Dean had been leading Good Vibes for years and was determined at last to make a success of it. For a larger cut of the takings, he made all the business decisions and dealt with the booking agents. After this three-month gig, there would be others; it was just a question of what the agents could find them. Except for Gav and Shauna, in their early twenties, the others were a bit too old to make it as real stars, but I was learning that there is a subculture of D-list musicians who make a perfectly decent living around the world without anyone having heard of them. All these guys were eager to give up their back-home jobs as used-car salesmen and small-time landlords, and play music full-time. Who wouldn’t?
Gav showed up to every rehearsal, hoping they could expand their repertoire, maybe a U2 number, nothing outlandish. Mostly, though, nobody else showed up, and they blamed him for not knowing they’d rescheduled because he hadn’t been spending enough time with them. They figured I was keeping him from having a good time with his mates in the band, making me feel guilty for being there, although Gav had no doubts he’d rather spend his days with his new girlfriend than his workmates. But Gav could get along with most people, and we often went out with them for drinks at Hollywood or King Club late at night, where everyone would drink shots of tequila until Dean started complaining and calling everyone ‘muthafuckas’.
The latest rift was because Dean wanted to invest a third of next month’s salaries on some new stage costumes. Gav couldn’t understand why, when he was stuck at the back of the stage almost hidden behind his drum kit, he still had to wear cringe-making Eurovision-style shiny trousers and two-tone shimmery sleeveless T-shirts. Poor dear. The only person who actually looked good in these costumes was Shauna, who had spectacular breasts thanks to the enhancement operation she’d had just before coming out here, and had her costumes cut extra tight, so skimpy that even I would watch mesmerised just to see if the thin strips of material would stay in place as she danced up on stage.
Gav had been playing in bands since school, winning Battle of the Bands competitions and taking master classes. He hit the drums hard, and sometimes sticks broke during a set, but he was a master of switching to a new one without losing a beat. Now and again he’d need to re-stock on sticks from the music centre at Nagwon. It was a huge multi-level arcade full of music shops – guitars, drums, amps, pianos, every kind of instrument. People were always re-stringing guitars or trying out sounds, cleaning pianos and tubas. I have never been musical, although I love dancing, so Gav’s proverbial candy shop where he tested drumsticks and ogled guitars and DM5 amps bored me silly. But then we emerged and made our way through the maze of faceless buildings and the sea of people to explore the city.
We decided to visit another kind of musical landmark, the place where ancient Korean music was played once a year, Intangible Cultural Property Number One. The Chongmyo Shrine, like Kyungbokkung, was another island of calm and symbol of national pride, set back from city hustle and bustle by expanses of pale stone courtyard. Stretching across one end was a low hall painted deep red, with a tall, sombre roof made of dark grey pottery tiles. Behind the locked red doors of the hall were the spirit tablets of all the kings and queens of the Choson Dynasty.
The Choson Dynasty lasted from 1392, when Seoul became capital, for five hundred years. The name Choson, meaning ‘land of the morning calm’, was given by the Chinese, who saw the sun rise from Korea’s misty mountains. The ruling elite of the Choson Dynasty respected China as the home of their political ideology and the guiding principles of life, Confucianism. Advocating education, obedience, discipline and ancestor worship, Confucianism remains one of the guiding principles of Korean life.
The Choson Dynasty’s golden age, seen as the high point of Korean civilisation, was the reign of King Sejong the Great, whose phonetic alphabet replaced the complex 3,000 picture symbols of Chinese. Today literacy in South Korea rests at nearly ninety-nine per cent, helped by the Confucian respect for education. Other Korean inventions during the fifteenth century included moveable metal type, which produced books on farming and medicine to spread learning; Korean printers mastered this technique several years before Gutenberg, and thousands of books were produced. It was a time when the sciences and the arts thrived, a pinnacle of scientific and technological achievement.
Back out on the streets, we found ourselves at Chongno Samga, the busy intersection in the commercial centre of the city, and ready to eat. After the incident with the noodles and the scissors, I’d been loath to risk restaurants, but it was time to try again. I’d learned of a dish called bibimbap, vegetables with rice, popular with westerners. We found a place that looked simple and innocuous and walked in.
The woman in charge, wiry with short curly hair, immediately told us to leave. ‘Only Korean food,’ she explained.
‘It’s OK,’ said Gav, and I smiled. ‘We want Korean food!’
Eyeing us suspiciously, she let us sit down at a table. In due course, a young waitress walked towards us to take our order, but suddenly she blushed, put her hand over her mouth, started giggling uncontrollably and ran back into the kitchen.
It was perplexing, in the centre of a capital city of a first-world industrialised nation. We waited, and the older lady came back and agreed to bring us bibimbap – warning that it would be ‘ferry, ferry hhat!’
It arrived and looked delicious: a bowl of white rice, around which colourful vegetables were arranged in sections – grated carrot, slivers of cucumber, wilted spinach and long thin enoki mushrooms – with a blob of hot red sauce and a fried egg in the middle. I grabbed my chopsticks and started to tuck in when the bossy woman returned. She whisked the chopsticks out of my hand and thrust a metal spoon in my right hand instead.
Was my performance with chopsticks so awful? Our host gestured towards all the other diners who were using their spoons for bibimbap. Then she showed us that you take the spoon and mash all the ingredients together until the whole lot is covered in red sauce, and eat it with a spoon only. You had to laugh. We mashed up our bibimbap like good little children, and ate it all up. It was full of intense flavours and distinct textures – wonderful.
I was beginning to realise Korean culture had many rules of etiquette; discipline and obedience were revered; breaking the rules just wasn’t done. Rice dishes in Korea are eaten with a spoon, and that’s that. Chopsticks are for side dishes and noodles.
Our road didn’t have a name, or at least there weren’t any street signs, and we couldn’t figure out how to explain exactly where we lived. To get home, we’d ask the taxi driver for the Hyattu Hotelo, because everyone knew where that was; so he’d take the road that wound up around Namsan towards the Hyatt, and then when we got close to where we lived we’d shout yogio! And the poor confused driver would ask yogio? And we’d assure him yes, here, thrust 1,000-won notes in his hand, and jump out before the traffic behind starting beeping their horns.
The cost of living in Seoul was similar to back home, and nights out could cost a lot more, which made me anxious every time I withdrew my savings. Withdrawing money wasn’t all that easy, though. I’d brought only plastic, assuming that everywhere in the world was hooked up to the same system these days, and that traveller’s cheques were an outmoded thing only benighted old yokels carried around. Surely in technologically advanced Korea, the home of the electronic gadget, taking out cash with my bank card wouldn’t be a problem. The bank machines showed all the right symbols for my bank card, but they’d spit out the alien bit of plastic, suggesting I try another machine elsewhere.
One Sunday evening, we took a taxi to a new area of the city, ready to explore. We spotted a bank machine but it returned our cards in disgust. There was a more promising row of machines across the road, but the road had six lanes of speeding traffic and you weren’t supposed to cross it without using a special walkway. We found the walkway, trekked all the way over, and had the same humiliating response from each of the bank machines.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Gav.
‘How do you know it will be fine?’ I replied.
We spent most of the evening walking from bank machine to bank machine. We thought maybe we’d go and see a film, but couldn’t figure out how to get in to the cinema. Eventually we ate terrible pizza, the only meal we could afford, and went back to Itaewon defeated.
The machines in the Hyatt did accept international cards – but only until a certain time of day. If they were out of service, there was another at the Hilton, and one in Myungdong – but you could count on one hand the number of bank machines in this enormous city that accepted foreign bank cards, and they tended to be out of service half the time. They didn’t tell you that in the Welcome to Korea magazine. It didn’t make you feel very welcome.
Not wanting to spend extravagantly anyway, in the evenings I’d kiss Gav goodbye as he strode out the door listening to music to gear himself up for the show, then I’d go out for a long walk – just pick a direction and go hunting for adventure. When I lived in Athens, an evening stroll around town would generally yield a few smiles, bizarre conversations, the occasional invitation to join in someone’s party, some little epiphany about Greek life. Whenever I felt lonely and down there, I’d just go for a walk and see what cropped up. I’d found the same in Georgetown, Guyana. I was told it was far too dangerous for me to go out on my own, as a white woman; that if I were to venture into the Stabroek Market on my own I’d be either mugged or killed. For a week or two I stayed obediently in the compound. And then I got bored, and started walking – and, of course, found friendly people as I watched the real life of the city happening around me.
Here in Seoul, from the road that wound around Namsan I’d look out across the lights of the sprawling city, punctuated by the huge TV screens of electronic billboards. I’d find my way into different neighbourhoods, watching how people went about their lives, like the old man I saw who was beating the heat of the summer night by moving his bed outside and sleeping on the road. But making contact wasn’t easy in Seoul. I could wander around for hours and smile at strangers, but most people seemed not to notice me. In a world where nobody says hello, life can be pretty dull. Be open-minded, I told myself, lose your expectations, be patient, keep trying.
Later, I’d go down the hill to a local ‘PC bang’ (computer room) called Click where I emailed friends and family back home, and wrote down my thoughts and impressions. It was cheap at 2,000 won per hour, and open all night; this was before Internet cafes cropped up everywhere in the world, and this innovative phenomenon was proving hugely popular in Korea, having grown from one hundred rooms to 15,000 in the last two years. They were situated in every neighbourhood of the city and were filled with Korean youth, who went there to play computer games on the high-speed lines and chat on their hand-phones and chain-smoke. I sat amid clouds of cigarette smoke and the electronic simulations of gunfight as young people in headphones shot each other’s characters to pieces, the noises interrupted every few minutes by the jangle of a phone and the subsequent ‘Yoboseyo? Yoboseyo?’
Sunday was the only evening I had with Gav, and we crammed a whole week’s worth into it. The next Sunday, we stocked up on cash first and visited a district that supposedly had theatre and street entertainment. But however much we searched for something cultural, we only found bars and restaurants. By the evening, however, we had made the important linguistic discovery that hopu or hof indicated draft beer, which was cheaper than bottled beer, and therefore fun to drink. Sitting in a bar was always good fun anyway, because Gav had the proverbial Irish gift of the gab and the two of us could spend hours just talking away.
It was the morning after this night on the hof that I learned to love kimchi.
Of course I’d tried it from the beginning: it’s an essential requirement of Korean cuisine, the national dish, a staple of the diet. Korean couples sometimes take a kimchi-making course before they get married, and there are summer kimchi-making contests. But at first, kimchi strikes you as a distinctly acquired taste. It’s made of Chinese cabbage soaked in brine and rinsed, then layered with a mix of green onions, garlic, soy sauce or shellfish sauce, ginger, salt and lots of hot red pepper powder or flakes, which is all left to ferment as a pungent red mess. A family’s supply of kimchi was traditionally kept in a big glazed jar and buried in the ground through the cold winter as a stash of goodness. It has vitamin A and calcium, more vitamin C than a fresh apple, it breaks down fats in the body, is low in calories and high in fibre, and has all sorts of immunising properties helpful against cancer and heart disease. It comes as a complimentary side dish with every meal, so you keep trying it. And you think, ‘Hmm, still not sure’.
Then one day you discover its usefulness as a hangover cure. You just know it’s the best thing you can put into your body. It’s salty, spicy and full of crunchy vegetable goodness, like a bloody mary you eat with chopsticks, and it gets to work right away on curing that fuzzy headache and queasy stomach. Before you know it, you can’t get enough: you’re hooked on kimchi. You’re ordering extra. You know it makes sense. Comfort me with kimchi.
There are many different kinds, depending on the vegetables used and the length of the aging; instead of cabbage you can use crunchy radishes, tiny ones or chunks called kaktugi, and you can have fresh or sour kimchi, plain or watery. You can have kimchi ramyun, the spicy instant noodles we’d taken a liking to, or kimchi tchigae, the stew with tofu and meat. To most Koreans, a meal without kimchi is unthinkable. It’s kimchi, and not variety, that’s the spice of Korean life. And now I was hooked. It had to be a good sign that I would find the heart of Seoul sometime soon.
CHAPTER SIX:
DARK NIGHT OF MY SEOUL
It was 11 p.m. in this city of eleven million people, and I was still just trying to meet one or two of them. I was on my own in something that called itself a ‘Beer Restaurant’ between one of the universities and the fashion district of Myungdong, drinking a beer and eating popcorn. It was a busy place full of voices and laughter, suits and office shirts, an after-work sort of place. The floor was strewn with food and cigarette butts and paper napkins. It reminded me a bit of a tapas bar in Spain. And yet not quite, because – ah yes, there you go – people don’t spit on the floor quite as much in Spain. Here it was quite the national pastime. The received wisdom was that it got rid of the bad humours in the body, or something; surely the reality was that it spread them around?
Cold beer and big plates of food were dispensed from a bar in the corner. The beer, ‘"Live" by Hite: Three Filtering Non-pasteurization’, was described on the glass as so fresh and clean, made with pure spring water (’Health! Fresh!’), you’d think it was good for you. But at the table behind me, two men were asleep, heads down on the table. At the table in front, two red-faced men in golf shirts argued loudly with smokers’ voices. Ten young guys came in, short black spiky hair and phones hung around their necks. They shuffled chairs and pushed tables together, ordered food and drinks from the waiter; then one of them fell asleep, and they all stumbled out again ten minutes later, leaving beers and fruit plate barely touched. As the volume rose, one of the sleeping men behind me woke up and staggered heavily out the door, trying to drag his friend with him quite literally. One of the ten young men returned to search clumsily under the table for something, probably a phone, no doubt now mired in the phlegm and napkins and cigarette ends.
I looked on amused but slightly bemused: was this the only city in the world where a lone, ostensibly eligible female could walk into a bar and have no one to talk to? OK, so I was wearing a ring on my wedding finger, but that’s not usually a major deterrent to banter and flirtatious chit-chat. It wasn’t that they hadn’t noticed the only person in the room whose hair wasn’t black. I was so evidently not from around these parts, and I was trying to smile and look approachable. You don’t realise how nice a little attention is, how much it contributes to your sense of self, until it’s not there. I could hardly blame the good men of Seoul for that: I was taller than most of th
em, and felt grotesquely fat compared to the women, many of whom were wafer-slim, graceful, immaculate and beautiful with their long, straight black hair. There were a few women in this room, hanging out with their office mates, most of them oddly frumpy but animated. I was too big in general for this town, and too scruffy. My long brown hair was getting unbecomingly wavy up in the humidity so one day I took the scissors to it in the bathroom, thinking short might be cool. No, it still frizzed. Not very hana-sum. My skin was pasty white from the smoggy city air. I felt awkward, unnatural, unsexed.
I’d been in Seoul for almost a month, but I wasn’t meeting any people. It was partly because of the language barrier, though if no one spoke English, you had to wonder why the beer labels were in English. Some people stared, others completely ignored me, but hardly anyone smiled or said hello. It was nigh on impossible to learn anything first-hand about people’s lives.
Seoul was impersonal, like all big cities, three times the size of any other city I’d lived in: people going to and from their offices, intent on business, and although in the evenings they evidently loosened up a bit, it didn’t make them any more friendly to outsiders. To be barely curious about foreigners – when there were so few here – struck me as odd. Was it against the rules of Korean etiquette? Maybe it was national pride, this lack of interest in the West, which you have to commend, of course – who needs the West? Perhaps especially in a country that had had a US army presence for fifty years.
I took a book out of my bag and started reading, making notes. Could South Korea still have traces of its Hermit Kingdom past, its policy of isolation, mistrusting and excluding foreigners? For centuries after the devastating Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, Korea was allied with China but refused entry to other foreigners, became like a hermit. Even in the 1800s, when Roman Catholic priests came with trade ships from Europe to this part of the world, their learning was seen as a threat. The British East India Company sent a ship to Korea, and it was turned away on the grounds that it contravened Korean laws to engage in foreign commerce. There was a ‘closed door’ policy. That’s all long in the past. Yet the twentieth century wasn’t kind to Korea.
Meeting Mr Kim Page 5
