Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  Korea’s relationship with Japan has been a dificult one. In the very south, the two countries are only 200 kilometres apart. Around AD400, Japanese raids on Korea resulted in the establishment of a small colony of Japanese on the Korean peninsula, followed by communities of Koreans settling in Japan. The Koreans, better educated at the time, passed on to the Japanese the Chinese script and skills such as metalwork and silkworm culture. According to Richard Storry’s A History of Modern Japan, ‘their contribution to the cultural development of Japan can hardly be overestimated’.

  Then in 1592, an ugly, low-born and hugely ambitious Japanese general named Toyotomi Hideyoshi set out to conquer China via Korea. When the king of Korea refused passage, 200,000 Japanese troops stormed Pusan in the south and fought their way north via Seoul and Pyongyang to China. They were repelled by a combination of Chinese troops and the successes at sea of a Korean admiral named Yi Sun-shin; this was the brilliant man who invented the ‘turtle-boat’, a ship protected by a shell-like roof of iron. Hideyoshi returned in 1597, and inflicted much bloody fighting on Korea before both he and Yi died a year later, ending the conflict. The misery imposed on the Korean people through the Japanese army’s cruelties, accompanied by famine and disease, left what Storry calls ‘a legacy of hatred’.

  So three hundred years later, when the Japanese wanted to open relations again with Korea – whose usefulness as a pawn in the war games of her larger neighbours was by then glaringly apparent – they were rudely rebuffed. But as tensions between Japan and Russia increased, an Anglo-Japanese alliance gave Britain’s endorsement as Japan moved in to take over Korea. In 1904, Korea was forced to accept Japanese financial and diplomatic advisers. A year later, the king of Korea was persuaded to give control of foreign affairs to a Japanese resident-general. Gradually powers were eroded, the king abdicated, and a Korean assassination of a Japanese general gave Japan an excuse to annex Korea in 1910.

  Good Vibes performed nightly from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., so Gav slept until lunchtime and liked to rest before the show. But in the afternoons or on Sundays, his day off, we could take a taxi from the Hyatt and go exploring. Taxis were reasonably cheap, though spirits could be dampened by the mad traffic jams which left you sitting in the motionless cab, watching the meter. Today we drove around Namsan towards the heart of the city, passing Namdaemun.

  Seoul has been inhabited for about six thousand years, since Neolithic times, and has been the capital for more than six hundred years. Namdaemun, the Great South Gate of the old city walls with an arched passageway for the king to pass through, had two huge black tiled roofs layered one above the other. Built in 1398 and then rebuilt in 1448, it somehow survived the Korean War that destroyed most of Seoul, and now held the noble title of Tangible National Treasure Number One – but was overlooked by concrete and glass high-rises and surrounded by a roundabout with several lanes of speeding traffic, so crazy you had to cross via subway passages. Home to nearly eleven million people, Seoul has almost a quarter of the entire population of South Korea. Smog and dust hang in the air, amid grids of utilitarian commercial office blocks.

  We passed what looked like a Korean wedding party outside a restaurant. The women were dressed in traditional clothes, or hanbok – dresses of fine muslin fabrics in bright pinks and yellows with red trim, crossing the chest to make a ‘V’ at the neck, with a very high waist, wide sleeves and billowing skirts – with their black, straight hair pulled back into neat ponytails. As we swept up an eight-lane street, steep, jagged hills appeared in the near distance, bluish-green through a slight haze. Kyungbok Palace stood breathtakingly beautiful against that backdrop. Its heavy sloping wooden roofs curled skyward at the ends.

  The taxi dropped us outside. Inside the gates, in a wide courtyard, cute Korean kids dressed smartly in jeans and trainers played around a temporary art installation of chrome spheres, which reflected the old architecture in the sparkling sunlight. The palace itself, so completely different from huge rectangular European stone palaces, was a series of wooden buildings, painted with flowers and dragons, around peaceful courtyards with trees and ponds. On the gables of the roofs, heavily laden with black tiles, stood the black figures of animal spirits. The wooden shutters were painted in delicate pinks and reds and greens, trellises rendered in different shades, lines accentuated here and there; an infinite attention given to how forms complemented each other, how a doorway led to another. Handmade Korean paper or hanji was used in windows because it kept out the humidity in the summer, and let through light from the sun and the moon. Built in the fifteenth century, Kyungbokkung had been destroyed many times by Japanese and other invaders over the centuries, and repeatedly rebuilt. After last being razed to the ground by the Japanese in the early twentieth century, Kyungbokkung was finally restored in the 1970s to its former grace, painstakingly reconstructed, and now stood as an island of serenity and a symbol of national pride.

  On that sunny Sunday, Korean families were picnicking on the fringes of the palace grounds on raised wooden platforms with thatched roofs. We hadn’t brought a picnic and the area around the palace, Kwanghwamun, was a highly gentrified district for ministries and cultural centres and the president’s house – but on the other side of the street we found a proletarian little cafe. Pointing to a sign on the window, we ordered kimchi tchigae (pronounced ‘chi-geh’), which we’d read was a spicy stew. Our Korean language skills being strictly rudimentary, we weren’t too surprised when what came instead was a tray of dishes of tofu, green beans, yellow discs of pickled radish and tiny fried fish. Delighted by all these new flavours, we tucked in and washed it all down with a couple of beers. Just as we were getting ready to pay the bill, out came the kimchi tchigae: an enormous steaming vat of spicy soup, garlicky with chunks of tofu and sliced meat and lots of Chinese cabbage; accompanied by covered metals bowls of steamed rice. The rest had been hors d’oeuvres.

  Seoul was overflowing with wonderful food, I soon discovered, and eating was taken seriously. People picnicked everywhere, setting out mats at the side of the road, even between parked cars. Delivery men zipped up the pavements on motorbikes, carrying dinner in steel cases; women delivered lunch on foot, trays carrying several different dishes balanced on their heads. In ‘soju tents’, makeshift places set up with orange tarpaulins in the street, people ate and drank all night; these places were frowned upon because they didn’t conform to the government’s vision of modern Korea, but they persisted nonetheless.

  I had arrived entirely ignorant of Korean food; it was a completely unknown taste. Unlike many Asian flavours I was familiar with – Chinese, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese – Korean had never penetrated my world. In Toronto, I used to be baffled by the stretch of Bloor Street between Bathurst and Christie known as Little Korea, where the signs were all in a strange script, all boxes and circles and sticks.

  Who knew that learning this alphabet would be the easy part? It was developed by King Sejong in the fifteenth century using a scientific but simple system, which enabled ordinary people to write in their own language. Unchanged since then, hangul was indeed all boxes and circles and sticks; but they were easy to make sense of once you learned the sounds, based on phonetics. There were fourteen consonants and ten vowels, which joined in twos and threes to form syllables. I enjoyed learning new languages and this one had some logic to it. My notebook was already full of words I was learning assiduously, though I hadn’t tried them out much except on the little old man who ran a tiny stall on our hill, where I started buying cartons of fruit juice and milk. I’d been somewhat flummoxed to learn that the numbers one to five varied depending on the kind of object you were counting – Chinese numbers for minutes and Korean for hours, either for days – but I assumed all would eventually become clear once I started talking to more people. I’d mastered olmayeyo, ‘how much’, and ‘thank you’, kamsamnida (short for kamsa hamnida).

  Gav provided after-show club sandwiches from the Hyatt, and occasionally a meal in the hotel resta
urant, international and expensive but outstanding. I started exploring the neighbourhood shops for everyday food, but at first resorted to buying the same few items I recognised: Cornflakes, fluffy white bread, tins of tuna and squeezy-bottle mayonnaise. Even something that looked reassuringly familiar could have a weird taste, such as a carton of tomato juice that turned out to be heavily sweetened. I tried buying some fresh noodles, but they just ended up tasting of flour as I had no idea what to buy to go with them. Where to begin? I would have to look around and watch what other people were buying. A market seemed a good place to start, so I dragged Gav along.

  Namdaemun Market was one of Seoul’s two main markets, both the size of small villages. Down one lane after another, stall after stall had different types of dried, edible seaweed and huge jars of giant ginseng roots with thick torsos and twisting tendrils suspended in red liquid, the root Koreans have cultivated for many centuries to improve health and energy. The market was also bursting with fresh produce: eels writhing in buckets, whole pigs’ heads and feet proudly displayed, and live, fat greenish-brown sea cucumbers in tanks. Or were they sea slugs? I’d never thought much about either before. People sat at the stalls and ate them freshly plucked from the tank. These were foodstuffs I was probably never going to stomach.

  There were also tables filled with knives, jungle hammocks, dark green blankets, camouflage trousers and night-vision binoculars. Evidently a great deal of army gear made its way into the markets. Other tables were heaped with checked shirts, chinos, and those round canvas hats with flat tops and narrow brims, distinctive pieces of Korean casual wear. Amid piles of made-in-Korea clothes, lots of western labels were in evidence and price tags showing high prices in pounds and euros that bore no relation to the handwritten signs in Korean won.

  Bargaining was the order of the day, and Gav enjoyed that part. Olmayeyo? They got out a calculator and showed you the price; and you said anyo (short for aniyo), no, and they passed you the calculator so you could put in a counter-bid, back and forth until the price was right and you could say nae, yes. I got myself a khaki army T-shirt for 2,000 won and a pair of shorts with handy side-pockets for 10,000 won, 1,000 won being roughly equivalent to a US dollar. We found a couple of cheap army sleeping bags that might come in useful.

  Namdaemun Market also sold a lot of knock-off watches, and Gav spent ages looking at them. In one dimly lit shop, its shelves crammed with boxes and parts, watches arrayed everywhere, we were baffled to find one with ‘Gavin’ written on the face. Naturally, we had to buy it. As we agreed on the fair price, the two men running the shop invited us to toast the purchase with a beer. From under the counter appeared some plastic cups and two large bottles that were shared out liberally. The shopkeepers were brothers, perhaps: each had faint eyebrows that curved in crescents above thin eyes, a squat nose and a square chin. As we sipped and smiled, they looked approvingly at Gav, admiringly even, and finally confessed they thought my man very ‘hana-sum’ because of his prominent nose and hairy arms. They smiled and praised his ‘funny little beard’. Gav blushed slightly, but with his big blue eyes, bronze hair and his mustard-yellow short-sleeved shirt – which now showed off hefty biceps, thanks to all the drumming – he did indeed look hana-sum.

  The simple way to learn about Korean food was to start sampling it in restaurants, you’d have thought. And yet, oddly enough, it wasn’t that simple. Seoul wasn’t the paradise of sushi bars we’d imagined it might be; we hadn’t seen anything like a sushi bar in fact. We had tried one ‘traditional Korean restaurant’ in Itaewon, and ended up with a gritty, dirty-brown soup with a couple of whole dead fish in it. It wasn’t clear what we should be looking for. There was also that gruesome fact that Koreans were known to eat dog meat; what if we ordered dog by mistake?

  I decided to take the plunge one evening. Where we lived, on the lower slopes of Namsan between Itaewonno or Itaewon Street and the Hyatt, was a fairly ordinary neighbourhood, a jumble of modern, red brick, flat-roofed houses and small apartment buildings, with little shops and the occasional restaurant. There were no menus outside the restaurants, so I had no idea what it would cost or what they would serve, but halfway up the hill was a plain-looking place that appeared inexpensive.

  The waitress couldn’t understand what I wanted at first. What, her expression seemed to ask, is this foreign person doing here? I persevered. It couldn’t be that much of a problem – I was a customer after all. I smiled, then gingerly removed my lace-up black trainers and left them by the door, stepping up onto the raised floor of the eating area in my socks, as you were supposed to. So far so good. It was quiet in the restaurant. I picked a table and sat down cross-legged on the floor, trying to look confident, trying to – ahem – blend in. I sit cross-legged on the floor a lot at home, so that part was easy.

  The waitress came over to take my order. I realised there were no menus at all. I looked around. Maybe the handwritten sign on the wall was the menu, but I couldn’t read it. Thankfully, the one or two other customers included a Korean businessman dressed in a suit, who spoke English fluently.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  ‘Thank you. I’m just not sure what to order. Can you recommend something?’

  ‘I see! Well, yes, let me see... Do you like noodles? Yes, well, perhaps you should try mool naengmyun. It is a special summer dish of noodles.’

  ‘Thank you! That sounds great.’ I was relieved. ‘Um, could you tell them that’s what I would like?’

  He did, adding, ‘I’m not sure if you’re going to like it, but it is good!’ Then he went back to his own meal and his newspaper.

  As I waited for it to come, I felt pleased to be sitting cross-legged at a table in Seoul. I’ve always found travel to be the best way of learning about the world, I thought to myself. When I’d first been given an opportunity to visit Guyana, for example, I barely knew where it was. But I’d learned so much from that trip, including some history of my own culture. I’d never been good at learning history or geography from textbooks – all those dates and facts slide instantly from my brain – and I’d always had a bad habit of avoiding newspapers, because they can be so depressing. But here I was, learning about Korea first-hand. How pride comes before a fall.

  My mool naengmyun, which arrived in a large steel bowl, turned out to be a chilled clear broth with a clump of translucent grey vermicelli in the middle, with half a hard-boiled egg and a tiny bit of shredded vegetable stuck on top. Hmmm, I thought, underwhelmed. A squeezy bottle of red sauce came with it, and metal chopsticks and a flattish spoon. Then the waitress brought a very large pair of scissors, and I knew I was way out of my depth.

  I tentatively picked up the metal chopsticks and plunged them into the clumped mass of noodles. But the noodles stuck together and had the elasticity of bungee cords. There was no chance of separating a mouthful, the way they stretched. Nor were metal chopsticks any help when it came to getting a grip on these slithery things. I offered what I hoped was a reassuring smile to the businessman as he left.

  The cook was watching through a hatch, and she came over and sympathetically replaced the metal chopsticks with wooden ones, but I still couldn’t pull of a few mouth-sized strands. A surreptitious attempt to use my fingers made an awful mess. People averted their eyes. Never having used large scissors to eat noodles, I just couldn’t bring myself to pick them up, knowing I was bound to make a huge, embarrassing faux pas, and – worse – worried they were some kind of misguided concession to my western ineptness with chopsticks. Yet when I managed to shove a noodle into my mouth, I felt like a kid sucking at her first string of spaghetti and wondering breathlessly when it was going to end. It didn’t want to break. I had to bite down hard on each thin strand with my front teeth to get it loose.

  Finally, after in this inelegant fashion I had got part of this odd-tasting food of cold broth and bungee-noodles into my stomach, a family sat down at a nearby table and ordered the same thing, and I saw them take up the big scissors and cut
up the noodles into pieces. The mystery was solved, sort of. But I was fascinated that anyone would invent a noodle so resilient it has to be served with garden shears.

  When you travel, exploring restaurants is usually part of the fun. Even when you don’t know the language, it’s hard to imagine being scared of going to a restaurant. But I’d started to realise that Korea could be very different.

  CHAPTER FOUR:

  MANY, MANY FAT AMERICANS!

  During thirty-five years of Japanese occupation from 1910, Korean culture was crushed; some Koreans went into exile, and many others were tortured and killed. Koreans found this particularly humiliating because they had always considered themselves superior or at least equal to the Japanese, having even introduced them to Buddhism. Yet according to Bruce Cumings in Korea’s Place in the Sun, ‘almost every westerner supported Japan’s "modernising role" in Korea’.

  The Japanese razed Kyungbok Palace in the name of city planning and turned the compound into an administrative centre; the crown prince was sent away to marry a Japanese princess. The Japanese installed their army in Seoul at Yongsan. Able-bodied young Korean men were taken away to fight Japanese battles across Asia or to labour in mines and war factories. Over 100,000 Korean women were kidnapped and shipped off to Manchuria to serve as ‘comfort girls’ or ‘comfort women’, prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. Half of Korea’s rice harvest was sent to Japan, leaving people poor and hungry. Koreans were forced to assume Japanese names, language and religion. Richard Storry in A History of Modern Japan says the Japanese regime in Korea was ‘more efficient and in some respects much less arbitrary and harsh than that of the former royal government’; this could also be said of the modern Chinese occupation of Tibet, which is internationally condemned today. Storry says it was ‘rigid, severe, unimaginative, and dedicated to an almost hopeless ideal – namely the integration of the Koreans with the Japanese’. The Japanese occupation lasted until 15 August 1945, when at the end of World War Two the dropping of atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima forced Japan to surrender to the Allied Forces.