It was fleeting contact, but it was enough for my minders. There was a polite cough from behind. ‘I think we’d better be going, sir,’ a soldier said. ‘We’ve told the detail you’ll be at the bridge in two minutes. And as if to reinforce his suggestion he spoke into a walkie-talkie and snapped it off, and we began to walk briskly off to the west.
We were still, notionally, on Route 1—the road that led all the way to Pyongyang and up into the wilds of Manchuria. But ahead of me, I had been told, was a narrow, weed-clogged stream that ran just behind the Demarcation Line. In front—and I was walking past it now, I realized—was the infamous elm tree where Americans encountered a posse of hysterically furious North Koreans one summer’s day in 1976. The Americans had claimed that the tree prevented them from looking at the bridge with their binoculars—the foliage obscured the view. So they tried to trim the branches back. There was a terrible fight, an hour of hand-to-hand combat that involved knives and axes and ended with two American soldiers being hacked to pieces by North Koreans. It was the worst border incident for many years, and the green baize table resounded with pounding fists, and the warehouse walls echoed with exchanges of abuse for months to come. But no shooting broke out, and for that the Panmunjom process, clumsy and childish though its procedures may on occasion seem to be, deserves some credit.
Now I was but a hundred feet from the end. The road drove on ahead, and in the distance I could see that it turned lazily off to the right and disappeared behind a low hill. But immediately in front, on the left, was a small blockhouse with a UN flag. Beside it stood the beginning of the small, otherwise insignificant bridge. A row of yellow steel poles, hip high, barred the way to any car that might want to cross. Beside the line of poles was an old rusty sign, with some of its old yellow paint still sticking. Military Demarcation Line, it read in English.
The bridge ran for perhaps a hundred feet beyond the line of poles, beyond the Demarcation Line. Thirty-odd years ago this line marked the end of a war. Today, it marked the effective end of a country, of an ideology, of an economic system that has helped make South Korea one of the world’s great miracle states. It also marked the literal end of my progress along the length of Korea—and yet I was in no mood to stop. I wanted to press on, to see the rest of a country for which I had a new and abiding fascination.
There was a blockhouse on the northern side of the bridge, and within it I could see two heads bobbing in conversation. Two North Koreans, no doubt, sentries, making certain no mischief was being performed so close to their territory. As I approached they stood up, and one came out of the hut and watched my final steps. There was a North Korean car, black and rather dirty, waiting beside him, facing away from me with its engine running. It was all very quiet, except for the thud of our marching feet.
Idly—for I had no real intention of trying anything—I asked one of my escorts what would happen if I chose to walk on, between the steel poles and into North Korea. ‘We’d have to let you, sir,’ he said, gritting his teeth and not smiling. ‘We have no power to stop you. But they call this the Bridge of No Return. You do know that, don’t you, sir?’ He looked menacing. For the first time since I started walking I felt a wave of uneasiness pass over me, like a cold wind.
We walked on for the final feet. Someone said something quiet to my escorts, and three of them began to walk much more quickly than I and arrived at the steel poles a few seconds before. They turned around to face me and stood at ease, their feet placed squarely apart, their arms clasped behind their backs. There were only three, but they effectively commanded the approach to the bridge, and they had a resolved look about them.
I arrived at the line. It was 2:35 P.M. The stream, someone said, was called the Konshan-gang. ‘Please do not touch the MDL sign,’ said the black sergeant. ‘It’s part of the armistice agreement.’ The American soldiers stood foursquare before me, looking sternly into the middle distance, unsmiling. Behind them, no more than a stone’s throw away, the two North Koreans were now both out of their hut, looking with keen interest at this curious delegation. Someone mentioned—it may have been a joke—that the propaganda loudspeakers had just begun referring to this impoverished visitor who had been forced to walk all the way to the frontier, since he hadn’t enough money to buy a car. Someone else reported that the North Koreans had invited me to cross over to their side. Was the black car, then, waiting for me? Did I fancy that the North Koreans were beckoning to me?
‘A couple of quick pictures, sir, before we go?’ said the sergeant, and the snaps were duly taken, and the American jeep was duly summoned, and it was suggested I might like to be driven away. I craned my neck to see across the border once again, but the black car had gone, and the drabsuited soldiers were back inside the hut. One seemed to be talking on the telephone. I got into the jeep. ‘It’s all over,’ said Billy Fullerton. ‘You did it. Well done.’
On the way back I asked the sergeant—who by now was in a much brighter mood—whether I could in fact have walked across the bridge? ‘Well, of course you could. This is a free country. My men would have tried to persuade you not to, of course. They were big guys, weren’t they? They could have been pretty persuasive if they tried. I don’t think you would have wanted to go. Not really. Besides, this is a much better place. Don’t you think?’
Behind me now the bridge faded into the distance, and we left sentry post by sentry post, to salutes and bugle calls and shouts of ‘Keep Up the Fire!’ and ‘Rock Steady, Men!’ The hills of North Korea, blue and misty in the late afternoon light, dimmed into the distance; the hills of South Korea, looking just the same, loomed ahead. And then there was the strong brown stream of the Imjin, and there the rickety old Freedom Bridge, and a few bumping moments later I was back on the smooth asphalt among the tour buses and caught in a routine traffic jam of those who had come up that day, as every day, to view the memorabilia of the war.
They had come—ordinary Koreans all—to see the ruin of war and also for a more powerful symbolism: for if it is here at the Imjin that the country’s political geography ends, then equally it was here, three-odd decades ago, and with the armistice signed just a few miles away, that the country and its miracle rebirth really started. The Imjin, Panmunjom, the DMZ, and the Demarcation Line—the place, vitally important now to the new Korean mind, where the long war ended, and where the new state has had its birth.
Epilogue
At Sunrising the Wind fell, which oblig’d us to lower our Sails and Row, to get further off, and prevent being discover’d. At about Noon the Weather began to freshen, and at Night we spread our Sail, directing our course by guess South-East. The Wind growing fresh at Night, we clear’d the point of Corea, and were no longer apprehensive of being pursu’d…
Hendrick Hamel, 1668
I stayed around the frontier zone for a while that Friday afternoon. While I had been in Seoul earlier in the week, an invitation had come to me, in a roundabout way, from a man who, for the previous three years, had lived and worked in and around the borderline: he wanted to give me tea and to ask me how I had found the Korea through which I had travelled. He was a man who rarely moved beyond his own immediate circle of specialist colleagues, and I jumped at the opportunity of seeing him and of hearing his impressions of a country he was able to know better than almost all other outsiders.
His ability to know Korea well stemmed from his uniquely privileged position. He, unlike almost all foreigners who visit the peninsula, was permitted—and permitted by no less an authority than the terms of the 1953 armistice agreement—to travel more or less at will on both sides of the frontier fences. Should he so choose he can take his breakfast in the present Southern capital, Seoul; his lunch in a former all-Korean capital that is now sited in the North, Kaesong; and his dinner in the present Northern capital, Pyongyang. Should he so demand he can wander by the Kum River one week, and—after obtaining a permit, a document that is rarely denied to a figure of his standing—by the Yalu River the next. He is able
to commune with those who aid and advise Roh Tae Woo on a Wednesday and with those who aid and advise Kim II Sung on the Friday following.
To identify this man by name or title or rank or even to describe his unusual duties is strictly forbidden—such were the terms of his invitation to tea. But it should be said at once that what he does is legitimate, is fully recognized and appreciated by all the governments concerned, and is—in my view, and in the view of his many supporters, admirers and fans—one of the very few politically constructive tasks being undertaken by anyone on the Korean Peninsula.
The afternoon we met he had already had breakfast with a Chinese general up in Kaesong. He had taken his lunch with an American commander near the Imjin River, and he was planning to attend a small cocktail party that evening given by the North Korean Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang. His only complaint was that he didn’t relish the prospect of driving along North Korean Route 1 after dark, for while Route 1 in the South was properly lit and metalled and cambered, in the North it was not much more than a cart track, lumbering with unilluminated military vehicles and the rough transports of the peasantry; the journey, even in a swift official Mercedes, was purgatory indeed.
He had been assigned by his European sponsors to his job in Korea for the last three years, and he knew most of the protagonists well. He loved Korea, quite passionately. And he was deeply saddened, he said, by what he thought had been the progressive deterioration of the situation across the frontier line during the last time he had had the opportunity to observe it.
‘The suspicion, of one side by the other, is profound, we all know that. The build-up of military forces goes on, the tension increases, we all know that. But what has surprised and truly depressed me is that the obstinacy, the obduracy, the shortsightedness—the real bar to any progress—is nearly all to be found on the Southern side.
‘I am not saying the Northerners are angels, far from it. They live in an astonishingly controlled state, as everyone knows. But so do the Southerners. And they, the ones we think might show some tendency to compromise, to reasonableness, show none at all. Every idea that comes down the pipeline and looks reasonable ultimately gets rejected by Seoul. The generals in Seoul are utterly intransigent, and that is with the knowledge, connivance and probable support of the Americans. So long as the Americans call the shots in South Korea, there’ll be no political movement. Things will simply get worse and worse.’
He said all this in the early spring, a few days after President Chun had made his dismaying announcement that he was rejecting the apparently popular demands for political change in Korea. The country was in the grip of a very deep anger and exasperation, and this man’s sadness mirrored, diplomatically, his own frustration over what, at the time, seemed to be an impossible situation.
But then, after a few heads had been broken and a few thousand rounds of Korea’s particularly unpleasant brand of tear gas had been fired, President Chun—to the liberal world’s astonishment and delight—gave in. The political reforms that so many had seemed to want were promised (though whether they would actually be granted, and without limit, remained to be seen). Political prisoners were freed. There was heady talk of democracy and of a free press and of civil rights and of humanitarian reform—words and phrases that had not, for more than twenty years, been accommodated in Korea’s political lexicon. The gloom began to lift. I then heard that my host at the frontier had left for another task on the far side of the Pacific Ocean, and that before he had embarked on the plane he had told friends that he had been considerably heartened by the news, though he continued to be sceptical and wondered how long the peace and harmony would last.
But he had made other remarks that teatime too, and one I remembered as seeming particularly poignant and strange. ‘I shall be very sorry to leave Korea,’ he said, ‘for I have made many friends. I know many families, mainly senior people, on both sides of the Demarcation Line. I will try and keep in touch over the years.
‘But I have a suspicion. From what I have seen, and from the conversations I have had, I actually believe that the people who will think of me as a friend, and who will write to me more constantly, will be the friends I made in North Korea. It has nothing to do with politics—I am no fan of Kim II Sung, don’t worry. But the people in the North seem, in a strange way, to be purer in their Koreanness. They are still gracious and kindly. There is something old-fashioned about them. There is a degree of sincerity and gentility that somehow seems to be evaporating, just a little, in the South. Many people I know in the South are too concerned with their own prosperity, with the rush of their lives, to remember their Koreanness. Perhaps it is my imagination, but I felt the Koreans north of the line were more—how shall I say it?—more unspoiled. I feel they will remain my friends for longer.’
It was, indeed, a poignant moment. The hills beyond his living room, where we sat with our tea, were those of North Korea—for now as inaccessible to me as the mountains of the moon. The people who lived and worked in and beyond those hills, in farms and factories, in all the ri and dong and shi and myun, were very little different in an inner sense from the people who lived in the South. The people of the Yalu-gang were much the same as the people of the Kum-gang; the climbers on the Diamond Mountain of the North were every bit as Korean as the walkers in Sorak-san National Park; the people of Pusan were much the same as the people of Wonsan—all united by their race, their language, their script, their ancient history, their fear of invasion, their dislike of the Japanese and the Mongols and the Chinese, and quite probably of the Americans, the British, and the Russians too. For now the people to the south of where we sat were free, and the people to the north were not. All very sad, all very wrong—and all, no doubt, to be changed before too long. Whence all that has happened since the agreement that made this fence will seem so pointless, such a waste of time and energy, a misuse of the intelligence of man.
And then, as we sat and mused in the fast-fading spring sunshine, a bird, perched on a branch of a tree that stood in North Korea, began to sing. It sang well and lustily for many minutes, and we both stopped talking and listened with pleasure. And then it stopped, and my host put down his teacup and stood up, suggesting silently that he must ready himself for his journey north.
‘That bird,’ he said, pointing to the tree outside his window. ‘It was such sweet singing, don’t you think? But you know in Korea the people don’t say—they never have said—that the birds are singing. They say instead that the birds are crying, weeping for some tragic reason that is only known to them. Korean birds never sing. They always weep. What a very sad, sad country this always has been. Such a mournful place, and yet so very lovely. It is not a country that will be easy to forget.’
And then my escort from the army reappeared and saluted, and I climbed into a jeep and in an hour was back across the Imjin and back among the skyscrapers in the capital, and the neon lights were on, and Korea didn’t seem a sad place at all—not for this night, anyway.
Glossary
-do: Province.
-dong: Suburb.
-gun: County.
-jip: Literally, house, used as ‘restaurant’.
-mun: Gateway, as in Namdae-mun, the great south gate in Seoul.
-myun: Borough.
-pan: Parish.
-ri: Village.
-saram: Person, e.g. Meeguk saram, American.
-shi: City-region.
-up: District.
A-joshe!: Hey, you! (said to a man).
Angibu: The Korean secret police.
Anio: No.
Anju: Snacks and salty appetizers served with beer.
Annyong-haseyo: Literally, Are you in peace? Used as ‘Hello’.
Annyong-hee kaesayeo: Goodbye (said by the one who is leaving to the one who isn’t).
Annyong-hee kashipshiyo: Goodbye (said by the one who isn’t leaving to the one who is).
Arirang: A Korean mountain, and the title of a famous song.
Buk: North.
Bulgoki: Marinated and barbecued meat.
Cha-da: Sleep.
Chaebol: The major Korean industrial corporations, e.g. Hyundai, Samsung.
Cheju-do: Literally, the land over there.
Chige: Wooden A-frame-shaped carrier used by porters or chige men.
Chima: Long, floor-length skirt, traditional dress for women.
Chindo-kae: A tough little dog found on Chindo Island in southwest Korea.
Chogori: Jacket or blouse, traditional Korean dress.
Chokbo: Family-tree book kept by almost all Korean families.
Chonbok chuk: Rice and abalone gruel, popular in the south.
Chong mal?: Really?
Choson: Literally, Land of Morning Calm; old name for Korea.
Choson Minchu-chui Inmin Konghwa-guk: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea).
Cho-un: Good.
Chung wa dae: The Blue House—the Korean presidential palace.
Daegook: Literally, big country; also used to refer to China.
Daehan Minguk: Republic of Korea (South Korea).
Dong: East.
Gang: River.
Gwen chan sumnida: No thank you.
Haenyo: Diving women of Cheju Island, gatherers of abalone and sea cucumbers.
Hae-sam: Sea cucumber, a much-favoured seafood.
Haetae: Guardian beasts of a town, mythological mixtures of lion and dog.
Hanafuda: Japanese word for the Korean game hwatu
Hangbok: Korean national dress.
Hangul: Korea’s unique phonetic alphabet, designed by King Sejong.
Hanyak: Korean folk medicine.
Harubang: Standing ‘grandfather’ stones, often found on Cheju-do.
Hodori: Baby tiger, symbol of the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
Hong cha: Red tea.
Korea Page 32
