Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  Soon, thirty-two games of World Cup football would be played there, but for now, all most people could think of when you said ‘Korea’ was the Korean War, that old television programme M*A*S*H, and cheap manufactured electronics. Having never seen M*A*S*H, and being useless at modern history, I felt completely in the dark.

  I started to read up. The Korean peninsula, stuck halfway between China and Japan, has been divided into two countries for over fifty years since the Korean War. The capital of South Korea, Seoul, is on roughly the same latitude as Beijing or Tokyo, Spain or Greece. The country has cold, dry winters and hot, wet summers. You didn’t need a lot of inoculations to visit (just one, against Japanese encephalitis, not considered a big risk). South Korea, or the Republic of Korea, the ROK, has a population of forty-five million – close to that of England, though the landmass is smaller, nearer the size of Portugal. As long as North Korea didn’t attack, a very remote possibility, South Korea was deemed a safe country for tourists. It had beaches and mountains – those details appealled. After enduring yet another long and brutal Toronto winter, I could handle some lounging on beaches and wandering in mountains. I pictured myself becoming tanned and slim, letting my nails grow, relaxing and absorbing the local culture effortlessly.

  The brother of an ex-boyfriend and his fiancée, who had taught English in Seoul a few years earlier, agreed to meet me in a local bar. They mentioned getting mildew on their clothes during rainy season, but otherwise they were fairly positive, though they didn’t seem to have seen much of the country beyond the capital and couldn’t tell me much. Anyway, I wanted to be surprised by Korea.

  I sublet the apartment on Fairview Boulevard for the next six months, finding a couple who loved it instantly the way I had, and whom I trusted enough that I could leave my belongings in one of the huge unlockable cupboards that stretched into the roof. With great excitement I said goodbye to the dirty streets, where blackened snowbanks – the mounds of snow that accumulate on pavements throughout the winter in the city – were finally melting and turning to dust. I said goodbye to the dull, brown post-winter grass and, for rather arbitrary reasons, made a journey to Seoul, Korea.

  CHAPTER TWO:

  SPECIAL TOURISM ZONE

  In the Korean War between 1950 and 1953, 47,000 Korean and 37,000 United Nations troops lost their lives in South Korea, and more than a million in the North, while some accounts say as many as three million Korean civilians also died. The UN troops were mostly Americans, but also British, Africans, Europeans, Asians, South Americans and Australians. Images of those years show frozen mud, tanks, bomb craters, death. Seoul had to be completely rebuilt after the uneasy ceasefire that ended the fighting in 1953. North Korean guerrillas were still infiltrating Seoul in the late sixties, and there were many scares of invasions by land and submarine – even from underground, as tunnels had been discovered burrowing under the border, wide enough for tanks.

  The main US army base, built to protect the South from invasion by the North, is in Seoul, near Itaewon at Yongsan – where, at the start of the twentieth century, the Japanese invading army was based. It seems strange to me to have such a big US army presence in the middle of the city, a garrison of 630 acres, but then North and South Korea are still at war.

  The bar was dark and crowded as Good Vibes rocked the room with their high-energy funk. At tables glinting with whisky bottles, respectable Asian businessmen in grey suits swept their arms through the air as they swayed vaguely to the beat, eyes closed and ties loosened. A young executive leapt around the dance floor, wiggling his hips, his jacket swinging from one hand and, from the other, the belt he’d somehow removed. The businessmen’s wives, delicate ladies in silk with immaculate hair, boogied gracefully to ‘Brick House’.

  After a very long day flying, my first afternoon in Seoul had been a blur. I’d been on a plane full of short middle-aged Asians I assumed to be Koreans, all wearing casual clothes and washable beige hats. My man met me at Kimpo International Airport with a red rose and whisked me into town in a taxi, past blockish high-rises, the imposing, monolithic National Assembly building, and general big city chaos. It was a greyish day, but we giggled at being together again.

  The Grand Hyatt Hotel was a prominent slab of smoky mirrored glass on a big hill called Namsan. I had a quick tour: an enormous air-conditioned lobby lined with chestnut-stained wood and Cartier and Rolex boutiques, cathedral-sized windows looking down over lush gardens and beyond them a mass of urban conrete, pale grey in hazy sunlight. Someone was playing a piano in the lounge.

  ‘This is where I come to have a coffee and read the paper sometimes,’ said Gav. He’d raved about the place on the phone. ‘There’s a couple of Polish girls who play violin and flute in the afternoons. Come on, I’ll show you JJ’s.’ He took me to the downstairs level to see the nightclub, which was empty except for a few staff polishing glasses for the evening. We didn’t have much time to look around as Gav had to get ready for work.

  The band had shared hotel rooms for the first week, then moved out to apartments. We had one to ourselves for now, a five-minute walk away in a small, modern flat-roofed block, decorated blandly with lino floors and plastic furniture. There was a place to leave your shoes by the door before you stepped up onto the raised floor, but otherwise it was furnished in western style: kitchen, living room, bedrooms, bathroom with a shower. I pulled crumpled clothes, a dozen books and the laptop computer from my backpack and got dressed to go back to the Hyatt and see the show.

  Posh hotels – the Hyatt was classed as ‘Super Deluxe’ – really weren’t my natural environment. I’d rather have the surprise of freshly shucked oysters from a grubby bucket on the beach than sit in the hippest spa hotel and be served them on a designer plate. I preferred a bit of edge; my latest going-out outfit back in Toronto had included black bovver boots and a second-hand fireman’s greatcoat. But for my first night at the Hyatt to see the show I managed jeans and platform sandals and a skimpy top.

  JJ Mahoney’s looked plush and tasteful by night, with leather upholstery lining the walls and subdued lighting. I stood swaying my hips tentatively, clutching my bottle of beer. It was the same routine of cover songs they’d been practising for the last few months, so I knew it well. Dividing the stage from the audience was a semi-circular bar attended by efficient, slick waiters. I’d got to know the band: Dean the lead guitarist and band leader with a drooping Mexican moustache and long ponytail and lots of gold necklaces; Vinny the percussionist with a shaved head and wraparound black sunglasses; Leroy the male singer with a habit of saying ‘yeah yeah yeah’ and grinning constantly; Barry the quiet, corpulent, older bass player; and Shauna the young, slim, female singer with a winning smile. They played funk, soul and R’n’B, with a few of the current vacuous pop numbers by Cher and Britney thrown in. Sneer as I might, they made you want to dance.

  ‘Hello Seoul Korea! Allriiiight!’

  Between songs, Dean announced Good Vibes was ‘all the way from Canada’ and excited screams were offered in response. The drummer, thrashing away at the back of the stage, dropped his serious face for a moment to flash me the hint of a smile. For Gav, drumsticks functioned like mere extensions of the fingers; as he talked to you, he flicked them and spun them and created little drum rolls on the back of the couch. Being on stage was like a drug in his veins. Signing autographs later didn’t hurt. So this was the rock and roll lifestyle in North East Asia. Well, not really, but it was close. They weren’t big in Japan, they weren’t big in Korea, but they were big in JJ Mahoney’s Bar.

  For a few weeks now, they had been playing western pop six nights a week to entertain the city’s elite. The nightclubs of the big hotels in Seoul were prestigious, and the Grand Hyatt was top dog. It was the hotel for oil tycoons, foreign ministers, magnates like Bill Gates and heads of state like Bill Clinton. A bottle of Johnny Walker in JJ’s cost around US$500, and there were several evident on the tables. The small bottle of local OB beer I was nursing had set me back
US$10, and if you wanted Heineken it was US$15. It was for this sort of ambiance the band had to wear the sparkly suits. On the plus side, it was an enviable contract for them: three months being paid a regular wage in US dollars, with free accommodation. Gav was now a professional musician, and he was travelling. Play that funky music, white boy.

  As they launched into a soulful number and Leroy crooned ‘Let’s get it on’, I made my way to the bar to invest in another small bottle of beer. A Korean man in a sweater and thick Coke-bottle glasses, who’d been coming to see the band regularly, confessed to me his favourite musician of all time was ‘Otis Reeding’. Tough guys in black suits sat at the bar behind tall glasses of fruity cocktails with umbrellas, ogling Shauna. ‘I’ve seen these guys pay the bartender a tip of US$200 just to keep their seat for the night,’ Gav had said. Beside European businessmen and hulking American army officers sat sleek Korean women with long black hair; in the toilets, however, they turned into skinny girls who smoked nervously, stared into mirrors, and spat on the floor.

  A rift had developed already in the band because Gav hadn’t joined the others in sampling the local girls before I arrived. ‘It’s just not my bag, man,’ said Gav, since most of those offering themselves up were actually prostitutes. A friend of his back home, who spent his holidays in the seedier parts of Malaysia, had said Gav was mad taking a girlfriend along to Asia. Ugh, that creepy nudge-nudge attitude among guys when it comes to Asian girls, Swedish girls, French girls. And what is it about Kylie Minogue that all men like? What?!

  When the show ended around 2 a.m., Gav and I jumped into a taxi and headed a short distance down the hill to Itaewon, the district that grew up around the US army base to cater for soldiers’ needs. This was a bit more interesting. In the area affectionately known as Hooker Hill, we wandered down streets lined with ‘Gentlemen’s Entertainment’ clubs like Fun Girls Country Club and Kiss in the Dark, advertising in lurid neon such unthinkable delights of the flesh as ‘Fine Drinks!’, ‘Beautiful Women!’ and – avert your eyes, not for the faint-hearted – ‘Darts!’ The sleaze was pervasive but mild, and there were food stalls everywhere for the undiscriminating late-night partier: fried fish, fried pancakes, sausage-shaped white rice cakes in hot red sauce, potatoes-on-a-stick. Standing in the stickily humid night, we ate chicken skewers slathered with barbecue sauce.

  Back on the main street we walked to Hollywood, one of a handful of dance clubs open all night on the upper floor of a nondescript building, and breezed in like VIPs for free because of Gav’s minor celebrity status. ‘Get this,’ said Gav. ‘Last week we were partying with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. They love us here.’ Hollywood was an unsophisticated but lively place frequented by foreigners, visiting or resident, and young Koreans, mostly women. When Gav said he’d had a hard time shaking off a Korean girl one night, I tried not to be jealous.

  At Hollywood we ran into half of a young Australian band who had a contract playing at the Hard Rock Cafe. Gav had met them a couple of weeks earlier, and now he offered to buy the bass player a beer. ‘What about a jug, man?’ Adam retorted. Gav, beaming, came back from the bar loaded with glasses and a frosted pitcher of beer. It was easy to dance the rest of the night away. At dawn, the music stopped and the curtains were opened and everyone staggered into the smoggy, faintly fetid streets, donning sunglasses against the bright grey morning. As we took a cab back up the hill, away from this little international enclave, I saw groups of Korean men squatting on their haunches to chat at the roadside, beside enormous piles of garlic that looked like snowbanks.

  Next day we walked down the hill into Itaewon again for an expensive and awful breakfast of weak coffee and tasteless toast. Seedy Itaewon had been designated the ‘Special Tourism Zone’ of the city. In the harsh light of day, this seemed designed to put tourists off Seoul. The main street had been completely dug up for the construction of a new subway line, leaving a big brown crater and muddy, chaotic walkways on either side. Interspersed with bars and the occasional restaurant, dusty little shops and stalls crowded the pavements, all selling the same knock-off Prada T-shirts, Gucci belts, Louis Vuitton luggage and Rolex watches, as well as custom-made suits and onyx chess sets. Maybe Special Tourism was simply a euphemism for what went on in the Gentlemen’s Entertainment Clubs?

  On the subject of Special Tourism Zones, it was now possible for non-Koreans to take an organised trip to the DMZ, the DeMilitarized Zone and site of the armistice negotiations of 1953, some way north of Seoul. This was the borderland that divided North and South, the sloping line that was drawn across Korea, heavily defended on either side of the four kilometres of no-man’s-land. You had to dress appropriately to visit – no jeans, no long hair for men, no short dresses for women, and no military clothing unless part of a prescribed uniform. The day trip included a military escort to Freedom House to glimpse North Korea, well known as the most closed society in the world. In 1976, two US servicemen were hacked to death by North Koreans at the DMZ. The idea of going to see this as a tourist seemed macabre to me.

  The no-man’s-land, a swathe of land on either side of the Demarcation Line that crosses the Korean peninsula from the East Sea to the Yellow Sea, had been largely untouched by humans for half a century and had now inadvertently become a wildlife sanctuary: somehow a sign of hope, of rebirth. It remained the principal site of the peace dialogues. In a couple of weeks, fifty years after the outbreak of the war in June 1950, the first-ever peace summit between the leaders of North and South Korea, Chairman Kim Jong-il and President Kim Dae-jung, was about to take place in the North’s capital, Pyongyang.

  The world is understandably fascinated by North Korea. It became a communist country in 1948 and is ‘the secret state’. It lends itself to sinister speculation, ‘chilling photographs’ on CNN, and makes a perfect enemy for James Bond or Spooks. Its frightening nuclear programme is in the hands of a dictator with a bouffant haircut and aging Elvis look.

  Kim Il-sung, his father, shaped North Korea over an astonishing forty-eight-year reign, and was named ‘eternal president’ a few years after his death in 1997. Chairman Kim Jong-il inherited the state just as all first sons inherit their father’s business in Korean culture. Since then he has run a Stalinist regime, without basic human rights such as freedom of speech or freedom to leave. Radios receive only one official station, allowing its citizens no real understanding of the outside world. The official line given by its leaders is that North Korea is a paradise of equality with no need for outside links; a nation that works together as happily as it sings and dances together in the massive performances it likes to show the world. This image was shattered after the truth came out about years of horrific famine, which killed as much as ten per cent of the population. Dissidents occasionally smuggle out pictures that tell the truth. Stories have emerged of concentration camps for political prisoners, public executions of those trying to escape, homeless children, people lying dead in the streets of hunger and cold. The camps must have been so effective that in the 1980s Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe invited North Koreans to Zimbabwe to torture and kill ‘dissidents’ in his own detention centres.

  Kang Chol-hwan, in his book The Aquariums of Pyongyang, described how he spent ten years of his childhood in a North Korean gulag. For no real reason, his whole family was consigned to slave labour, near starvation and imprisonment. The account tells of a corrupt society where bribes are the only way to survive; of people reduced to eating grass, children’s skin rotting from infection, and of the author’s frustration, after he escaped to South Korea in 1992, on meeting students who argued in favour of communism.

  It is North Korea that preoccupies the media, naturally, and it is important that we understand what is going on there – but I was here to get to know the South. It’s ironic that the world knows more about the secret state of North Korea than its free, open counterpart to the south. Little South Korea has always been overshadowed by China the giant to the west, Japan the strong, once-imperial power
to the east, the strange communist regime of North Korea, and Russia to the north of that. What a shame South Korea is mostly known for its war, when in fact it’s such a peaceful nation, never having invaded another country. It was a troubled place for many years, and the only people who tended to come here apart from the US soldiers and the businessmen were English language teachers, usually recent graduates from North America here to pay of their crippling student loans; none of them had much time to travel around.

  There weren’t many tourists at all here, it seemed. In this Special Tourism Zone of Itaewon, however, there was a little Tourist Information kiosk, and I picked up a copy of a brand-new government magazine in English called Welcome to Korea, the very first issue. It suggested places to see in Korea that were unrelated in any way to the war: firefly festivals, mud bath festivals, and ancient royal music performed once a year, classed as ‘Intangible Cultural Property Number One’. It was this traditional culture I wanted to see. In the Korean national foundation myth, founder Tan-gun’s mother was a bear who became a woman by eating twenty cloves of garlic and a bundle of mugwort and staying out of sunlight for twenty-one days. Who knew?

  We stopped at a little roadside stall selling cheap jewellery, and bought a couple of plain silver rings. Partly for practical reasons, we decided to wear them on our wedding ring fingers; in this very foreign place, with its residual seediness, it might be easier to pretend we were married. It was also a romantic gesture, because we’d actually made it here together.

  CHAPTER THREE:

  THE NOODLES AND THE SCISSORS

  Although today Korea is politically divided, Koreans have been Korean for thousands of years. When I think about my white British background, it’s probably a mixture of various invaders, ancient Briton with Germanic Saxon, Roman, Viking Scandinavian and Norman French; there’s also some Irish in me, and my grandfather came from Hungary. Koreans have been dominated by Chinese, by Mongols and by Japanese, and have lived with Americans for half a century; they have taken elements of other cultures and adapted them into Korean culture; but within Korea there has been hardly any intermarriage with other nationalities and the gene pool has essentially remained Korean.