But it turned out I was not the only Westerner in town, anyway. I was mooching along a lane, looking for a bulgoki-jip, a restaurant serving the barbecued beef for which this part of the peninsula is famous, when I glanced into a bookshop. There, standing at the back in animated conversation with the owner, were two white men in long raincoats. I opened the door, and they looked up at the jangling of the bell, their faces portraits of blank astonishment. ‘What…’ they both spluttered, and then I told them what I was doing, and we all marched off to dinner. ‘Simon,’ said the taller of the pair, ‘my name is Elder Harper and this’—he pointed to his friend, a small, blond boy who looked about eighteen—‘is Elder Cran’. They were both missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Mormons.
With no disrespect meant to its followers, I have never been able to be terribly enthusiastic about the Mormon church. Logically I have to suppose there is not much to choose between prophets being crucified and rising from the dead in Palestine, sitting under trees and gaining self-knowledge in northern India, or finding golden plates at the top of hills in upstate New York and then urging followers to walk across America to found Salt Lake City. Faith—in matters like these and in leaders like these—is what powers a religion along; a moral code, having precious little to do with legend or leadership, is what actually makes it worthwhile; and Mormon’s moral code is certainly not to be sneezed at, even if it is a trifle too strict for many tastes.
Mormon leaders I have come to know in Hong Kong in recent years have suggested their church is making a ‘big push’ in the Orient; the effort that Elders Harper (Eric, from Arizona) and Cran (Michael, from New York) were making in Naju was presumably part of the push. They were the foot soldiers of a new battle for converts being directed from Salt Lake City, and like all foot soldiers, they were having to suffer for victory.
We sat on the floor of a small café, eating bulgoki and kimchi and rice and most of the about twenty side dishes this particular café had to offer, and I drank a large bottle of O.B. beer, and listened to them talk. They had been together in Naju for the last month. Eric Harper was the elder, at twenty-three. Michael Cran, who looked no more than a child, was twenty-one. Both wore identical blue suits and white shirts; each had his name and station in the church on a plastic tag on his lapel. They lived in the Mormon House on the outskirts of town with one other American—the leader of their little cell—and a Korean, to help with the language.
‘I was sent out here to do missionary work ten months ago. I learned a little Korean at headquarters in Salt Lake, then I came out to Taegu to polish it up, then I was assigned here.’ Elder Harper exuded doctrinal self-confidence, like the better kind of car salesman. ‘I’d sure love to have you come over to the Mormon House. But we don’t allow any strangers to come in. I’m really sorry about that. You’ve been staying with the Catholics? They’re much easier, aren’t they? I sometimes envy them. They make life so easy. But then a hard life can mean better rewards, can’t it?’
Elder Cran seemed not quite so convinced. He had only been in town for four weeks, spoke very little Korean, and was a little homesick. ‘It’s been three months since I left home. We aren’t allowed to see any newspapers or magazines. Tell me what’s been going on back home. I saw the cover of a copy of Time magazine the other day. But the church doesn’t like us to get distracted by the news. I miss it, I must say.
‘Still, we must be doing a good thing. We were in that store trying to persuade them to take copies of the Book of Mormon and stock it. We’ve had it printed in hangul, you know. He wasn’t too keen. It’s a challenge, all right. How many converts have I made? Well, that’s difficult to answer. Not many, that’s for sure. How do I tell if I’ve had a good day? Well, I guess if it feels good, it must be good.
‘But I like Korea, that’s for sure. I always wanted to come to a country like this. South Africa, that’s the kind of country I like. Strong, knows what it wants, good police and troops. Korea’s like that. They like American power. They’re pretty conservative. Strong regimes are just what I like. So Korea’s a good place.’
We talked in this vein, Harper the self-assured, Cran the uncertain, for a couple of hours. ‘Sure wish I could join you in a beer. Not allowed. No coffee or tea either.’ The church hierarchy hadn’t taken a position on the acceptability of the two types of tea offered in all Korean restaurants—the poricha, or toasted-barley tea, and the oksusucha, made from corn—glasses of which are set down without asking the moment you walk in. ‘So we stick with water. No stimulants. That’s the word around here.’
We left, and as the pair walked me back to my hotel I came to the uncomfortable realization that we—the café, the hotel, and the lanes in between—were right in the middle of a red-light area. Scores of dingy little bars, all with English names and the strange tautology ‘Room-Salon’ in neon above the door, beckoned to us. Girls licked their lips and pouted and I, eager to see what it was all about, hastened back to where I could drop the elders off. ‘Disgusting, this,’ said Elder Cran, the man who liked conservative regimes. ‘So debased. Surprising, I find it. Do you have this sort of thing in London? I guess you do.’
The pair left when I turned into my hotel doorway. ‘We’ll be back tomorrow to go to the mogyoktang. You have one in your hotel. It’s the one we always use. We have to come—no choice—there aren’t any baths in our house.’ And they pointed to the door of the public bathhouse, steam pouring from it into the cold night air and a few pinkish Koreans walking out, hurrying home before they caught cold.
I waited until they had gone, then walked quickly back up the road to the Room-Salon with what I thought were the prettiest pair of girls. They were all in pairs, usually one standing at the doorway, the other sitting at a table, her short skirt pulled as high up along her thigh as the law and decency allowed. I found one pair that seemed particularly seductive and went inside. The door was slid shut behind me, and one of the girls asked simply: ‘Maekju?’ and when I said yes, three large bottles of O.B., and a plate of peanuts and toasted seaweed squares were placed on the table, and the girls got down to business.
It was a brothel, of course, of the very coarsest kind. The girls, on close inspection, were slatternly, but they giggled a lot and had fun trying to teach me some Korean. I liked the phrase ‘I shipaloma,’ which has to do with carnality and whoredom, but in which order I could not be sure. I was told never to use it in polite society. I told them one or two choicer phrases in English and then went hard at it trying to convince them that Texas was not in England. Yes it was, they kept saying. ‘Diana. Queen in Texas. Texas yong guk.’ Then, it being quite hot in the airless little room, I took off my windcheater, whereupon one of the girls, the perkier of the two, started, with beguiling gentleness, to pluck at the hairs on my forearm, saying all the while to her companion, ‘Gorilla! Gorilla!’ and laughing. She had never seen anything quite like it. Her friend, who was rather thin, laughed a lot and slopped more beer into the glasses. My girlfriend, who had long hair and a degree of buxomness rarely seen in Korea, turned up the cassette recorder, pulled down the blinds, and asked me to dance with her. Sheena Easton, a pretty girl herself who I remembered came from Glasgow and had been turned into a star on the BBC, belted out some dire song, and the Korean girl, who said her name was Anna, danced slowly around the floor, pressing her body tightly against mine and after a minute took my hand and pressed it to her back to prove that she was not wearing any panties.
Then, in quick succession, three things happened. Anna, emboldened by the beer, or perhaps overcome with the doubtful magic of dancing with a gorilla, thrust her hand down the front of my shirt and felt every last detail of my chest. I, emboldened by the beer, and perhaps overcome by dancing with a girl who had wanted me to know she wasn’t wearing any panties, thrust my hand down the front of her dress. She was not wearing a bra, and I had a glorious moment feeling her very substantial breasts and feeling their nipples stiffen to my touch.
; And then a man walked in. I took my hand away. She took hers away. There were some ill-tempered words muttered by all three of the Koreans in the room, and from somewhere a bill appeared under my nose, and I was asked to pay about twenty American dollars—six or so for the beer and fourteen or so for the seaweed. Anju, anju, the girl kept saying, explaining as best she could—and through tears, for she seemed to know she was in some kind of trouble—that the anju, the salty appetizers that always come with beer in Korea, were very expensive. And then the doors were opened, and it was suggested that I might like to leave. The cold air pierced me like a knife, and I staggered, somewhat morose and bad-tempered, back to my bed, alone.
The following morning I was up at dawn, having slept like a log. The sun was rising into a sky of the clearest eggshell blue. My socks were quite dry. My pack felt lighter than it had for days. I stopped at a stall and bought oranges, chocolate, and a carton of milk and stepped out for the long haul to the city of Kwangju, the capital of the province of South Cholla, and a place that will always be linked—not merely in Korea, but all around the politically conscious world—with the memory of a most savage tragedy. The city of Kwangju, where the face of modern Korean politics was changed for all time by the most terrible of massacres.
4. Memorial to a Massacre
Justice is severely executed among the Coresians, and particularly upon criminals. He that rebels against the King, is destroy’d with all his Race, his Houses are thrown down, and no Man does ever rebuild them, all his Goods forfeited and sometimes given to some private person. When the King has once made a Decree, if any man is so presumptuous as to make any Objection to it, nothing can protect him from severe Punishment, as we have often seen it executed.
Among other particulars I remember, that the King being inform’d that his Brother’s Wife made great Curiosities at Needlework: he desir’d of her, that she would embroider him a Vest; but that Princess bearing him a mortal Hatred in her Heart, she stich’d in betwixt the Lining and the Out-side some Charms and Characters of such nature, that the King could enjoy no pleasure, nor take any rest while he had that Garment on.
After he had long study’d to find what might be the cause of it, at last he guess’d at it. He had the Vest rip’d, and found out the cause of his trouble and uneasiness. There was not much time spent in trying that wretched Woman. The King condemn’d her to be shut up in a Room, the Floor whereof was of Brass, and order’d a great Fire to be lighted under it, the Heat whereof tormented her till she dy’d.
The News of this Sentence being spread abroad through all the Provinces, a near Kinsman of this unhappy Woman, who was Governour of a Town, and in good Esteem at Court for his Birth and good Qualities, ventur’d to write to the King, representing, That a Woman, who had been so highly honour’d as to marry his Majesty’s Brother, ought not to die so cruel a Death, and that more Favour should be shown to that Sex.
The King, incens’d at this Courtier’s Boldness, sent for him immediately, and after causing 20 strokes to be given to his Shin-bones, order’d his Head to be cut off.
Hendrick Hamel, 1668
Dusk was coming on when I arrived on the outskirts of Kwangju. The warm, still air was drenched with the scent of early jasmine, and the sky was alive with flights of early swallows. But it was far from being a scene of total pastoral peace: every ninety seconds—I timed the intervals when they seemed so regular—the whole earth shook, the magnolias and cherry trees trembled, and a thick, pounding roar sounded from off to the west. Artillery practice, someone said.
And then the swallows vanished from the sky, and fighter planes screamed low overhead, deafening and maddening all life below. Army trucks, endless convoys of heavy green monsters with their headlights on and with helmeted, masked, and rifle-carrying soldiers standing alert on the back, growled slowly along the roads. The booming of the artillery was endless. Kwangju seemed like a city on the edge of war.
I should have had some early clue as I walked there, through the brilliant morning and the warm, sultry afternoon. Within five miles of Naju the road suddenly widened to perhaps five times its normal width and stretched straight as an arrow for three full miles, with yellow markings and arrows painted on its surface. It was an emergency airfield runway. There are many such in Korea, just as there are in Switzerland, which—like Korea also—has secreted high explosive charges deep inside its bridges and tunnels against invasion and the threat of war. Korea’s emergency airfields are used regularly, often to the intense chagrin of motorists: only the day before I had read an announcement in a newspaper saying that the main Seoul-to-Pusan expressway would be closed the next day for six hours so that air force fighters could use it as a landing site. In the interests of national security, the traffic that normally thunders along the country’s main artery would have to do as best it could on the country roads.
This runway had clearly been used the night before. Uniformed men were clearing away strings of landing lights from the cabbage fields on either side of the field; and scores of massive steel barricades, the black-and-yellow tiger-striped objects that, as I have said before, have unwittingly become one symbol of modern Korea, were being wheeled back onto the taxiways, closing off the strip to unfriendly craft. I suddenly felt insignificantly tiny, walking across this huge frozen ocean of concrete. The sun reflected up from the cement, glaring hotly. I found I had to stop every mile to eat a biscuit and drink a sip of water; perhaps, as a result of my frolic in the Room-Salon, I had become spectacularly unfit, or else an airfield runway is a deceptively exhausting thing along which to walk. Either way, it was a trying couple of hours, especially since passing police cars eyed me oddly, and I wondered if I was not, in fact, allowed to be there at all.
It was altogether much more comfortable to be back on the old road—still Route 1, my diversion now being complete—no matter its narrowness and its congestion. The drivers were still friendly, often stopping to encourage me or offering me lifts (which I feel bound to say I declined, though on steep hillsides I did so with very marked reluctance) and food and drink.
It might perhaps seem, in view of their immense hospitality, rather churlish to remark critically on Koreans’ driving. But my strong impression then on the road to Kwangju—and it was an impression that didn’t alter very much en route—was that the Korean driver is a very dangerous animal indeed, a beast totally without understanding of speed, pathologically incapable of steering, utterly ignorant of the width of his vehicle, and eternally forgetful of such luxuries as the brakes and mirrors with which his car is invariably equipped. He knows only one device, and that is the horn, on which he seems to spend most of his time sitting, if not standing.
So a Korean road is a noisy place: horns blare, tyres screech, car bodies carom and ricochet off each other with wild abandon. On my first day I watched two buses sideswipe each other; between Naju and Kwangju I watched a truck overcook a bend and shed at least a hundred thousand bottles of Coca-Cola, all of which shattered, fertilizing half a dozen pyong of grass verge with their strange chemistry; and every day I would see wrecked cars nestling down ravines, in culverts, up trees, and halfway through bridge abutments; and ambulances raced this way and that, sirens sounding, bells ringing. I had seen similarly execrable driving once before, in Turkey; and once in Iran I came upon two buses that had collided head-on and watched forty bodies being carried out onto the sand. But those, in a way, were one-off spectaculars: here in Korea, the sound of wrenching metal and splintering glass was like a bass continuo, and if you managed your day without getting or giving a dent, or at least a fright, then you were both lucky and statistically unusual.
(I have hired cars on four occasions in Korea. None has been a great success. Once, on Cheju Island, two tyres blew out in the first half hour, and the car, duly retreaded, would only steer to the left and insisted on describing large anti-clockwise circles in the road. Another time, in Kyongju, a farmer drove his tractor-a three-wheeled microtractor that disrespectful souls call a ‘
rice rocket’—into the side of my car while I was parked and demolished both doors and windows. On a third occasion thick black smoke poured out of the steering column, and when I tried to remove the key the plastic surrounding had melted, welding the engine permanently on. And with the last car, we went over a bump at a modest speed, and a door opened and flew off. Having detailed that I am no great fan of the Korean driver, nor of the cars that are given to rental companies, at the risk of diverting from the main topic, it is only fair to add for the record the peculiarly Korean style of Article 2 of the General Principles of Our Company, as written on the back of the form from one of the firms from whom I had rented a car: ‘…we shall operate this business on the principle of Kindness, and shall make our best Efforts to provide Safety and Convenience to the Renter, with the Service devoted to the Renter in the Spirit of Trust and Sincerity.’
This was on the form handed to me by the pretty girl whose car had smoke pouring from its steering column. She seemed near tears when I told her of the vehicle’s fate, and she bowed many times and then offered to pay for the whole thing herself.)
Route I turned north after the runway and crossed a range of hills that were higher and longer than any I had crossed so far. By now it was a hot day, and I was exhausted when I reached the top. I sat down to rest by a railway embankment overlooking the next valley. The peace was profound and quite lovely. I had come well away from the road, and the only sounds I could hear were birdsong and the distant desperation of a baby goat crying for its mother. The earth was warm, the grass was moist and fresh and the palest of greens, the embankment was covered with newly blooming forsythia and wild cherry. Down in the valley below, the roofs of the houses presented a many-coloured chequerboard, orange and blue and yellow, above the whitewash of the walls. Once in a while a small local train hummed past-for this was not the main line but a branch line to places like Hwasun and Polgyo, a line for the nearby farmers and smallholders, not for the businessmen bound between Seoul and Pusan—and its passengers waved pleasantly at me. I lay back in the sweet-smelling grass, serenely pleased with life, and slept contentedly for a while in the afternoon sun.