Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  I had fifteen minutes to wait. I knew that well. Once a month, shortly after lunch, the Seoul government stages a civil defence drill; the sirens blow, the police fan out, and everyone must take to shelter. The roads must be clear, too—no traffic other than police cars and emergency trucks is allowed to run. Anyone caught driving or walking on the streets is fined stiffly. Korea intends to have as many of its civilians as possible left living should the Communists invade again: too many were killed in June 1950, when the Northerners tried it for the first time. So the Southerners practise ways of improving their fate.

  The seconds ticked past interminably. My civilly defended colleagues smiled nervously at me, and a mother looked embarrassed as her child, spotting me, fled behind her skirts. There was a girl wearing a T-shirt bearing one of those meaningless, half-formed sentences that have become almost an art form across in Japan. Hers said: ‘Westwood. We will be just like standing over. 1955.’ She smiled and told me she was a student at Seoul National University.

  ‘Civil defence is the government’s way of keeping the people nervous,’ she declared, assuming, probably correctly, that she and I were the only English-speakers among the shop’s captive clientele.

  ‘But what if the North attacks?’ I said. ‘Better to survive, isn’t it?’

  ‘They won’t attack. They don’t have to. They’re more clever than that. Our only enemies here are the Americans.’

  I said I thought she was being a little unfair. Didn’t she remember the sacrifices the Americans had made for Korea during the Civil War? ‘It was a civil war. They should have kept out.’

  But the all-clear sirens began to wail just then, and she waved cheerfully and took off for class. The others in the shop had vanished too, leaving me standing among the avalanches of Reeboks and Adidas and Nikes, and the manager was coming to ask if I wanted to buy…

  An hour later, after I had passed the undamaged magnificence of the Oriental Brewery Company—brewers of O.B. beer, the better of the two local brands of maekju—I was at the river Han. My first sighting of what, for me, was supposedly a landmark of some moment, was of a less than impressive trickle, the southern nullah that separates Yoido Island from the shore. But Yoido itself is an impressive sight, though of a rather bloodless kind, and in no way redolent of Korea: it is all office blocks and government headquarters—IBM on one side of the road, the Korean Broadcasting System on the other—and the eastern tip of the island is dominated by the enormous gold-tinted skyscraper of the Daehan Insurance Company—at the time of writing the tallest office block in Northeast Asia but soon to be outdone by the new Bank of China building in Hong Kong. (And already out-skyscraped by the Raffles Towers in Singapore—some comfort being taken in Korea by the fact that it was built by their very own Ssanyong Construction Company.)

  But perhaps Yoido is best known for its mighty plaza, a lone and level plain of hard asphalt and stone a good mile long and half a mile wide—the kind of place that all totalitarian states (and many others besides) seem to have at their disposal for laying on the most impressive demonstrations of national unity and power. This is where Armed Forces Day is celebrated each October; it is where the Pope offered mass and where the Korean masses came out to vent their anger at the shooting down of their airliner over Sakhalin in 1983. Today I was almost alone and felt mightily insignificant as I traced my way along the patterns of white lines that showed where the tank commanders should place their tracks or where the armies of schoolchildren should set their slippered feet and begin their routines of patriotic dance.

  At the far end of the plaza was the main stream—the Han River, mightiest in all Korea, a rival to the Yalu and the Kum and the Imjin. It was an impressive river, a real city river, with tall buildings on each side and a feisty flow against the buttresses far below me. But the impression that the Han might give, of power and strength and great utility, is a false one. Politics have made the Han a sad sort of stream, a river that is pointless at one end and now supposedly very dangerous at the other.

  The dangerous end is a long way upstream, where the North Koreans (from whose territory the river’s northern branch flows) have lately said they plan to build a dam. The inference taken by the ever-suspicious Southerners is that the dam would then become a highly potent weapon in the hands of the manic Northerners. At a word from Kim II Sung or one of his deranged generals (this, I hasten to say, is how the Southerners see things, and they are almost alone in so doing), their dam could be blown up, a wall of water would course down the north fork of the Han, smashing through towns like Hwachon and Chunchon, demolishing the small dams that have already been built there by the South Koreans, and running straight to the capital, inundating and destroying factories, railway lines, houses. It would be a masterstroke, a military coup de main, an attack that could not be repulsed and that could, moreover, be classified by the attackers as a terrible accident. We’ve destroyed your capital? How perfectly frightful. Do let us lend you ours.

  Perhaps the danger is overstated: the South Koreans do have perfervid imaginations when they consider their brothers north of the line (though perhaps not surprisingly: North Korean attacks—like the infamous bomb in Rangoon that wiped out half the Southern cabinet—have tended to be furious and bizarre), and it may well be that Pyongyang just wants the extra electricity. In any case the South Koreans are talking about building a big new dam themselves to catch the northern waters, should they ever come on down.

  The other end of the Han is perhaps not so dangerous, but, like the seaward end of the Colorado River (which is bone dry), is somewhat lacking in point. This has nothing to do with topography, however. A quick look at a good map will display the worthlessness of the river. (A good map only: most South Korean maps of this region are quite hopeless because they refuse to admit the existence of a division between North and South Korea. Technically, of course, they are right—the division is merely an armistice line, not a border or a frontier, and neither side regards it as anything other than a temporary holding point, the equivalent of a start line in battle. This can cause the innocent traveller some problems: the map most tourists use shows, for example, the province of Kyonggi-do extending quite uninterruptedly from Pyongtaek in the South to Kaesong in the North. True, there are not too many roads shown around Kaesong, and if you look carefully it is possible to see that all the northbound railways and roads end rather suddenly and without explanation. But Route I continues all the way, and one might suppose that it is possible to take the car for a picnic up at the old Koryo capital. The car would be utterly destroyed, and all its occupants, before they had managed to get within ten miles of Kaesong, for the city lies well within North Korea, despite the unwillingness of the South’s official cartographers to recognize the fact.)

  Anyway, armed with a good map, it is possible to see the reason for the pointlessness of the Han. A boat heading downstream can proceed with blithe unconcern for about twenty miles. After that patrol ships will stop it, minefields will blow it out of the water, machine guns will rake it from stem to stern. The seaward end of the Han may enjoy flowing water and tides, but there is a thin red line across the river mouth that shows where the southern border of the Demilitarized Zone runs through. The Demarcation Line runs in midstream, where the Han meets the Imjin, and on the far bank are the northern border of the DMZ and the guardposts of the People’s Democratic Republic. Any Southern boat foolish enough to wander into such waters would be sunk or evaporated within seconds. The effect of this reality—the thin red line the better maps show crossing the mouth of the Han—is to stop the river to navigation as effectively as a cork or as the kind of chain barrage the Chinese once put across the Pearl River near Canton, or the Orangemen across the Foyle at Londonderry.

  Seoul, in other words, can receive no ocean-going ships—no ships at all, in fact. The only craft you see on the capital’s broad reaches are lighters carrying hay or sleek motorcruisers carrying tourists along the most pointless—headless, tailless—of river
s in Asia. The cargoes come and go via Inchon, twenty miles to the west.

  It was 26 June 1654 when Hendrick Hamel and his crew crossed the river ‘as wide as the Maese is at Dordrecht’ after ‘lying many Days at several Places’, and they proceeded straight to see the king:

  …we humbly beseech’d his Majesty, that since we had lost our Ship in the Storm, he would be pleas’d to send us over to Japan, that with the assistance of the Dutch there, we might one Day return to our Country to enjoy the Company of our Wives, Children and Friends. The King told us it was not the Custom of Corea to suffer strangers to depart the Kingdom; that we must resolve to end our Days in his Dominions, and he would provide us with all Necessaries. Then he order’d us to do such things before him as were best skill’d in, as Singing, Dancing and Leaping after our manner…

  But I decided—there being no current king before whom I might Leap after my particular manner—to have a haircut instead.

  A Seoul haircut, it has to be stressed, is a very different animal from its namesake out in the ruder world: it is more a Korean institution than a mere trim, and it has little enough to do with hair. Any man who feels tired or a little jaded, who requires his spirits lifted or his psyche toned to perfection, visits a barbershop. In any case I, long before this moment, had promised myself that as a reward for getting the three hundred-odd miles from Cheju to the Han River I would enjoy a few moments before the altar of hedonism before pressing on for the final miles up to the borderline. So, once I had entered the city proper—the city walls were knocked down fifty years ago, but five of the nine great gates are still there, and I counted myself as being in Seoul city once Namdae-mun, the huge south gate (National Treasure Number 1) was safely behind me—I scanned the streets for the rotating red-white-and-blue electronic ‘poles’ that indicate the existence of a barbershop.

  There were scores from which to choose, even though I had deliberately kept away from Itaewon, the American forces’ lubricious playground, where the prices would be higher and the delicacy of the operation lessened by its frequency. The ibalso, for the Korean man, is a port of refuge, an oasis for Confucian pleasure-seeking, a place to forget the trials and travails of this unnervingly fast-changing country. The Korean barbershop is perhaps the best example of the subtle infiltration of true pleasure into a society that appears on the surface to be strict and unyielding in its approach to Work and Duty and the Love of State. The Japanese, we all know, blow off steam, but they do so in an exaggerated, slightly repellent, and often atavistic way, a way that is a fascinating and spectacular phenomenon, incredible to many Westerners, the subject of many recent books. But the Korean, when he attempts to win release from the tensions of his life, often does so in what has always seemed to me to be a more truly civilized manner: he reminds me of the old Confucian gentleman who, pipe in hand and book at elbow, ruminates idly on the contentment that is possible in life without the frenetic pursuit of pleasure, Nippon-style.

  Thus the ibalso, and the one I had chosen was a type specimen of the breed. The room was divided into three curtained enclosures, inside each one of which was a barber’s chair, a basin and an assortment of unfamiliar machines. I was greeted by a young man in a blue jacket, and from benches behind him four young women, all in identical short white dresses, stood to appraise their customer. I undid my pack, took off my angler’s jacket, and replaced my New Balance boots with slippers that were very nearly as comfortable—perhaps more so. There was the usual giggling—palms placed beguilingly over mouths—before I was ushered to the chair, and the young man proceeded to snip away at what little hair remained on my sunburned head. He worked silently for no more than ten minutes and then stood aside to let me see in the mirror that he had taken enough away (and not too much: that might mean it could be a full fortnight before I needed to return); then he vanished behind the curtain, the better to let the real business of the ibalso begin.

  The girls came into the cubicle and closed the curtains securely behind them. The chair tipped back until I was horizontal. One girl—how pretty they were, prim and virginal, and deliberately chosen for this reason—took the slippers from my feet, drew off my socks, and lifted my legs up onto a cushion she had placed at the edge of the basin. At the same time her colleague had drawn up a stool beside me and had sat down and placed my hand in her lap.

  The third girl—who introduced herself in English as ‘Sue, your razor maid’—started to apply cool shaving foam to my face and stropped a pair of tiny-bladed razors. The last girl fiddled with the tall, cranelike device that I had earlier failed to recognize. It now emitted puffs of steam, and the girl directed its broad nozzle close to my right cheek, and a jet of hot damp breath riffled pleasantly against my skin.

  All four then began to work in concert. The foot girl started to wash my toes one by one with warm water; the manicurist, burying my hand in her lap, started to wet and trim the nails; and Sue started to nick, hair by individual hair, the stubble from my skin. Her friend directed the jet, Sue applied the foam, and—snip! scrape! snip!—away went another few blades of hair. She began with my cheek, moved on to my forehead, went with infinite care and patience down to my neck; inch by inch, every follicle was probed, and any lurking hair was cut off at the stem with an edge of perfect sharpness.

  Meanwhile the foot girl had dried my toes and was now, my heel between her soft thighs, trimming the nails. From time to time she tutted; when she found one nail in a particularly battered condition, I tried to explain that I had walked, and she seemed to understand but could not comprehend why I had not, in that case, visited a barbershop every night of my journey and had a girl such as her attend to my needs so that I never reached this stage. ‘Naughty man,’ she cooed.

  All this cutting and polishing and repairing—hair, nails, tiny long-forgotten pieces of skin—went on for about forty minutes, during which time the girls either talked softly to one another or said things to me—I had not the foggiest idea what—and then giggled. It was all very pleasant. Sue’s friend had by now smeared some aromatic compound all over my face, and it had dried hard, so that it felt as though I had on a rubber face mask. It was difficult to smile, and one of the girls tickled me to make me laugh, deliberately to cause whatever was on my face to crack, which it did, with a small, explosive click.

  Then Sue leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘An-ma?’ and I nodded. Massage time. One girl to each leg, one girl to each arm, they kneaded and pummelled and stretched me, at one moment causing intensely pleasurable pain with finger-pressure massage, at another levering back my joints to the very limits of orthopaedic endurance. As I lay there, one girl—she had now introduced herself as being called Kyung-ah—sat beside me and asked me to drape my arm around her back while she did something to my rib cage. She giggled as my arm encircled her. ‘Tighter!’ she said, and squealed with delight as I rubbed her waist. One of the other girls then clambered completely on top of me and began to probe the deeper recesses of my stomach muscles and my chest, while I gazed happily down the front of her dress, and she saw me and arranged herself so that even more was visible. ‘Seventh heaven, yes?’ she asked, and smiled. I loved her.

  All this went on for an hour, until one of the girls broke off and decided she had forgotten my face; she ripped off the opalescent mask and began to pluck at my cheeks with her tiny fingers, like a violinist, pizzicato. She inserted a tiny bamboo whisk into my ears and twirled it until its amplified scratches sounded like a hammer on a drum. She kneaded my nose and squeezed my neck. And all the while her companions were applying their skills to ankles, ribs, wrists, back—until that small, exquisite finale when my fingers were clicked back until the joints sang out, and I felt the catlike sensation of fingernails running along my palms and the delicate breath of the girl blowing on them to tell me that her duties were now officially over. A cup of tea appeared. The girls disappeared. I dozed pleasantly until there was a slight cough from behind, and it was suggested that I might like to hand over just 8,000 won
, £7. I had been in the chair—which was now tipped discouragingly vertical again—for two hours. It was quite dark outside, and I felt that I had been in heaven.

  I had dinner that night with friends—the most English of food, served with impeccable calm by an elderly Shanghainese who had lived in Korea since 1949 and now stayed in the small Chinese community that clusters around the Taiwanese Embassy. The Chinese, indeed, are the only real minority living in Korea; this is a society of almost total ethnic purity, with none of the racial minorities of Japan, no gypsies, no untouchables and outcasts other than the poor foreigners—those who are known collectively as sangnom and are to be treated politely but without any need to waste any Korean emotional energy. The sangnom are unpersons, and few enough Koreans fall into this category. The Chinese would, for even if they are born here, they are not Koreans, and the Koreans do not mix with them, nor do they mix with the sons and daughters of Choson.

  The ethnic integrity of Korean society can at times be a frightening phenomenon and is one of the reasons for the power and energy of the miraculous economic performance the nation has displayed in the last twenty years. The whole country, on certain topics, thinks perfectly alike; the whole country, when urged in certain directions, can be an unstoppable giant, everyone working in concert, no disagreement, all with the same degree of comprehension and sympathy.

  The thirty-five Dutch sailors had little enough to say about the Royal Palace; they were embarrassed, it seems, by the attention they were receiving from a citizenry who fully believed them to look like exotic sea monsters, kraken, or blond-haired serpents. Hendrick Hamel noted that the local people thought that when these strangers drank, they had to tuck their noses behind their ears, and such huge crowds gathered outside their house that the militia had to issue a regulation that forbade such gatherings.