Korea

by Simon Winchester

  MacNab was more interesting than it looked that night. The Japanese had built an airstrip at Mosulpo in the thirties and had used it when they had bombed Shanghai, only a few hundred miles away across the Yellow Sea. Then the Americans had used it during the Korean War as a prison camp for captured Chinese, forcing the prisoners, at the time of the armistice, to choose whether to be repatriated to Communist China or to Taiwan. Most went to Taiwan, of course; in fact, it has long been supposed that troops in the invading Chinese armies knew they had a remarkable opportunity once they had crossed the Yalu: if they managed to avoid being killed then, assuming the war would one day be over, they would have a choice of countries to which to be repatriated. Nearly all would have chosen Taiwan, hence the choice presented to them once they stormed the river was, essentially, death or freedom. A droll situation indeed for a soldier in a Communist army.

  I left P.J.’s ranch after a couple of days. He was in an exceptionally good mood the night before I went. A letter had just come from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in New York inviting him to a thirtieth anniversary gathering of all the living winners of the Ramón Magsaysay Award—a prize he had been given ten years before for his work at Isidore. He was to go to Bangkok, all expenses paid, to help celebrate the birthday of a prize given ‘for those men and women in Asia who have personified the achievement of the ideals of the great Filipino president Ramón Magsaysay, and who have thus contributed significantly to the public good’.

  ‘Bangkok,’ he said, rolling the word around his palate like wine and grinning a puckish grin. ‘Sounds like fun.’ And he gave me a strong handshake and bade me Godspeed. ‘You know where I am if you need me. I’ll always be here.’

  I didn’t see him when I left next morning at eight. He read, or listened to the BBC World Service, until four or five every morning, almost until the sun came up. He was in consequence rarely awake before eleven, and when I passed by his room he was snoring softly. He had been a most remarkable man, a giant in many more ways than the merely physical.

  It was still spitting with rain as I stretched out my stride on the high road to Cheju City. The road was die-straight for miles and very exposed, and when storms rumbled down from the slopes of Halla-san to the east, it became uncomfortably chilly. I tucked my head down against the blast and considered the odds and ends of life. It wasn’t long before my reverie was interrupted.

  First, two buses driving hell-for-leather in opposite directions clipped each other, neatly severing wing mirrors, radio aerials, and an assortment of other chrome-covered or glass-filled chunks of hardware that clattered like a hailstorm along half a mile of roadway. The two drivers clambered down from their charges and promptly collapsed fou rire, while their passengers looked on, glum and bewildered. Most of them were elderly—travellers on the so-called hyodo kwan guang tours, in which children pay for holidays for their parents or grandparents, in the best Confucian tradition. And then again, and suddenly and from nowhere, a horseman galloped past me; he was on a normal, full-size horse, not one of the classic Cheju horses, which are minute dwarfs said to be descended from those brought down from Mongolia by Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century. (The Mongols brought many things—Buddhism, fur hats and coats, and a language that has had a lingering influence on the peculiar dialect still spoken on the island.) I must have been no more than a blurred image as the horseman raced past, but something about the image must have registered, for a couple of furlongs later he pulled up his charge and turned around and cantered back to me for the sole purpose of asking for a cigarette. He tried to light it while his horse snorted and steamed in the rain, and he exchanged the occasional phrase, ending on the usual surprised and optimistic note about all Englishmen being gentlemen. He then turned his horse once again and thundered off until his hoofbeats were drowned out by the rush of the Halla-san winds.

  And then I breasted a hill, and Cheju City lay before me—an unlovely sprawl of modern buildings, tall hotels (for honeymooners either too tired or impoverished to take the taxi down to Sogwipo), and rows of single-storey houses. Most of Cheju City has been built in the last twenty years, though not, like Seoul and Inchon, because its predecessor had been destroyed in the war. Indeed, the war had left Cheju Island relatively unscarred except psychologically, and in a manner peculiar to many islands around the world.

  The Communist invasion of South Korea began in June 1950. But war came to Cheju Island a great deal earlier and, indeed, in a more classically Marxist manner. In the summer of 1947, not long after the People’s Committee for North Korea had been formally convened in the Northern capital, Pyongyang, a number of Communist cells were formed on Cheju (which then had a population of a quarter of a million; today there are twice that number). The strategy, so far as one can gather now, was for the island to be subverted and used as a southern springboard from which a secondary invasion could be mounted against the republic. Had the scheme worked, the Americans—or the United Nations—would have been in direct difficulty. The so-called Pusan perimeter inside which the Allied forces took refuge would simply not have existed, and it would have taken the most enormous of battle skills to repulse an onslaught that was both terrific in scale and double-pronged in design. Had the Communist ploy succeeded in Cheju, the whole of Korea might now be united—under the malevolent leadership of Kim Il Sung.

  But Cheju did not take easily to subversion and insurgency. Well-trained guerrillas, led by tacticians trained in Moscow, fanned out into the long valleys that radiate down from Halla-san and made lightning raids into the villages—villages that in those days were still protected by medieval stone walls and where a positively Sicilian code of brotherhood and omertà reigned. (The walls were demolished, the stones used to build the dry-stone walls that make up the little fields that give the island so Irish a character.) But the villagers fought hard and well, and the Communists made little enough headway, though some villages, like the hamlets of Sangmyong-ri and Kumak-ri close to Father McGlinchey’s Isidore, were thoroughly Marxist, and remained so for some while after the war.

  It took three years before Seoul realized the depth of the insurgent problem on Cheju; but by 1950, when President Syngman Rhee decided to dispatch a regiment of militia to Cheju City docks, there was already an uneasy stalemate. In the bitter fighting 60,000 had died and some Cheju islanders say that 60,000 died on each side, which seems rather improbable. Only 415,000 soldiers and civilians, after all, died on the southern side in the entire Korean War. The rifts caused by the bitter little conflict on the island are still felt today, however. No border, no frontier line, no armistice ever separated the warring factions down there once the battling was done; no hermetic seal was ever placed on the hatred between insurgent and conservative. And while thousands of Communists moved prudently across to Japan (many of the ‘North Koreans’ who now live in Tokyo are in fact Cheju islanders who chose the wrong side in the island civil war), many of the collaborators and less visible members of the Northern forces still remain, occasionally to be uncovered, occasionally to be exposed. Omertà protects many; bitterness remains; it is an odd island, stranger than it might seem from the holiday brochures—a deep place, with long memories and peculiar secrets.

  I trudged on through the city outskirts, past the ugly office blocks and the hotels, past the warehouses where the exporters store the oranges, kumquats, pineapples, tangerines and bananas that Cheju sends to the rest of Korea. It would be idle to pretend that Cheju City is a pretty place; it looked as though it were made of grey Lego blocks, and a sooty haze of smoke from yontan, the powdered-coal briquettes used to warm the houses, hung over the place. The roads were wide, and there were few cars; the whole place had a strange sterility about it, an unnatural quietude. Perhaps it was the season. And there was something sinister about the way the airport suddenly loomed up, unmarked on any map (because of security, the authorities say) and surrounded on all sides by barbed wire and watchtowers. There had been fog, and no planes had landed at all that morning;
but now the circling jets roared in one after another, and the place was a maelstrom of noise, an odd contrast to the silence of the town.

  It was, in any case, a relief and a small pleasure to come down to the sea and to the rather raffish, rather seedy milieu of the coast. The honeymoon crowd were out in force here, down to see and, inevitably, to be photographed beside a strange contortion of basalt that was known as the Dragon Head Rock, or the Yongduam. A legend, of course, came attached, as so often in this legend-rich corner of the world—and woe betide any Korean who dares challenge its veracity. It seems that a servant of the Sea Dragon King was climbing Halla-san in search of some magic mushroom that holds the elixir of eternal life; the mountain gods were none too keen on an aquatic interloper finding such a thing and shot him dead. He was duly buried at sea, promptly turned into a dragon, and lo! His head reared up onto the beach and ascended thirty feet in the air, for the honeymooners’ pleasure and delight.

  Quick! Quick! shout the taxi drivers, and lead the poor brides—exhausted, quite shattered, and generally bewildered—to clamber up some knob or spire of rock or perch on some slimy crag. Here! Here! they beckon, and demand that the youngster, in the highly unsuitable combination of high heels and chima chogori, teeter to the edge of some precipice and pose with her bemused young husband. Click! go the Instamatics and hummm! go the Sony Video Plus 8s, and the record is there for all time and the elders.

  There are a fair number of elders—unrelated, members of the hyodo kwan guang corps—gawking at this performance too. And there is an elderly and grumpy-looking horse, a tiny, shabby-coated Mongol nag that stands with infinite boredom by the top of a nearby cliff, and a queue of elders waits to mount him, briefly, for another picture-taking session. The ideal souvenir of a Korean journey to Cheju, then, would be a photograph of a frail, old, monkish fellow in grey hangbok and horsehair hat, sitting astride a barely living horse that by rights ought to be in the van for the glue factory, with the Dragon Head Rock in the background being clambered over by a cursing, spitting group of young brides busily laddering their stockings and breaking their heels but being too shy to cry out to their new husbands about the awfulness of it all. Koreans, in short, have not reached the most advanced level of tourism: it is all done en masse, is very Confucian in its style and inhibitions, and cannot survive for long.

  I spent my final evening playing poker in a small house by the Yongduam, talking to a group of cheerful Irishmen to whom I had been mentioned by P.J. McGlinchey. They were missionaries, too—not all priests, mind you—and workers in a variety of fields: doctors, psychologists, social workers, accountants. Each Monday night they assembled in the little house in Cheju City and played poker and drank deep of Paddy until the small hours. There were copies of The Listener and The Spectator on the table, and we had boiled ham for dinner and ginger pudding and custard. I half expected to switch on the wireless and hear Liam Hourican reading the news on Radio Telefis Eireann, or hear the sweet tunes of The Dubliners or the tones of James Joyce. But the music, when I switched on the radio, was all in the same sad vein of Korea, and the announcer was saying his thank-yous and farewells for another day of listening to Korean radio. ‘Annyong-hee kashipshiyo,’ he said. ‘Kamsa hamnida.’ Outside a stiff breeze blew in from the west, and there was the pungent sourness of strong kimchi from the house next door. Inside was a small oasis paved with the Ould Sod; beyond the thick walls of the house was the wild and mysterious Republic of Korea.

  Three hundred years ago the journey northward was more trying than mine would be. ‘They put us into four Boats with fetters on our feet, and one hand made fast to a block…on the north side of the island they call Sehesure is a bay, where several barques lye, and whence they sail for the continent, which is of very dangerous access to those that are unacquainted with it, because of several hidden rocks, and that there is but one place where ships can anchor…’

  For me it was a simple trek along the bay coast, taken at six the next morning. I bought a sailing ticket and, for the heck of it and in the hope of meeting someone interesting, a berth in a four-berth cabin. I showed my passport to the policeman, said my fond farewells to my poker companions of the night before, and boarded the Dongyang Express Ferry Number Two, waiting for its daily dawn departure for the port of Mokpo. A group of smiling attendants bowed, and one escorted me to the second deck and gave me the key to the cabin he had just opened, Number 169. A slim and exceptionally beautiful girl was sitting on a lower bunk, putting on her lipstick. ‘Annyong,’ I said, with a smile, and put down my rucksack. ‘Meeguk?’ she enquired. ‘Anio, yong guk saram.’ ‘Ah,’ she returned, with a smile. ‘An English gentleman. How are you?’

  And at that glorious moment two things happened: the ship’s engines began to rumble mightily, and the wooden piles of the quayside began to slide past outside the porthole; and a young man in a blue suit entered and touched the young woman’s hand. They had been married just two days before, he explained, and were making their way back home. Would I like some yogurt? Or to look at the photographs of their holiday on Cheju Island? I declined both, politely, and went above and out onto the boat deck. We were out beyond the moles now, and the city had become a blur of new construction, all lying at the foot of the huge green mountain, the summit of which was basted with pure white. It was a clear, cold morning, and beyond the protection of the seawalls a stiff chop had developed, and the Dongyang Express started to roll heavily. It was cold, too, so I went below. The bride was sleeping; her husband was gazing moodily out to sea. In six hours’ time we should reach the mainland.

  3. The Boat Country

  There are in the Country abundance of Taverns and pleasure-houses, to which the Coresians resort to see common Women dance, sing and play on Musical Instruments. In Summer they take this Recreation in cool Groves under close shady Trees. They have no particular Houses to entertain Passengers and Travellers, but he who travels, goes and sits down, where Night overtakes him, near the Pales of the first House he comes at, where tho’ it be not a great Man’s House, they bring him boil’d Rice, and dressed meat enough for his Supper. When he goes from thence, he may stop at another House, and at several. Yet on the great Road to Sior, there are Houses, where those that travel on Publick Affairs, have Lodging and Diet on the Public Account.

  Hendrick Hamel, 1668

  The great deep-ocean trawler that, on a coincident track, lingered briefly alongside us as we rounded the south point of the island of Chindo looked tired and weatherbeaten. She had long streaks of rust staining her bright blue flanks, and the guard rails on her starboard side were bent inward from the pounding of some tremendous storm. She was—I pulled out my binoculars and could read her name on her transom—the trawler 77 Oyang, a thousand-tonner, one of the world’s largest. She was quite well known as one of the toughest and most adventurous of Korea’s huge fleet of deep-water fishing craft.

  I had seen her some long while before at the fish quay in Inchon, when her crew was readying her for a long trip in the Southern Ocean. The firm that owned her was called the Oyang Susan, the Five Ocean Fishing Industries Company, and they operated a fleet of boats that were usually scattered across the seas from the Bering Strait to the waters of New Zealand. Now, after more than a year of occupying her business in deep waters, this particular old lady, the 77 Oyang, was coming home to let her crewmen go to their families, to let the owners inspect her, and to allow the maintenance men aboard to work on her enormous engines. She had been fishing, as I recalled the skipper telling me in a café in Inchon, in the waters off the Falkland Islands.

  The prize, in such faraway waters, was something called the cold-water arrow squid, which Koreans value with an intensity approaching worship. They dry it and serve it up with peanut paste as a concoction known as ojingoa—you can see hundreds of plastic packets of the stuff hanging from racks in the food shops—and it is said that Koreans consume half a million metric tons every year—twenty-five pounds of arrow squid for every man, woman an
d child in the nation. Boats like the 77 Oyang vanish for months at a time to hunt for it in the most distant corners of maritime geography.

  Korea says she has no fewer than nine hundred deep-sea fishing vessels on her registers—almost the largest number in the world, comparable only to the deep-ocean fleets of Russia and Japan. The captain of this vessel was a man named Lee Hyun Wu, my notes remind me, and he once told me that his fuel tanks would allow him to stay at sea for three months at a time: he would make passage from Pusan or from Inchon to Wellington in New Zealand, a trip that would take twenty-four days. He would then refuel and pass eastabout in the Roaring Forties, below the Horn, and into Port Stanley, the Falklands’ tiny capital. After a couple of days of relaxation and a chance to compare notes with the skippers of the other long-haulers, the Poles and the Japanese, he would take off for the fishing grounds, four days’ steaming north. Here he would sit for the better part of two months—sweeping the seabed clean of its squid colonies, filling his holds with hundreds of tons of the tentacles and ink sacs and the white, fleshy muscles so favoured by the folks back home. And then, his forty days in the wilderness completed, he would steer eastward yet again, pass below Capes Agulhas and Catastrophe, and return to New Zealand, and to the comforting womb of the Korean mother ship. He would do that three times before receiving his marching orders by radiogram from Seoul—invariably an instruction to return to base, interrupted only by a request to take a bellyful of some other kind of warm-water fish from the Saharan waters off Mauretania, where another factory ship was waiting. Forty days later, and he would be where I could see him on this windy March morning—butting through the swells of the Yellow Sea, with only a hundred miles to go before the lights and comforts of home.