Yin Yang Tattoo

by Ron McMillan

  A flash of embarrassment darkened Lee’s face before he pulled out a security pass and looped it around my neck, where it immediately became entangled with my cameras. A new wave of Press Corps grumbling followed us into a function suite bigger and considerably more crowded than a football field.

  Ben Schwartz materialised from nowhere and as he fired off instructions without preamble, his appraising gaze swept back and forth across the room. He nodded respectfully towards Asian guests and flashed an outstretched hand, politician-style, in acknowledgement to Westerners. My job description for the evening held no surprises. I was to photograph the more obviously important people as they sipped cocktails, then make sure I got good shots of the speakers at the official announcement. Schwartz and Lee would help me identify the key faces, and I knew what that meant: every few minutes I would be dragged across the hall to catch another crucial spontaneous grip-and-grin. Photographing cloudless skies would be more interesting and a lot less demeaning.

  The mostly male crowd worked hard at small talk and the giving of face. About one-fifth of them were Western businessmen and diplomats high on the social circuit, ever on the lookout for new friends on the inside track of Korea, Inc. The targets of their earnest gazes were all Korean, middle-aged or older, most of them trim, neat figures who contrasted sharply with their counterparts, many of whom looked damaged by life on the cocktail circuit.

  I split from Schwartz and Lee and did my rounds. It was easy to identify the more important guests by the cut of their suits and the density of sycophants hovering in their proximity. The mere hint of a camera pointing in their direction had the also-rans jostling for positions closer to VIPs.

  Bobby Purves arrived with a Westerner whom he introduced as Eric Bridgewater of the British Embassy. As I did my best not to recoil from Bridgewater’s dead-fish handshake, Bobby gave me a lop-sided grin.

  ‘You ever find yourself in trouble over here, any trouble at all, pick up the phone, Alec, and whatever you do, don’t bother calling Eric.’ Bridgewater laughed politely, but made no effort to protest.

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ He turned his back and addressed a couple of rotund Europeans in what sounded like native German. I grabbed Bobby by the elbow and took him a few paces into the crowd.

  ‘What do you know about K-N Group factories in Cholla-do?’

  ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning I have to go to Cholla Province to photograph a factory.’

  ‘You do know what ‘K-N’ stands for?’

  I didn’t know. He helped me: ‘Kyongsang-namdo. K-N.’

  The southern end of the Korean peninsula had a cultural divide going back centuries, and the rivalry between the Kyongsang provinces in the East and the Cholla provinces in the West was almost as fevered as the one between North and South Korea.

  ‘K-N is a Kyongsang company, and always has been. It has offices and businesses and factories all over the country, but there are no K-N factories in Cholla.’ Shaking his head, he pushed through the crowd towards where Bridgewater held two wine glasses high.

  The rumble of hurried foot traffic announced the opening of official events to the impatient hordes of Press photographers and cameramen. Company juniors herded them to a platform set up behind ranks of seats. On a raised podium facing the seats was a long table in front of a brightly-lit partition emblazoned with the K-N Group logo.

  The formalities were blessedly brief. Schwartz played master of ceremonies, switching effortlessly from English to Korean and back again, welcoming all distinguished guests, many of whom he drew attention to by name.

  Next up, a government Minister delivered a ten-minute address in a Korean monotone that made even the locals squirm with boredom. Schwartz made no attempt to translate, an apparent oversight that was only explained when the Minister repeated the monologue in stilted, uneasy English.

  When Chang’s turn came he spoke English, breaking his speech into short paragraphs, followed by pauses while Schwartz translated into flowing Korean. As an icebreaker it was inspired, drawing murmurs of appreciation all round. The speech itself was a stream of platitudes, and soon he wrapped up with the hope that his esteemed guests might remain and enjoy a celebration of cocktails and other delicacies. Cue enthusiastic applause and clinking of glasses which the security men took as their signal to move in and herd the still-grumbling Press pack towards the exits.

  After another hour I needed a break. I intercepted a waiter and relieved him of two champagne goblets, which I downed in quick succession before tackling the cold meats and cheeses. When I had my fill I moved on. Cameras held to the fore in fake professional zeal, I zig-zagged to the exit and along the corridor to the toilets where I idled in a cubicle for ten minutes and wished I still smoked. I hadn’t had a cigarette in years, but occasionally I would give almost anything for a smoke. This was one of those moments.

  Back in the crowded reception I stayed well away from Lee, who stood next to the buffet with a fat European man who plucked relentlessly at the spread of food while talking non-stop.

  Schwartz popped into view on the far side of the room, talking to a well-dressed woman with her back to me. Her immaculately coiffed black hair, perfectly straight and severely cut to hang just below her ears, showed signs of greying. Even Korean men dye their hair at the first hint of grey so I assumed she was foreign and even from this far across the room, I could tell she was an attractive thing. I plotted a course that might give me a better look.

  The ever-shifting crowd forced me to change direction and move in closer. I was curious, but not curious enough to cop a fresh set of instructions from Schwartz, whose radar at that moment locked onto me. As he gently took the woman by the arm I looked in the other direction, listening to him call my name. Maybe he wanted me to photograph them, which would suit my current curiosity. With a camera in front of your face, a long rude stare becomes a badge of professionalism. I turned casually towards them with my camera held to my eye. Schwartz leered at me.

  ‘I think you know Miss Kim – Jung to her friends.’

  He whispered an apology in her ear before retreating into the crowd.

  ‘Hi Alec.’

  The pause stretched forever. I stood numbed, my ears filled with a rushing sound that drowned the conversational hum of the cocktail party. Standing maybe five foot four in low Italian heels and a shimmering grey two-piece suit, she displayed the effortless sense of style that I knew so well. As ever, her make-up was immaculate, and if it weren’t for the grey in her hair, she could easily pass for ten years younger. I hadn’t seen her in ten years. I realised I was still looking through the viewfinder of the camera. I let go and it bounced harmlessly on its strap. If it had broken into pieces on the polished floor I might not have noticed.

  ‘Jung-hwa.’ It came out almost as a whisper. ‘What a surprise, I mean what a nice surprise. I – ’

  ‘Didn’t expect to see me?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. How do you know Ben Schwartz?’

  ‘Very well.’

  Cryptic. I raised my eyebrows in an unspoken request for more information. She obliged, and I instantly wished she had not.

  ‘We’ve been married for nine years.’

  Schwartz chose this moment to return.

  ‘Darling, there’s someone you really must meet.’

  She took his hand and didn’t look back. My Miss Kim.

  ‘You’re as white as a ghost, Brodie.’ Bobby Purves looked at me, curious, as Schwartz and Jung-hwa slipped through the throng. ‘You didn’t know?’

  ‘You knew Jung-hwa was married to Schwartz?’

  ‘Of course I bloody did. Everybody here knows. I assumed you did too, and that’s why you never mentioned it.’ He started to say more, but swallowed his words. The look on his face was one of pity that made me feel very small.

  I escaped a few minutes later. I hadn’t been able to have another word with Jung-hwa, but after the way she had looked right through me, I wasn’t even sure I wanted
to try. At the hotel entrance there was a line of waiting taxis. Thanks to the quieter evening traffic, a few minutes later the cab set me down at a corner shop near the Hyatt, where I stocked up on cheap beer.

  Back at the room I walked around in a near-daze, sucking from a bottle of OB. What a first twenty-four hours back in Korea it had been. I’m wined and dined by the K-N Group President and treated to a high class whore who entertains me with a night of sex and whisky. I find out I have to work with Ben bloody Schwartz, that my client company is nearly bankrupt – and that tomorrow I have to photograph a factory in a part of the country where K-N Group has never manufactured anything. On top of all this, from nowhere, my very own Miss Kim pops up wearing Schwartz’s wedding ring and freezes me with a chill glance that belies the years we spent joined at the hip. It surely could not get worse than this. I looked at my watch. John Lee was picking me up in less than five hours.

  Chapter Seven

  Picture a major highway leading out of any capital city on a holiday Saturday. Hopelessly overcrowded, multiple lanes saturated with nose-to-tail traffic that alternates between dead stop and a fifteen miles per hour crawl. On Korean highways rolling jams hurtle along at eighty miles per hour, nothing but blind faith and two yards of Tarmac separating one car or van or truck or express bus from the vehicle in front, the one behind – and the ones on either side.

  Koreans are proud of their country’s many achievements and quick to boast of their inclusion in world rankings of all stripes, but one top placement they don’t go out of their way to publicise is Korea’s regular inclusion among the world’s top five most dangerous nations for drivers.

  Two terrifying hours into the trip and the sun was almost up, the pre-dawn light on the road signs telling us we were nearly half-way to Kwangju. We were barely moving, which could only mean one thing. In traffic this dense travelling this close together, accidents were as catastrophic as they were commonplace. Closing my eyes and reclining the seat I tried to get some sleep, my thoughts crowded by a sense of dread at what lay along the highway, and other worries that refused to go away. Maybe it would only be a breakdown; and maybe I was not involved in what might be an assignment from hell.

  I woke to the realisation that traffic was beginning to pick up pace. I tried hard to keep my eyes closed but morbid curiosity won out just in time for me to see a yellow taxi concertinaed to half its length between the back of a 20-ton truck and the front of an express bus. Six feet from me a young man’s dead eyes stared from the front passenger seat. Behind him a slender arm, a woman’s watch on the wrist, hung limp from the crumpled window frame, blood dripping from carefully-tended fingernails to pool on the ground below. As we passed, a fireman casually threw a blanket over them. I didn’t want to think about what that guy saw in his nightmares.

  Lee drove on without comment. He had hardly said a word since Seoul, and now conversation seemed almost out of place. Soon the flow regained its normal mad momentum and, as there was no slow lane, nowhere to seek safer passage, we had no option but to join in the fray.

  We were still about twenty miles short of Kwangju when Lee pulled off the highway and soon afterwards we swung under a shiny metal archway so new that it was absent of signage. A freshly-paved two lane road flew arrow-straight to a building the size of an aircraft hangar, an isolated man-made island in a sea of rice paddies. In its car park sat six K-N Group buses angled nose-first together in sets of three, like giant sergeant’s stripes.

  As Lee led me towards an entrance I noticed there were no markings anywhere on the new building. Inside it was another large, industrial-looking structure, single-storeyed with a sloping, corrugated roof, and on the far side, cut in half like a full-sized architect’s model. Behind it the hangar’s vast walls were one giant, soft-focus mural backdrop of brown rice fields and jagged Korean mountains, almost completely bare of trees. I couldn’t remember mountains like that anywhere near the hangar, and South Korea’s peaks were all thickly clad from decades of reafforestation since the Korean War.

  I turned to Lee. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Let’s get your equipment.’

  He walked out past two men in K-N uniforms handing out simple denim jackets, red neckerchiefs and what looked like small, gold-and-red badges, to a grinning line of men and women with the round, sun-burnished faces of country farm folk.

  Chapter Eight

  Whether they realise it or not, tourists to the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea experience a bewildering array of citizen actors playing out bizarre roles in a social experiment of Orwellian bleakness.

  Swallow the propaganda and North Korea is a land of great joy, of uniform, unshakeable faith in the doctrine of Juche, or ‘self-reliance’, of deep national pride in their stance as resolute isolationists, dependent lackeys to no-one. It is a complete crock of shit.

  The abject misery of the Northerner is as plain as the eyes on the actors’ faces. The eyes of ordinary people forced to role-play as happy citizens, coerced into feigning blissful contentedness in a land portrayed, however implausibly, as a workers’ paradise.

  I once watched ‘real’ actors on a film set at a North Korean movie studio, their unchanging wooden ex„pressions, even in front of a rolling camera, giving the game away. One look at the expensive film camera explained why. Since only the take-up spool was moving, the tool at the centre of the charade obviously had no film in it.

  On another visit to the North I witnessed the resigned look of a department store ‘shopper’ as she surrendered to the store assistant a gaudy sweater that she had just seemingly bought in front of me, her role as a contented consumer suspended until the next foreign visitor ventured onto the painstakingly-directed stage that was Pyongyang Number One Department Store.

  The same numbed pain afflicted the eyes of the middle-aged student in the vast Peoples’ Library. Open on his desk was an arid tome on the effects of global weather patterns on the rainforests of Brazil. Referring to the text with painstaking attention, he printed in his notebook with a blunt pencil in a childish hand: Where are you going yesterday? I go to the movies with my good friend Mr Park.

  Three hundred miles to the south, unselfconscious tanned faces laughed loud while they compared badges and, with fat fingers callused from years of farming the land, struggled to fit them to lapels. No matter how blurred they were by decades of prosperity and freedom, the roots these people shared with their northern cousins were instantly recognisable. Where a Northerner’s gaunt face would be clouded by a mix of reticence, resignation and fear, these plump-featured southern farm folks bubbled with the humour and curiosity that marked them as a parallel family strand a half-century distinct from their benighted brothers and cousins in the North.

  I wondered what story was spun to explain their presence here, dressed as North Koreans and sporting lapel badges bearing the face of the dead Great Leader, instigator of the fratricidal Korean War, and sworn enemy of the South. It would not be too difficult. Tell them they are extras in a documentary film, slip them a few readies and the promise of a decent group meal and soju by the crate. It was the ‘why’ that really bothered me. Why would K-N Group have me here, in provincial South Korea, photographing a mock-up of a North Korean textile factory, phoney North Koreans and all?

  I had a tripod and two lights set up when Schwartz arrived swinging an attaché case, cabin luggage tag flickering from its handle. I had suffered a pre-dawn death race on the highway to hell while Schwartz flew down, thirty minutes in the air, the biggest threat to his wellbeing presented by the in-flight coffee.

  ‘What’s the story here, Schwartz?’

  ‘Are you ready to get to work?’

  ‘Photographing a fake factory filled with phoney North Koreans wearing Kim Il-sung badges?’

  ‘Do what you have been hired to do, and maybe you’ll get to pick up that cheque.’

  Maybe?

  ‘My job fee’s got nothing to do with you – ’

  ‘I don’t give a shi
t what you’re making here because I could buy and sell you twice over, Brodie, but if you don’t do the job right do you really think Chang’s office will sign off on your fee?’

  He turned his back on me and I fished out my colour meter and toured the hangar. For the moment, dealing with a nightmarish blend of artificial light sources was a welcome diversion only interrupted by the scream of high-performance engines that shook the entire building. Through an open door I saw a low-flying jet fighter, delta wings reflecting in the water-filled rice fields.

  From then, relief from the din of the fighters was fleeting and momentary. Every few minutes one and sometimes two jets screamed overhead, closing down conversation and jangling nerves. The warehouse had to be directly in line with the final approach path of a military airfield.

  For four hours I struggled to get giggly sturdy South Korean farm folk to look like downtrodden under-fed North Korean factory workers, an impossible task that called upon every professional trick I could muster. I populated foregrounds with the skinniest people in the building. I made compositions and camera angles draw the onlooker to one or two sharp faces, and used a restricted depth of field to push other subjects out of focus. A critical viewer might commend artful use of focal planes to accentuate my subjects, when in reality I was burying giveaway details in the background blur.

  In a business where making the most of every given situation is the norm, I was in new territory, and didn’t like it one bit. Tuning my equipment to show an ugly portrait subject in the best possible light, or letting dense shadow hide the run-down machinery in the background of a factory shot was one thing, but save for the contrived con that was advertising, in my line of photography, portraying a completely fictitious environment as reality was unexplored territory.

  I worked against rising unease that threatened to push me over the edge into full-blown panic. These photographs had to be part of a scam of proportions I could only guess at. I was thousands of miles from home, up to my ears in debt – and the job that I had hoped would save me now threatened to sink me for good.