Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  I said I wasn’t exactly sure I approved. I had been quite depressed by the sight of enormous piles of junk food in the village shops—marshmallows and Popsicles, Smarties and potato chips—where once there had been racks of vegetables and fruit and meat and bags of different kinds of rice. ‘Chosen the wrong target there, old boy,’ he said. ‘Digestives are very good for you. Full of roughage, you know. Keep you regular. Good for Koreans, good for everyone. Now, some of the stuff they make—well, I wouldn’t eat it all myself. But if that’s what they want, that’s what they want. Sign of the times, I’m afraid. They get richer, they want what we have. And we’re in the business of giving it to them—stands to reason.’

  I muttered darkly about dietary imperialism, but the remark was immediately lost because a new couple had come into the restaurant and greeted the biscuit man warmly. Then, ‘Jules Black,’ announced the man, thrusting his hand into mine. ‘San Francisco. My wife, Gita. Junk jewellery business is our line. Lots of outlets in the Bay area. You?’

  He was a small, birdlike man, almost lost under the shoulders of the large check jacket he wore. His wife was huge—a bold blonde woman with a Central European accent, with glasses dangling around her neck on a jewelled rope, and tight white trousers. ‘A writer?’ she said. ‘Never met one before. Must be real interesting.’ The accent was Europe but the idiom was purest California. But they didn’t find writing at all interesting, really, and turned back to Trevor. ‘Tell us about this machine of yours. Did I hear you right? Gita and I were talking about it in the room. You said it’s two hundred yards long? One machine? How’n heck do you get it here?’

  And so Trevor tried to explain the mechanics of biscuit making while Jules looked at his watch and Gita played with her bangles. It must have been the kind of conversation repeated a thousand times a day between salesmen and dealers who fetch up in remote Ramada Inns and late-night airport cocktail lounges, neither party really listening, no one really interested—a sort of vaguely social Muzak turned on to keep away the unbearable silence. Maybe some of the facts would stick. ‘Remember that guy we met in Korea?’ Jules might say at a jewellers’ convention, prompted perhaps by the sight of a Ritz cracker under his canapé. ‘Biscuits like this come out of a machine as long as two football fields. That’s what he said. Damn sure he did.’ And Gita would nod in confirmation, and the topic would promptly switch to something else. ‘See the game last night?’

  The Blacks didn’t like Korea. ‘The cities are damned dirty places, everyone’s out to cheat you. Junk jewellery—well, that’s what we call it; it’s the less expensive stuff, you know—it’s a very fast-moving business. Lots of competition, lots of cheating, lots of shady dealers. You have to be on your toes. But we found a guy here—or rather Trevor found him for us—who’s real honest and nice. We’ve bought some stuff from him. Price pretty good too.’ Trevor winked at me.

  We all went out to dinner in a local Chinese restaurant. ‘Can’t take Korean food,’ said Jules. ‘So goddamn spicy, makes me nauseous. Know what I mean?’ Mr Kim from the Far East Gems Corporation—Trevor’s friend, the man with whom the Blacks were now doing business—turned up with his wife. ‘How’d you know we was here?’ asked Jules. ‘I just asked people in the street, Did you see some foreigners go past? It took about a minute to find where you were. You’re probably the only whites in town.’

  Mr Kim was a slick, snappily dressed, fast-talking man with an American accent and enormous bags under his eyes. His wife said little but smiled winsomely and said she understood all that was being said. ‘My English is very poor,’ she said. ‘She’s shy, poor darling,’ said Gita. They talked stones—not diamonds or rubies or emeralds but their country cousins, amethysts and white zircons and blue topaz, and mysteriously named artifices like kunzite and xanthite that are apparently popular with the resort set.

  They swapped stories of disasters. ‘Gal we know came out from San Diego,’ said Gita. ‘Husband had died, left her the business. She was going shopping for stock in Taiwan—Korea’s big competition, isn’t it, Mr Kim? Anyways, we met her in Taipei in the hotel, saw her going off with some Chinese dude. Next morning she was very chipper. She had done this really good deal, she said. Paid him sixty thousand bucks in cash—all her money. He would deliver the stuff later that morning. Well, of course he never did. He just skipped town. She was in terrible shape. We did our best to comfort the sucker, but what can you do? There’s one born every minute, isn’t there, especially in this business?’

  Trevor took me to the hotel bar after dinner. It was an astonishingly noisy place, full of drunken businessmen who were being lured onto the stage to sing to their colleagues, who all cheered and threw things about. We sat at the back, at a deserted counter manned by a pretty girl of about eighteen. ‘Anna,’ said Trevor with some pride. ‘My little darling,’ and he reached around her waist and kissed the girl on the cheek. Anna smiled sheepishly at me and shook my hand.

  We tried to make conversation, Anna listening politely and pouring our beers, and replenishing the seaweed squares on the anju plate. I mentioned that I very much liked to eat the seaweed as I walked along, whereupon she reached under the bar and, making sure no one was looking, gave me half a dozen packets of the stuff and told me to put them in my pocket. At the going rate her gift was worth, I reckoned, about thirty dollars. ‘Bloody expensive, drinking in this country,’ said Trevor. ‘I can get through three hundred dollars in a night, easy. Hostesses are a bloody fortune. I get good pay installing these machines. But I end up my stay here in debt. Always the same. Have a good time, though, I’ll say.

  ‘So good, these Korean girls,’ he remarked later, after he had told Anna to meet him when she got off work at about 3.00 a.m. ‘She’s a treasure. I’ll be sorry to leave her. She really likes me. Virgins—they’re the ones. Mind you, it takes a good few weeks of hard work and patience to persuade a virgin to come across. But it’s good. Damned good.’ And afterwards? ‘Oh, well, Simon, ç’est la vie, I suppose.’ I said I thought Koreans set great store by virginity, and that a girl who had lost hers might well not be easily marriageable. ‘Pshaw,’ Trevor snorted. ‘Don’t believe all you hear. ’Course they can get married. They may not get first pickings. But there’s always someone around who’s ready to take shop-soiled goods. No—if they knew they couldn’t get married, there’s no way they’d go with me in the first place, is there? Stands to reason.’

  He took me to the factory the next morning. Mr Lee, Manager of the Tong Yang Confectionary Company’s Orion Number Two plant, sat proudly in his vast office, surrounded by samples of his company’s products—packets of brown lumps called Chocopies, Coconut Cookies, Animal Crackers, and Digestives. He offered tea—‘and I hope you will have some fresh Digestible Biscuits.’ ‘Digestives,’ corrected Trevor. ‘Ah yes, thank you, Mr Jones, digestibles. Very good. Very crunchy. Very good for health.’

  The plant was clean and modern, and because of all the cooking, very hot. Trucks filled with flour—milled in Korea from Canadian red winter wheat, said Mr Lee—were backed into the loading bays, as were tanker trucks, from which, via great silver tubes, life-giving liquid sugars and hydrogenated fats and oils were being sucked into the ever-hungry factory. Inside hundreds of young girls all in identical white uniforms presided over the baking machines which, with their lighted inspection windows, looked like skyscrapers that had toppled over sideways.

  I thought the girls working as quality controllers on the Animal Crackers line had the most difficult job. As the rows of freshly baked beasts shot past them, so they had to pick out the deformities and the stillbirths—elephants sans trunks, neckless giraffes, pigs that had failed to inflate or had holes in their snouts. They were paid 120,000 won a month for their services—£28 for a forty-eight-hour week.

  Mr Lee was very much a company man, proud of Tong Yang and his association with it. ‘We are much more than digestible biscuits,’ he said. ‘Read what our chairman says.’ And he gave me a copy of the latest ann
ual report, in which the extremely corpulent (and ‘sadly, rather unwell’) chairman, Mr Yang Koo Lee, explained the basis of his firm’s fortunes.

  ‘I am convinced that the real meaning of this enterprise’s existence, as well as the entrepreneur’s assigned mission,’ he wrote, ‘is to see to it that the happiness, prosperity and peace of the society wherein the enterprise inhabits bear fruit, by making the best use of its functions as creation and harmony, characteristics of the very organic body as enterprise.

  ‘In this regard I am proud of having played a part in solving the immediate problems of eating and sleeping among those of the food, clothing and shelter, most basic desires of human beings, through the cement and food manufacturing industries which are the Tong Yang Group’s basic business areas.’

  Mr Lee’s enterprise, the report summarized, makes Portland cement, clinker, gas stoves, tumble driers, Chocopies, road-paving machines, large ventilating fans, fried glutinous rice cakes, chocolate bars, cuttlefish-shaped peanut snacks, and Digestive Biscuits.

  The Far East Gems Corporation was, by contrast, a grubby, insalubrious place—a sweatshop of the old school, where three hundred cutters were crammed together in ill-lit, unventilated rooms, working nine hours a day slicing and polishing stones for Mr Kim. The great man sat in his air-conditioned office, computers blinking, reading telexes or taking telephone calls from dealers and buyers all over the world. ‘They come to us because we’re the best,’ he declared as he put down the phone. ‘Sure, it’s Antwerp for diamonds, and Israel too. But we’re talking about rougher stuff than that. We don’t touch diamonds. Germany, Hong Kong, and Bangkok, they’re pretty good in this market—the Thais pay much lower wages than we do, so they’re big competition. But we’re just better at it—best cutters in the world. Don’t know why. They’ve just got an eye for it here, I guess.’

  He employed large numbers of students from the local university. ‘They need the money, they’ve got good eyesight, they’re quick. They’re not about to complain about the conditions. They can make up to eighty bucks a week if they’re good. And some of them are very good.’

  Before going into the cutting business Mr Kim owned a small business making whale-muscle tennis racket strings for Kawasaki. He started cutting stones in 1979, with seven employees. At the end of his first year he had thirty employees and a turnover of £400,000. In 1986 there were three hundred workers, and he did £2.7 million worth of trade. ‘Profitable business—took my wife off to Hawaii on holiday last year. Couldn’t do that on tennis racket strings, could I? Hey—your watch looks scratched. Let’s give it a shine.’ And an aide, clearly accustomed to such little courtesies, removed the watch from my wrist with a prestidigitator’s skill. It was returned two minutes later. ‘Plastic, not glass, I’m afraid,’ said the aide with a contemptuous glare. ‘Not possible to shine.’

  Trevor and his driver gave me a lift out of town on the Kunsan road next morning. ‘Never been to Kunsan base,’ said Trevor. ‘I have this strong feeling that when in Rome, do as the Romans do. And they’d stay away from the Yanks.’ They dropped me on a straight road that was lined with thousands of flowering cherry trees. Across the road from us the driver of an immense container truck had stopped and was standing up on his doorstep, cutting some blossom to take home. A line of cars had drawn up behind the truck, but no one honked at him, the drivers evidently supposing that what he was doing was well worth stopping for, and they were only sorry they didn’t have the height to do the same.

  It seemed a very, very long way to the Kunsan base. It was very hot and humid. The maps totally ignored the existence of the installation—not even the large-scale chart had an indication of runways or taxiways. Someone back in Mokpo had claimed to have known where it was, and had drawn a circle in pen marked on the northern tip of the Kunsan peninsula, and had marked it ‘Air-base’. I always hid that map when talking to Koreans in authority, assuming that the more alert of them would rush off and dial 112 or 113. In any case, the self-styled geographer was wrong, for when I tried to walk to this projection I found the road running out into a mess of sand and shingle and the backyards of old factories and storage yards.

  Another man directed me to the centre of Kunsan City and walked with me for a mile until I protested, saying that there were surely too many houses for there to be a base nearby. ‘No, we go bus station,’ he said brightly, whereupon I struck my leg forcefully, told him I was walking, not taking the bus, and turned on my heel. ‘Wait,’ he called out. ‘Long way. Must go by bus. Too far.’

  I wished I had listened. The road, straight, narrow, streaming with murderous traffic, went onward and ever onward. Plenty of American cars and dollar-only taxis went by; I was passed by the bus that came down every day from the big air base at Osan; a caravan of sleek silver buses bearing the insignia ‘8 TFW—Wolfpack’ zoomed past—the base football team and their fans, coming home from a game. And each time I thought that the base must be just over that rise, or behind those trees. But it never was. I walked across the top of a pair of dams that held back an enormous lake; fishermen were stringing up their nets for the evening. I passed a village with an entrance arch that said ‘Welcome to Silver Town’, and into which a few of the American cars were turning. But still the road kept on unrolling, and darkness was starting to fall, and my feet were getting sore.

  Finally, a glimmer of lights in the distance, and a water tower—the surest sign, given the American penchant for the purest of waters, of an American installation. The tower had a revolving searchlight mounted on top, and the beam swept across the road before me. It was quite dark when I finally reached the gate—a copy of a temple gateway, with a greeting in both English and Korean, and in place of the guardian kings, four American sentries, two carrying automatic rifles, the other two with pistols.

  I followed the sign marked Visitors, and found myself in a dingy hut, with one Korean and two American guards. I set down my pack and asked for the base information officer. The guard—a corporal—thought there wasn’t one. Besides, it was too late, he’d have gone home. He was probably expecting me, I said; could he try him at home? The corporal, who clearly preferred the simple life, and waved other pass-holders through with no more than a perfunctory glance, sighed deeply and promptly announced his intention to go off duty. ‘Here, Mike, you look after this guy,’ he said to his colleague, and a much more cheerful airman, an Irishman named O’Keefe, took over the task.

  He had his trials too. No one could be found. Offices were shut, desks unmanned. Finally, after about half an hour, the phone on his desk rang, and there was a muffled conversation. He handed the phone to me. ‘Good evening, sir,’ said a voice at the other end. ‘I’m sorry to have to say this, but we don’t have any room for you here. You’ll have to go back to Kunsan City. The base is absolutely full.’

  After an entire career that seemed at times to have been spent squeezing and cajoling and greasing and bribing my way into and onto things—planes, theatres, ferryboats—that claimed to be full, overbooked, closed, finished for the season or sunk, I was not to be put off that easily. Besides, it must be at least eight miles back to Kunsan, it was dark, I was completely shagged out, and there might not be a hotel to be found there either. So I asked the disembodied voice—Lieutenant Joe LaMarca, public affairs—if he had any idea I was coming. ‘We certainly did, sir. But we thought it would be next week. And anyway, I’m in the middle of softball practice. I really can’t help. Why not call us tomorrow morning?’

  He was just about to hang up and go back to his mound or his diamond or wherever, when I decided to play my only ace. I decided to lie. ‘But look, Lieutenant, I really don’t want to disturb your game, and I’m in no hurry, really, so I can wait around here as long as you like, you take your time, but you know I wouldn’t have come here—walking all the way, that is—if I hadn’t been assured personally that there would be an accommodation waiting for me here.’

  ‘You were told there would be room for you?’ said the l
ieutenant. ‘Who told you?’ I spluttered something about U.S. Forces Headquarters in Yongsan—the camp in central Seoul where the commanding general has his office. He paused, then—in one of those magical moments, as when the reservations clerk finds your name on the computer or the final passenger fails to show up on time—he took the bait. ‘Well, you just better come in and wait. Go to Billeting. I can’t promise anything. But get yourself over there. Hand me back to the sentry. I’ll tell him to let you in.’

  There was still some more argument and what the Indian newspapers call ‘red-tapism’, before I finally showed my passport to the sentry and was ushered aboard a shuttle bus. We passed down miles of identical streets—East Ninth Street, West Fifth Street, A Avenue, C Avenue—until the driver let me off outside Building 309, a bile-green shack that looked like a unit in a country motel in Mississippi but was, in fact, Billeting.

  ‘C’mon in,’ drawled a female voice when I knocked, and when I opened the door it looked even more like a country motel in Mississippi. A tall black woman stood behind a check-in desk. She had a pencil in her mouth and a worried look on her face. Behind her, next to the charts showing which rooms were occupied and which were free, was a cooler filled with bottles of Michelob and Miller Lite; in front of the counter was an arrangement of plastic armchairs, a display case filled with tins of Spam and bottles of Coke, and an enormous Zenith television set that was showing very fuzzy pictures of a basketball match. The woman was called Staff Sergeant Nancy Morgan; she came from Covington, Virginia; she thought Korea was a ‘real neat place’ and she promised she would find me a room for the night. ‘Don’t you worry about a thang,’ she drawled. ‘I kin fit you in someplace.’ And she was as good as her word and eventually found somewhere—Bingo! she said—and made me register and asked me to pay for the night in advance. ‘Four dollars a night—pretty reasonable, huh? Of course, it means you’ll have to share.’