The two Cholla provinces are the rice centres of Korea, and here, on this warm, early spring day, the farmers were out ploughing or planting the paddy. Last year’s stalks peeked above the water like thousands of moustaches neatly trimmed by the autumn harvesters. This year’s new plants—transplanted from smaller seedling beds—were being dibbled into the thick mud by small posses of women, each woman bent double, her skirts hitched up around her waist, her feet and legs quite bare, and a straw hat jammed on her head to protect her from the glare of the sun. The men—bare armed, bare legged and splattered with mud—worked the ploughs, the oxen pulling the single share of fire-hardened wood and the new earth almost bursting from beneath the old with exuberant ease. Now that the last frosts had gone, the earth seemed to need to be worked—maybe it was the energy and might of the oxen, maybe it was the eagerness of the farmers to get on with their growing season—but everything here seemed to be happening so fast, so enthusiastically. In other countries where I had seen people plant and harvest rice—India, northern Luzon, Burma, China—there was always a sense of laziness to the rhythm, a comfortable sense of languor, as though everyone knew the sun and rain would do the trick, the rice would grow, the granaries would fill, and no hurry was required. Here in Chollanam-do, there was a factorylike urgency to it all: Pull that plough! Turn that wheel! Plant that seedling! Dig that furrow! I found it almost exhausting to watch.
I had been on National Route Number I ever since I left Mokpo, but now, as the sun began to slant down behind the poplars on my left, I had to leave it for the country road that my map said went to Illo. I crossed the railway line a couple of times—smart-looking diesel trains hurtled past me, the blue one bound for local destinations, the red-and-white ones bound for the big cities of the North. (National Route I, which I planned to follow intermittently, led all the way to Seoul and beyond, to Pyongyang and the Manchurian border. Three hundred miles north of where I stood, at this junction with the lesser road, it would be cut by a pair of fences, the most impregnable and most heavily defended in the world.)
It was late afternoon when I reached the turning to Illo Town. Two motorcycle policemen were waiting there, directing traffic to stop for a caravan of long black limousines that shot along the highway and turned up to a government building on the skyline. Local government leaders, the police explained. I asked directions to Saint Gertrude’s Church, beside which Mr Kim and his family were said to live. The usual enquiry: Was I American? No, English, and a broad beam spread across the policeman’s face. ‘I am take you,’ he said with immense pride, and pointed to his pillion seat. It was an order rather than an offer. I got aboard with some difficulty; my pack weighed innumerable pounds and my standing on one leg trying to wrestle the other over the back of the motorcycle turned into a performance that would have won me a place in the Royal Ballet. But eventually I was on, whereupon the policeman turned on his blue flashing light and we roared off down into town, scattering people and chickens on every side.
I found the house—small, two-storeyed, with a bright blue roof and a balcony. It was deserted and neighbours pointed to the number seven on my wristwatch; by seven, it seemed clear, the Kims would arrive home. There was nothing for it but to wait, and so I contented myself sitting on the steps of the nearby church, eating strawberries in the early evening sun and watching two middle-aged Korean men playing tennis. They were, I soon realized, excellent players. They hit hard and true, and their brown arms and legs, muscles taut as hawser wire, gleamed with fine sweat. They never said a word to each other. They just grunted with their exertion as they played, machinelike in their accuracy and speed, absolutely matched in their excellence. I became more fascinated as their game went on, rally after rally, never a ball lost or a shot missed, the net unmoved, the fault lines untouched, exchange after exchange after exchange. Their excellence was hypnotic—boring even, since there were no spectacular errors or misjudgements to upset the balance of their play.
Having seen the rice planters working so hard earlier in the day, and now watching these tennis players competing in so deadly a fashion and with such silent, bloodless determination, I found myself thinking—tangential though the thought might at first seem—about the extraordinary success of every one of Korea’s recent ambitions. How triumphant the country had become from utter ruin in the 1950s to the world’s fastest-growing economy in the 1980s! And much of that success, I fancied, had come about because of the sheer will-power and concentrated effort that the Korean people apply to any venture they undertake—they play tennis hard, well, and to win; they build ships night and day, at lower prices and in greater numbers to beat the competition; they work their fields at an exhausting pace to make quite certain their fellow people want for nothing in their diet, and so that the nation has to import nothing—no food, anyway—from abroad.
My mind, lulled by the long metronomic thud of the players’ rallies, pursued the thought a little further. A year or so before I had been saying my farewells to a friend who was changing trains in Irkutsk, in Siberia. It was well after lunch on a bleak day in deepest midwinter, bitterly cold and snowing hard. The express from Novosibirsk to Khabarovsk arrived exactly on time, rumbling out of the greyish gloom, snowflakes glistening in the yellow glare of its headlights. As it creaked to a halt amid a sudden smell of hot iron and warm oil and steam, a dozen burly women rushed from a hut beside the rails and, using heavy iron crowbars six feet long, set about prising the enormous blocks of accumulated grey ice from between the bogies of the carriages. With huge crashes like the calving of small glaciers, the ice fell away and the wheels, hitherto hidden in the ice, looked like wheels again, ready to convey the express on to its next Siberian city.
The women, all smoking tiny, sweet-smelling Russian cigarettes, finished their task just at the moment the guard waved his flag and blew his whistle, and the train began to move on eastward once again. Not a second had been lost; with great efficiency and zeal the huge trans-Siberian monster had been kept in running order, kept well greased and fuelled and equipped to do battle with the worst weather the world can hurl at any means of transport anywhere. And I thought back then to Nikita Khrushchev, and the bullying remark he once made to the then American vice-president, Richard Nixon: We will bury you, he had said. We will bury you. And now, looking at this simple Siberian scene, with its mixture of great determination, of absolute obedience to duty no matter how irksome and difficult, of oblivion to difficulty, to cold, to pain—I thought: My God, they will, you know. These Russians—and I realized, of course, that I was making a none-too-reasonable and even sentimental judgement on all Russians merely on the evidence presented by a dozen Siberian labourers—these Russians have the capacity and the ability to do anything they wish. Nothing can stop a people as determined as this. No strikes. No arguments. No grumbling unwillingness to work. Utter ruthlessness, obstinacy and will-power, all directed to the good of the state. They can bury anyone they want.
And as with Russia—thus went my thoughts a year or more later, on this spring evening in the tiny town of Illo—so with the Koreans. With such determination—in the fields, in such factories as I had seen, in the fishing boats, or on the tennis court baseline—how could they lose? Maybe they would not win today, not immediately, not for some years. But one day they would be up with the masters—one of the big boys, one of the kings of the world, and make no mistake about it.
‘Are you an English-speaker, sir, by any chance?’ A very pretty girl had tapped me on the shoulder, starting me from my reverie. She was smiling broadly, her finely chiselled features glowing in the warm twilight. ‘You are? Why are you here? We see very few foreign people in Illo.’ I explained that I was waiting to see a Mr Kim from the house beside Saint Gertrude’s and that I had a letter, written in hangul, that would explain. I pulled out and gave to her the crumpled note of introduction Mae-young had written for me at Sogwipo, whereupon the girl gave a cry of sheer delight: ‘We are friends, she and me! I was at school with her!
I am the daughter of the house. You must come in. Come on in!’
The family—or the three then in Illo, members of what I later learned was the total family of five—had been out for an afternoon stroll. The parents were sitting on the floor of their living room when Ae-ri (as she introduced herself—‘A most lovely name, don’t you think?’ she giggled) brought me in, and there was some confusion as they put down teacups and bottles of O.B. beer, and struggled to their feet to greet the newcomer.
Mr Kim, the father of the house, was tall, well tanned, a fit-looking man in his early sixties who spoke some English, and after a hurried consultation with Ae-ri said he would be ‘very happy indeed’ if I would stay to dinner and then sleep there for the night. ‘We have a Western bed, you know,’ he said proudly. He introduced me to a small, curly-haired lady with shiny red cheeks and a ready smile: ‘This is Kyu-Hwan eum-ma,’ he said, meaning, literally, ‘This is the mother of Kyu-Hwan.’ His wife.
Korean protocol can on occasion be cumbersome and confusing—this occasion being one such. The lady that Mr Kim was introducing to me was the person that a Westerner would probably call Mrs Kim. Her actual name, the one she would use if she was introducing herself to a shopkeeper, say, was, Ae-ri explained to me later, Mrs Choe—Choe Mi-young. But to Mr Kim she was neither Mrs Kim nor Mrs Choe. She was, instead, the mother of the family’s eldest son. And since the eldest son was called Kim Kyu-Hwan, then Mr Kim’s wife was introduced as ‘Kyu-Hwan eum-ma’, Kyu-Hwan’s mother.
The system, for all its apparent clumsiness, does have some advantages, even for me. The moment I heard Mr Kim’s phrase I knew first that this woman was Mrs Kim; second that Ae-ri was not the only child of the union; third, that there was a son somewhere; and fourth, that he was called Kyu-Hwan. The modest sentence of introduction thus gave me a considerable amount of information about the Kim family—rather more than a Mr Smith at a cocktail party might give me by introducing his female companion as ‘my wife, Mary’.
Mr Kim, who was dressed in baggy silk trousers and a grey silk blouse tied with ribbons and toggles made of bone, settled himself back onto the floor, crossed his legs, and pushed a royal blue silk cushion across to me. He asked me to sit, apologizing for the lack of chairs but noting rather grandly that ‘we don’t like to use chairs—they take up so much room’. He made a signal, and his wife and daughter left silently through the sliding paper-windowed door, presumably to find some more tea. Once they had gone Mr Kim, without any ceremony or shyness, proceeded to ask me my age—an important first step in the forging of any relationship, I was later to discover, between Koreans and the rest of mankind. I told him (‘You are a Monkey!’ he said, when he worked out that I had been born in 1944. ‘Very—how shall I say?—very tricky!’), whereupon he immediately began to gush forth facts and statistics about his family.
He was sixty-four. (That is to say he was sixty-three, to the Western way of counting. In much of the Orient, Korea included, a child is reckoned to be one the moment it is born.) He had been born in Mokpo and had grown up in the bewildering atmosphere of Japanese colonialism—he had been given a Japanese name at school, he had been forced to learn to speak Japanese, he had been impressed into the Japanese militia, and he had been given a job guarding prisoners of war from Singapore. ‘You will never understand, no matter how long you stay, how bad the Japanese times were. They tried to strip everything away from us. They tried to destroy all that was Korea. But we stood up to them. We rejoiced when they were defeated. I have never spoken a word of Japanese again—and I never will.’ He shuddered with distaste as he said this, though Ae-ri, when she brought in more beer, rolled her eyes heavenwards and tutted at her father, who had clearly given this little speech many times before. ‘Why don’t you forget it? It is so long ago. We need the Japanese. We must be their friends again.’
His wife was fifty-nine, he went on. He had three children—Kyu-Hwan, who was thirty-nine, an engineer in Seoul; Sung-Hwan, who had been born after the end of the Korean War, in 1954, and was now working with the police in Taegu; and Ae-ri, who had gone to Soodo Women’s University in Seoul (to study Japanese, her father later admitted, with evident distaste; it was at the university that she had made friends with Kyoung-sook, who had studied Japanese too) and was now working in Seoul as a ticketing agent for Korean Airlines. There had, I gathered, been some trouble with her marriage, and she was now back in Illo ‘getting over it’. But it was made clear to me, despite all the degrees of intimacy of the conversation thus far, that I was to know little about it and that it would be impolite to ask for further details, since the family had already lost a considerable amount of face over the whole incident.
Mr Kim had worked for so much of his early career in Seoul—the children had all been born and brought up in the capital, where most ambitious Koreans eventually migrate—but had ended up as a foreman at a steel factory on the east coast. He had retired four years ago and had used his final bonus—a month’s pay for every one of the twenty years he had worked—to buy this modest house in Illo. He now spent his days walking, his evenings reading or talking. He was very interested in the outside world, never having been beyond the shores of Korea, nor ever likely to. His last real holiday had been a trip to Cheju-do two years before, and he talked delightedly about the beauty of the diving women, and laughed happily when I warned him that the haenyo were in fact rather more beautiful in retrospect than they actually were at the time.
But his most powerful memories were, as one might suspect, of the Korean War. Once our modest dinner had been cleared away—we ate alone, the women bringing us soup and rice and a small dish of meat with perhaps eight side dishes of pickles and marinated fish—he brought out a map, demanded more beer, and showed me where he had seen action.
He had been twenty-six when the North Korean Army invaded on that wet June Sunday in 1950. He was immediately impressed into service—the standing southern army at the time of the invasion was a mere 95,000 men, with eight divisions, some mortars and some artillery pieces, but no tanks. With immense assistance from the Americans an army was hurriedly formed, trained, and sent into war. Kim Jung Jin was a recruit, an infantryman of no particular distinction—a ‘grunt’, he would have been called in that later war as tragically pointless as the one in Korea, and fought so near by, and between such similar enemies.
Private Kim had been busy in his war. He had also been lucky. He had fought his way through the length and breadth of the peninsula for nearly the entire three dismal years that followed and was neither captured nor hurt, ‘not even a scratch’.
He pulled a blurred old sepia picture from his wallet, showing him, or so he said—it could just as well have been Audie Murphy, so blurred was the picture—‘on the road near Taejon, some time in the summer of 1951’. The image was a pathetic one: it was of a young soldier, barefoot, with baggy trousers and a camouflage shirt tattered beyond repair, shuffling along a dusty road alone. He carried one boot—his only boot, so far as I could see—in his right hand, and an elderly rifle was slung across his left shoulder. He looked more like a gamekeeper on a rather decrepit Yorkshire estate, and the thought that he had wandered through Korea like this for three years, being shot at by the fanatically trained soldiers of the Korean People’s Army, or by the ‘volunteers’ of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, seemed barely believable. ‘It was very cold in winter,’ he said, brightly. ‘This picture was taken in the summer.’
He knew his war backwards and inside out. He knew all the dates, all the men, all the battles, all the decisions, all the victories, and all the defeats. He was, in fact, a walking encyclopaedia of the Korean War, and we talked of it late into the night, over yet more beers and with many small bottles of that powerful firewater known as soju, the drinking protocols of which require each drinker to fill the other’s glass so that there is always something to drink and no possible way of avoiding the drunkenness that follows.
So my recollection of his conversation is a hazy one, alth
ough I see from my notebook that I managed somehow to write down a fairly complete chronology of the war on the day after the one I spent in Illo, so at some moment during the day’s hung-over walk I must have recalled it all.
He remembered (according to these notes) all the strange arcana of the times. He knew that Yugoslavia, India and Egypt had abstained from the Security Council resolution naming Douglas MacArthur as commander of the UN forces. He knew that MacArthur’s landing at Inchon was code-named Operation Chromite, and he could recite the names of other American operations, the actual or the merely planned—operations with names like Big Switch and Little Switch; Killer, Ripper and Strangle; Piledriver and Roundup and Thunderbolt (which latter was General Matthew Ridgway’s celebrated attack on the Chinese defences of the Han River in that bitter winter of early 1951).
He knew of the pointless ebb and flow of battle, how Seoul fell to the Communists, was retaken by MacArthur, was taken again by the Reds and then once more by Ridgway’s men, and how similar tidal races had raged up and down rivers and ranges of hills and impenetrable valleys and fjords and coastal plains and paddy fields. He remembered the cold; of being entrained and marched or crammed into swaying trucks to every corner of the old kingdom; he remembered the trenches, and the C-rations and the packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and the occasional and much-valued comradeship with those few Americans who actually tried to talk to the soldiers of the ROK armies.
He knew of all the friends and foes, of the armies and navies and air forces of the Americans and South Koreans, of the Chinese and North Koreans, and of the battle groups made up of such improbable allies as Ethiopians and South Africans, Frenchmen and Dutchmen, Filipinos and Turks, Thais and Belgians, Australians and Columbians, Canadians and Greeks, and that little contingent of infantrymen from Luxembourg, all of whom were waging war under the UN flag.