Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  The only privilege she has, as we have just seen, is the chance of being torn to pieces and eaten up by a wild beast when she is out for a constitional, and that we may safely say is not a privilege to be envied. The poor thing has no name, and when she is born she goes by the vague denomination of “So-and-so’s daughter”... The Corean woman is a slave. She is used for pleasure and work. She can neither speak nor make any observations, and never is she allowed to see any man other than her husband.

  Isabella Bird, another English writer and traveller, the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographical Society, visited Korea several times between 1890 and 1896. She also attested that ‘Korean women are very rigidly secluded, perhaps more absolutely so than the women of any other nation’, and wrote of the ‘curious arrangement’ of men being banished from the streets and women only walking the streets of the capital during the darkest night for a prescribed time. ‘A lady of high position told me that she had never seen the streets of Seoul by daylight.’ Queen Min, the wife of the twenty-sixth king of Choson, was deemed the most powerful person in the country in the years 1874 to 1895. But royal ladies might never have seen beyond the city walls of Seoul. Not even the royal doctor could set eyes on the queen, while women of lower status were granted much more freedom.

  Even in the twenthieth century there were ‘honour killings’ of women for ‘sexual shame’: there’s a horrific story of this in Elizabeth Kim’s book Ten Thousand Sorrows. The availability of screening technology resulted in that nasty practice of aborting daughters. The exception to all this was the legendary matriarchy of Cheju Island. The women, it is claimed, owned the property, gave the family their name, and only allowed men ashore once a year. Even today in Cheju there are communities of strong fisher-women, who dive to a depth of up to twenty metres, without any breathing apparatus, for seafood or seaweed to sell.

  So much changed for women in only a hundred years! In recent years, women throughout South Korea have become successful, even powerful. A major Korean publisher has books on financial planning specifically for women, with interesting titles such as Women Drinking Starbucks Coffee Vs Women Buying Starbucks Shares. They are highly educated, and, like western women, their main problems stem from juggling the demands of family and career, trying to get ahead in a traditionally male-dominated society. The women I had met generally seemed friendly and confident.

  In Hendrik Hamel’s account of seventeenth-century Korea, he wrote that since there were no inns, travellers would be welcomed into private houses for some food and something to drink and a place to stay. Perhaps this was a very old tradition. In any case, taking a bus to the unknown end of the line, to a little fishing village and Kim Cheung-suk’s house, had been a good gamble and a worthy detour.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN:

  ACQUIRING HAPPY MEMORIES

  After Shilla gave way to the Koryo Dynasty, there came a devastating invasion and occupation by the Mongols from the twelfth to the thirteenth century, during Kublai Khan’s campaign to subjugate China and Japan. The Choson Dynasty arose from its ashes, founded by one of those who helped drive the Mongols out, the Korean general Yi Songgye, who created the city of Seoul (then called Hanyang).

  The emerging Choson society was strictly regimented and controlled and heavily taxed. Koreans had to wear identity tags that indicated rank as well as place and date of birth – very Confucian – and were not allowed to travel outside their home province. The Confucian values promulgated in the Choson era include filial obedience, a hierarchical ranking of family members based mostly on age, and a type of caste system that placed great emphasis on education. These values have, by and large, survived into contemporary Korean society.

  In The Red Queen, Margaret Drabble’s novel set in Korea, a character says ‘one of the principal weaknesses of our Confucian system was that it made no place for the spirit’. That’s where Buddhism was needed to create balance and harmony.

  ‘I want to go into the sea with you,’ demanded my new female friend. ‘But I can’t swim, so I keep my clothes on.’

  Feeling like a day at the beach where I could spend some quiet time reflecting, I’d taken a local bus down the coast from Kampo to Chunchon, trying not to get it confused with Chuncheon. However, quiet time wasn’t really on the cards. It was now officially summer, and the beach was filled with teenagers and families. Going for a swim, I felt rather conspicuous. A western woman coming to a beach alone and stripping down to a bikini was a totally bizarre sight to them, and it was hard not to get paranoid. Every time there was a loudspeaker announcement, I imagined it was saying ‘Foreigner is entering the water, stand clear!’ But after a while people got used to the idea of me being there, and even started saying hello.

  I was clearly the only person on the beach interested in getting a tan. Most people went in the sea in shorts and T-shirts, hats and sandals. Every now and then you’d hear someone shrieking as they were thrown into the water fully clothed. It’s surprising how many South Koreans can’t swim, when the country is almost surrounded by water. For most of the teenagers, the beach was about eating and taking photos.

  The water was cool and deep, and though it was a little oily, you could clean off in the shower-jang. The people having the most fun of all seemed to be the coach-parties of old folks. Wrinkly ladies would strip down to their waists when changing into dry clothes, and chuckle away at one another’s wet T-shirts. Korea seems a good place to be old: a time for playing chess in the park, dancing, picnicking, always in company. It’s firmly embedded in Korean culture that you must look after your elders, and those old people who lived through the Korean War and the Japanese occupation certainly deserved a good time now.

  Wearing a sarong over my bikini I walked the length of the beach, watching, and on the way back met a young man and woman who insisted I sit with them and share their cans of beer.

  ‘We want you to think well of Korea,’ the young man said. The young woman held my hand and fluttered her eyelashes at me, smiling and passing me the beer. This seemed to be the week for meeting interesting women.

  ‘Please have some ochinga,’ her friend said, handing me the packet of dried squid.

  ‘Thank you. Where are you from?’ I asked.

  ‘Taegu,’ he said, a big city inland from here. He wrote their address in my notebook. He asked what I was doing in Chunchon, and tried to tell me a Korean expression for the type of travel I was doing. My female friend was getting bored and declared we should go in the water, although she couldn’t swim so had to keep her clothes on. I removed my sarong as she grabbed my hand and pulled me in. We splashed around in the waves for a bit, I in a bikini and she in her white shirt and black trousers, and then I got out and took her photograph as she stood, grinning in the water in her soaking clothes. When she emerged, she handed me what she called her ‘two-hundred dollar sweater’ to dry myself on, and grabbed my sarong to dry her hair.

  ‘I don’t mind that I got my expensive clothes wet, I don’t mind you wet my two-hundred dollar sweater. I go in the sea with you because you are so beautiful,’ she claimed. She was a real comic actress. I reminded her that her friend was throwing her into the sea fully clothed when I’d passed by earlier. She merely pointed to her cheek to ask for a kiss.

  ‘I am very sorry for my English,’ she said. Then she dismissed me.

  ‘We can go back to Taegu happy now,’ said her friend, ‘because we have met you.’

  I had set up my tent on the sand among the teenagers and families. Camping was free. As the afternoon wore on, a popular attraction was beach karaoke in an open tent on the sand with the requisite screen and microphone. It seemed rather public for Koreans, who usually did their singing in private rooms. As dusk fell, the guys in the tent next to me lit a campfire and started their own singing. Fireworks started going off everywhere. I liked the fact that young people could set up their tents here for free, set of fireworks, eat and sing safely surrounded by friendly faces. But I craved a bit of peace and soli
tude.

  I wandered of a way to where it was quiet, and sat cross-legged to watch the red moon rising from the sea. Four pale swathes of cloud hung above it like calligraphy; a thin reflection stretched across the water like a pathway of moonlight from the horizon to the shore, cherry coloured, red and yellow. As I sat watching in the dark, a young guy who said he was an off-duty policeman but looked barely old enough – Koreans always looked so young to me – asked if he could sit down. He said he wanted to talk, but the whole conversation consisted of him saying the Korean word for English then drawing a cross on his palm and saying ‘No’. I nodded, and concentrated on the moon changing colour and rising up the lines of cloud as if they were rungs of a ladder. Eventually they stretched out to thin lines across a big yellow three-quarter moon.

  Leaving behind the policeman but not having the energy to go through the whole raw-fish experience for dinner – it was something that people tended to do in groups, and the food was only sold in big expensive plates – I went for the easy option and bought a cheap pot of quick noodles, shin ramyun, from a friendly lady at a beach shop who was putting her young son to bed. She gave me chopsticks and poured hot water from an urn on my plastic bowl of noodles, and directed me to a low lino-covered platform on the sand where I could sit and eat and listen to the waves.

  When I woke early the next morning, the sun was already roasting the tent. The beach was completely covered with litter, especially where my campfire neighbours had been singing the night away. A lady came by with tongs and bag to pick it up, piece by piece. I couldn’t help thinking it would be better if people didn’t leave their rubbish lying about. While I was packing up my tent, the teenage girls in the tent on the other side of mine asked if they could take their photograph with me, insisting we put our arms around one another as friends. The lady who rented out inflatables gave me a thumbs-up sign.

  It was almost time to head back to Seoul, but something was urging me to see Kirimsa, a nearby temple. I still craved some reflective, peaceful space. The experience at the commercialised Pulguksa had been so uninspiring; I hoped this less famous place would be different. I started out walking, and within minutes was offered a lift by a man in a van. I was doubly lucky: he was learning English, asked interesting questions, and talked about his kids as he drove. He asked where I was going, where I’d been, and was impressed by my travels but seemed very sad when I admitted that I hadn’t made it to see King Munmu’s underwater tomb, just down the coast and obviously the big local attraction.

  I’d read about it: a legendary tomb of a famous Shilla king buried under the sea, which you could glimpse from the cliff above. Perhaps it’s the symbolism that makes it such a prized treasure, because King Munmu ordained his ashes to be scattered at that spot so his spirit would protect the Shilla Kingdom from Japanese pirates. Fed up with sightseeing after Kyungju, I’d decided to give it a miss, but now, not wanting to of end the driver who’d been kind enough to pick me up, I told him I’d run out of time. That was unfortunate, he said, but he added proudly he would drive me there himself next time I came. He drove me all the way to the gates of Kirimsa, where he asked someone to take a photo of us, and earnestly asked me to post him a copy of the photo, giving me his address in Chunchon. Insisting on paying my admission, he wished me happy memories of Korea, and left. I walked up the hill, smiling.

  The president recently asked people to be especially nice to visitors in the lead-up to Visit Korea Year. Was it because for so long nobody left Korea with happy memories, and so few people come here to acquire them?

  As I walked up the hill towards the temple, there was silence all about except for the quiet tocking of a wooden instrument somewhere. I stopped to read a sign giving Kirimsa’s history. Then a class of chattering teenage schoolboys came boisterously up the path and drowned the silence as they showed off, reading from the English sign for my benefit. I grinned, and walked up the pathway ahead of them.

  I reached a small courtyard surrounded by wooden meditation halls; in the middle an old tree cast a circular shadow around itself in the midday sun. From a gloomy hall came the monotone of a monk striking a wooden drum, a gong struck in another hall, and a monk in another hall began to sing. The clean sounds merged in a natural harmony. This was what I had been looking for, I knew at once. I sat and immersed myself in its simple beauty.

  A temple was first built here by a monk from India who educated 500 disciples. It was enlarged and given its current name in 643 during the reign of the Shilla queen Sondok. Pulguksa, just outside Kyungju, had once been a branch of Kirimsa. Kirimsa thrived in the Koryo Dynasty, and in the Choson era served as a rallying place for troops during the Hideyoshi invasions, the monks becoming a kind of militia. In the Great Hall sat three colossal Buddhas made of clay covered with a smooth, matte gold, the features rather Indian, with pointed noses and heart-shaped faces, and delicate red lines for lips, pale green for the eyebrows and beard. I sketched the patterns carved in the wooden roof-eaves, and fell in love with a hanging painting of a young man carrying radishes on a stick up a mountain to where an old man with a long white beard sat on a tiger.

  From the humble wooden buildings to the intricate artwork, Kirimsa had been maintained meticulously, and yet was still a working monastery. Oblivious to the visitors, a group of people sat attentively on the temple floor listening to the monk’s teaching. It was a place of worship, study and peace.

  I found a hall where the original 500 disciples were depicted in foot-high statues of seated figures, each one individually characterised by a physical attribute or mannerism: one scratching his ear, one pink in the face, one with hairy eyebrows, two slightly overweight, grinning and holding hands. Almost comic, and very human! Were they modelled on the actual disciples? Was each one made by a different monk? As I emerged, pondering this, I saw the group of schoolboys had caught up. There was an excited murmur among the crowd, and the teacher came up to talk to me, explaining that the boys were from a school in Taegu and would like me to be in their group photo. Before I knew it, I was having my photo taken in the centre of an entire class of teenage boys. Each one politely said goodbye as they filed out of the courtyard. Presumably they too could now go back to Taegu with happy memories – and a photo to prove it.

  One of the larger halls was dedicated to the reunification of the Korean peninsula. As I examined it, a monk caught my attention and silently mimed eating rice, pointing to the dining hall and signalling to listen for the gong. I was famished, and when the gong sounded I gratefully joined the monks and temple family for one of the best meals I’ve ever had the good fortune to eat: dark greens with sesame seeds, mushrooms and avocado, flowery stalks, cold soup with seaweed and sesame and cucumber. This food, with its varied textures and tastes, seemed like a celebration of everything that grew on the mountains. A tiny old woman, ninety if she was a day, came over to give me some large green leaves to wrap rice in, and hot green peppers with dipping sauce. Someone else offered sweets and watermelon.

  Reluctant as always to leave, I wanted to see the only cave temple in Korea, built in the sixth century by Kwang Yoo and his companion monks from India. This was a few kilometres away. I set off walking, passing friendly ladies sitting in the shade selling herbs and beans and powders for healing, and a coach party of old people lunching under the trees, and creaky old men dancing to the sound of a beaten drum. The valley was filled with swallows and bamboo and rice fields, sun glinting of every leaf. In the blistering heat, though, I was delighted when a bus driver stopped for me. He kindly gave me a free ride as he wasn’t in service, just driving that way anyway, and he dropped me off just down the road. I spotted the gates and made my way up the hill, glad to have a bottle of water.

  I saw something high up in the distance on the steep hillside and soon realised that it was the prayer sanctuary off the Stone Buddha Temple. The climb up the rocky clif was hard but fun with the ropes provided. I met two couples from Taegu, the Korean ladies in their strappy high-heeled sandal
s managing the climb just as well as me in my rugged shoes. When we reached the cave, the view across the valleys and hills was sublime. This Buddha was known as ‘seated at the entrance to Nirvana’, and the vista spread out before us was heavenly. I struck up a conversation in English with one of the men as we admired the green forest below, enjoyed the cool breezes and rested. They were on their way to Kampo, and asked about my travels.

  ‘And how do you find the Korean people?’

  ‘Very kind, very warm,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you!’ they replied. No, thank you, I thought. They were thanking me for allowing them to be kind and warm. Sure enough, when we all found ourselves back at the gates, they insisted on giving me a can of ice-cold beer, stuffing a can of apple cider into my bag for my journey, and wishing me happy memories.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

  HARD ROCK IN THE ROK

  In the late sixteenth century there came the invasions from Japan led by Hideyoshi and his samurai army. Recovering from this, Korea once again accepted the dominance of China and agreed to pay it a tribute. Korea clung to China and entered its most pronounced period of deliberate isolationism, learning of the world only through China’s contact with it. Korea cut itself off from all other external contact; the Hermit Kingdom did not welcome visiting ships. The royal family of eighteenth-century Choson isolated themselves in the refined palaces of Seoul, rarely leaving the confines of its walls. Respectable upper-class women were supposed to remain indoors.