Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  On the bus we sat in a traffic jam for hours, but finally made it to Seoul and our connection to Inchon, from where we would take our ship. I rang the shipping company number again to confirm, and was told we didn’t have tickets reserved after all, even though they’d been booked a week earlier by the Tourist Information Centre in Pusan. We made our way to the shipping company’s offices anyway, where a guard told us there were absolutely no ships to Shanghai. Could we just go in and talk to the people in the office anyway, I asked?

  Inside a dark warehouse there was a cabin, where they said there was a ship to Shanghai and that we did have tickets booked on it, but that the crossing would take slightly longer than the usual crossing because of a typhoon.

  It wasn’t easy leaving Korea.

  With the excitement of the travels ahead, I didn’t dwell too much on saying goodbye. Something had been telling me it was time to go. I had my happy memories and my stories to take away, and Wook would be keeping in touch. The typhoon turned into a super-tornado, leaving the ship anchored just outside Inchon harbour for a couple of days. Held in limbo, I reflected on my Korean summer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:

  COMFORT ME WITH KIMCHI

  Two days ago I met Jae in Seoul and enjoyed talking about you and your pictures... The two days which you and Jae and I spent will be remembered forever between ourselves. If you come to Korea again, I and Jae would be happy and prepare everything more systematically. Hope to have cheerful days. I wait for your frequent mail.

  Bye-bye (annyung).

  Wook in Seoul.

  Our extra-slow boat made it to Shanghai, and we crossed China to within a stone’s throw of Tibet; then went south to Thailand and a perfect tropical beach for the final two weeks before the flights back home. On the Khao San Road in Bangkok, we found a Korean restaurant, and ate there twice on our last day. Somehow, we made it through one of the weirdest, most challenging starts to a relationship you could have, and we kept wearing those silver rings we’d bought in Itaewon. We’d always have Seoul.

  Back in Toronto, we devoured cheese sandwiches and microbrewery beer with gusto, while trying to figure out what this ‘real life’ was that everyone kept saying we had to adjust back to. Rooms felt very cluttered with unnecessary furniture, as we were used to sitting on the floor; the apartment seemed outlandishly large. In spite of being somewhat disoriented, I felt a sense of possibility. When Gav went back into the Irish pub where he had worked before – so long ago, it seemed now – one of the waitresses propping up the bar in her usual spot said, ‘Hey, didn’t you go away somewhere?’ before turning back to her gossip. For them, half a year had disappeared in routine, while we would never be the same people again.

  I worked from home and would make a bastardised bibimbap for lunch some days, steaming the rice while I chopped vegetables, fried an egg, added red pepper paste. When I craved comfort food, I’d head to Little Korea for a bubbling hot kimchi tchigae. The man in the Korean-run convenience store where I bought the square plastic packages of kimchi-flavoured shin ramyun always asked, ‘You can eat?’ and, fanning his mouth, ‘Very spicy!’ Coming home late at night, I gorged on kimchi straight from the tub with my chopsticks, which I’m sure any Korean would say is simply not done. My home-rolled kimbap never came out very well, although I’d bought the proper rolling mat in Seoul. But I could fold a square of salted dried seaweed around a mouthful of sticky rice using steel chopsticks. And I would always eat my bibimbap with a spoon.

  I kept in touch with Wook by email, and told him about the problems of adjusting to life back home.

  Glad to hear about your latest life. The reason why settling back is hard, I think, that you have made too long a journey. Everyone tends to feel unsettled and solitary after a travelling through many strange foreign lands. I hope everything will be OK with you. Your last two meals with Gavin in Bangkok, especially having bibimbap and kimchi tchigae, was touching and impressive even to me. I think you can get over the icy cold wilds of Toronto by always thinking of the warm sunshine and waters of Hwayangdong Valley in Korea. My life here is always regular and interesting – weekends in mountains or seasides and the rest of a week in Seoul.

  I asked him a Korean language question, and I almost wished I hadn’t. I wanted to check that the phrase Odi gan I’d heard in Korea did indeed mean ‘Where are you going?’ He replied that this was incomplete ‘and a little mistaken’, that ‘Where are you going?’ was Dangsin odiro gal gutsinga. Another email followed the same day, expanding on the point.

  I’ll explain it in detail – the sentence ‘Where are you going?’ in English has two meanings: when it is future form, it means ‘Where will you go?’ and when it is progressive form, it means ‘Now where are you going for?’ In case of the former, ‘Where will you go?’ is read as ‘Dangsin Odiro Gal Gutsinga?’ in Korea. In case of progressive form, it is read as ‘Dangsin Odiro Ga Go itsum niga?’ in Korea.

  Good Luck to you. Addio (=An nyung=Bye-bye)

  Wook-hyuon

  I wrote back to him again, confused and puzzled, because ‘Odi gan?’ was a question I’d heard and responded to several times, and I was sure I couldn’t be that mistaken. I’d only written to him to check the spelling, really. He wrote back, now confusing me even further by telling me that my understanding of odi gan was ‘absolutely correct and precise’. Sigh. I wasn’t going to master the Korean language anytime soon.

  Glad to receive your mail again. It is a little getting colder and colder in Seoul. The weather at Naksan in September was freakly cold. But now Naksan is very cold, maybe below zero. GOOD LUCK to you. I hope to have frequent connection with you.

  An nyung (=Bye)

  WOOK-hyuon’

  I was moved by his warm, unreserved friendship. He hardly knew me, and yet he would offer his help and hospitality, as so many other Koreans had done during my summer there. This is not something you find everywhere in the world. The American Henry Miller described his friendships with Greeks in 1939 that way in The Colossus of Maroussi. Long may such friendship continue.

  My summer in Korea happened at a historic time, with the peace summit between North and South, Chairman Kim meeting President Kim. The sunshine policy of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung earned him the Nobel Peace Prize, and it made South Koreans more eager for reunification.

  Riots continued: in October 2000 they were against globalisation and free market policies; in March 2001 riot police broke up a strike at the Daewoo factory over job cuts. But South Korea’s economy was flourishing again, with the occasional trade spat with China over export tariffs on Korean cellular phones and cheap Chinese garlic.

  South Korea continued to prepare for the World Cup, completed the new Seoul Stadium for less money than it cost the British Football Association merely to buy the Wembley site in London, and created a nifty bit of urban renewal too. A municipal rubbish dump near the stadium was sealed and then grassed over to create a golf course and ecology park overlooking the river, while pipes inserted into the former tip would carry gas to a newly built village to fuel it for sixteen years. In 2002, not only did South Korea host the World Cup with aplomb, in ten superb stadiums, but – famously – its team beat Italy. The stands were a blur of red as the Korean fans rose up as one and went bananas. Imagine the soju consumed that night.

  My dad, who writes about football and was there when Korea got knocked out of the World Cup in the semifinals, says that when Germany scored a winning goal against them, the cheering in the stands went deathly quiet for a moment; and then it simply continued as before, as happily as ever.

  Unfortunately, while Korean people are hospitable, warm and good-humoured, most foreigners tend to encounter the stony face of Seoul. It’s not very welcoming being laughed at in restaurants or told to leave, not easy getting around when taxi drivers are short tempered. Yet it makes your day when a complete stranger comes up to you in the street and asks if they can help you. And on getting out of Seoul, you begin to understand why Kore
ans are so proud of their country.

  Korean culture must be one of the least diluted in the world, especially for such an advanced nation. This is beginning to change in a tiny way. Because the male population is bigger than the female and women are becoming more successful and financially independent, South Korean men are actually looking elsewhere in Asia for wives. But for some time after the Korean War, a mixed-race child born of an American father and Korean mother could be stoned as a non-person, as Elizabeth Kim recounts so poignantly in her memoir Ten Thousand Sorrows. She says ‘the intense love for the country’s heritage and traditions has its darker side of hatred for anything that taints the purity of that heritage’.

  Korean nationalism has for centuries been a weapon to protect their freedom and independence from foreign aggression, or to preserve Korean identity in times of foreign invasion. It is a powerful force, although it must have broken down at some point on the road that led to Korea being divided. Yet the Korean people have never sought domination over another nation. Perhaps it’s because there is spirituality at the heart of the culture: Seon masters who live in simple poverty, meditating in silence, living in harmony with nature. While Koreans strive for economic growth, they have a place in their hearts for the simple life away from the city and material things. They’re also a people who have massacred and repressed their own, who litter their beaches and build ugly buildings, of course. It’s hard to generalise.

  Pride in the Korean way has kept traditions alive. As a foreigner, you learn the Korean way, or you stay within the foreigner zones, the Special Tourism Zones.

  Wilfred Thesiger, the British explorer of Arabia, believed that our ability to travel easily ‘has shrunk the world, and robbed it of its diversity’. I don’t think it has, thankfully. In spite of half a century of American influence, South Korea has adopted only those things it found useful – perhaps the middle-class American dream – and made them Korean, but it doesn’t want to be anything other than Korean. That’s just as well. There are few enough places that remain enigmatic to westerners.

  South Korea’s pop culture has been spreading through Asia since 2000 in what is called the Korean Wave or Hallyu. Across Asia, audiences are enthralled by the storylines, intimate relationships, outstanding technical quality and good-looking stars of Korean soap opera. Korean success on large and small screens has led to a big new investment project: Hallyu-wood. China is beginning to envy South Korea not only for its pop stars but for the marriage of individual happiness and sophisticated consumerism with Confucian values about family loyalty, something China lost during the Cultural Revolution. South Korea has modernised and yet retained its traditions.

  The spirit of Korea is forward-thinking yet ancient too, on the cutting edge of technology but clinging proudly to its soju tents and shamanism; reserved and serious in the pursuit of education and wealth, yet enjoying life, laughing, singing on the top of a moutain; seeking to balance the individual needs with the community needs. As the nation gains stature, a more confident new South Korea is emerging, proud of its traditions but happy to welcome the world. I can only hope that this nation will never lose its freedom again.

  The peace talks began to be overshadowed by the fear of a growing nuclear programme and unstable government in the North. North Korea is known to have the largest land army in the world, over a million soldiers increasingly deployed towards the border, according to Robert Kaplan in Atlantic Monthly; it has missiles trained on Seoul, so that nobody can invade North Korea without causing massive casualties in the South. It has stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons. US Vice President Dick Cheney was famously quoted as saying the only reason the United States invaded Iraq instead of a similarly rogue state like North Korea is that Iraq was ‘do-able’. Robert Kaplan stated: ‘Totalitarian regimes close to demise are apt to get panicky and do rash things. The weaker North Korea gets, the more dangerous it becomes.’

  On the other hand, sudden reunification of the Korean peninsula could be devastating to the economy and society of South Korea. But since the reunions in 2000, more than 9,000 family members from North and South Korea have been temporarily reunited, with over 100,000 more applying to be considered.

  Many things have changed since 2000. There is more and more exciting architecture, for example, and wine expert Jancis Robinson reported in 2007 that there now seemed to be more wine bars in Seoul than in London, with wine prices not much higher than the United Kingdom and United States. In fact, singer Kim Soo Hee on a visit to London in 2007 talked about a recipe for kimchi with wine taking Seoul by storm.

  In early 2008, the fifteenth-century city gate of Namdaemun, which had survived Japanese invasions and the Korean War, burned down as a result of arson. Wook wrote:

  ‘Here in Seoul most people are in awful sorrow and distress as if they lost their parents. But the past is only the past. Koreans will reconstruct the second Namdaemun as grandly as it used be.’

  Annyung haseyo means go peacefully, go in peace. One of the gifts I took away from Korea was a greater awareness of Buddhist thinking – mindfulness, making a difference in everything we do. Bad things that happen in life have been caused by us – collectively. By each person striving to do what’s best, all of us have better futures. Perhaps we have a responsibility to help South Korea remain the free country it is today, and to be aware of what is happening to those suffering under the regime in North Korea. Buddhism means a more philosophical life. The way to truth is within ourselves, and we should enjoy a worthwhile life as much as we can.

  When I quit my job and went to South Korea, people said, ‘You’re so brave, I wish I could do that.’ Well, why not? It simply means giving up some creature comforts for a while. If we can’t learn to sleep on the floor and go without the things we depend on in everyday life, if we can’t leave certain events to chance, what possibility is there for enlightenment, for real happiness? When caught in routine, we are seldom learning new ways to make the most of life. From time to time we must take a break to discover a new path and to open up the possibility of being surprised.

  As with all long breaks from work, this time gave me the chance to reassess what I wanted out of life, what I was capable of. I had needed to be thrown into challenging, unfamiliar situations. Maybe I also needed to learn what a blessing it is to make friends, especially in other countries. The fact that people like Wook cared enough to keep in touch and offer me hospitality, for no other reason than friendship, is moving and gives hope.

  I hope my time in Korea also taught me to be welcoming and hospitable to others when given the opportunity. When we really travel, we absorb part of the culture and take something away with us. I think of it as ‘souvenirs’: memories, intangible cultural properties. There were so many stories to tell of that summer, and I was anxious to preserve them, and eventually put them all together to try to thank the Korean people in the only way I could, by showing others it can be a place to go to acquire happy memories. I’d got the inspiration I needed – found it in every little town and village and temple I visited – although what I have written about Korea is at ‘a rather low level’, as Wook might say.

  Today I’m in Woo Jung, one of my favourite Korean eateries in London, eating squid fried in sweet chilli sauce with crunchy vegetables, with rice and kimchi and cold barley tea. There are still so many dishes to try. The young couple sitting beside me order about half of the menu and sit concentrating on their food, although the guy talks on his mobile while picking dumplings out of his soup bowl. Even young Koreans take their food seriously. It’s by no means an exclusively Korean crowd here, or at any of the other Korean restaurants I’ve started to frequent. Annyung haseyo, calls the waiter as more young people come in. I stop in to the Korean/Japanese supermarket across the street to buy kimchi, and then venture into the Seoul Bakery, where the friendly Korean lady urges me to try her different cakes, all baked on the premises, and I find pure heaven in the form of a warm eggy cake filled with walnuts, raisins, sesa
me seeds and honey.

  Maybe it’s strange for me to be so hooked on things Korean when I only spent three months there, it occurs to me. But then I meet an English man who runs an entire website dedicated to things Korean, even though his only link to Korea is that he had a Korean girlfriend once for a year and a half and likes Korean film. So perhaps it’s not so unusual to be drawn to this exciting culture. Korea will always be a part of my life now, and it’s appropriate that one element of that is food, since food is such an important part of Korean life. And food is something we can enjoy every day. Why not make a harmless ritual pleasure of it?

  Gav hadn’t really found his dream with the band in Korea, but he now only remembers the good times, and there are days when he dreams of going off to the other side of the world to play music. He reminisces about being ‘a rock star in Asia’, and when I laugh he reminds me, ‘Hey, I signed autographs, man!’ Good Vibes continued to get international gigs, and he almost went back to join them once. He joined another band for a while, but grew tired of the uncertainty of the music business and decided sensibly to hedge his bets and get a law degree. Gav and I moved to England together, and after our Korean adventure spent seven wonderful years together. We are still the best of friends.

  After standing in King Muryong’s tomb and walking in Korean hills, I was happy to be back in England and have history and nature close by. Britain has a Korean population of about 30,000, most living in London. Korean friends tell me that many come to England for the high level of education for their children, anxious to catch up on their education and skills after the devastating effects of the war. For ten years after the war there was no education, no teachers, and so the children of parents who grew up at that time also suffered.