A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  Isabella was contented and busy with her numerous occupations: talking with the people through Mr Miller, ‘taking geographical notes, temperatures, altitudes, barometric readings and measurements of the river (nearly all unfortunately lost in a rapid on the downward journey), collecting and drying plants, photographing and developing negatives under difficulties – all the blankets and waterproofs in the boat being requisitioned for the creation of a “dark room”’. At about five o’clock each evening Kim feigned exhaustion, ‘a deception to which his lean form and thin face with its straight straggling white hair lent themselves effectively’, and there was much bother about the night’s anchorage and much haggling with the locals for a hen or its eggs, and much breaking of faggots, frying of rice fritters, gossiping, belching, pipe-tapping and finally snoring from the crew’s foredeck. And Isabella too slept soundly, hunched in her trestle bed, looking forward to the simple sounds of animals and people that would wake her at daybreak.

  The people of the Han valley were docile, indolent, friendly, robust and they lived in warm, mud-walled homes alongside large stinking pigsties. Each dwelling, however humble, had a best ‘gentleman’s only’ room with matted floor, wooden pillows and large hat cases hanging from the rafters. Here the men were served huge meals on low wood tables and they ate voraciously. Eating was a principal hobby among Koreans, for ‘from infancy onwards one object in life is to give the stomach as much capacity and elasticity as possible’. In order to reach the desired amplitude, ‘A mother feeds her young child with rice and when it can eat no more in an upright position, lays it on its back on her lap and feeds it again, tapping its stomach from time to time with a flat spoon to ascertain if further cramming is possible.’ In later life, therefore, everything was grist to the capacious and omnivorous Korean maw. ‘Pork, beef, fish, raw dried and salted, the intestines of all animals, all birds and game, no part being rejected’; fermented beans, seaweed fried in fat, sweet potatoes, lily bulbs, chestnut cakes and baked dog were among other delicacies. Isabella watched people eating over three pounds of meat at a sitting, plus several bowls of rice, topped off perhaps by twenty-five peaches or melons. After the men showed that they ‘had reached the desirable state of repletion by eructation, splutterings, slapping of the stomach,’ they rolled out into the sun to sleep it off and the women came creeping into the room and ‘gobbled up their lords’ leavings’.

  This was indicative of the Korean woman’s domestic status. She had no claims on her husband, only duties towards him. At the age of puberty she was ‘bundled up in a mass of wedding clothes’ and her eyelids were sealed together so that she did not see the unknown male to whom she was then married. Henceforward, she was known only as ‘the wife of so-and-so’, or the ‘mother of such-and-such a son’; her husband called her ‘what’s-her-name’ or ‘ya-bu’ that meant roughly ‘look here’, and when he tired of her he took a concubine or perhaps a second wife. The women of the upper classes led empty, silent, secluded lives; peasant women were, in a sense, more fortunate, for they could forget their troubles in work. They fed the bristly black hogs, cleaned rice with pestle and mortar, beat those lordly robes, shredded cabbage and turnip for pickled kimchi, strung up orange and ginger peel to dry in the sun. Probably, as Isabella says, it had never occurred to any humble wife to turn suffragette and so they, like their husbands, seemed reasonably contented with their monotonous unadorned lives.

  There were just two feared and hated disruptions to the peaceful patterns of Korean rural life, and the darker bête noire of these was the tiger. As Isabella travelled further inland, she heard ever more bloody tales of tiger depredations. Domestic beasts and poultry were frequently attacked and so, apparently, were vulnerable humans – children, isolated woodcutters, lone travellers at night. Isabella was sceptical at first, but the genuine and voluble terror of the people convinced her that such tales were true, and indeed they must have been, for deaths-by-tiger were reported in the respectable missionary-sponsored periodical The Korean Repository with the frequency and gruesome prosaicness of traffic accidents. For example: ‘A son of Mr Kang of Wonsan aged 12 years was coming home from a neighbour’s house some yards distant when he was caught by a tiger and carried off. His skull and feet were found next day on a hill, back of the French missionary Père Boret’s compound.’ The very prevalence of such disasters had its uses: a standard way of avoiding creditors or escaping from the law was to leave bits of one’s shredded clothing in the lonely woods and abscond … ‘taking a tiger’ it was perhaps called? ‘The Korean hunts the tiger one half of the year and the tiger hunts the Korean the other half’ ran the jeering Chinese proverb. The men who did the half-hearted hunting were a very special brigade, tough, honoured and singled out for valour like commandos. They wore loose blue uniforms, seed necklaces and special conical hats and were armed with rusty matchlocks charged with three pea-sized balls of shot apiece. The hunt was a risky business, though the rewards were great – tiger insides were coveted by the Chinese for medicines (as in Malaya), tiger claws were much prized by wealthy ladies, and tiger skins graced the floors of wealthy homes.

  The other curse of the countryside, as predatory, unpredictable and almost as savage as the tiger, was the yang-ban. Yang-bans were the ‘licensed vampires of the nation’ in Isabella’s view, landed squires, pretentious parasites, high-ranking holders of official sinecures that entitled them to idle in luxury paid for by excessive taxes and forced ‘loans’ exacted from the humbler classes. Convention forbade a yang-ban to work, to bear any burden as heavy as a pipe or book – or even to support the full weight of his own body. Attendants carried his every requirement and supported him on each side as he strutted along at a slow, pompous pace. ‘Unsupported,’ Curzon suggests, ‘he would I suppose fall to the ground from the sheer weight of his own importance.’ Yang-bans simply lived off the land, entitled to free services, board and lodging wherever they went, and to requisition animals, women or junks as the fancy took them. Peasants hid their daughters, ponies and fattest hens if they knew one was coming, and were sometimes sullenly unhelpful to Isabella’s servants, fearing they would browbeat them as did a yang-ban’s entourage.

  After five weeks on the River Han, Isabella and Miller reached the northernmost navigable point and the journey culminated dramatically in ‘a superb mountain view of saddle-back ridges and lofty grey peaks surrounding a dark expanse of water, with a margin of grey boulders and needles of grey rock draped with the ampelopsis, a yellow clematis, and a white honeysuckle’. She longed to go on, but the rapids ahead were so fierce that Kim went utterly on strike, so they turned downstream and, a few days later, she and her little party regretfully left the sampan and took to the roads.

  For ferocity and pigheaded recalcitrance, the Korean pony was unequalled, even in Isabella’s considerable equine experience. When saddled, the beast ‘performed the singular feat of bending his back into such an inward curve that his small body came quite near the ground’; when faced with another pony, he went for it, hooves flying, teeth bared, squealing and trumpeting with fury; at night, his bony head was chained to the trough and his body partially slung to the roof-beam in order to prevent him from maiming his stable-mates. Each pony had its own mapu (groom) who fed it thrice a day on a brown slush of beans, millet-stalks, rice-husks and water. The animals liked the beans best, and another of Korea’s characteristic sounds was the flappetyz-flop of a pony’s long tongue delving to the bottom of the trough and slurping every accessible bean into its mouth. Well-fed though they were, the ponies took a malicious delight in keeping their riders in a state of alarmed suspense by suddenly lying down in the road, or collapsing on their forelegs with their skinny rumps in the air, or even starting off backwards at a brisk trot. Dearly as Isabella loved horses, she never made friends with one of these.

  With Mr Miller the question was not so much one of friendship as of simple survival. He wrote a brief account of his journey with Isabella in The Korean Repository and made it sound
extremely uncomfortable and joyless. While on the sampan he suffered an acute rash, caused, he eventually discovered, by the fleas and other vermin which, descending from the oarsmen’s clothes stowed above his bed, took up residence in his underwear. When they changed to ponies, poor Mr Miller rapidly learned that ‘I could not ride on a pack-horse as well as I thought I could.’ He soon fell off, in fact, into a shallow muddy gulley and lay there ‘holding my feet up to keep them dry and looking back to see if Mrs Bishop’s horse would step on and soil my shirt bosom. I might have turned a somersault and lit on my feet,’ he explains grandly, ‘but I was particularly cautioned before leaving home to be sure under all circumstances to keep my feet dry.’ How Isabella must have chuckled to herself when she came upon this troubled evangelist with his precious feet in the air! He must have been rather a wet young man however dry his feet, but she gave him some marks for effort, recording that ‘though not an experienced traveller’ he ‘preserved the serenity of his temper under all circumstances’.

  And circumstances seemed designed to test the serenity of the most unflinching, especially when they centred upon the Korean inn. They came in two (unstarred) varieties: irregular and regular. The former were untenanted hovels with a few troughs for the beasts. The latter consisted ‘of a filthy courtyard full of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumble-down gateway. A gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies, mapu, hangers-on and travellers’ loads make up a busy scene.

  ‘On one or two sides are ramshackle sheds, with rude, hollowed trunks in front, out of which the ponies suck the hot brown slush which sustains their strength and pugnacity. On the other is the furnace-shed with the oats where the slush is cooked, the same fire usually heating the flues of the kang floor of the common room, while smaller fires in the same shed cook for the guests. Low lattice doors filled in with torn and dirty paper give access to a room the mud floor of which is concealed by reed mats, usually dilapidated, sprinkled with wooden blocks which serve as pillows. Farming gear and hat-boxes often find a place on the low heavy cross-beams. Into this room are crowded mapu, travellers, and servants, the low residuum of Korean travel, for officials and yang-bans receive the hospitalities of the nearest magistracy and peasants open their houses to anybody with whom they have a passing acquaintance. There is in all inns of pretensions, however, another room, known as the “clean room” 8 feet by 6, which, if it existed, I obtained. If not I had a room in the women’s quarters at the back, remarkable only for its heat and vermin, and the amount of ang-paks, bundles of dirty clothes, beans rotting for soy and other plenishings which it contained, and which reduced its habitable portion to a minimum. At night a ragged lantern in the yard and a glim of oil in the room made groping for one’s effects possible.

  ‘The room was always overheated from the ponies’ fire. From 80° to 85° was the usual temperature, but it was frequently over 92°, and I spent one terrible night sitting at my door because it was 105° within. In this furnace, which heats the floor and the spine comfortably, the Korean wayfarer revels.

  ‘On arriving at an inn, the master or servant rushes at the mud, or sometimes matted, floor with a whisk, raising a great dust, which he sweeps into a corner. The disgusted traveller soon perceives that the heap is animate as well as inanimate, and the groans, sighs, scratchings, and restlessness from the public room show the extent of the insect pest. But I never suffered from vermin in a Korean inn, nor is it necessary. After the landlord had disturbed the dust, Wong put down either two heavy sheets of oiled paper or a large sheet of cotton dressed with linseed oil on the floor, and on these arranged my camp-bed, chair and baggage. This arrangement (and I write from twenty months’ experience in Korea and China) is a perfect preventive.’

  A few days later they began an ascent of 1,320 feet across the Pass on Tan-pa Ryong and into the Diamond Mountains, where hundreds of Buddhist monks, who had been banished from all the cities, dwelt in a state of unharassed disestablishment. It was an enchanted region, beautiful beyond her telling. The nearby hills were a tangle of maple, hazel, chestnut and pink azaleas; serrated grey peaks and billows of woodland bunched the distances; valleys were trim old-gold with buckwheat and maize; blue shadows lay along the pines. They spent the night at the monastery of Chang-an Sa, the ‘Temple of Eternal Rest’ and a model of medievalism with its dormitories, refectories, and infirmary for the halt and blind, cells for wayfarers and temples instead of high-arched churches. The monks, gentle and jolly-seeming fellows, wore hats with long fringes, cultivated persimmons, lived on pine-nuts, rice and honey, and rose at midnight and four a.m. to peal their devotional bells.

  ‘A full night’s sleep is not easy of attainment in a Korean monastery,’ complained Curzon, who had also passed that way. In his opinion few of the bonzes were true believers, and the continuing yield of acolytes was due less to spiritual hunger than to the fact that monks were able to ‘subsist in the main upon the charity of others – an occupation in which the Korean finds an enchantment that personal exertion can never supply’. Isabella agrees that the monks seemed rather lazy, were reputed to be profligate, and ‘their religious performances are absolutely without meaning to them, and belief, except among a few, does not exist’. And yet – it was all so beautiful, courteous, orderly in a timeless oriental way that Isabella almost forgot the unkind things she had said about Buddhism to the tight white faces in Church Assembly Halls in Leeds, York, Coventry and points south. The monks were so hospitable, serene, benevolent, and ‘I am compelled to admit that they exercise a certain fascination and that I prefer to remember their virtues rather than their faults,’ she concludes. But that was not her final conclusion; returned, two years later, to the assertive pressures of Christian evangelism, she would respond as she always did to the occasion and denounce the degenerate evils of Buddhism in no uncertain terms.

  By the time they reached the costal plains it was early June, the season when, according to the Korean Almanac, ‘The tongue of the oriole turns over in its mouth, putting an end to its song, and the horns of the elk drop. Beetles and locusts arrive.’ And so did the heat. Villagers were knee-deep in the steamy paddies puddling rice and the spindly pink legs of the ibis were also submerged as they speared frogs from the warm mud. Coolness was promised only by the cooing of wild doves on a lake-shore and the sight of a seaside village, which did not, however, live up to expectation. ‘In the early twilight, when the fierce sun-blaze was over, in the smoky redness of a heated evening atmosphere, when every rock was giving forth the heat it had absorbed in the day, across the stream which is at once the outlet of the lake and the boundary between the provinces of Kang-won and Hamgyong, appeared a large, straggling, grey-roofed village, above high-water mark, on a beach of white sand. Several fishing junks were lying in shelter at the mouth of the stream. Women were beating clothes and drawing water, and children and dogs were rolling over each other on the sand, all more or less idealised by being silhouetted in purple against the hot lurid sky.

  ‘As the enchantment of distance faded and Ma-cha Tong revealed itself in plain prose, fading from purple into sober grey, the ideal of a romantic halt by the pure sea vanished. A long, crooked, tumble-down narrow street, with narrower offshoots, heaps of fish offal and rubbish, in which swine, mangy, blear-eyed dogs and children, much afflicted with skin-disease, were indiscriminately rooting and rolling, pools covered with a thick brown scum, a stream which had degenerated into an open sewer, down which thick green slime flowed tardily, a beach of white sand, the upper part of which was blackened with fish laid out to dry, frames for drying fish everywhere, men, women and children all as dirty in person and clothing as it was possible to be, thronging the roadways as we approached, air laden with insupportable odours, and the vilest accommodation I ever had in Korea have fixed that night in memory.’

  The accommodation at Ma-cha Tong must have been execrable, a real hell-hole, for Isabella to single it out from h
er dire and drear litany of Korean inns. And one reviewer of her eventual record of the expedition, Korea and Her Neighbours, voices a complaint that many readers must have shared at about this stage: ‘Not a single discomfort is omitted; we are not spared an ounce of dust nor a single predatory insect. Inn after inn is more detestable than the last … it is all a little hard on the meritorious and sympathetic public which was guiltless from the beginning of sending out the forlorn pilgrim. We take it for granted that pilgrims shoulder the wallet and strap on the sandal shoon for love of the pilgrimage. Then why dilate on mud and dirt and starvation and hungry myriads who inhabit darkness? They are themselves apt to beget weariness and make the impatient reader inquire with an objurgatory sniff, “Then why on earth did you go there?”’ The public was used to travel writers omitting most of the unsavoury details from their narratives. Nevertheless, the critic is right to suggest that Isabella did lay the filth on with a trowel during this particular journey, and it is quite a relief to learn that she and Miller eventually reached the main road to Wonsan, with telegraph poles sprouting incongruously on either side and the promise of a comfortable billet at its end.

  The comfort of the billet, which was at the American Protestant Mission, was somewhat disturbed by the rumours that had been humming along the telegraph wires from Seoul to Wonsan during the last few weeks and which Isabella had not heard until then. The tales were all of war: of clashes between the Tong-haks (the rebel faction) and Royal troops in the capital, of bloodthirsty mobs gathering to march on the treaty ports, of invasion from Japan, from China, from Russia, perhaps from all three together. Isabella calmly discounted them all, brooking no such upstart interference with her plans, and on 19 June took a steamer round the coast to Chemulpo.