Korea, Are You at Peace?: Tales of Two Women Travelers in a Troubled Land
198
Korea, Are You at Peace?: Tales of Two Women Travelers in a Troubled Land
198Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781458210388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abbott Press |
| Publication date: | 08/09/2013 |
| Pages: | 198 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d) |
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KOREA, ARE YOU AT PEACE?
Tales of Two Women Travelers in a Troubled Land
By J. A. V. Simson
Abbott Press
Copyright © 2013 J. A. V. SimsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4582-1038-8
CHAPTER 1
ARRIVING IN ASIA
When Isabella Lucy Bird Bishop arrived in Korea in the winter of 1894, the port of Pusan was crawling with Japanese officials, merchants, and military men. She was already a seasoned traveler, who had visited and written books on North America, Australia, the Hawaiian (Sandwich) Islands, Japan, and India. Indeed, she was an exceptional nineteenth century British woman, who supported herself by the sale of her travel books. She had been transported to Pusan from Nagasaki aboard a Japanese steamship, the Higo Maru. The large number of Japanese operating in this Korean port might have signaled that something was amiss, but in early chapters of her book, she does not dwell on the paradox.
Pusan, which Bishop transliterated as 'Fusan' throughout Korea and Her Neighbors (and which is now generally transliterated 'Busan') is the major port in southeastern Korea. It was the city from which General MacArthur mounted the defense of South Korea after the invasion from the North in 1950 that started the Korean War. When Isabella Bishop was there, Pusan was controlled by the Japanese, who had made it a treaty port in 1876, using a form of gunboat diplomacy similar to that previously exerted by Western powers on Japan and other Asian countries. This was part of a long-term Japanese strategy to control shipping and trade in eastern Asia. By the end of her stay in Korea, Bishop appeared to be sympathetic to Japanese imperial impulses in Asia, perhaps reflecting the British imperialistic worldview of her time.
When Isabella Bishop initially arrived in the port, her impressions of Koreans were positive. She found the white-suited Korean a "novelty, and while resembling neither the Chinese nor the Japanese ... is much better looking than either, and his physique is far finer than that of the latter." She also declared that "mentally, the Koreans are liberally endowed... The foreign teachers bear willing testimony to their mental adroitness and quickness of perception."
I also arrived in Korea by way of Japan, seriously jet-lagged and disoriented, having spent more than twenty hours in the air from Charleston, South Carolina to Los Angeles and then across the Pacific. I was one of fifteen faculty members newly recruited to teach college courses to American military personnel in Asia for UMUC in the fall of 1999. We flew into Tokyo for our initial orientation to the unfamiliar Asian culture and to the almost equally unfamiliar American military culture within which we would be working.
Following three days of orientation in Japan, those of us teaching in Korea flew on to Seoul to complete training on the Korean peninsula. I was to teach biology at Osan Air Force Base (Osan AFB) near the town of Songtan, about forty miles south of Seoul. In Seoul, we filled out official documents and forms for military passes, heard lectures on Korean history and culture, and toured Seoul and the nearby countryside.
During that time, we made several trips to monuments, temples and museums within easy driving distance of Seoul. We spent one afternoon at Independence Hall, the national museum of culture in Chungchongnam-do. For those interested in language, do means 'region' in Korean. Another day we visited a temple boasting a huge statue of a sitting Buddha at Gagwonsa. To give an idea of the country's comfortable size, we were able to drive from Seoul, near the northern border of South Korea, to Gagwonsa, almost halfway to the southern tip of the country, eat lunch there, make a leisurely visit to the temple with its great seated Buddha, and drive back to Seoul that same evening.
Korean museums are fascinating, if not entirely foreign-tourist friendly; however, my favorite places to visit were Buddhist temples—colorful and highly decorated structures, peopled by drab, gray-garbed monks, who sometimes chanted with medieval monotony, beat drums like jazz musicians, and struck huge bell-like gongs with logs, but otherwise simply walked reverently around the temple grounds. Gardens adjacent to Buddhist temple grounds were probably the source of their food, as is true with monasteries in the West. Some temple grounds also offer accommodations to (paying) visitors who wish to experience the peace and quiet meditation found there. Some orders are even more entrepreneurial; we ate at a restaurant in Seoul that was run by Buddhist monks.
From Pusan, Bishop traveled by Japanese ship to Chemulpo, the name she uses throughout her book for the port of Inchon on the Western shore of the Korean peninsula. Located not far from the mouth of the Han River, this is the port nearest Seoul and the site of General MacArthur's surprise Inchon Landing in September, 1950 that turned the tide of the Korean War.
From Inchon, Bishop proceeded by "chair" (palanquin) to Seoul, thanks to arrangements made by a British official. She described the countryside in the vicinity of Seoul as charming. However, her impression of Seoul was distinctly negative. The city disturbed and disgusted her.
"I know Seoul by day and night, its palaces and slums, its unspeakable meanness and faded splendors, its purposeless crowds, its medieval processions which, for barbaric splendor cannot be matched on earth, the filth of its crowded alleys, and its pitiful attempt to retain its manners, customs and identity as a capital of an ancient monarchy in the face of the host of disintegrating influences which are at work ..."
I shared Bishop's distaste of Seoul and of other large Korean cities and looked forward to leaving the city as soon as possible. Nonetheless, that week in Seoul was an eye-opener. As it progressed, I began to develop a keen interest in Korean history and culture. The people and their customs aroused my sympathy, in part because of the ordeals they had suffered in the preceding century. The Korean peninsula has been a buffer between Japan and China for two millennia. Korea borrowed extensively from the Chinese, and contributed greatly to Japanese culture, although the Japanese are loath to admit it. Exhibits at Independence Hall made obvious the fierce cultural pride of Koreans and their equally intense desire for autonomy and abiding mistrust of the Japanese.
Isabella Bishop would not have recognized the Korea I saw those first few weeks in Asia. Wide streets clogged with cars; buildings reaching to the sky; women walking about by day. As time went by though, the afterglow of the ancient Hermit Kingdom seeped into my consciousness like cosmic background radiation. Deferential bowing; drums and gongs in somber Buddhist temples; mistrust of foreigners; wild, shamanistic dances by women in brightly colored, flowing silken robes; bowing and expressions of respect; the casual mistreatment of women.
One of the sites we visited during orientation week was a Korean Folk Village in Kyonggi-do, an idealized version of past village life. As a Michigan native, the site felt like a Korean version of Greenfield Village, the open-air Henry Ford museum in Dearborn. I wandered through the reconstructed, century-old shops and family compounds, each of which consisted of four or five buildings surrounding a central courtyard, often walled for privacy. The domiciles were neat and sparsely fitted out with mats, pottery, and low tables.
This idealized version of Korean country village life contrasted sharply with life in the villages Isabella Bishop described. She spent the greater part of a year traveling into the Korean backcountry by boat (sampan), cart, or horseback. There she saw mainly the poverty, squalor and confusion of life in villages along the way.
"The regular inn of the towns and large villages consists chiefly of a filthy courtyard full of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumble-down gateway. A gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies, mapu (horse handlers), hangers-on, and travelers' loads make up a busy scene ...
On one or two sides are ramshackle sheds, with rude, hollowed trunks in front, out of which the ponies suck the hot brown slush which sustains their strength and pugnacity ... Low lattice doors filled in with dirty paper give access to a room, the mud floor of which is concealed by reed mats, usually dilapidated, sprinkled with wooden blocks which serve as pillows. Into this room are crowded mapu, travelers, and servants, the low residuum of Korean travel ..."
During my backcountry meanderings, I happened upon a couple of small countryside villages that were certainly neater than those described by Bishop. I visited some of the same areas she did but arrived there by vastly different means. In late nineteenth-century Korea, the major vehicles of transportation outside of cities were boats, horses, and carts. Boats navigated the many waterways lacing the mountainous countryside; small, feisty Korean ponies carried travelers over winding mountain paths; and bull-carts trudged the muddy and rutted paths of the backcountry. I had the luxury of traveling primarily by car, train, or bus. The railways and major roads, while crowded, were reasonably well maintained.
To those who are receptive, solo travel in unfamiliar surroundings enhances sensitivity to sensory stimuli. It may be this heightened awareness that becomes addictive to the inveterate traveler, who wants to see, smell, hear and feel with an intensity normally dampened in familiar surroundings and in the company of others. The first few weeks in Korea were a bombardment of unfamiliar sensations. Everything around me was unfamiliar—sights were exotic, tastes and smells were strange, and sounds ... well ... the sounds were a cacophony I had to stretch my mind to contain and interpret.
The sights of the town I lived in, Songtan, contrasted sharply with my prior suburban American imagery. No one had a lawn, but gardens were everywhere. Plots of corn and beans surrounded houses, and melon vines grew up trellises and pillars that formed a part of the very structure of homes. An enchantingly colorful image I came upon during early meanderings was of mats laid neatly in front of homes along the roadway and covered with red peppers drying in the sun. It was late summer, leading into fall, and although the trees above were browning monotonously, the brilliant red mats below created the visual joy of a New England autumn.
The smells, too, were rich and densely organic. Behind my apartment building were two houses with roofs on a level with my balcony. When the frosted glass door to the balcony was open, I could see across garden patches below to kim-chi pots and clothes lines decorating the flat rooftops. Earthy, fermenting smells of kimchi hung in the air, flavoring the ambient moisture and soot.
Kim-chi, the national condiment, is made from fermented vegetables, usually cabbage, like a Korean version of sauerkraut. It is laced with wild herbs, heavily spiked with red pepper. Its flavor and odor vary depending on the ingredients and the preparer, but the common version has an acrid smell with a sour and slightly bitter taste—a cross between beer, sauerkraut, horseradish, and red pepper. Sometimes it has putrid overtones, especially if fish are in the mix. Kim-chi is served with every meal, rather like ketchup in America, and it is eaten with almost everything except sweets. My favorite was radish kim-chi, a delicacy not served often. The condiment is stored in crockery pots on side patios or flat roofs of every Korean home. Ideally, at some stage of the fermentation process, the pot is buried underground to make the fermentation process anaerobic, which is not so easy with urban kim-chi production. Offers of kimchi were a form of hospitality I learned to accept graciously, and I came to enjoy a bit of it with meals.
And then there were the sounds. The end of summer was hot in Songtan—oppressively hot and muggy—although probably no worse than Charleston would have been in late August without air-conditioning. Like most apartments and homes off-base, my apartment had no air-conditioner, so windows were left open to catch any chance breezes. Unfamiliar sounds rang through open windows. The loudest were from Osan airbase only a few blocks away. The shriek of jets and the thump-thump of helicopters reverberated in the still air. Shrill sirens announced emergency-system tests on base. Taps and anthems were blurred and muffled in the dense air.
From the streets and houses behind my apartment, urgent voices and distressed animal sounds carried through open windows. In the trees and grasses, insects whirred and tittered, especially, the buzz-saw screeching of cicadas; these sounded louder and more insistent than Charleston cicadas. A particularly noisy colony inhabited a poplar tree near the Education Center on base. It was almost deafening to walk beneath that tree when I first went to introduce myself to co-workers in the UMUC office and to pick up keys for a very cheap old car I had purchased with a fellow faculty member. For two or three days, the cicadas screeched and scolded every time I walked beneath that tree. Then a cold snap came and the tree fell silent. A few mornings later, cicadas were strumming their fierce trills again, so I knew the weather had warmed. However, a cold spell so early in autumn suggested that rumors of cold Korean winters were probably not idle.
Another unfamiliar sound thrumming through open windows and on the streets was, of course, the Korean language. Its guttural exclamations rang through the alleyways of Songtan, and a gentler version was exchanged on Osan airbase between Koreans, mostly women, who performed the everyday service work on base. They were secretaries, bank tellers, food servers at the Taco Bellor Antonio's Pizza, check-out clerks at the commissary and Base Exchange. With one another they spoke Korean; when they addressed customers (soldiers and contractors), they used English with variable success. Sometimes a G.I. or a contractor would make an angry or disparaging remark if he couldn't understand the slurred sentences of a woman hired to make on-base life easy. Insulting words, tones and gestures probably penetrated, but the soldiers' rudeness rarely perturbed the polite and deferential façade of service workers. It's hard to know how much ill will may have festered behind the polite demeanor. I never heard a woman answer back or defend herself against the rudeness, but it must have rankled in someone of a culture where respect is of paramount value.
In one of the buildings behind my apartment, the man of the family shouted a lot. Of course, I couldn't make out what he was saying—it often sounded simply like grunts that varied in pitch. Sometimes a woman would yell back; sometimes there was wailing; sometimes I could hear a child cry or a dog bark. One time I saw a man on his roof strike a woman; I assumed it was his wife. And one night I awoke to sounds of yelling and thumping and wailing that lasted for what seemed like half an hour. I had trouble going back to sleep, thinking about that not-so-distant drama and another woman's helplessness. As well as my own.
CHAPTER 2
BUYING A CAR IN A BUDDHIST EATERY
During orientation week in Seoul I bought a car. That is to say, John, another new faculty member, and I gave Sam, a veteran Marylander, $220 for an '88 Hyundai that Sam was desperately trying to unload. It all started in a dimly lit Buddhist restaurant where we had our final communal dinner of orientation week. We were drinking rice wine and eating a wild variety of mysterious vegetarian concoctions—mix-and-match versions of diced this with that sauce, some of it very hot—when a colleague across the table began to talk about a car he was trying to sell. Indeed, he needed to sell it because he had bought a new one and couldn't legally keep more than one car on base. In fact, his old car was parked illegally by the auto repair shop at the military base in Seoul. He thought he had a buyer, but the deal had fallen through. He claimed the sound system alone was worth $200.
John, sitting next to me and also destined for Osan, said, "Heck, I'll buy the sound system."
I turned to him and asked, "Why don't we go in halves and buy the car?"
He laughed. "Sure, why not."
Sam responded immediately. "It's a deal."
The next day, everyone in our group left for Osan except me.
My apartment wasn't ready, having apparently been abandoned in chaos by the previous tenant. I hung around the Education Center and got online in the computer room, where I saw Sam and asked him about the car. He was a bit vague and bleary-eyed, but he seemed to remember that he had offered to sell his old car for $200, and he really wanted to get rid of it. With a little prodding, he took me to see the vehicle and do a "test drive" around the parking lot. When I agreed to buy it, he helped me transfer the title on-base and obtain insurance off-base. The insurance cost more than the car itself. Before buying the car, I told Sam I would not drive it out of Seoul, and he agreed to deliver it to Osan.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from KOREA, ARE YOU AT PEACE? by J. A. V. Simson. Copyright © 2013 J. A. V. Simson. Excerpted by permission of Abbott Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue.................... xi
Section I: Culture Shock In The Hermit Kingdom.................... 1
Chapter 1. Arriving In Asia.................... 3
Chapter 2. Buying A Car In A Buddhist Eatery.................... 12
Chapter 3. Three Foreign Cultures.................... 21
Chapter 4. The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).................... 31
Section II: Into The Korean Backcountry.................... 41
Chapter 5. Out Of Town And Into The Mountains.................... 43
Chapter 6. Temples, Tombs, And Time.................... 57
Chapter 7. Cars, Bars, And Military Bases.................... 66
Chapter 8. Monsoon.................... 74
Chapter 9. Taegu, Where The Livin' Ain't Easy.................... 84
Chapter 10. Southern Comfort, Korean Style.................... 96
Section III: Reflections On The Korean Way.................... 101
Chapter 11. Language, Class, And Culture.................... 103
Chapter 12. Religion, Belief, And Hope.................... 114
Chapter 13. Women In Korea.................... 125
Chapter 14. Environmentally Friendly Korea.................... 137
Chapter 15. Lasting Impressions, Land Of Morning Calm.................... 142
Appendix: Overview of Korean History.................... 151
Transliterations of Korean Words.................... 165
Suggested Readings.................... 167
Acknowledgements.................... 169
Endnotes.................... 173
Index.................... 177