Mr Kwong was very much a Korean nationalist. He loathed the Japanese for what they had done during the colonial period (which included, ironically, building Kunsan Air Base in 1938), and he was determined his son should grow up with a loathing for them, too. ‘There is a programme on our KBS television, a soap opera I guess you’d call it, about life under the Japanese. It is the only programme I force my son to watch. It is too easy for young people to forget what those Japanese did to us. We can never trust them again. They seem friendly now, but deep down they are not. They have plans for us, just like they’ve always had. They are not good for the Korean people. I dislike them—in fact, deep down I have to say I really hate them for what they have done. They took away our language. They took away our names and made us take Japanese names. They took away our king. They stole our treasures. They ruined our land. No, I can never forgive them for what they did. You in the West seem to have forgiven them for what they did to you. Me, I can never forget what they did to Korea. I am determined my children will never allow it to be forgotten.’
And yet, did I sense in him a growing unease about the American pressence, too? It was difficult to know. On the surface Mr Kwong was very much a base employee, almost an American himself, the owner, indeed, of a couple of bars that were much used by the airmen. ‘You’ve got to remember that three-quarters of the population of this country has never experienced a war. You can understand why there is a feeling of growing anti-Americanism, of growing anti-militarism. The young students-they don’t know what the Communists did to us, they can’t really see why the Americans are over here, and why we need so many troops in our own forces, and why they have to be called up and pressed into the services. I may not agree, but I can understand.’
Just then two burly and unshaven airmen walked past. One wore a patch on his jacket that said ‘Munitions Storage—We tell you where to stick it!’ The other had a T-shirt with the words: ‘Kill ’em All. Let God Sort the Bastards Out.’ Both were sporting newly stitched shoulder patches showing what appeared to be a small plane—the fuselage looking remarkably phallic—beneath the rubric ‘One Hundred Successful Missions to A-Town’. Mr Kwong shook his head with distaste.
‘That’s what I just can’t take. Don’t they ever learn? We need to be respected here, and they’re not respecting us. They still treat us like we’re some backward Third World country, and you know we’re not. We’re proud, we’ve got good reason to be. But this…’ He gestured with despair. I said I hadn’t found anything very offensive about the two passing airmen. ‘Maybe not, maybe I react too much,’ he said. ‘I have worked for twenty-five years trying to bring the two communities together. I organize them to go out to meet families. I try to persuade them to learn a bit of Korean, to eat some of the food, to understand why they’re here. But they don’t want to know. And it’s the way some of them treat our women, and our men too. Some of them just have no respect for us. The way they see it, they’re top of the pile, and everyone else is nothing. It makes me mad.’ He stubbed his cigarette out angrily, then performed his sleight-of-hand act, and another was instantly alight in his mouth and he was puffing on it furiously.
‘Still, getting the communities together works in some ways. We have about three hundred marriages a year between Korean girls and American men. There are still a lot of girls who want to get out while they can, and an American passport’s a good way to do it. But in other ways it’s not so easy to get girls down here. We’re getting to be a much richer country, you know. Girls won’t come and dance and do all the other things they have to as hostesses in places like A-Town. They don’t have to. They can get other jobs now. You take a look—the average age of the dancers down there is going up. The girls aren’t very pretty. And there’s still this stigma of getting involved with a foreigner. Korea is racially very pure, still, more so than Japan. There’s a feeling that we shouldn’t dilute our stock if we don’t have to. I tell you, I’ve got a difficult job down here; it gets more difficult, too. I earn my money, that’s for sure.’
I ended up rather liking Mr Kwong, despite his outward similarity to a snake-oil salesman. It was all an act, designed to impress his masters on the base. I think he knew it cut little ice with me, and so he dropped the pretence and became just an intelligent, acutely sensitive Korean. It is said that Koreans have an unusually developed nunchi—a deep sensitivity to the moods and attitudes of those around them—a very finely tuned set of psychological antennae. Mr Kwong had more nunchi than most, which is probably what has made him so adroit a liaison officer for the last quarter of a century, able to arbitrate between the conflicting cultures of the air base and the people on the two sides of the cyclone fencing. But the cultural divide was widening, without a doubt: his job was becoming more difficult, and he was shrewd enough to realize it.
I left the base later that day. One of the air force captains came to Kunsan City with me, and we took the ferry together across the Kum River (which had been such a Maginot Line during the early stages of the war, defended by the American Army, but crossed with depressing ease by the southward-racing North Koreans) to a grimy little town called Changhang. The captain had been stationed at Kunsan for the better part of a year, but he had never been on the rustbucket of a ferryboat, and he looked uneasily about him at the smoky little lounge, crowded with its very ordinary Korean passengers. ‘God, the smell of kimchi. I’ll never get used to it. Lot of our men come over here to the train station. They can get the train clear up to Seoul,’ he said. ‘But I never did. Guess it’s a lot easier to stay on base. Everything you need there, so long as you get to A-Town once every few days.’ He was still hung over from the night before, and grinned sardonically. We had left him in the Hollywood Bar with a girl twice his size, and he looked bruised and rather sheepish at what must have been the inevitable outcome of the encounter.
We stepped off the ferry on the Chungchongnam-do side. True to form, it had started to spit with rain. The air force captain had been planning to walk around town, but then said he thought he would feel a little easier going right back on the ferry to Kunsan. I shook his hand and thanked him for all he had done. He took my picture and then stepped back onto the boat, timidity, I thought, having got the better of him.
I watched the ferry draw away into the grey mist, and his face disappeared gradually into the blur of the crowd on the rails. My last contact with America thus faded, I turned and confronted Korea once again. My expedition to Kunsan had brought me some way off to the west of the track of those long-dead Dutchmen, and I had some stiff walking to do to get back onto their trail.
7. The Roots of the Nation
The Houses of the Coresians of Quality are stately, but those of the common sort very mean; nor are they allowed to build as they please. No man can cover his House with Tiles, unless he have leave so to do; for which reason, most of them are thatch’d with Straw or Reeds. They are parted from one another by a Wall, or else by a row of Stakes, or Pallisades. They are built with wooden Posts or Pillars, with the Interval betwixt them fill’d up with Stone up to the first Story, the rest of the Structure is all Wood daub’d without, and cover’d on the inside with White Paper glew’d on. The Floors are all vaulted, and in Winter they make a Fire underneath, so that they are always as warm as a Stove. The Floor is cover’d with Oil’d paper. Their Houses are small, but one Story high, and a Garret over it, Where they lay up their Provisions…
Hendrick Hamel, 1668
There were hills ahead. The map showed that to the north lay an immense region of tightly packed contours and triangulation points, small, fast-flowing streams, and twisting roads. The horizon was ragged and blue where the mountains rose from the coastal plain. None of the hills was very high—a twelve-hundred-foot hill here, another at fifteen hundred, another at two thousand. The Kum River, over which I had just been uncomfortably transported, meandered its way lazily along the range’s eastern flank: the Dutch sailors had been ferried across it on their way up to the court, and I wou
ld have to cross it twice as I headed back onto their track.
About an hour out of Changhang—a grubby, mean little port that smelled of smoke and rancid fish—I climbed a small, pine-covered knoll for no more sensible reason than to switch on my little radio to see if I was beyond the range of the American transmitters at Kunsan, and thus define the local limit of the base’s cultural influence. (I was almost out of range, twenty miles north as an F-16 flies: through the hissing and crackling of the overworked ether I could just make out a litany of college football scores and an announcement for an aerobics class that night in the base gymnasium.)
From up here among the pines I could see more clearly to the north the hills of Chungchongnam-do. To the south I could see the estuary of the Kum, and to the west, the battleship-grey mass of the sea. Between the wide waters and where I stood, the land was flat, and whenever the sun came out it glittered briefly on hundreds and hundreds of rice fields, like tiny mica mirrors. But there were no such glints of light to the north of me. The fields were larger, and there were cattle and the beginnings of another season’s tall field crops. It was beyond a doubt that I had left Korea’s rice country behind for good. I was getting within the penumbra of the now not-so-distant capital city, and the sights and the people, their standing and their attitudes, all were beginning to change.
I found a yogwan on the north side of a small and rather pretty market town called Sochon. It was a far cry from the kind of hostelry that greeted Isabella Bird, when she made the first of her celebrated Victorian journeys to Korea. ‘The regular inn of the towns and large villages,’ she wrote,
consists chiefly of a filthy courtyard full of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumbledown gateway. A gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies, mapu, hangers-on, and travellers’ loads make up the busy scene.
Low lattice doors filled in with torn and dirty paper give access to a room the mud floor of which is concealed by reed mats, usually dilapidated, sprinkled with wooden blocks which serve as pillows. Farming gear and hat boxes often find a place on the low, heavy crossbeams. Into this room are crowded mapu, travellers and servants, the low residuum of Korean travel…
The ‘low residuum’ of Korean travel is rather more kindly treated today. The yogwan is not the most basic of local inns—there is an institution called the yoinsuk where the rougher trade takes its nocturnal ease, but even the meanest yoinsuks are tolerably clean and welcoming. The yogwan, though, particularly if you are careful to ask for one that is cho-un (good) as I would do when feeling reasonably flush, is as comfortable and pleasant a place to spend an inexpensive night as any I have known anywhere. Indeed, it can fairly be said that the tradition of the Korean yogwan is the true tradition of the wayside inn, forgotten almost everywhere else, where a local family will take in the weary traveller almost as much by way of civic duty as for commercial gain.
The inn I found in Sochon was typical of the marque. I found it in the usual way—from some distance I could see the tall brick chimney, and closer to it I could see the red-and-white stylized sign for a steaming bath (a sign I always confused with a Viking ship; and I agonized for weeks over what possible links there could be between Eric the Red and the early Koryo kings). Both chimney and sign indicated the presence of a public bath, a mogyoktang, and more often than not, I had discovered, a yogwan came alongside a mogyoktang so that bathers could rent a room by the hour or so, the better to cool off and to relax.
The inn was a modern brick building of perhaps three floors, with what passed for a reception desk upstairs. Two old ladies—the venerable owner and her almost equally venerable daughter, it later transpired—were lying on the floor beside their tiny telephone switchboard. They were playing hwatu, the ancient game of ‘flower cards’ (known in Japan as hanafuda), and I was loath to interrupt them. Hwatu is a pretty game to see being played, with rules like rummy: the cards themselves are tiny, gaily coloured squares with pictures representing the various months—a pine tree for January, a plum tree for February, cherry for March, and so on. The players—who often stake considerable amounts of won on the turn of a card—become amusingly excited; and when I approached the stairway of the yogwan I would hear the old ladies’ cries long before I found them.
But they broke off quite happily and took me off to see a variety of their rooms. This particular yogwan had only ondol rooms—some of the more modern inns have Western-style quarters, with beds and carpets, in the event of a wandering foreigner happening by—and the ladies seemed keen that, subject to this one limitation, I should have just the room I wanted. The first was pleasant enough, except that there were two men already lying on its floor, fast asleep. The second was about an inch deep in water, but I was shown in nonetheless, perhaps in case I was interested in floating myself to sleep. But the third room was perfect: the clock (all Korean rooms have massive clocks with enormous pendulums) had all of its hands lying in a heap at the bottom of the glass, but the rest of the facilities appeared to be working normally. I agreed to take it, paid up my 8,000 won—about £6—and took possession.
The bathhouse next door closed at eight, and although there was a perfectly good shower beside my room, it seemed a waste not to try Sochon’s public facilities. There was a moment of confusion when I handed over my dollar and proceeded through the ladies’ entrance (the only difference in the two silhouetted heads being that one had slightly longer hair), but I was eventually upstairs in the proper side: I tucked my clothes into a locker, snapped the keychain around my ankle, and walked somewhat self-consciously—the postage-stamp-size, all-purpose towel held rather ridiculously around my middle—into the bathing arena.
A mogyoktang and its more modest relation, the taejungtang, or ‘masses’ bath’, are monuments to egalitarian cleanliness, reducing all who enter to the basic entities of bone and muscle, freed from all pretensions of riches or power. In a place like Sochon there can in any case be few enough who are rich, and I daresay all those in the bathhouse that evening were farmers and shopkeepers and clerks and their sons, with their wives and girlfriends and daughters behind the partitions next door. The traditional reason for the huge numbers of bathhouses in Korea is that until very recently few houses had baths, or indeed water supplies, of their own: a person’s mogyok had to be taken in privately gathered and fire-warmed water, especially during the bitter Korean winters when the rivers would be frozen solid. Now, though, most houses have water, and a bath can be had at home with ease and economy. But the old ways die hard, and if Koreans no longer have to visit their bathhouses for reasons of frugality and space, they do so now in pursuit of that most Confucian of ideals, the civilized pleasure of the purest kind.
The main bathing room was immense, with a tough red tile floor and white-tiled walls, and mirrors, mirrors everywhere. It was a positive plumbers’ heaven: there were shower heads, taps, faucets, douches, spouts, plunges, fountains, sinks, basins, footbaths, bidets, sitzes, lavers, tanks, cisterns, buckets, baths, and other unnamed devices of steel and enamelled iron and vitreous china placed at convenient points everywhere. Thousands of gallons of hot water seemed to be running from everything—pure steaming oceansful of the stuff streamed, gushed, trickled, cascaded, sprayed, splashed, sluiced, sloshed, surged, foamed, bubbled up, poured down, raced across, and welled from under until everything and every surface, be it horizontal or vertical or sloping, curved or plane, smooth or rough, hirsute or bald, pink or yellow, was wet through and wonderfully warmed, with every pore wide open, every square inch of flesh glistening and gleaming and becoming brighter and more polished by the second, by virtue of its mere proximity to all these limitless acre-feet of cleansing water.
Once my eyes had become accustomed to the comfortable blanket of steam, I began to see the other figures who had come from their homes to wallow in all this warmth and wetness. There were perhaps eight men and two young boys. Each of them appeared to be obsessively fascinated, N
arcissus-like, with making his body as clean and perfectly presentable as possible. One young man was scrubbing his back with a long loofah; another pared his toenails; two shampooed their hair; one rubbed vigorously at his legs with a chunk of pumice; the others—including the boys, whose hands were grubby, from an afternoon of taekwon-do practice, no doubt—were standing under showers either hot or cold, covered with foam that came from the various liquid potions and the pink or green or yellow bars of perfumed soap that the management thoughtfully provided.
I was struck by how spare and rangy and fit the men all looked—there was no spare flesh, there were no thickened waists, no blotches or bulges of fat. They were all perfectly formed, Adonis-like figures—smaller than the average European or American maybe, but they looked a lot neater and more efficient. A sensible diet, long working hours, compulsory military service—probably all of these had conspired to whip their bodies into such enviably good shape; and the bathing probably helped too, by undoing all the evils of the drink that the Korean men habitually and conspicuously consume.
The walking had had its own effect on me, mind you. I was getting leaner, and I had a good farmer’s tan on my arms and face. So I didn’t feel too intimidated by the presence of these more ideally fashioned men as I began to scrub and soap and rub myself clean. My presence did cause a ripple of interest, however: Korean men’s bodies are almost wholly hairless, and the introduction into this naked world of a creature who even while clothed was thought of as a gorilla did trigger some consternation and alarm, though mercifully it evolved into nothing more than friendly curiosity. From the trajectories of some of the gazes I once suspected their interest to be uncomfortably priapic, but that seemed more my problem than anyone else’s, and after ten minutes or so the crowd’s attention wandered—the harder they stared at me, the harder I stared back, and that seemed to do the trick.