Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  It was not to last. Shilla’s strict hierarchical system based on ancestry created an elite, and those excluded became discontented, leaving an opportunity for warlords to move in. In 931 the last king of Unified Shilla entertained in his palace the man who would found the succeeding Koryo Kingdom a few years later and move the capital elsewhere. The Shilla palace was abandoned, the site deserted for centuries, and eventually became a habitat for wild birds, leading to its modern name Anapji Pond, anapji meaning ‘wild geese’.

  Though the city of Kyungju was pillaged over the centuries by the Mongols and the Japanese, they say the spirit of Shilla, the ancient kingdom that built it, lives on today in a ‘museum without walls’, brimming with national treasures. It’s recognised as one of the world’s ten most historically significant sites. To get there meant travelling across the country to the south-east in the direction of the East Sea and Japan on my latest solo adventure.

  The bus went through the industrial and agricultural heart of the republic. Korea had been for two decades the fastest-growing economy in Asia, though affected by the devastating pan-Asian market crash in the late nineties; it was known for ship-building, car manufacturing, Samsung electronic goods and LG appliances. Here, new roads and apartment blocks were being built, and rows of Hyundai trucks stood ready in rows on red, sandy earth. A mammoth concrete bridge was being constructed over fields of crops, while below, a little farmer was pulling a cart through a shallow stream. I looked up from my book at one point as we crossed the Naktong River outside the industrial town of Kumi. The wide, meandering river looked beautiful in the clear evening light and the lush, blue-green hills were untouched. Darkness fell before the bus stopped at Kyungju.

  I walked through the empty streets of the hotel district, while above me the black sky was lit up strangely every few minutes by silent streaks and flashes of lightning. Kyungju being a must-see destination, there was a rather fetid international hostel full of backpackers playing cards. I opted instead for the air-conditioned Chorok-Chang, or Green House, with the usual selection of violent and pornographic videos by the staircase. My room was character-less in typical yogwan fashion but cool and clean, with a huge red LED clock of the kind one might find useful in a bus station.

  Spotting vertical neon signs down a sidestreet, I went into a bar with a beer garden in the back. Ultraviolet lights zapped insects and a Korean girl sang ‘New York Frame of Mind’ for a crowd of two. Behind her rose a grassy hillock which I realised, with some excitement, was an ancient Shilla burial mound. Back at the motel, I dismantled the alarm clock to rid the room of its strange LED glow and morbid countdown of minutes, and went to sleep with great hopes for the next day.

  In the middle of Kyungju was Tumuli Park: twenty burial mounds of Shilla monarchs, man-made hills constructed up to thirteen metres high. After twenty minutes of walking around its boundary wall towards a ticket booth with souvenir stands and tour buses, I wondered what they meant by ‘museum without walls’.

  The next important thing to see was the seventh-century Astronomical Observatory Tower, the oldest in Asia, outwardly simple and yet designed intricately with 366 stones, roughly one for each day of the year. Again, there was a fence and a ticket booth. The only advantage of buying the ticket seemed to be that you could get close and have your photo taken next to it, which many people were already doing. Koreans like to have their photo taken beside famous sights. It has its roots in Confucianism; as Simon Winchester says in his book Korea, it is important ‘to be seen to be doing the right thing and to have proof of having done it for the elders back home’. I gave it a miss and kept going.

  I was dying to see Anapji Pond, the site of the summer palace of Unified Shilla. I left my backpack with the friendly ladies selling souvenirs, walked across the green lawns towards the ornamental ponds, and tried to feel the history of the place. It might have been easier before they built the busy main road that ran around the site. It was pretty, but dull, a backdrop for wedding pictures with no sense of what it once had been.

  As the morning progressed in the ‘museum without walls’, I started to feel the object here was to tick off the sights from your list, take photographs and buy stuff. My mood wasn’t much lifted when I reached the museum within walls. My big backpack contained the emergency tent as usual and it seemed absurd to carry it around the museum. There were lockers, the guards said, but it turned out they were too small.

  ‘Can’t I just hide it in a corner?’ Stealing was unheard of here.

  ‘Aniyo.’ The guards looked sniffly at my short shorts and black trainers, and dismissed me.

  They were clearly used to a better class of visitor. It’s true that appearances are important in Korea, but it hadn’t been a problem before. I carried my bag.

  The museum within walls, perversely, housed all the fascinating treasure of Anapji Pond – the excavated objects from the ancient summer palace that lay buried underground for so long. The minutiae of everyday life at the palace were here – locks and keys, incense-burners, laundry paddles, hooks for hanging bamboo blinds, silver needles and scissors – along with evidence of civilised aristocratic entertainments such as boats and oars, and delicate ornaments in the shape of lotus flowers. My favourite was a set of oak party-dice, with commands engraved on their sides: roll one, and ‘Dance silently’; another, ‘Drink and sing’; ‘Request anyone to sing’; ‘Empty two cups of wine’; and the unforgettable ‘Let others hit your nose’. And there were dazzling gold crowns, elaborate but paper-thin, with spangles and pieces of jade shaped like cashew nuts hanging on thin gold strings. Imagine the thrill of unearthing all this.

  Encouraged, I headed out by bus towards the famous temple of Pulguksa, the ‘Buddha Nation Temple’. I worried, though, when I saw signs with cute cartoon monks pointing the way of the ‘tour’. Then I realised one of the great halls, directly behind the Hall of Great Enlightenment, had been transformed into a large gift shop. The temple was overrun with tourists taking photographs. I tried to appreciate the long cloisters and lovely paintings, but I couldn’t connect with anything. These places so highly prized seemed to have lost their Buddhist spirit entirely.

  I was just sensitive to being on the tourist route. They had chosen to turn their town into a Shilla theme park, with Shilla pharmacies, Shilla petrol stations and family restaurants with Shilla-style curly roofs. Organised travel wasn’t working for me. I found the first bus heading out of town towards the sea, anywhere, and bought a ticket to the end of the line.

  Travel in Korea has not always been safe. The first European to write about a sojourn in Korea was the Dutchman Hendrik (sometimes spelled Hendrick) Hamel, who arrived in August 1653 when he was shipwrecked in a storm, losing half the crew in fifteen minutes, of the south coast en route from Taiwan to Japan. Once on Korean soil, he found it very difficult to leave: he and his shipmates were held captive for thirteen years. The king in Seoul simply said ‘it was not his policy to send foreigners away from his land’ – a rather extreme form of hospitality – because he did not want his country to become known to other nations. They communicated through another captive Hollander, Jan Janse Weltevree, who had been in Korea for almost thirty years, long enough that he hardly remembered his own language.

  Korea was by then a ‘Hermit Kingdom’. While British explorers like Raleigh, Spanish ones like Antonio de Berrio, the Portuguese and the Dutch had been sailing the world’s oceans and laying claim to its lands for a hundred years, Korea kept to itself, barely aware of the outside world. During those years, Korea was repeatedly attacked and invaded by its more aggressive neighbours, Japan and Manchuria. The country had recovered, but developed an understandable fear of other nations, and simply closed its doors.

  The Hollanders were held on the southern island of Cheju and treated with friendship by the governor then ruling, but subsequent governors were less kind and the men grew weak from eating nothing but rice or barley flour. Hamel’s account describes Chejudo as being highly populated, tho
ugh poor, and fertile with plenty of horses and cattle. He describes the ‘high mountain’ (the volcanic Hallasan) and valleys where rice was cultivated. Eventually, they were transferred to Seoul, making the long journey up the west side of the country on horseback, passing through Kongju. In Seoul, the king refused again to let them leave the country, then asked them to perform a little show of dancing and singing, and drafted them as his bodyguards, oddly enough. The Dutchmen were allowed a certain amount of freedom in Seoul, as long as they didn’t try to escape. They bought houses and were admired by the Koreans for their fair skin, but they were always looking for a way to get home.

  Of the thirty-six survivors from Hamel’s ship, the Sperwer, only eight escaped finally to Nagasaki, most of them in their late twenties and thirties by then. When they reached Japan, the Korean king’s fears were realised: they divulged to their Japanese interrogators how the Korean army was armed (muskets, swords, bow and arrow and some pieces of artillery), where the fortresses were (near every city, usually on a high mountain, with enough food for three years), and how many warships they had (every city had to maintain one). The Japanese also asked what the Dutchmen knew about the land link between Korea and China, and what the purpose of ginseng root was. Then they let them return home.

  It was dark and the rain was falling heavily when my bus reached the end of the line at the East Sea, the sea that Hamel and his men had crossed eventually to Japan. We stopped at a town called Kampo that I knew nothing about. I sheltered from the downpour for a while along with other disembarking passengers, then when it looked like the torrential rain wasn’t stopping, I walked off into the night in search of a room. Before long, I found a man and a woman to ask if there was somewhere to stay. We conversed in the usual way, with a handful of Korean words, a handful of English, and lots of hand gestures.

  ‘Here is a hotel,’ the man said, pointing to the large tower that dominated the view.

  I explained that I was hoping for a cheap guesthouse. ‘Do you know of a minbak?’

  They didn’t think so. Then they deliberated and invited me to follow them. The man assured me that it was safe: he was the postman. Because of the complicated numbering system in Korean streets, houses being numbered depending on when they are built rather than where they are, postmen are accorded a high level of respect. We walked off through winding streets, and I felt rather gleeful that my way was being guided again. Eventually, we arrived at a house and they introduced me to the lady of perhaps forty who answered the door.

  ‘This lady is Kim Cheung-suk. This is her house. I live upstairs,’ said the postman, pointing. He wrote down his address in my notebook. I took of my shoes and sat on a mat on the living room floor, and the postman left shortly after, leaving me with the two women.

  Cheung-suk broke the ice by showing me some photographs of herself and her husband on holidays around Korea, and was surprised when I recognised and named the famous places. She asked me how old I was, whether I had a husband, why I was travelling alone. We shared a beer, maekju, communicating with some difficulty, and all got a little giggly as she and her friend, curious about my clothes, bizarrely asked me to show them the sports bra I wore under my vest T-shirt. When eventually I thought I’d better start yawning and get to bed, wherever it was, they instead suggested we all go out.

  My new girlfriends took me down to the seashore to a brand-new bar in the shape of a ship, where we had more maekju and fishy crisps and I tried to expand my Korean vocabulary, although I wasn’t likely to remember any of it. The bar was quiet and bright and lacking in atmosphere, but they were proud of this modern establishment in their small town. When finally we went back to the house, Cheung-suk offered me a little room of her living room, where washing was hanging to dry. She lingered in the room as I spread out my sleeping bag. We said goodnight.

  I woke around six with sunshine streaming through the window, blue sky above. I hunted around for my socks and shoes near the door and found the outside bathroom. When I returned to my room and sat down on the sleeping bag, Cheung-suk came in and, to my surprise, curled up on the floor next to me like a cat. I felt slightly awkward. I had no idea what to do when your host curls up on your bed. I awkwardly made conversation, showed her my map and explained where I’d been, then decided to go for a walk. My socks had moved again; white hairs gave away that the little pet dog was taking them every time I left them by the door.

  Kampo was a proper fishing village, and it smelled fishy, with bags of fishy rubbish lying about. Towards the end of the deserted pebble beach there was a little restaurant set up in tents. Fishermen had hung their wetsuits on a line to dry after coming in with the morning’s fresh catch. Just beyond were a military hut and razor-wire fence. This fence extends all down Korea’s east coast as a precaution against invasion by the enemy to the north. The west coast is free from it because the beaches there shelve very gradually for a long way out to sea, removing the possibility of a surprise attack by boat.

  Back at the town end of the beach, at the harbour, there was much industrious activity as fishing boats unloaded, men and women winding the nets into neat piles as they took out the fish, and others mending nets. In an open warehouse, men and women were packing fish into crates. Empty crates were hosed down with water, and smoking ice fell down a chute from the upper floor into a cart, to be pressed into the boxes with layers of fresh fish. On the quay, men with slicked-back hair and rubber overalls squatted around an upturned crate on their break, smoking cigarettes and placing bets.

  Where the harbour met the village were a dozen raw-fish restaurants, the tanks outside filled with orange crabs with spiny long legs, or purple squid with their pointed hoods, a wild variety of sea creatures. I walked for a while longer, taking photos, then headed back to the house. Cheung-suk was coming up the street in her black sleeveless dress, wearing rubber gloves. Had she been working at the docks? Where was her husband from the photographs? Was he a fisherman, on a trawler at sea perhaps? I wished my language skills were sufficient to get to know more. I felt thrilled to have been invited to stay in her house, and yet utterly foolish for not being able to learn much about her life.

  She carried into the living room a low lacquer table covered with bowls. She’d made a delicious lunch of fried fish and seaweed soup and rice, accompanied by side dishes of marinaded greens and pickled vegetables from tupperware boxes in the fridge, and we sat down together and enjoyed the food. I smiled, and she smiled back. As we sat cross-legged on the mat together, she painted my nails with her nail polish, and brought out a wooden Buddhist bead bracelet, and gave it to me.

  It was time for me to leave. I wanted to take her photograph, but she was reluctant to let me, complaining she was wearing only her house-dress and no lipstick, with her hair piled in a bun. I persuaded her to allow me to take a picture of her looking natural with her son and the dog. But she also gave me three other formal photographs of her with her husband. In the first they were sitting on a mountain-side on Cheju Island, dressed in their best clothes, on their honeymoon; in the second, he had his hands on her shoulders at Maisan; in the other, he had his arm around her, standing in front of a huge seated Buddha at Soraksan.

  I’d found it impossible to experience the true spirit of Buddhism at Kungju, which was full of day-trippers taking photographs. Yet now this complete stranger, Mrs Kim, who any other day might have been one of those day-trippers, had given me the opportunity to experience life in this Korean fishing town. I was so grateful. She was generously exercising her Buddhist principle of offering kindness to strangers, and she now, like me, had the story of spending a funny and intimate day with a woman from the other side of the world.

  I always find when travelling it’s harder to meet women than men, but I hadn’t done badly in Korea. In Kongju, I’d met the information officer at King Muryong’s tomb, and the cleaning lady there, and the lady who’d been to Niagara who invited me to join her for lunch. At Sudoksa, I’d met Kim Moon-sim who showed me around the temple
. My encounters with women in Seoul had been odd, of course. One night, I was wandering in Itaewon and waiting at the traffic lights when a girl came up and said, ‘Buy me drink?’ I smiled and shook my head – had I just been propositioned by a prostitute? Another night we’d been out with Gav’s band at King Club, and Vinny’s Korean girlfriend was with us. She had short bleached hair, and an unusual, urban chic; she was a lot of fun, though she seemed to be kept by a rich man in Japan, who paid for her apartment and bought her the fancy clothes. As we were all sitting around the table, she playfully put her hand up my skirt. Then asked me to come home with her. But that was the madness of Itaewon for you.

  There had been powerful queens during the Shilla period. But Hendrik Hamel’s account of Korea from 1653 to 1666 includes a section on marital law stating that ‘the Koreans treat their women as slaves’. Men then could have as many wives as they could maintain and visit prostitutes too, keeping one wife as his housekeeper and others as a sort of harem. Only men could perform important functions like ancestor worship, and men were seen as the mainstays of financial security. Confucianism ranked the male above the female and created an opporessive social environment for women; the eldest male was the spiritual head of the family, and women existed to serve men and give birth. The only powerful women were mothers-in-law, who were allowed to treat their son’s wives as slaves.

  When Henry Savage Landor, an eccentric English painter and explorer who often travelled with his kittens, wrote of his months in Korea in the 1890s – an account that is not deemed wholly accurate, it must be said – he was unimpressed by the low status of women, and described the ‘very strange custom’ that accorded to women the right to walk about the streets of Seoul during the ‘woman’s hour’ after sunset, during which time men were confined indoors but tigers and leopards were on the prowl: