Holidays in Hell

by P. J. O'Rourke

  It wasn't even an act of desperate protest. Opposition candidate Kim Dae Jung hadn't lost the Korean presidential election yet. KDJ was just giving a small pep talk to a group of well-wishershalf a million of them. They spread in every direction out over the horizon, packed flank to flank and butt to loin, all standing at attention in a freezing Seoul drizzle with serious, purposeful expressions on their mugs.

  When a Korean political candidate does a little stumping, a little flesh pressing, a little baby kissing, he puts on a sour face, mounts a platform and stares at the crowd. He's surrounded by Samoan-size bodyguards, his chap-sae, or goons, (literally "trapped birds'). A couple of the goons hold an inch-thick Plexi glas shield in front of the candidate's face. The shield has handles bolted on both ends like a see-through tea tray. The crowd shouts the candidate's name for half an hour, then the candidate yells at the crowd. Korean sounds like ack-ack fire, every syllable has a primary accent: YO-YO CAMP STOVE HAM HOCK DIP STICK DUCK SOUP HAT RACK PING-PONG LIP SYNC!!!! If the candidate pauses, the crowd responds in unison with a rhymed slogan or with a precise fifteen seconds of waving little paper Korean flags. There's no frenzy in this, no mob hysteria, and it's not a drill or an exercise.

  I'd never seen spontaneous regimentation before. And I don't hope to see it again. I was standing on the platform, a couple of goons away from "The DJ," as the foreign reporters call Kim Dae Jung. And I was looking at this multitude, and I was thinking, "Oh, no, they really do all look alike,"-the same Blackglama hair, the same high-boned pie-plate face, the same tea-stain complexion, the same sharp-focused look in 1 million identical anthracite eyes. They are a strange northern people who came to this mountain peninsula an ice age ago and have kept their bloodlines intact through a thousand invasions. Their language is unrelated to Chinese or Japanese, closer, in fact, to Finnish and Hungarian. They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, "the Irish of Asia."

  There was a very un-Irish order to that crowd, however, an order beyond my comprehension-like nuclear fission. There is order to everything in Korea. They call it kibun, which means, to the extent it can be translated, "harmonious understanding." Everything in Korea is orderly, except when it isn't-like nuclear fission.

  The speech ended, and every single person in that audience pushed forward to be with Kim Dae Jung. I looked down from the platform and saw the kid in the front row wiggle out of his white parka. He was a normal-looking kid (but in Korea everybody is normal looking). He had a sign reading, in garbled English, MR. KIM DJ ONLY BECOME THE 1ST PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD, on one side and the same, I guess, in Korean on the other. Then, with a can-do smile, he nipped the digit and began his calligraphy.

  The DJ, in a goon envelope, descended to meet his chanting admirers. I tried, without goons, to follow him. I was cross-bodyblocked and stiff-armed and went down in a second. I was a oneman zone defense against a football team of 500,000. Squat, rockhard Korean bodies surrounded me in three dimensions. I was squeezed and heaved and, most of all, overwhelmed by the amazing stink of kimchi, the garlic and hot-pepper sauerkraut that's breakfast, lunch and dinner in Korea. Its odor rises from this nation of 40 million in a miasma of eyeglass-fogging kimchi breath, throat-searing kimchi burps and terrible, pants-splitting kimchi farts.

  I came to the surface of the crowd and went under again like a toddler in big surf. I was squashed and tumbled. My foot came out of my shoe. My pocket was picked. Finally, I was expelled from the mass with one collective shove and kick.

  This is what Koreans are like when they're happy.

  And the Koreans were very happy with their first presidential election in sixteen years. They voted like the dickens-an 89.2 percent turnout. But I couldn't get any of them to tell me why. What was this election supposed to be about?

  Practically everybody running for president was named Kim. There was Kim Dae Jung, the opposition front-runner, Kim Young Sam, ("Kim: The Sequel"), also the opposition front-runner, and Kim Jong Pil ("Kim: The Early Years'), the opposition straggler. Plus there was the non-Kim candidate, Roh Tae Woo (pronounced "No Tay Ooh" and called "Just Say No" by the foreign press corps). Roh was handpicked by the military dictatorship that's been running South Korea since 1971.

  Everybody knew Roh was going to win because Kim the DJ and Kim the Sequel had promised to unite antigovernment opposition behind one candidate, but then they forgot and spent most of the campaign bickering with each other. And Roh was going to win anyway because he had the constituency that votes with M-16s. (When these boys make their voices heard in the marketplace of ideas, you'd better listen up.) So the election wasn't about winning.

  And the election wasn't about political-party allegiance, either. The distinctively named parties-Peace and Democracy, Democratic Justice, Reunification Democratic, and New Democratic Republican-all fielded candidates. If I were a hard-working journalist with a keen eye for detail, I'd sift through my notes now and tell you what Kim belonged to which. But that would be a waste of everybody's time. A Korean political party exists solely to boost the fortunes of its founding candidate and has the average life span of a trout-stream mayfly hatch.

  Campaign promises? Kims 1-2-3 promised to promote freedom of expression, work for reunification of North and South, fight corruption, improve the country's god-awful human-rights record, raise living standards, and lower taxes. But then that fascist pig Roh Tae Woo went out and promised to do the same and lots more of it. Nobody, Kim or un-Kim, said too much about Korea's near absence of social-security programs, the $140-a-month minimum wage, the seventy-two hour work week or the fact that it's illegal to have an independent labor union. Kim Dae Jung is supposed to be the big liberal in the bunch. When interviewed by a Canadian business magazine, the DJ, that feisty champion of the common man, was quoted as saying, "Of course we want to advocate some social welfare, but we do not want to be excessive. . . . If trade unions advocate extreme or radical demands, the law must prohibit this." So the election wasn't about campaign promises.

  Why was everybody voting so hard? The only answer I could get from Koreans was "democracy."

  "What's this election all about?" I asked.

  "Democracy," they answered.

  "But what is democracy?" I said.

  "Good."

  "Yes, of course, but why exactly?"

  "Is more democratic that way!"

  Well, this is heartening to those of us who prefer a democratic system. But I still don't know what they're talking about. "Korea must have democracy," my Korean friends told me. "Democracy is very good for Korea." "Korean people want very much democracy."

  I guess democracy is something that if you're going to be really up-to-date, you just can't do without-like a compact-disc player. (Actual South Korean experience with democracy, by the way, consists of one thirteen-month period between the April 1960 overthrow of strongman Syngman Rhee and the May 1961 military coup by General Park Chung Hee.)

  On election day I cruised Seoul with an old friend from the democracy fad in the Philippines, photographer John Giannini. It was supposed to be a national holiday, but the Koreans went to work just the same, the way they do six days a week, starting before dawn and stopping who knows when. Rush hour doesn't even begin until seven P.M.

  Traffic in Seoul is a 50 mph gridlock with nobody getting anywhere and everybody driving like hell. The sidewalks are endless rugby scrums. Elbowing your way through a crowd is Korean for "excuse me." The city is as gray as a parking garage and cleaner than a living room. People stoop and pick up any piece of litter they see. You can spend twenty minutes in an agony of embarrassment trying to figure out what to do with a cigarette butt. And they yell at you if you cross against the light. Everything is made of concrete and glass and seems unrelentingly modern, at first glance. But many buildings have no central heating, and the smell of kerosene stoves pours out every shop door, mixing with kimchi fumes, car smoke, sewer funk and
the stink of industry. It's a tough, homely stench, the way America's ethnic factory towns must have smelled seventy-five years ago.

  Giannini and I tried to find the slums of Seoul, but the best we could do was a cramped, rough-hewn neighborhood with spotless, bicycle-wide streets. Every resident was working-hauling, stacking, hawking, welding, making things in sheds no larger than doghouses. Come back in a few years, and each shed will be another Hyundai Corporation. We felt like big, pale drones in the hive of the worker bees.

  The voting was just what every journalist dreads, quiet and well organized. There were no Salvadoran shoot-'em-ups, no Haitian baton-twirler machete attacks, no puddles of Chicagoan sleaze running out from under the voting booths. People were standing patiently in line, holding their signature seals, their chops, at the ready. Poll watchers from each candidate's party sat to one side, rigid on a row of straight-backed chairs. A reporter who could make an interesting paragraph out of this would get that special Pulitzer they give out for keeping readers awake during discussions of civic virtue. Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam said there was massive vote fraud. But if there was, it was serious, orderly Korean massive vote fraud.

  Giannini and I did see one fellow getting roughed up by a crowd outside a polling place. We shoved people, in the Korean manner, until we found someone who spoke English. He told us the fellow being kicked and punched was a suspected government agent. The police came, punched and kicked the fellow some more, and hauled him off. It was certainly the first time I'd ever seen police arrest somebody on suspicion of being a government agent. But that's Korea.

  We went out in the country to find people voting in authentic traditional funny clothes. But this, too, was a bore. So we gave up and went to a restaurant-a few floor mats and a kerosene heater in a tent beside the Han River.

  The Han is as wide as the Hudson, and its valley is as beautiful as a Hudson River-school painting-but more serious, with a gray wash over it. The Koreans are serious about fun, too, thank God. They're perfectly capable of a three-hour lunch, and so are Giannini and I. We ordered dozens of bowls of pickles, garlics, red peppers and hot sauces and dozens of plates of spiced fish and vegetables and great big bottles of OB beer and mixed it all with kimchi so strong it would have sent a Mexican screaming from the room with tongue in flames. By the time we drove, weaving, back to Seoul, you could have used our breath to clean your oven.

  After the votes were counted, the Koreans were not very happy with their first presidential election in sixteen years. Most citizens responded in the Korean way, by going to work in the morning. But some student-radical types decided they'd found a big vote fraud in a ward, or gu, office in the industrial district of Kuro, in southern Seoul.

  As usual, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Korea has an infinite capacity to make you feel dumb. This is a whole nation of people who did their homework on Friday night. Even when they don't know what they're doing, they're doing so damn much of it that they're still going to get an A.

  Anyway, the student radicals discovered a locked ballot box under a stack of bread and milk in a truck leaving the Kuro gu compound. Local officials gave some lame excuse about how the ballot box had to go to a special vote-counting place, and how the bread and milk truck just happened to be headed that way, and how they'd covered the ballot box to keep the votes from getting cold. . . . The students were having none of it. They invaded the five-story Kuro gu building, took the local officials hostage and called for one of those massive violent student demonstrations for which Korea is justly famous.

  The way famous, massive, violent Korean student demonstrations work is that the students get a sound truck, turn the volume up to Motley Crue and take turns screaming at themselves. Violent student demonstrators sit around cross-legged in an appreciative half circle and, between screams, holler "Dok chore tado! Dok chae tado! Dok chae tado!" which means "Smash the dictatorship." The chant is punctuated with unnerving, black-shirtish synchronized karate chops.

  This can go on for days, and at Kuro it did.

  Meanwhile, extra-violent student demonstrators were breaking paving stones into handy projectiles, filling soju rice-winebottle kerosene bombs, building desk-and-filing-cabinet barricades in the Kuro gu doorways and pulling apart some nearby scaffolding to make quarterstaves out of iron pipe. A line of command had been created, and all defense preparations were taking place behind a row of stick-wielding young malcontents.

  Lack of press freedom in Korea is one of the big student gripes. But the students don't like actual reporters any better than the government does, at least not American reporters. The radicals-in counterfeit New Balance shoes, Levi's knockoffs and unlicensed Madonna T-shirts-are much given to denouncing American dominance of Korean culture. It took a lot of arguing to get past these ding-dongs. One pair, a dog-faced, grousing fat girl in glasses and a weedy, mouthy, fever-eyed boy, were almost as obnoxious as my girlfriend and I were twenty years ago at the march on the Pentagon. However, they had some oddly Korean priorities. "Don't you step on bushes!" shouted the fat girl as I made my way into the building that they were tearing to shreds.

  Inside, firebombs were parked neatly in crates, stones were gathered in tidy piles, more lengths of pipe were laid in evenly spaced rows to booby-trap the stairs, and additional barricades were being carefully constructed on the landings.

  Looking down from the roof, I saw little groups of students break away from the chanting and form themselves into squads, squatting in formation. They dok chore tadoed for a while then quick-marched to the front lines around the Kuro gu compound, where each was given an assigned position and his own firebomb to sit patiently beside. Demonstrators continued to arrive, bringing boxes of food, fruit juice and cigarettes.

  You had to admire the students' industry and organization, if not their common sense. The Kuro gu building faced a spikefenced courtyard with only one narrow gate to the street. There was no way out the back of the place except through the upper-story windows or off the roof. And right next door, completely overshadowing the scene, was a huge police station. Four thousand policemen gathered there that evening, in their distinctive Darth Vader outfits-black gas masks, Nazi helmets and stiff olive-drab pants and jackets stuffed with protective padding.

  The government assault came on Friday morning, two days after the election. It was well under way by the time I arrived at eight A. M. You go to cover a Korean riot story looking more like a Martian than a Woodward or a Bernstein. You wear heavy clothes for protection from the cold and rocks, good running shoes, a hard hat or motorcycle helmet marked PRESS in English and Korean, and the best gas mask you can find on the black market. (It's illegal for civilians to buy them in Korea.)

  Korean riot police use the pepper gas developed during the Vietnam War, which is fast becoming a favorite with busy dictators everywhere. I'd been hit with the stuff before, in Panama, but the Koreans lay it on in lavish doses, until the air is a vanilla milkshake of minuscule caustic particles. Pepper gas can raise blisters on exposed skin. Any contact with a mucous membrane produces the same sensation as probing a canker sore with a hot sewing needle. The tiniest amount in your eyes and your eyelids lock shut in blind agony. Breathing it is like inhaling fish bones, and the curl-up-and-die cough quickly turns to vomiting. Pepper gas is probably the only thing on earth more powerful than kimchi.

  There was street fighting going on all around Kuro gu, in an orderly way, of course. First the Darth Vader cops form a line with shields interlocked. Then the students run up and throw firebombs at them. The police respond with a volley of tear-gas rifle grenades. The students throw stones. The police fire tear gas again and then charge.

  The police hardly ever catch a student. That would disturb the kibun of the set-piece battle. Instead, there's a squad of volunteers from the police ranks called "grabbers." The grabbers dress in down-filled L.L. Bean-type parkas, jeans, Nikes and white motorcycle helmets. They carry hippie-tourist-style canvas shoulder bags filled with tear-gas grena
des, and swing long batons that look like hiking staffs. Their jackets are all in pleasant shades of beige and baby blue, color coordinated by squadrons. With gas masks in place, the grabbers look like a bunch of mentally unbalanced freelance writers for Outside magazine.

  The grabbers huddle behind the riot police. As soon as the students break ranks, the grabbers spring out and do their grabbing, beating the shit out of anyone they lay hands on. The beaten students are then led away. Student demonstrators are not often formally arrested in Korea. They are just "led away." What happens to them next is, I hear, even less fun than getting caught in a Kim Dae Jung rally.

  Being out in no-man's-land between the students and the police isn't much fun either. Rifle grenades were flying through the air, and stones were racketing on the top of my hard hat; plus there was this creepy xxx video rubber-fetish thing all over my face. No gas mask is fully effective against the pepper-gas clouds, and mine looked as if it dated back to the Crimean War. Inside it, I was coughing and weeping and thoroughly panicked, and outside it, barely visible through the scratched and fogged-over eyepieces, was the world's only mayhem with choreography. I had stumbled onstage in midperformance of some over-enthusiastic Asian production of West Side Story.

  Back at Kuro gu itself, the police had retaken the courtyard and first four stories of the building, but the students were still holding the top floor and roof.

  The students don't wear gas masks. They put on those little Dr. Dan and Nurse Nancy cotton face things, and they smear toothpaste on their skin, but otherwise they riot unprotected. The police in the courtyard were firing salvos of gas grenades, twenty at a time, into the fifth-floor windows and onto the roof. The gas bursts looked like albino fireworks. The police also have armored cars with gun turrets that shoot small tear-gas cannisters at hundreds of rounds a minute. Two of these had been set in flanking positions and were raking the rooftop. That the students could even stand in this maelstrom was a testament to Koreanness. But they were not only standing; they were fighting like sons of bitches.