Meeting Mr Kim

by Jennifer Barclay

  In 1895, the Korean writer and traveller Yu Gil-jun published his Observations on a Journey to the West, the first Korean book on such a subject, and wrote what must have seemed completely radical: ‘I believe that not only writers and critics but also people of all classes and women as well should know what is going on in the world. ‘

  The Chinese Empire finally recognised Korean independence at the end of the nineteenth century – but only as a result of pressure from Japan, which was ready to swoop in and take over.

  It was always hard to adjust when I got back to Seoul. Coming back after several days away tended to put me in a foul mood temporarily. It was partly something like jet lag: by the time Gav had finished work and we’d relaxed, we tended to go to bed close to dawn, which is when I got up in the countryside. And out there, I’d been hiking and free camping and swimming and meeting people, while back in Seoul I sat around all day, writing in the smoky PC bang, meeting no one and spending too much money on beer. There were days when I hated being back in Seoul, but then I got over it, relaxed and started enjoying it. Although Gav and I still argued sometimes and had misunderstandings, I came back to Seoul each weekend to be with him for his last show of the week, the one night he could completely relax, and his day off.

  We were lying in bed on a Sunday, with the fan whirring full blast against the summer humidity, as it had been non-stop all through July. Our frail neighbour was summoning phlegm from the depths of his chest and spitting with gusto, and the strange buzzing insect was buzzing away on the screen window. Feeling far from home, we tortured ourselves by fantasising about cheese and mashed potatoes, about brown toast and baked beans. It started as an innocent ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have X for breakfast?’ and ended up a long itemising of comfort foods, a Sunday roast with gravy and red wine or real ale. All things you could only have here in synthetic substitutes or for silly money at the international hotels.

  It was ridiculous, after such natural feasts as I had had at Kirimsa, and yet it was a nasty trick your body played on you, that you longed for the impossible and after two months in Korea began to daydream of toast and baked beans. It only happened in the city, which to me was not traditionally Korean and yet not western either.

  So one morning as we emerged from a night of dancing at Stompers, noticing it was already 6 a.m., we asked the taxi to take us to the Hyatt, and splurged a king’s ransom (just for me – Gav got in for free) to shiver in the air-conditioned dining room and gorge on a buffet breakfast of sausages and toast, smoked salmon and croissants. Giggling, I stuffed the miniature jars of jam and honey into my tight jeans pockets on my way out. Later we went to Starbucks at Myungdong for good coffee and cheesecake, sitting on the third floor listening to the jazz muzak while we watched the beautiful people passing below, the shiny, glossy-haired youth of Seoul. We were also tempted into a bar near the Hilton that said it served draft stout; what it actually served was tiny half cans of stout mixed into pitchers of draft OB.

  Still, mostly we were loving Korean food. I suggested to Gav we try a little cafe opposite Click and now it was a favourite haunt that we’d dubbed The Kimbap Ladies, where we would have a lunch of chamchi kimbap, the rice and seaweed roll made with tinned tuna, or kyeran ramyun, instant noodles with egg. We walked to the top of Namsan and decided to have lunch on a restaurant terrace overlooking the city one day. Confidently, I ordered a pork soup. When it arrived, it was so greasy and fatty I couldn’t stomach it, and had to remind myself I couldn’t be expected to adapt to everything Korean in the space of one summer.

  Usually when I was gallivanting around the country, Gav would do the show, then go out to Hollywood and spend time with other musicians. He slept late, went to the Hyatt for a civilised free lunch. Then sometimes he’d watch videos – films or drumming videos – in the afternoon until it was time to get ready again. It was just a normal working week and sounded terribly dull, but he still got a real high from the good nights on stage.

  Maybe it was because I kept returning full of amazement and stories, but Gav decided to leave the band at the end of the Seoul contract, so we could travel together. They didn’t have another contract lined up – a few possibilities had fallen through – and so if he stayed with them he’d have to go back to Toronto and play in some club in the suburbs. The contract Good Vibes were hoping to get next was playing in a casino in Las Vegas, or on a Disney cruise ship, either of which would be pure misery to him. He joined to see the world. And, I think, he wanted to travel with me, which of course made me happy.

  He gave a month’s notice to Dean, the band leader, to enable him to line up another drummer, which shouldn’t be dificult given that there were so many other bands around, always in flux. Dean said no hard feelings. Gav spoke to another drummer called Chris, from Montreal, who was interested in taking over his position.

  The end of July meant the end of the contract at the Hard Rock Cafe for the group from Adelaide. The next Sunday we were invited to their final show in Apkujongdong, which was across the river, one of the most expensive and sophisticated areas of Seoul, full of boutiques with staff who followed you around the shop.

  Gav and I went first to a Vietnamese restaurant – new and rather fancy, but we craved the familiar taste. You didn’t get Vietnamese immigrants running Vietnamese restaurants in Seoul, it was run by Koreans. The waitress started giggling so much she couldn’t even take our order, so the manager took our order of two bowls of pho ga. He tried to explain what it was, and we said we’d had it before at home, which he found hard to comprehend given that we were clearly not Vietnamese.

  When the pho ga arrived, they’d tried to make it more Korean by serving tepid soup in tiny bowls. We were paying an awful lot for this pleasure, so when the manager came over to ask if everything was OK, I asked if we could have it heated up. A few minutes later, a young waiter arrived with two steaming bowls of soup on a tray, obviously nervous as he balanced the edge on our table. Shaking, he carefully lifted off the nearest of the bowls, and the other slid back, tipping the tray and emptying its scalding contents into his lap. Oops. Apkujong wasn’t quite the cosmopolitan centre of sophistication it looked, though it was trying hard.

  Back outside, we were surprised to see an Irish pub, with a sign in the window saying ‘Draught Stout’. ‘Orangeman’s Day’ was a rather unusual name for an Irish pub, but this was Korea after all. The idea of Guinness on tap seemed too much of a taste of home to pass up, and too funny to ignore, given that Gav was Irish and we met in an Irish pub. So we made our way up the stairs, where we found a barman standing over a fridge of cans in an empty room. They didn’t have draught stout, he admitted, in fact they didn’t have draught anything, not even OB hof. But we could buy a small can of Guinness for 20,000 won (US$20). We weren’t that desperate, thankfully.

  We made our way to the Hard Rock Cafe, where the Australian band Hot Dog were getting ready. Hot Dog seemed an odd name for a band in a country notorious for eating dog. Most Koreans were now embarrassed about the practice and kept dogs as pets, but apparently there were still a few dog meat restaurants; it was believed to be good for the male libido. Dog meat restaurants were extremely rare and very, very expensive, so you never had to worry about eating it by mistake. Perhaps the band’s manager should have thought better of using the name Hot Dog in Korea, but it didn’t seem to have kept people away.

  It was more of a working-class Korean crowd than the international jet-setters of the Hyatt. When the live music started, we joined the Koreans dancing to a Beatles number. One sweet middle-aged couple, both wearing hats, had some very fancy moves. Hot Dog reciprocated culturally by playing a couple of Korean love songs, and Gav was invited up on stage to play drums for a Lenny Kravitz hit. I was very impressed and proud of my rock musician. After the show, we helped Hot Dog pack up their gear. They’d been here for three months and didn’t want to leave, so it was lovely to discover the staff had arranged a dinner for them to say thank you, and even nicer to realise we were kin
dly invited along.

  All twenty-odd of us made our way to a nearby restaurant. A long, low table had been set up in a screened-off outside area, and in the balmy night we kicked off our shoes and sat on little mats, feet tucked under our bums. Waitresses emerged with bottles of beer and soju by the armful. There were holes in the table at regular intervals for barbecues, and the waitresses loaded hot coals into them. Then they covered them over with grills, and brought out plates of raw galbi, marinated meat, and laid the thin slices onto the grills to sizzle away. This barbecue style of cooking was called bulgogi, literally ‘fire-meat’, usually beef but sometimes pork. Dishes of tofu and kimchi and pickles were also loaded onto the table. Koreans loved to eat in this shared, leisurely, social way and, like family, everyone dipped their chopsticks in the same bowl.

  The girl opposite us delicately put a whole soft-shell crab in her mouth, chewed it up then spit out the shell, urging us to do the same. She knocked back soju like it was Diet Coke, while we tried to stick with beer as much as possible. We learned to spoon some bean paste called samjang into a fresh lettuce leaf, add a slice of raw garlic, put a bite-sized piece of meat straight off the grill on top and then roll it up and pop it into the mouth to let the flavours explode. Repeat as necessary.

  With all of us eating and drinking together, it developed into a splendidly raucous and spirited occasion. A young Korean who called himself Victor started challenging Gav to shots of soju. ‘One shot! One shot! Just one shot!’ he shouted, and somewhat bafflingly, ‘You are my teacher!’ They knocked them back, then minutes later Victor made the challenge, ‘Teacher! One shot! Just one shot!’ and they did it again. Repeat ad nauseam.

  At long last, we left the restaurant awash in those telling green bottles, and made for a norae bang, a singing room. As we all squashed into a smoky space, people began to wail along to the music. Gav played U2 on the guitar while, on the TV screen, a man sang a love song because his wife had been shot in the head during an aeroplane hijacking. It was all very surreal. In the hallway outside, Victor sat on the floor with his head helplessly between his legs, semiconscious, a sad victim of trying to drink with an Irishman. I was feeling tired and a little sad and out of place, with all these youngsters doing their thing and Gav at the centre having a grand old time and barely aware of my presence. But I was starting to understand what Korean nightlife was all about.

  Shauna, the band’s singer, was by now sharing our flat. On the first of August, I came back from my nightly wanderings around town to find her there when she should have been on stage for another couple of hours. Dean had fired her halfway through a set. Gav arrived back straight after the end of the show. When he had asked Dean what he was doing firing Shauna halfway through a set, Dean had fired him too.

  The two talked for hours about the general unbearable madness of the workings of Good Vibes under management that could be astute one minute and psycho the next. It was exhausting just hearing about it. Dean, meanwhile, went out drinking tequila all night. In the morning, he called, and Gav talked to him for an hour, calming him down, with the result that both he and Shauna were reinstated. Perhaps Dean realised it would be hard to continue without the drummer and the female lead singer – the hotels insisted on a female lead singer. Gav was leaving Good Vibes at the end of the month anyway, but he preferred to keep working and making money in the meantime.

  The bass player’s girlfriend, a tiny, freakish American woman with a face like a bird who wore rhinestone sweaters and cowboy boots, was visiting and poking her beak into everything. She rang and enquired in her strange squeaky voice why she hadn’t seen me at the Hyatt.

  ‘I’ve been here a week and I haven’t seen you.’

  ‘I don’t really like hanging around the Hyatt,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t like class?’

  What a strange, insulting thing to say. I had no answer for her. I’d tried, I really had.

  In the evening, when I went all the way down the hill to my favourite setak, or laundry, the metal shutters were down. Perhaps the summer holidays were starting. But the builders hadn’t taken their holiday yet, it seemed. Across the road I noticed an old house that was demolished only a week before was already being replaced by a new construction: concrete foundations had been poured, boards were up and steel girders were being put in place with impressive speed. Koreans certainly seemed good at this rebuilding business, perhaps understandably given all those palaces and temples that were continually burned down over the centuries.

  It took a lot of hard work to rebuild this country after the Korean War. The succession of military leaders in the sixties and seventies focused on economic growth and a move towards modern technology for South Korea, and the dedicated Korean people created a booming economy – in spite of the huge cost required to keep the army on alert in case of attack from the North. Many of the big household-name companies, the ‘giants’ like Samsung and Hyundai, Lotte and LG, started as small family businesses, building from the ruins of the war. In forty years, the GDP per capita went from the level of the poorer countries of Africa to that of the lesser economies of the European Union.

  With the Asian economic crisis in the nineties, even the giant corporations started going bankrupt. But the miracle of the Han, the ‘Asian tiger’, was created because people were prepared to work long hours to get on. They seemed studious and industrious, and able to endure hardship. I thought about the family that ran the nearest little shop to our flat. They lived in a tiny room adjoining the shop, where sleeping mats were laid out under a mosquito net at night, and the cash was kept in a box under the television. I remembered those people I saw lying asleep in their cars on Namsan, in their shirts and ties, trying to catch a little rest.

  I needed to find out how to extend my ninety-day visa. I’d read that it was possible to extend a visitor’s visa by ten days, which was all I needed, so I rang Korean Immigration. The woman who answered had limited English, and her directions on how to find the office seemed too vague: go to Omokkyo subway station, take exit six and walk for ten minutes. But what direction, I asked? She didn’t understand. I asked if it would be possible to extend the visa, and she said no; when I asked why, she changed her mind and said it cost nothing to extend it for ten days. Then, bizarrely, a male voice came on the line and said that this phone line had to be shared among ten people and that I should come to the office instead – and he hung up. Argh. Get me out of Seoul, get me to some peaceful, welcoming country place where people are kind.

  I’d been getting the impression that this first week of August might be prime summer holiday week, but it hadn’t occurred to me what that meant until I got to the bus station. It was heaving with people like Heathrow Airport during a summer holiday strike, and the Excellent Express buses going across the country to the east coast, where I had hoped to go, were booked up for most of the day. Seeing that traffic was going to be heavy anywhere, I decided against a long journey and opted instead for a coastal national park, Taean Haean, which was just a couple of hours down the west coast and yet not far from Toksan, the serene place where I was welcomed into my first Buddhist monastery.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN:

  THE BEACH, KOREAN STYLE

  The Japanese occupation of Korea lasted until 1945, and the division of Korea was made as part of the Japanese surrender procedures after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the night of 10 August 1945, two US colonels in the Pentagon chose the thirty-eighth parallel as a simple demarcation line to show where the US zone would end and the Russian zone begin. This separated the mostly agricultural south from the more industrial north. The Soviet military then sealed of their zone and stopped trade and traffic with the south. The Allies attempted to re-unify Korea until December that year, but the Soviets refused to consult with Koreans who disagreed with the proposed trustee government system. So two separate governments were created.

  The Soviets installed as leader a man who had been a communist partisan pl
otting against Japanese rule from outside the country – Kim Il-sung. He conferred with Stalin about how to proceed, discussed what support he could expect. Just as the US was beginning to turn its attention elsewhere, the North attacked in the middle of the night on 25 June 1950, starting a war that would achieve nothing but destruction and shut down the border completely.

  ‘This time, once past, will never more return,’ said Dong-kyuen, a thirty-something man from Seoul with an extraordinary command of English that made it sound like romantic poetry.

  I sipped on my lukewarm beer and thought that this eloquently encapsulated fact did not distress me greatly. I had by now sampled the entertainment possibilities of Mongsanpo that evening, where thousands of Koreans had gathered to camp by the Yellow Sea. I’d eaten noodles, watched the performance of mediocre pop bands on stage, and inspected the rifle ranges. The tide was out about half a mile and the muddy wet sand was alive with hundreds of torches that looked like fireflies in the foggy gloom – people digging for crabs.

  Somewhat improbably, considering the masses that thronged this seaside camp, Dong-kyuen was feeling lonely. Having convinced me to come and drink beer with him, he ordered several big bottles at a time so they sat on the table warming up, and gassy OB does not improve at that temperature. He was paying, however, so I couldn’t complain, and he also ordered a big plate of fruit. And he spoke English. So I sat and picked at slices of melon and banana while listening to his tales of ten years in the re-insurance business before he left to manage an English language school.

  I had actually bought a bus ticket for a place called Mallipo, or Manripo. It’s confusing the way anglicised Korean names can be spelt a number of alternative ways. Mallipo can be Manlipo or Manripo, Chongno can be Jongro. Obviously it’s because there aren’t exact equivalents for our letters in the Korean language, and that old cliché of mixing up ‘l’ and ‘r’ happens constantly. There was a funny map outside the Hilton hotel on Namsan, which pointed out the great landmark of the ‘Seoul Towel’. In Welcome to Korea magazine, an article expressed Seoul’s great excitement over the arrival of the famous musical from New York and London, ‘Lent’.