkable insult. I caught snippets of Schwartz describing in impressive detail each of the shots I had set up. Like every PR person I ever worked with, he shamelessly implied that everything achieved so far was only thanks to his personal creativity and deep understanding of the job at hand. He raised his voice to counter the din of yet another passing jet.

‘Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? Yes, the Due Diligence team arrives on Friday. They'll be too late to go to the office, and we have their weekend pretty much covered.

‘Yessir, the shots from here will be ready in plenty of time. We'll have prints and digital files made for distribution, and leak a few to the newspapers before the London guys land.' After a few more ‘yessirs', he rang off, and turned back to me.

‘A Due Diligence team arrives in a few days, so if you even
think
about messing us around, you'll never see a dollar of your money. I'll make sure of that.'

He walked away, punching a number into his mobile as he went.

 

Between fitful snoozes on the long drive back to Seoul I saw only one inter-city bus in a rice field, tyres in the air, windows blown out, completely ignored by passing traffic. An everyday episode of carnage already a few hours old, it might merit a column inch and a postage-stamp photograph buried on an inside page of tomorrow's newspapers.

As traffic flowed through the notch in the line of hills that marked the beginning of the Seoul plain, a curtain of brown smog rose up against the grey-blue sky.

Lee left me at the hotel with instructions to be ready at eight o'clock the next morning. If he knew what or where we were to be shooting, he saw no need to share that information with me, and I wasn't about to ask.

 

By the time I walked into JJ's, I was freshly showered and fed, and feeling at least the physical benefits of forty-five minutes in the hotel gym.

The bar in the Hyatt basement heaved with singles of all ages. Groups of Korean men hunkered around tables shrouded in blue smoke. Lone Western businessmen sipped selfconsciously at bottles of Bud or Heineken and warily scanned the abundant supply of overdressed women. Scoring in a joint like JJ's was easy. The real challenge was scoring sex that didn't break the expense account budget, as the bar attracted some of the most expensive whores in Korea.

On a small stage of chrome and mirrors a four-piece Filipino band, fronted by a curvaceous Filipina, belted out cover versions of Top-20 hits through the ages. Like every Filipino cover band I ever heard – and they pop up in hotel bars and lobbies all over Asia – they were tightly rehearsed, note-perfect, and with the exception of the singer's curves, eminently forgettable.

Bobby Purves stood alone, tie loosened, one polished brogue on the brass rail, a half-empty litre of draft on the bar in front of him. I saw him make a signal for two more of what might be the most expensive beers in all of Korea.

‘I can't afford this place, Bobby. I'm tight for cash until K-N comes up with an advance.'

He shook his head even as he slurped at the fresh glass. ‘We'll grab a couple here, then move someplace where the eye-candy's better.'

‘Remember I wanted to ask you something?'