Korea

by Simon Winchester

  But those who reject the West purposely, to satisfy a spiritual and intellectual yearning to become part of the East, are rare birds indeed. Over the years, as I have wandered around forlorn corners of the globe, I have enjoyed seeking such people out and have listened with fascination as they explained their reasons for having taken the fateful step.

  Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek romantic whose Writings from Japan is one of the classics of what one might call truly disinterested travel literature, summed it all up. Hearn wrote scores of elegant essays from the East that now seem to be what so much other writing is accidentally or carelessly not—almost wholly free from the taint of his own patriotism. Hearn managed this simply because he had no patriotism and owed no allegiance to any nation but only to himself. He summed up what my new Bombay-wallah friend and perhaps what those Britons who have buried themselves deep inside the fabric of China were all searching for—the reason for their having come and settled in for life. He used the Japanese word kokoro—‘the heart of things’: Lafcadio Hearn searched for kokoro, and his writings testify to his having found it, to a greater degree than most.

  My friend in India is searching for the kokoro of Maharashtra, and Carl Ferris Miller, whom I met one Sunday afternoon in a tiny seaside town called Chollipo, is an old man evidently searching for the kokoro of his beloved Korea.

  Ferris Miller, as he is generally known, who was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, some seventy-odd years ago, became a Korean citizen in 1977. Like most of those ‘old contemptibles’ who chose to settle here, he came in 1945 with the American navy. He came officially to help reconstruct the country after years of Japanese occupation; he came less officially to help gather intelligence (he had studied chemistry at university, which may or may not have helped); he came unofficially to dabble his toes in the muddied waters of the battered and bruised postwar society. And he fell in love with the place, instantly.

  It was, he says now, a real and hopeless love, and it began when he was on the troop train that brought him, ship-weary and innocent, from the southeastern port of Pusan to the northwestern port of Inchon. (His train would have passed through the city of Chonan, which lent a pleasant symmetry to my hearing of his story, since, as I shall shortly explain, it was at Chonan railway station that I first set out to meet him.) He stayed with the navy for six years, and then escaped to Japan when the Communist forces invaded. Once the UN forces had secured for themselves the city of Pusan, Ferris Miller was brought back and went north with the advancing forces when they recaptured Seoul. Then he caught hepatitis and was flown back to Japan—a prudent enough move, since Seoul was recaptured by the Reds once more, so he would in any case have had to move again. Finally, in 1953, he returned to Seoul yet again, and took up a residence that he was determined should endure. He stayed with the army for a while, then joined the Bank of Korea, and then retired to play on the vibrantly sportif Seoul stock exchange. He has lived in Korea ever since. He never married, but he adopted a son, with whom (and with whose wife and children) he now lives, enjoying a life of blameless contentment.

  He will not easily forget renouncing his American citizenship. ‘I went along to the embassy and explained. They didn’t try to talk me out of it. They were very decent about it. I handed over my passport, and I signed a form, and that was that. Someone shook my hand and wished me well, and I walked out of the office. I was back in a week with my Korean passport, applying for a visa to visit the States. I wanted to go back home to Pennsylvania. I knew I’d have to go through all the hassles. It didn’t bother me. I’m not at all sentimental about giving up American citizenship. I had to. I had to take Korea and let Korea take me. It was an affair of the heart. There is no other explanation.’

  He had bought a small piece of land on the coast near Chollipo back in the mid-sixties. He needed somewhere to swim, and the Yellow Sea coast is the best by far in northeast Asia. Since the peninsula tilts gently down towards the west, all the beaches are long and have only a very shallow slope; and the tides in what the Koreans call the So-Hae—the West Sea—are the second biggest in the world (after the Bay of Fundy). The combination of long white sand beaches and enormous tides makes the Korean west coast a most amusing place for a swim—and so Ferris Miller had a tiny country cottage built there and visited it most weekends.

  And then he started to get interested in flowers and conservation. Koreans, in spite of their professed Confucian closeness to nature and their fondness for animals and plants, have not taken a particularly constructive attitude towards the preservation of their wildlife. True, some creatures—the Manchurian crane and Tristram’s woodpecker among them—are classified as Living National Treasures. In recent years bans on shooting birds everywhere except in the pheasant—and snipe-hunting areas of Cheju-do have helped bolster the numbers of orioles and hoopoes, wood warblers and kingfishers. The noble animals—the tigers and bears for which the peninsula was once famous—have all but gone; and such is the Korean appetite for any meat that moves that, except for the odd weasel or mouse, Korean forest floors are like vast empty ballrooms, dark and quite silent.

  The forests themselves have suffered, too: the Japanese took most of the usable wood to help their war effort, and so at the beginning of each April there is a concerted attempt to persuade everyone in Korea to plant a tree or two, to help the woods regenerate themselves. Pollarded poplars march in battalions along the country roads; there are ginkgo trees and maples that flame magnificently in October; there are London plane trees, seemingly culled straight from Notting Hill and Kensington, on many city streets; there are persimmon trees and ailanthus and sumac, bamboos, pawlonias and fine stands of old bamboo. But these are exceptions and are not often found beyond the national parks and the temple grounds. Out in the countryside proper there are millions of dull acres of pines and firs—good lumber perhaps, but not good trees. The variety suffered under the Japanese, and there has been little enough imaginative concern to reseed the country with any trees other than those of immediate commercial use.

  Korea has many wildflowers, though—there are fields full of gentian and azalea, forsythia (which was said to be President Park’s favourite) and cosmos, lavender and lilac and daphne—and the rose of Sharon, which, although not a rose (it is a type of hibiscus), is Korea’s national emblem. The beastly Japanese did their best to destroy it and replace it with their own chrysanthemum, but the rose of Sharon (as in Steinbeck) is a doughty plant and clung to rock and bank, and like Korea itself (for the symbolism is not lost) grows in ever greater profusion.

  But Korea commits little effort or money to preserving its plants and animals, and the needs of the economy far outweigh the less strident demands of ecology. Which is why Ferris Miller, who noticed how well the wildflowers grew on the clifftops above his seaside cottage, decided to teach himself about plant life and devote a sizeable period of his later life to preserving the very best that western Korea could grow.

  He bought up more and more land and fenced it off from prying trespassers. He imported—from the distant fields or from far countries—the first of what was to become the biggest Asian collection of magnolia trees. He started to plant the first of the hundreds of ilexes—the hollies—for which, along with the magnolias, the Chollipo Arboretum has become world famous. He imported and ferried in a number of traditional Korean cottages—thatched roofs were all right at Chollipo, no truck there with the modernizing zeal of Saemaul Undong—and had them rebuilt among the woods and sculpted landscapes of his paradise. He planted daffodils and crocuses, maples and oaks, plants with wonderful aromas, trees with extraordinarily exotic flowers and fruits—and the result has become a botanic and an aesthetic legend.

  I had heard of Ferris Miller on every journey I made to Korea—of this kindly, eccentric old man; this financial wizard who had marshalled the proceeds from his wizardry to improve the stock of Korea’s countryside; of this rather scholarly, rather private man who had devoted his life to this austerely difficult, but unfo
rgettably beautiful and graceful little country thousands of miles from his home. I had long wanted to meet him, and now, having made an arrangement to join a mutual friend at the railway station at Chonan one Friday evening, all seemed set for me to do so.

  I had walked all day from Kongju: a young German friend who had accompanied me for the trek dropped out after twenty miles, complaining of sore feet and general exhaustion. The hills between the two towns were severe indeed; and once I reached the village of Hyangjong-ri and the railway line from Pusan swept into view, and my little country road was joined by the great artery of Route I (which I last tramped along down south at Kwangju, where it was a very much smaller road), all the noise and nuisance of the approaches to Seoul began to assert themselves. So I didn’t blame my friend for catching the bus instead: the miles to Chonan were grim, unpleasing miles, and it was comforting to know that for the diversion west to the coast we would go by car.

  George Robinson, a young Englishman who ran a stock-broking office in Seoul and had come to know Ferris Miller both through that and through the very energetic Korea branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (of which Miller was current chairman), had arranged to meet me at the station—he having come south on the express from Seoul at the end of his week’s work. He had brought another chum along from Tokyo; and my one-day walking partner, a writer from Germany, made up the foursome. We took a taxi to where we planned to stay the night, an enormous holiday resort at a spa town called Dogo (and where I had dined once on a disgusting monster known as King Dogo Burger—which, bearing in mind the Korean fondness for munching their way through roast dogs and dog soup, could well, I thought, have been fashioned from somebody’s long-dead Rover). Our stay was brief but wild: we engaged the services of two hostesses from the hotel’s dance floor, who chatted amiably enough in halting English until we left at midnight. At three in the morning, when I was sleeping peacefully, there came a furious hammering at the door of my room. Both girls were there: they had come to minister jointly to my particular needs, and there was no need to pay any more since the paltry sum we had paid for their company on the dance floor would more than compensate them for their services until dawn. They looked eager and excited, and I wished (as I daresay the reader might wish, too) I had said yes. But in fact I decided there and then—and it was an extremely difficult choice, for the girls had been utterly charming—on a course of behaviour that was both prudent and medically responsible. I kissed each girl politely on the cheek, said a regretful annyong-hee kashipshiyo, shut the door, and retired for a fitful sleep. I was derided for extreme foolishness at breakfast the next day.

  We rented a car—a process that was rather simpler than I have known before. The Dogo hotel alerted a man in Onyang, a nearby town that, like Dogo, is famous for its thermal springs. The Onyang man turned up with his car half an hour later. He accepted a cash handout of 50,000 won—about £40 at the current exchange rate—handed over the keys, and told us to telephone him when we had finished with his car. There had been no paperwork. No insurance. No formalities or contract of agreement, no fiduciary bond or handshake. Nothing, in fact, other than the kind of mutual—and perhaps mutually foolish—trust that evaporated elsewhere (except perhaps for some corners of rural Ireland) a long while ago. We drove off to the west, each one of us just then loving Korea for that small and simple act of informal kindness. ‘We like Korea because it retains something that has vanished everywhere else in the world’—that was how a visitor from Osaka once explained his fondness for the place, and with that small act by the Onyang car owner, I could see again precisely what he had meant.

  The countryside became lower and more meanly furnished as we headed west. Our destination was on the coastline of what looked like a hammerhead extending out to sea beyond the prevailing sweep of the west coast—two bays pinched at the shaft of the hammer—and where Mallipo and Chollipo lay was on the flat topside of the hammer, a coast of cliffs and tiny islands and long white beaches of pure sand. It looked exactly like Oregon: the islands were topped with fir trees, there were rain clouds on the horizon, the tidal currents traced steely patterns on the sea surface, and small fishing boats murmured distantly.

  We took lunch in a small café on the Mallipo beach—the raw eel was vaguely disgusting, so I asked the owner to find me eggs, butter and milk, and I cooked sea salmon omelettes for the four of us, and we ate fresh bread and drank cold beer in the afternoon sun. Then another group of friends—a soldier from Scotland, his Korean wife and baby, and a young woman who was over on holiday from Battersea—arrived, and we drank more beer, and then set off for Ferris Miller’s place, five miles further down the coastal track.

  His cottage, set on a rise beside the hamlet, was itself surrounded by wildflowers and curiously exotic bushes, all labelled. Ferris himself proved a magnificent figure—tall and dressed wholly in hangbok from his ornately embroidered silk chogori and his baggy paji, all connected by silk strings and loops and small amber buttons known as hopak-dan chu, to his neat komusin slippers, boatlike shoes with dainty upturned toes. His ‘family’ were with him and everyone spoke Korean—he seemed wholly assimilated into the country in which he had lived for the last four decades. We should wander around the arboretum, he said, for as long as the light and the weather held.

  And so, for the remaining hours of the sun, we were beyond his fences and among his trees. Our new visitors set down a gingham picnic cloth under a magnolia tree and beside a huge bed of daffodils, and we all lay dreamily around in attitudes of Confucian idleness, drinking cool Burgundy and eating strawberries, listening to the pounding of the waves below and to the sighing of the breezes through the magnolias above, inhaling the scents of the jasmines and the sea, and feeling blessed at having entered heaven through the front door. And then our friends went back to Seoul, and Ferris came down and talked his way around three hundred varieties of magnolia and four hundred types of holly and about conifers and lobelias and the orchids he was just then trying to raise on a bank beside the potting shed.

  He had just been over to England with the Magnolia Society and had toured eight country houses to see which Magnoliaceae they had and which cuttings he might supply for them. The society, now based in Louisiana, regarded Ferris Miller as having one of the finest stocks in the world, and he was the star of the Cornish visit: the following year the society planned to visit him, and he would show off the results of his fifteen years of labours. He rarely let strangers in beyond the fences; he did not care for people, he said, only for plants and animals. He would spend all his money, and as much of his remaining time as possible, tending to this little oasis of beauty and charm, and pass it on to his adopted son, and hope that it would remain no matter how busily Korea continued with her headlong rush in pursuit of economic miracles.

  We spent the night in an old Korean house at the top of a cliff. We watched the sunset from the terrace and saw the night fall on an island that Ferris had bought the year before, and on which he had built a cottage only to be ordered to have it taken away lest North Korean boatmen rest there on their way to infiltrate the South—you are never far from the memory of war, even in a place as beautiful and peaceful as this. We ate in a local shop—the owner cooked us rice and soup and fish, and we had apples and strawberries afterwards, and drank makkoli and beer, and from a bottle of Glenlivet that my Scottish soldier friend had left for us. And then we climbed up to our clifftop and slept on our ondol floors, more content than it is possible to imagine with a Korea preserved in all its old magnificence, by the sea and away from the crowds.

  We rose at dawn and drove sadly back east. We took coffee at Dogo by noon and rang the Onyang man and gave him back his car, not much the worse for wear. The hostess girls from two nights before emerged from somewhere and insisted that a villager took our photographs—they had never seen foreigners before and wanted their boyfriends to see our gorilla-like arms clamped amiably around their shoulders, and we were naturally happy to oblige. And then my friends took off
for Seoul by train, and I set off walking north again along the road to Pyongtaek, and the final run to the capital, now less than two days’ march away. I turned my atlas to its last page and the province of Kyonggi-do, tightened the grip on my walking stick, hitched my fardel to my back, and strode out for the last few miles.

  This was American territory—a fact that became readily apparent when I was just a few miles south of Pyongtaek. I had been walking quite fast through deserted woodlands. I was, quite frankly, bored. The countryside was less interesting than it had been: I was hemmed in by tall trees, and the road, for some reason, had degenerated into a dirt track that was thick with mud after the rains of the night before. Construction machinery churned past me, belching out diesel smoke and splashing mud in every direction. It was hot and sticky, and I felt liverish and wished at that moment I had clambered up onto the Seoul train as my friends had suggested. ‘It’s only an hour or so,’ they had beckoned. ‘No one’ll know.’

  Thus I trekked on, hour after hour. I passed some signs of recent soldierly occupation—‘Headquarters, I Corps’ read a wooden sign ten yards into the woods, and I could see barbed wire fences and Quonset huts and wooden lean-tos and shadowy figures that moved along distant forest paths. They must have been relics of the spring exercises, for otherwise the woods were quiet, and the rutted roads were empty of the tanks and mobile howitzers that had been there days before. It could have been the woods at Versailles or the Thuringian—or great Gromboolian—plain: it looked not one whit Korean.