Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  And get up it most certainly did. With an effort that, more than any other post-war recovery effort in the world’s history, appears now to have been superhuman, truly miraculous, Korea stood, then took a first step, then began to walk with confidence, then to trot, and finally to run until—as now—it has started seriously to challenge the world’s industrial leaders, with a seemingly unbeatable combination of energy and efficiency, national pride and Confucian determination.

  There was no shipyard at Ulsan thirty years ago. There was not even a company called Hyundai. But now the Hyundai plant at Ulsan is one of the best and most productive in the world; and the men who had the idea to make it thus, and whose pride and vision have kept Korea’s shipyards and Korea’s car plants and, indeed, the Republic of Korea as a whole forging ahead and pulling away from all others, were, it seemed to me, true miracle workers.

  I was not, I must confess, either terribly interested in studying nor competent to explore the mechanics of Korea’s industry, nor the unfathomable mysteries of Korea’s economics. The price of steel plate and the costs of fuel oil, the insurance rates for the Strait of Hormuz and the cumbersome tables of freight rates for the North Atlantic Conference remain among the arcana that I could never hope to master. But I was, I soon discovered, fascinated by the Koreans themselves, by the Korean people. How, I wondered, had they managed it? What was it that had allowed them, or had perhaps impelled them, to become so hugely successful when all the Cassandras would have marked them down for Third World ignominy, for poverty, for oblivion. In short, what sort of people were they? So I made up my mind there and then, while talking to that dour Swede on that Ulsan jetty, to go back one day and try to find out. And indeed, in the early spring two years later, and armed with enough time to make a stab at understanding, I flew out to Hong Kong and boarded a non-stop jet bound for the Korean capital, Seoul.

  It was a late afternoon in the middle of March when I arrived, during a bout of what the immigration officer at Kimpo Airport called ‘flower-jealousy weather’. It had been warm the day before, he said, but in the night the wind had unexpectedly backed round to the northwest, blowing miserably cold continental air across the Yellow Sea from Harbin and the plains of Manchuria, and bringing flurries of snow down upon the Korean capital. The Great North Mountain Fortress was dusted with ice, and all over the city people were wrapped up in overcoats that they would have been foolish to suppose had now done their bit for yet another Korean winter.

  Worst of all, the early cherry blossom was being whipped from the trees and whirled up into busy little blizzards, the branches left bare and forlorn looking. Back in the West we would shrug our shoulders and huddle into our cashmeres. Out here, though, everything had to be answered by the application of a most complicated formula, and I was promptly given a lecture about it while everyone else was forced to wait. The situation, I gathered from the immigration officer’s seminar, was all to do with internecine envy and rivalry. The Chinese cold winds that keenly afflicted the Korean Peninsula had been dispatched because China was irritated—in fact, distinctly jealous, hence his charming phrase, kkot saem chu wi—that so many blooms had appeared so early in Korea and that Korea was being transformed for yet another springtime into something far more beautiful than, in Chinese eyes, it deserved to be. Did I see? Could I not understand how mad the Chinese weather gods had become?

  But then—perhaps because his boss had just appeared—the immigration officer abruptly changed his demeanour, stopped discussing the weather and the crops, and asked how long I planned to be in Korea. Two months, I said brightly, whereupon he drew a long intake of breath, whistling implosively as he did so. It was a gesture I recognized well: most of the people of northeast Asia, when faced with a problem or with a question that is not amenable to an instant answer, do much the same. It is a way of buying time, of giving the questioner the impression of deep thought and consideration, and of avoiding the face-losing notion that the answer is unknown or has been forgotten or is about to be an unwanted denial or in some other way negative. So Mr Chung, for such was the name of the young officer who stood between me and the Korean streets, sucked and whistled and gazed impassively at my open passport.

  ‘Where will you go?’ he asked, and he whistled again when I replied that I was heading for Cheju Island, a great chunk of windy basalt best known to Koreans as a holiday and honeymoon resort down off the south coast. ‘Forty days in Cheju?’ he hissed, incredulous, and I became aware of a vague feeling of alarm creeping down my spine, as though a cup of cold syrup had been tipped down my collar. The others waiting in the queue behind me—well-dressed and identical-looking German businessmen and American bankers and a less well-dressed Indian from Madras whom I had chatted to on the plane, and who was trying to sell the Koreans one of India’s less romantic commodities, like shellac or gutta-percha or urea—began to shuffle impatiently. I grinned at them, trying to look confident, as though I was temporarily in the hands of a buffoon, a mere hobbledehoy of a clerk.

  ‘What is your business? Why are you here?’ Mr Chung went on. I replied cautiously that I was going to Cheju on holiday, and that I was planning to use the island as a starting point from which I would walk the entire length of his country. ‘What?’ He hadn’t understood. ‘Walking,’ I said, and made two of my fingers stroll briefly across his field of vision.

  ‘Working?’ he asked, clearly having misheard and having dismissed the finger explanation as a sign of near lunacy. ‘No, not working, walking.’ And at this he suddenly cheered up, as though a switch had been pressed. ‘Ah! Not working. Fine. That’s good.’ And he inscribed my passport neatly with the words Not Working, stamped me and entered me into a computer file, and waved me on. I was back in Korea again, even though I had feared—despite my confident grin at the shellac pedlar and the man from Citibank—that I might well not be allowed in at all.

  It had something to do with a story about a fence.

  Some months before I had been down on the country’s southeast coast, motoring idly northward after a rather less-than-successful visit to National Historic Site Number 158, the underwater burial place of a long-dead Monarch, the late King Mun-mu. There had been an angry little typhoon named Wayne scurrying about in the Sea of Japan, and the narrow stretch of water between where I had stood and the rocky and half-submerged tomb of the old Shilla king was roiled and foamy, with great combers from the east pounding against the cliffs. The boatman, a grizzled and normally stout-hearted navigator, decided that for safety’s sake he would rather not set out that day. I pressed thick wads of folded won into his hand, but to no avail: he knew his Sea of Japan, and he was not planning to do battle with it for a mere visit to an old grave. So, grumpily, I set off northward in my rented Daewoo, vowing to return to Mun-mu when Wayne had spent himself raining and storming on some distant Manchurian moors.

  Now it so happens that along the entire east coast of Korea there is a fence—a tattered and rusty old barbed wire fence that was built in the fifties with the avowed purpose of keeping out would-be assassins and spies who might row down from North Korea and try to land. The mere existence of and supposed need for the fence are extraordinary enough. But then so is the fence. It has small platforms woven into the wire at random, and on each platform stands a Coca-Cola bottle or a pile of pebbles with a device painted in white on them, so finely balanced as to tumble down if ever the fence is disturbed. There are gates, which can be unlocked to permit people to go fishing or swimming (or to allow the inquisitive to try to commune with King Mun-mu), but they close at dusk, and there are large red notices warning that the beaches are curfewed at night, and anyone found walking on or swimming from them may well be thought an inbound spy and be shot. The beaches are lit by arc lights, and the sand is raked, the better to show up footprints emerging from the sea. So, if a spoor of Vibram imprints shows up in the sand, and if fallen Coke bottles and tumbled pebbles can be seen near the fence, it is immediately apparent which route the terror monger has
taken, and the police will be hot on his trail.

  Though said by the coastguards to be reasonably effective, such methods were not effective enough, as I was soon to discover. Twenty miles north of Mun-mu, as I rounded a bend in the road, I came across a party of Army Pioneers who were putting up another fence. And this, in contrast to its rather forlorn sibling, was a real granddaddy of a fence—eight feet of tough chain-link steel, topped with two-foot coils of razor wire, with sandbagged watchtowers every half mile or so from which armed guards peered suspiciously. It would be tricky indeed for any swimmer or oarsman to get into Korea via this monster.

  The new fence went on for dozens of miles, winding along clifftop and beachfront, to be silhouetted at dawn in scores of fishing villages, to be passed through only with permission and the unhasping of padlocks. I stopped and took a couple of pictures, and soon learned from a bored and friendly Pioneer leaning on his shovel that the entire coastline was to be protectively wrapped in barbed wire and chain link—thousands of miles of brand-new fencing were being erected, the better to preserve South Korea from all enemies, foreign and domestic. It seemed reasonable to let the outside world know of this small peculiarity, and so, when I reached a typewriter and a cable office I dispatched a brief story. It was duly published, a day or two later, in London and Washington: KOREA, the headlines read, FENCING HERSELF IN.

  A week later, according to a foreign-editor friend in London, the Korean Embassy telephoned. A senior official was on his way to the newspaper to voice an official protest, the message went. Kindly be on hand to receive him. And sure enough a diplomat did eventually present himself and read in tones somewhat less than friendly a message from Seoul complaining that by publishing details of the fence a grave national security lapse had been committed, and the consequences could be dire. Was the account factually wrong? asked the editor. Oh no, by no means, coughed the diplomat. All the facts were quite correct. It was simply that the fence did not, officially, exist. Writing about it and, worse yet, photographing it were grave offences. The consequences, the diplomat repeated, could be severe. It was likely that I would not be welcomed back to Korea, for instance, should ever I choose to return.

  In the event, memories being short or bureaucracies being less than efficient, no sanction was ever applied, and I squeaked in through Kimpo’s gateway with no more than a few moments of uncertainty that were prompted by Mr Chung’s laboured suspicions. I collected my bags—Korean customs officers invariably ask passengers to open every one, and today was no exception—and walked out into the chill. The first sight stopped me in my tracks. In front of the automatic doorway stood a quartet of soldiers in full battle dress, with helmets, gas masks, and rifles at the ready. They stood at four points of a square, facing outward, their bodies perfectly still, their eyes ranging like radar. There had been a bomb at the airport just a few weeks before, someone explained. No need to be alarmed.

  But there were troops and blue-uniformed police everywhere, it seemed. Mobile yellow-and-black tiger-striped steel barriers were pushed back by every road crossing, ready to close roads, gates, bridges, tunnel entrances—whatever looked like an escape route for a would-be attacker. All cars coming into the airport were being searched, bonnets and boots opened, mirrors held beneath the chassis, armed guards standing by, a caltrop spread before the front wheels and only tugged free when the searcher had signalled the all clear. I had been to Kimpo many times before, but never had it seemed such a nervous, jumpy place than on this day of flower jealousy, the day I had chosen to embark on my adventure. It all seemed rather ominous.

  Looking back, Korea had perhaps always seemed a rather ominous place. The image I, like so many people, first held of Korea—and it was a very faint image, indeed, one that flickered and dimmed the more closely I examined it, like a faraway star—was a mosaic of melancholy.

  The image was composed of and underlain first of all by a terrible sense of cold and then coloured in and fleshed out by mind-pictures of an unremitting and bladelike Siberian wind. I imagined impenetrable and unclimbable ranges of ugly mountains; endless plains of frozen mud; wrecked tanks smoking blackly against a leaden sky; mile-long lines of shambling refugees; mean, pinched little towns; bomb craters; shabbiness and raggedness; despair and injury; and cruelty and death.

  These images, of course, had woven their way into my childhood mind through the old Pathé news films of the Korean War, news films seen if not watched before the cartoons and the second feature and the main attraction in the one-and-nines at the local Gaumont: ‘General MacArthur storms ashore at Inchon!’ ‘The Glorious Gloucesters and Their Heroic Stand!’ ‘The Human Wave of Chinese—“Our Guns Were Red Hot!” said GI colonel!’ I have a distant memory of René Cutforth broadcasting on BBC radio about crossing the Han River, southbound (for at the time the Communists had taken Seoul again and were pushing the United Nations forces backwards), and I remember his words about the flickering fires in the oil drums left on the ice, and the young soldier from Tennessee nearly freezing to death, and all the participants in this strangely awful drama wondering just what they were doing and where they were going and, indeed, exactly where they were.

  And then the shutter snaps shut and the image, such as it was, halts its meagre progress. After 1953, the year I vaguely recalled as the date of the cease-fire between the two unhappily and perhaps permanently divided Koreas, there is no real image at all. A few names of people and places and events swim in and out of memory—Syngman Rhee, President Park, Koreagate, Kim II Sung, the KAL 007 disaster, Pyongyang, the Rangoon bombing, the green baize tabletop at the town of Panmunjom. But otherwise nothing. Just a distant memory of merciless and pointless fighting, a hazy knowledge of stunning economic miracles having been wrought in the subsequent years, and, pervading everything, a vague and haunting impression of a Korean face as somehow being a face that represents all that is mysterious, impassive, and vaguely frightening about the East.

  Ian Fleming’s Oddjob, in the Bond books, was a Korean—because to the most perceptive of Western popular writers, and, later for Hollywood casting directors, the Korean and the Korean face epitomized Asian menace, a face and a persona perfectly designed to induce a sense of fear. And then again, hadn’t I read that the Japanese always used Koreans to guard the very worst of their concentration camps, because Koreans would undertake tasks that even the Japanese might be too squeamish to perform? It might not have been true (though in fact it was), but it was an idea that added to the overall impression—that of an inclement and menacing place, far away and unknown, a country at eternal war with itself or with others, peopled by strange and unforgiving Orientals, a secret and forbidding country that was probably best kept a secret, filed away and forgotten.

  And then, that autumn day in 1985, I travelled there, and stayed for two weeks—the two weeks during which I journeyed down to Ulsan and to that mighty shipyard that first sparked my curiosity. But it was more than mere ships—much more—that changed my perception of Korea.

  I had not really wanted to go. It was a last-minute decision, prompted by a characteristic piece of newspaper-office idiocy. One Monday morning an editor came up with the not-unreasonable scheme (from my point of view) that I should fly immediately to Western Australia for a fortnight and from there to Manila, to write essays on Perth (before the America’s Cup) and the Philippines (before the fall of President Marcos). But then, later that afternoon, another, more senior editor discovered that the newspaper’s medical correspondent had flown off to a remote town in northern Japan to interview the ‘world’s oldest man,’ and had taken no less than £7,000 in cash with him, breaking all records and, to the chagrin of the accountants (for on most newspapers these days, accountants hold more sway than editors), all departmental budgets as well.

  Down came the predictable ukase: no more foreign trips to be made until the medical correspondent was found, his explanation given, and the cash returned. In vain did I protest that flights had been booked, appointments made
in Perth and Fremantle, luggage packed, sobbing families comforted. I railed and I argued. In the end I was told to go to the airport, check in, and call the editor before the chocks were pulled away. I did just that, only to be told that someone else had been asked to write about Perth, and that while I was expected in Manila three weeks hence, would I kindly now go to Seoul instead and write an essay on the country that, someone had just remembered, was planning to stage the Olympic Games in 1988. A hurried change of planes —no longer Qantas to Perth but British Airways to Amsterdam and KLM to Seoul; an equally hurried change of books (the Survival Guide to Australia being dumped in favour of the Insight Guide to Korea)—and I was on my way.

  It was a wretchedly long flight. I had idly mentioned to a friend in the office that we were probably flying via my old stamping ground of New Delhi, and it was only when I saw that the sun was off the port beam that I realized, cursing my stupidity, that we were in fact headed across the Pole, via Alaska. So I called the friend, collect, from Anchorage Airport, prompting a splendidly surreal argument that revolved around his much-repeated protest to the operator that, ‘No, I won’t accept the call from him in the United States. He’s in India.’ It took a little time before the penny dropped, and by then it was time for the flight to leave again, bound across the Pacific, down to Seoul.