Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  MEETING MR KIM

  Or How I Went to Korea and

  Learned to Love Kimchi

  Jennifer Barclay

  MEETING MR KIM

  Copyright © Jennifer Barclay 2008

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.

  The right of Jennifer Barclay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Condition of Sale

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Summersdale Publishers Ltd

  46 West Street

  Chichester

  West Sussex

  PO19 1RP

  UK

  www.summersdale.com

  Maps by Rob Smith

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  eISBN: 9780857653246

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jennifer Barclay has written on travel, culture and books for The Korea Herald, The Globe and Mail and The East and is a regular contributor to the blog www.londonkoreanlinks.net. Co-editor of AWOL: Tales for Travel-Inspired Minds, she has lived in several countries and is now based in West Sussex.

  ‘Errors of one sort and another there undoubtedly are in this account, but the truth is that something happened to me and that I have given as truthfully as I know how.’

  Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Epigraph

  Map

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: INTO THE UNKNOWN

  CHAPTER ONE: PUTTING ON DRINKING BOOTS AND SPREADING MY WINGS

  CHAPTER TWO: SPECIAL TOURISM ZONE

  CHAPTER THREE: THE NOODLES AND THE SCISSORS

  CHAPTER FOUR: MANY, MANY FAT AMERICANS!

  CHAPTER FIVE: HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE KIMCHI

  CHAPTER SIX: DARK NIGHT OF MY SEOUL

  CHAPTER SEVEN: SEOUL BY THE SEA

  PART TWO: MAKING FRIENDS

  CHAPTER EIGHT: KING MURYONG’S TOMB

  CHAPTER NINE: THE PATH TO BUDDHA

  CHAPTER TEN: HEART AND SEOUL

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE MONK AND I

  CHAPTER TWELVE: OUT WITH THE BOYS IN PYONSAN

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE BEER THAT MADE KOREA FAMOUS

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: GIRLS’ NIGHT OUT IN KAMPO

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: ACQUIRING HAPPY MEMORIES

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: HARD ROCK IN THE ROK

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE BEACH, KOREAN STYLE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: KOREAN MEN BEHAVING BADLY

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE LAST DAYS OF SEOUL

  PART THREE: WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE SEOUL

  CHAPTER TWENTY: SLICED LAW FISH

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: HAPPY AS A SQUID IN SOUP

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: COMFORT ME WITH KIMCHI

  KIMCHI RECIPE

  FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT SOUTH KOREA

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY AND USEFUL RESOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  3 May 2006

  Dear Jenny,

  I received your email in surprise. I frequently think of Songnisan and you whenever I see your pictures you sent me. Thank you for your mail again. I feel that two days and a night in 2000 will lead to our eternal friendship. Nowadays I live in Seoul with my family. I am told that you plan to write a book about Korea. I wish I could help you with your writing. For now, I am determined that my getting touch with you will last forever. If you should pay a visit to Seoul again, I will have an opportunity to be proud of my country through travelling with you.

  Sincerely yours,

  Wook

  14 July 2007, New Malden, London

  Mr Kim tells me Korean food is the most highly developed in the world. He is spending the day standing over a searingly hot barbecue cooking galbi, beef marinated in seventeen different ingredients. His white T-shirt somehow manages to remain immaculate, although he is slinging dripping steaks onto the grill all day.

  ‘French food is seen as the best in the world. The French, they have one hundred and seventy different cuts of the cow, of beef. Koreans, we have more than two hundred. Close to three hundred.’

  An impressive fact, although I wonder privately if it is a good thing to eat that many parts of a cow. The thinly sliced meat tastes sweet, however, and I’m impressed that young men like Mr Kim are spending their Saturday helping at the London Korean community’s annual food festival. All the Korean restaurants come together in the expansive garden of a local pub to create a cultural gathering. I come prepared to eat lots.

  I start off with tokboki, and the friendly lady whose table I share asks ‘Are you OK with this spicy food?’ It’s pleasantly crunchy with carrot, cabbage and spring onion. The sun comes out and she goes to seek shade, leaving space for an older Indian couple who sit down to eat bulgogi, marinated beef and rice. We are watching the taekwondo demonstration – tiny kids breaking blocks of wood with their kicks and punches. My objective today is to expand my Korean culinary horizons, and I am lucky to be invited to join a group of Korean friends at a table where we can share mounds of food, giving me a chance to taste a range of dishes and learn about them in good company. We’re in the shade of a tree and we have some drinks too. ‘You know we Koreans have to keep eating side dishes in order to keep drinking!’

  I trawl the food stalls and come back to the table with two new dishes. The first is soondae, slices of a dark sausage, griddle-fried with hot sauce and cabbage. Only when I put it on the table do I spot unmistakable slices of tripe lurking among the cabbage. My new friend TJ tells me it is good for the stomach and for energy! The soondae is squishy, with a chewy skin; someone says it’s like haggis but there is none of the spice of haggis, and the texture is more like the French boudin or black pudding. The tripe stays on the plate. TJ is disappointed. ‘It is better than snake!’ No, I think I could eat snake. ‘Better than dog!’ he jokes.

  My second experiment is tongdwaeji: slivers of spit-roasted pork, served with hot red garlicky sauce, slices of raw garlic and green hot chilli peppers, and – the really intriguing part – a spoonful of miniscule shrimp, each the size of a few grains of rice. The owner of the restaurant that supplied this today – whom I met a couple of weeks ago with his hands stuck in a bucket of wet cabbage, giving kimchi demonstrations – told me he and his chef hung this whole pig carcass on a spit, all sixty-nine kilos of it, last night so it could cook for seven hours, all the fat dripping away. Apparently the mini-shrimp are to aid digestion. The pork is lean and delicious, the prawns incredibly salty.

  The traditional music finishes and the karaoke is now going strong beside our table. As friends come and go, getting up to see other friends or buy food, more drinks are spilled than I have ever seen at one table. On the grass, older ladies are dancing to ‘YMCA’. A smartly dressed man sings ‘My Way’ and a young Korean woman with a surprisingly huge voice gets a standing ovation from the crowd. London has managed to provide weather that is almost summery – although it changes four times a day, like a woman, says TJ. The tripe stays on the table.

  My love affair with Korea started in the year 2000, when the following story unfolds, and I finally finished writing it in 2007. While some aspects of life in the Republic of Korea will have changed by now, I have tried to make sense of my
own experiences, which took place at a vital time in the country’s evolution, by placing them in the context of Korean history and culture. In that way, I hope it will be a lasting tribute, and go some small way to enhancing an outsider’s understanding of Korean culture through the adventures and misadventures of one bumbling westerner.

  PART ONE: INTO THE UNKNOWN

  ‘When have I not been weary in winter time, or indeed anywhere when settled?’

  Edward Lear

  CHAPTER ONE:

  PUTTING ON DRINKING BOOTS AND SPREADING MY WINGS

  There had to be something wrong.

  In the ratings of best places to live in the world, Toronto kept coming out top. Then why did I find myself crying when I flew back there after Christmas? Landing at Pearson Airport, I stood outside and saw only bland colours and concrete. As I took the bus downtown, a woman yelled into a mobile phone, enormous trucks barrelled past on the highway and the huge maple-leaf flag billowed in an icy January wind outside the Molson brewery, and I didn’t want to be there. Even my favourite view of the skyscrapers from the lakeshore didn’t make me happy.

  I was renting an apartment on Fairview Boulevard, the top floor of a big old house in the east of the city. I’d just turned thirty and noticed my friends were beginning to buy houses. Perhaps living abroad kept me feeling like I didn’t need to grow up. Now I wondered glumly whether deep down I didn’t want to live in Toronto forever, and whether seven years was long enough to spend in a place you didn’t want to stay in. It wasn’t that I was particularly homesick for England, but – I sighed, putting my bags down and the kettle on – I was no longer sure if this road was leading where I wanted to go.

  Stuck to the fridge door was a photo of the pretty village in green hills where I grew up and which we left when I was eighteen. I thought about how my mother was already bringing up two kids there by the time she was my age. I just had a mixed-up accent, a continual reminder that I was at home nowhere, and still didn’t know what I wanted to make of my life.

  I’d recently had such a run of rotten liaisons I was beginning to despair on that front. Not that I had any trouble meeting people, oh no. The previous summer there’d been someone utterly devoted, practical enough to build me bookshelves, rough around the edges but with quirky habits like playing the accordion, and his kids were delightful. But his surprise drug habit – well, I’d spent an exhausting few months trying to get the guy into rehab and out of my life. Others I met were as cold and brutal as a Canadian winter. Surprised how often I was getting hurt, I announced to my friend Patrick over a glass of red wine one evening,

  ‘Maybe I should become a complete bitch.’

  ‘No, babe,’ he advised, adding what of course I already knew: ‘You’ve just got to be yourself and wait for the right person to come along.’ So at least I wasn’t a complete bitch yet, according to Patrick anyway.

  I’d come to Canada for rather arbitrary reasons. Shortly after university, at the end of a year teaching English in Greece, a chance meeting while swimming in the Mediterranean had led in a circuitous way to Canada and marriage. So much went wrong during that marriage it’s hard to believe it only lasted a year and a half. But I’d decided to stay on in Toronto for a while, having finally found my way into a career – working with books and writers.

  From admin assistant and general dogsbody, I was promoted year after year as the literary agency I worked for expanded. The youngest agent in town, I was surrounded by brilliant people, and a portfolio of press clippings on my clients was developing nicely. I had an assistant and a comfortable office – with a couch, no less, which my boss had had lifted by painstaking means to my third-floor coop in the stylish house the agency occupied. But I was surely, irresistibly, feeling a seven-year itch. With little time for anything but work, I’d started to hate fancy restaurants and was frankly tired of responsibility, of bitchiness, of pushing myself hard all the time. I felt like I was faking – faking that I knew what I was doing, faking the veneer – maybe I wasn’t posh enough for this posh job. A certain hysterical cynicism gripped me one day when I discovered I could do most of my job hungover in bed, wearing pyjamas with a phone against my ear.

  Building up a client list, always on the brink of some breakthrough, I hadn’t taken more than a week’s holiday for years. I couldn’t go on. I saw the possibility of becoming bitter and twisted, or at least terminally unhappy, unless I made a change. I needed to get away from business, from being professional. I needed to play. So I did the only reasonable thing. I prepared to quit my job and go travelling.

  And then, at the end of January, I quite unexpectedly found myself in the back of a cab snogging an Irishman nine years my junior.

  I had met Gavin a few months earlier in my local Irish pub, where he was working as a bartender after dropping out of university to be a drummer in a band. He was tall with short reddish hair and, being a musician, a little unshaven square under his bottom lip called a soul patch. He had a sharp mind and a powerful ability to make me laugh, and together we were able to recite entire scenes from the telly programme The Young Ones, to the bafflement of everyone around. We’d got to know one another as friends, both seeing other people. But as January ended and those relationships foundered, we were both suddenly single. And to be fair, I didn’t realise quite how young he was at the time.

  His band, Good Vibes, was playing at a bar downtown and recording a video for their agent. Although I had a miserable cold, a mutual friend emailed me: ‘Get your drinking boots on – it’s the boy’s birthday.’ Gav was surprised to see his pals out in force – and rather humiliated, for the video had to be shot in stage costume. Good Vibes, I knew, was a funk and R’n’B cover band, but he’d kept quiet about the costumes. Since the agent was hunting down an international contract, there would be no half measures. Thus it was that I saw him sheepishly sporting an electric-blue sequined shirt and white shiny trousers on the night we began to realise a relationship between us might be possible. Perspicaciously, he changed his clothes after the show. In the taxi back to our neighbourhood at the end of his twenty-second birthday, we were suddenly kissing, and the idea of going out with a bartender/musician nine years younger than me didn’t seem all that silly... As they say, how can it be wrong, when it feels so right?

  February and March went beautifully. We laughed, we danced; we had dinners of sparkling Banrock Station and deliveries from Sushi Delight while sitting cross-legged on the bed. Meanwhile, I worked as hard as I could, closed deals and put money away for my travels. I prepared for the task, after the London Book Fair, of informing all my clients I would be leaving that spring, and tried to orchestrate a few last deals; I had a satisfying coup for one of my favourite authors, and it felt like a good note to leave on. My boss was supportive of the decision to ‘spread my wings’, and I knew the clients I liked would understand my decision. They nicely also said they’d miss me. The others – well, sod them. People said I was doing something brave (read: stupid), but for my own sanity it felt absolutely right to be taking a break. I longed for the date of impending freedom, even though I still hadn’t got around to booking a ticket anywhere.

  Gav’s band played gigs around the city and the suburbs, and many a late night I stood about while they loaded equipment into vans in freezing parking lots, acquainting myself with the glamour of the music business. Funk wasn’t exactly Gav’s favourite music – he was a rock fan, with interests ranging from King Crimson to Oasis to Nick Cave; he’d bravely played me the Murder Ballads the first time I stayed at his place. Nor were sequins and PVC his number one fashion choice, but as a drummer he liked to get people dancing, and there was a certain cachet for a white guy in being the main rhythm section in an otherwise black funk band. One of their songs was, appropriately enough, ‘Play That Funky Music, White Boy’. Besides, the real reason he’d joined Good Vibes was his dream to be a professional musician and see the world at the same time. We were on our way to the video store one evening when he excitedly to
ld me the news:

  ‘We’ve got a contract to play in Asia. Three months in the club of the Seoul Grand Hyatt.’

  Beneath my happy congratulations there was an awful sinking feeling. I’d just found a lovely man, and now he was going to the other side of the world. Then again, so was I. I just hadn’t decided exactly where yet.

  Although most people have a wish list of places to go, I’ve always been perversely attracted to travelling in places I know nothing about. I love the serendipitous trip, the chance to travel somewhere I’ve never even contemplated going before. A few days later, I casually aired the idea that since I was going travelling anyway, maybe we could go to Korea together.

  It turned out he’d been thinking the same. In Seoul, he would be busy playing in the band, so I’d have plenty of time for the solo exploring I liked – but we wouldn’t have to be apart for months. We both agreed that being apart for months was not conducive to a lasting relationship, not for us. I’d failed at it before. It seemed absurd not to give this a try, when we got along pretty well, give or take some late-night arguments. It would be an adventure, and neither of us would mind being alone there if it didn’t work out. Gav was due to fly out at the start of May with the rest of the band and a mound of drumming gear. Ignoring the gentle ribbing from friends about running away with my rock musician toy boy, I booked a ticket that would allow me to work out my notice and get me to Seoul at the end of May.

  My taste for travelling to lesser-known places comes partly from my dad’s family, who visited our Lancashire village from such exotic places as Bermuda and Botswana when I was an impressionable girl. It’s also a reaction against ‘must-see’ travel: top ten places to go, sights not to miss, how many stars does this experience get? The magic of wandering, finding unlooked-for pleasures, uncovering places for yourself: I’d much rather experience an unknown place myself than queue up with thousands of others to see the famous one. Unexpected beauty means so much more; you see it with your own eyes.