Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  ‘Now we’re into the self-esteem phase of Korea’s needs. She wants to feel good about herself. So she gets the Asian Games here. She gets the Olympics. She sends her cars to America. She exports TV sets to Britain. She feels proud, she has a sense of swaggering about a bit. A long way from the war, eh?

  ‘And then, once the self-esteem is all in the bag, she’ll go for growth. She’ll consolidate what she’s got and build on it, making herself richer and more stable, so that she can have any of the other things as and when she wants them. If she wants to build a hospital or raise a regiment or stage a motorcycling race, she can. But she needs to grow to be sure she can.

  ‘That’s it. That’s the theory. What do you think? Good, eh? Countries just like humans. Q.E.D.’

  A few moments later O’Neill went on to quote, approvingly, Patrick Pearse’s comment that education was ‘the murder machine’. He was an unconventionalist, at the very least.

  He has run his psychiatric clinic—it is funded by donations from abroad—for the last twenty years. He was in consequence utterly absorbed by the nature of the Oriental mind and how society dealt with it when it went awry. ‘There’s been so little study of the mind here. Do you know how many psychiatrists there are? Just three hundred, and that in a country of more than forty million. That’s nothing. They were developing a healthy interest until the Japanese came. They crushed it totally, and it hasn’t recovered yet.

  ‘Okay, I can hear you saying that they don’t need psychiatry because they’re mentally healthy people. Well they’re not, not as healthy as you might like to think. They don’t have the tensions that the Westerners do, that’s true. But as things get more modern, they have problems, and they have no way at all to deal with them. It’s all tied up with face, this ghastly Oriental thing that hamstrings everything. Face—they mustn’t lose it. No public shame. No embarrassment. And that means—in my field, anyway—that if you’ve someone in your family who’s got a problem, a mental problem, you just don’t admit it exists. You lock it away somehow. Literally—you lock a mentally ill person in his room and pretend he doesn’t exist. Oh sure, sometimes they have to come here, because they are really so sick, and people know we exist and think we might be able to do the trick. But I have seen them dumped on our doorsteps, trussed up in ropes, tied up like parcels. They used to think mental illness was the curse of the devil—what am I saying, used to? They still think so. They either dismiss it totally—you simply aren’t allowed to be depressed, you aren’t allowed to have neuroses—or else they get terribly hostile about it and think it brings shame and a loss of face to the whole family, and they reject it. That’s when it lands on my doorstep, trussed up like a chicken. And that’s if they’re lucky. I know many parents of girls who have problems, and they tell them they’ve got to kill themselves rather than bring shame on the family. I tell you, face is a terrible thing.’

  John Gunther, when he wrote his essays about the East for American audiences half a century ago, used to grumble about face. He once wrote an article about Shanghai and the certainty that the Chinese would have problems if they threw the foreigners out (the revolutionary breeze was blowing then, and Gunther could feel it and knew what damage it might do). They suffered from many disadvantages, he thought, but the most exasperating of all was face. Face meant you’d never take a risk, never take an intellectual gamble, a stab in the dark, since by failing you would lose your face and suffer shame and ridicule. So, if the tenets of the revolution forced them to reject all foreign influence, there would never be a Chinese Thomas Edison or a Chinese Henry Ford or a Chinese Albert Einstein. And as with China, so with Korea.

  How many times have I heard in conversation: ‘…and then he made me lose my face’? To a Korean, there can be no greater anguish. The young woman with whom I had argued so strenuously back on Cheju Island had lost her face—her myonmok—in the exchange. The fact of losing the argument was of no consequence by comparison. If you see a Korean on a golf course, do not approach him, no matter how dreadful his play might be, and advise him on how he might improve matters; he would be deeply offended, and you would be deeply wrong. ‘To lose face is bad,’ Confucius is supposed to have said. ‘To make someone lose face is unforgivable.’

  The Confucian deal, in a society like Korea’s where Confucianism is still widely followed, is a simple one: if people will agree to forget their individuality and concentrate on their duties, then they can be guaranteed that they will be treated with respect and kindness by all. Self-abnegation is bargained, in other words, for universal respect. Happiness is to be gained through human things, coming to terms with oneself, one’s family, one’s community.

  The modern world, which has Korea firmly in its grasp, offers a very different deal. Self-abnegation has been replaced by self-assertion. Human relationships, respect for elders, certainty of place in society—all these things are being overlooked today, and Koreans, like the rest of us, search for happiness through the purchase of goods and services, the quest for material pleasure and success.

  The two systems, the material and the Confucian, sit uneasily together. The assaults on Confucian values result in many more frequent tribulations among those who still cling to traditional ways—and deep within themselves most Koreans do, for a myriad of reasons—because of their upbringing, their fondness for the country, and for reasons of sentiment and faith. ‘He made me lose my face’ is heard more often these days simply because of the disharmonies between the two systems. We hear of cases—O’Neill had a number of them as patients—of what is called maum sang hada: a state of mental anguish over the loss of face that can make its victim want to give up, to throw in the towel, to retreat from society and hide in shame. You hear tales of people wasting away and dying, so severe is their shame.

  Which, then, is the better of the two systems? Is a life of self-abnegation, respect for others, a sense of duty, and correct behaviour more worthy than a life of self-assertion, of total freedom, of ‘looking out for Number One’? Or, put another way, is a society that is liberally stuffed with Edisons and Fords and Einsteins, and with depressives and murderers and alcoholics—is that approaching the ideal? Or do we have a more fulfilled society when all is carefully structured social harmony, where the jen and the yi, the yin and the yang, are in near-perfect equilibrium, where no one raises his voice, and every parent is revered by every child, where the elders are cared for, children are adored, imagination and innovation and invention are feared rather than favoured, and the individual is forgotten?

  There is no easy answer, for both systems have their attractions and both their ugliness. I had a letter waiting for me in Kwangju, from an English friend, a bright diplomat who had been fond of Korea for many years. ‘I am now seriously hoping,’ he wrote, ‘that I can retire to Cheju-do and live out my life in studied Confucian idleness.’ I could see what he meant. Others would opt for a compromise, and yet compromise, too, is fraught with complication. It is too easy simply to advocate the middle way, to hope for an eventual mixture of Western and Confucian values. The experiences of men like O’Neill would suggest that the two simply do not mix and that to impose Western material values on societies, on human beings, that have become adjusted over generations to wholly different sets of values, is to court danger. The clinical cases that O’Neill and his fellow doctors see in the hospitals and clinics in Kwangju are, they say, the tiniest indications of a deeper malaise, a sickness deeply rooted in a society that is perhaps rather more unhappy within itself than it might at first appear.

  On my final day in Kwangju one of the doctors who was making a house call dropped me at the front gates of the American air force base that lies eight miles west of town. I had left messages at the U.S. military headquarters in Seoul, saying that I might well pitch up at one of the bases along the route, and before I reached the big one, the huge fighter base at Kunsan, I wanted to make sure the system worked. So I coughed politely in front of an enormous American Sentry, mentioned my name, and
asked whether the base enjoyed the luxury of a full-time information officer, and if so, whether he could see me. The sentry’s face creased into a broad smile.

  ‘Hey, man, you must be the Limey who’s walking here? Good to see you. Hey, Brad, look at this fucker!—oh! begging your pardon, sir—he’s the guy I was telling you about. Walking all the way to the north. Isn’t that right?’

  The system did indeed work, and very well. One phone call, two signatures, and five minutes later a Chevrolet pickup had arrived, and I was in the hands of one First Lieutenant Mitchell Norton from Tennessee, inspecting what turned out to be ‘the biggest store of war reserve matériel in the whole of the ‘Pacific Ocean’. ‘Think of it as one great military version of Sears,’ he said. ‘Everything is here, ready to be delivered, ready to go.’

  He handed me a leaflet: Welcome to the 6171st Air Base Squadron, Kwang Ju, Republic of Korea. ‘Read it while we drive. It’ll save you asking a lot of damn fool questions.’

  The world according to the United States Air Force was a rather different place from the one I had come to know with O’Neill and his friends: ‘Welcome to Korea, “Land of Morning Calm”, and to Kwang Ju Air Base. The base is located about eight miles southwest of Kwang Ju city—a bustling and rapidly growing metropolis, it is known in Korea as Education City. The name Kwang Ju translates to “bright valley”…the village of Yong Bo Ri is located outside the gate and has a population of 1,800. The village consists mainly of stores, teahouses and other entertainments catering to American servicemen.’ Or brothels, as they are known elsewhere.

  The military men were still enjoying their Team Spirit exercise when I arrived at the base, and this normally peaceful out-station of American might (it is officially listed as a contingency base, kept on permanent standby in case of war) was busy and very noisy. The runway (which is also shared by the civil airport: passengers arriving on Korean Air Lines planes are ordered to pull down their blinds so that they can’t see anything) was crowded with jostling little fighters bidding for take-off. I was surprised to see how frail and insectlike these fighters were. They were F-15s, state-of-the-art, high-technology, huge firepower, all-weather wonders, and they had come here to Korea from the Kadena base on Okinawa. They might pack mighty muscles, but from beside the flight line they had delicacy and grace about them, as though a hefty gust of wind would blow them away and send them tumbling over the grass.

  Each few seconds a pair would take off, their jet engines screaming, gobbets of fire trailing from their tails. And every ten minutes or so a huge transport plane would follow, its propellers chewing hungrily at the air, its body swaying back and forth on its springs, until it reached enough speed to haul itself up into the air. A vast C-5 Starlifter took off, too—it eased its way painfully slowly along the runway until, at what looked like walking pace, and just as I was convinced it would plough into the chain-link fences at the edge, it just managed to get itself off the ground and staggered slowly above the hedges and the perimeter trees. Not until it was a good mile clear and felt itself freed from the gluey magnetism of home base did it start to arc into the sky, and then it diminished quickly to a dot in the blue, heading east for home with two hundred men and scores of tons of their gear.

  There was one curiosity at Kwang Ju, brought in by a Starlifter the week before. The 354th Tactical Field Hospital—motto: Mercy. Readiness. Honor—had come in a few dozen wooden crates all the way from Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Now, unpacked, it stood in a compound a hundred yards from the fighter flight line—a half-dozen khaki tents with treatment rooms, a dentist’s chair and drills, a drugstore, a physiotherapy unit, a collapsible operating theatre in which two operations could be performed in tandem, and a couple of armoured ambulances. ‘What you see before you, sir, is the finest example of mobile medical technology anywhere in the free world,’ said Captain Randy Hartley. He was standing beside a crudely lettered signboard, of the type much loved by Americans abroad, that indicated the mileage to the nodal points in the outside world. Myrtle Beach was at the top of the list; then Fayetteville, San Francisco, Honolulu and the DMZ. ‘We need that there,’ said Captain Hartley, ‘to give our boys a handle on where they are, how far we are from home.’

  He took me around the tents, showed me the operating theatre, the anaesthetic bottles, and the cases of scalpels. ‘Basically we can see our first patients thirty minutes after we hit the dirt. In battle our gear comes down on ’chutes, and we’ve tried it. We can have the first tents up in half an hour, we can do a fairly standard operation in ninety minutes. The whole hospital is fully operational in six hours.’

  And then he took me into the ward. It was empty, except for one sleeping airman who had come all the way from Oklahoma and had then tried to pick up a bomb and strained his back. There was one nurse in charge of him, a handsome blonde woman named Rose Layman, a lieutenant from California. She grinned as I was introduced. ‘Winchester? You don’ say. Then call me Hoolihan. Hot Lips Hoolihan!’ and everybody in the tent laughed. The Okie in bed wasn’t asleep either, and he turned over and yelled ‘“M*A*S*H”—I don’t believe it! Is this “Candid Camera”, or what?’ And of course, everything was there, right from television. Korea. A mobile hospital (though this was air force, Hawkeye’s was army). A blonde chief nurse. And a dude with a funny voice, hardly any hair, name of Winchester. It all seemed too good to be true, and Lieutenant Norton insisted on taking me for a drink to celebrate. ‘Hey, guys, this Limey’s called Winchester. Stars in “M*A*S*H”. Buy him a beer!’

  It was with some difficulty that I escaped a couple of hours later. But a young officer rescued me and put me into his jeep and drove me back into town. He had a sticker on his back bumper that identified him as belonging to an ordnance company. There was a drawing of an almighty explosion and in fluorescent yellow lettering the motto: We Leave Smoking Holes.

  The following morning I went across to see the last of the Irish priests whose name had been given to me on Cheju Island: Con Cleary, a chubby man in his late forties who lived in a tiny parish about five miles out of the city. He, like the rest, had been in Korea for most of his life, though after the Kwangju incident, which he saw and remembers with graphic detail, he went back to Ireland, shocked and horrified. ‘I had to go home, to work things out, to think about what I had seen, what it meant. For those of us who were there that week, it was unforgettably awful.’

  His cook made me lunch, and then we examined the maps, and then Con took me in his rusty old car to the road junction about a mile from home, away from the congestion of his parish. It was a little after two on a boiling hot afternoon. I was over the mountains now, on the northern side, and the only evidence of the city of Kwangju was a vague streak of pollution that seeped out along the valley towards the river. I would probably never go back again, but I would remember the place always. It was a city that had staged an event that Con Cleary, and all his friends, and half Kwangju, and half Korea, and half the world remembers—an event that, as Con had said, had been unforgettably awful—an event that had changed Korea forever.

  And then, with my pack on my back, my stick in my hand, and the unfamiliar tightness of my boots back on my feet again, I stepped out for the north. The map told me to proceed for a mile or two along beside the river. I was in a meadow strewn with wild cosmos flowers and the first daffodils of spring. Ahead, some twenty miles off, a vague blue line on the far horizon, were the Naejang Mountains. I glanced at my watch and quickened my pace: 120 paces a minute, 3.6 miles an hour, an unvarying pace I had managed to sustain all these miles so far. I had to hurry, for I had a dinner appointment in the foothills—a dinner appointment with a Buddhist monk.

  5. A Time for Meditation

  The Religious Men offer Perfumes before an Idol twice a Day, and on Festivals; all the Religious of a House make a Noise with Drums, Basons and Kettles. The Monasteries and Temples, which the Kingdom swarms with, are for the most part on the Mountains, each under the liberty of some Town. There are Mo
nasteries of 5 or 600 Religious Men, and at least 4,000 of them within the Liberties of some Towns. They are divided into Companies of 10, 20 and sometimes 30, and the eldest Governs, and if any one does not do his Duty, he may cause the others to punish him with 20 or 30 Strokes on the Buttocks. It being lawful for any Man to become a Religious, all the Country of Corea is full of them…

  Hendrick Hamel, 1668

  His name was Haedarng, he was something of a Shakespearean scholar, and I had met him a fortnight before near the summit of Halla-san. He passed me, coming down the hillside with a pair of companions. He was large, verging on the corpulent, though his figure was somewhat disguised by his grey, buttonless robes of a Chogye Buddhist monk. His head was perfectly shaven. ‘A very good afternoon, sir!’ he shouted as he strode past. His English was perfect, almost unaccented. I replied. He stopped. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. I am Haedarng, and I am a monk. Do you speak English?’

  And once he knew that not only did I speak it but that I was English, he called over his companions to shake my hand, and he kept saying, again and again, what a very great honour it was to meet me, how very wonderful it was that I had travelled all the way from my home to visit his humble country, and though he possessed nothing that I might consider suitable, he would be more than happy to offer whatever he had. After two minutes of this he stood back, breathing hard and sweating a little. I expressed my gratitude, and told him that I might in fact see him later on, and told him of my plan. He was ecstatic. ‘You really must come, dear sir. I live in a house that is terribly humble, terribly humble. But it is on your way, in the mountains between Kwangju and Chonju. Please, sir, please do me the honour of coming to see my humble home. I will tell you about my Shakespeare project, you would be very interested. I would try to give you a wonderful time. You must promise that you will come.’