THE COLUMBANS
THE COLUMBANS ARE a society of missionaries, founded in Ireland in 1916, with home houses in Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the US. In recent years we have ordained quite a few Columbans from our mission territories and they are the hope of the future. Our founding vision was to work in evangelization among the Chinese, but we were forced by circumstances to branch out in East Asia and South America. In the 1920s and 1930s, we were a suspicious lot to the British authorities. Documents recently released by the British government show that British diplomats in the Far East viewed us with singular suspicion: they saw us as an organization of Sinn Feiners, bent on the destruction of British institutions. It makes amusing reading today. The last Columban priest in China was expelled in 1953. Anticipating what was coming, the society expanded into the Philippines, Burma, Japan and Korea. In the 1960s, prompted by a call from the Pope, the Columbans moved into South America.
In 1964 I came to Korea as a Columban.
Salute
At eighteen I joined the army.
At twenty-four I was commissioned.
I came to this foreign place,
which I learned to love as I love my life.
and I was rewarded with love and affection.
Eighty years have passed.
The bells of jubilee ring out.
My spirit rests under mounded grass.
For the remnant it’s time to go;
a bleak prospect, I suppose.
Weeds cover the yards of home;
pigeons nest among broken tiles.
But behind the cathedral in Ch’unch’ŏn,
on the hill in Hongch’ŏn,
in the dead fields of Seoul –
friends’ forever beds –
in Chŏlla and in Chejudo
something Christlike lives.
May it ever be so!
By any standards, the Columbans were an extraordinary group of men, especially those I call the men of old, who were mostly in their fifties or older when I got here in 1964. I look back now at these giant men, the lives they lived, the isolation and loneliness of their parishes, the Spartan conditions they endured, and I marvel at their strength. In my time in Kangwŏn Province, the most northerly part of South Korea, I never saw one of the old hands buy a new chair, or lay a new strip of carpet. Anything that was new came from younger men. In fact, the man who installed a flush toilet in his house – the first in a priest’s house in the province – was almost excommunicated by the bishop for his wilful extravagance!
There are plenty of Korean priests now and quite a few Korean Columbans. Our role in Korea has changed greatly.
The men of old are gone. I mourn their passing:
The Men of Old
Giant men, they lived giant lives
though on something less than giant scale.
Over a cocktail I’ve heard them marvel
at the old French missionaries,
the guts, the endurance, the faith.
The French lack substance to me,
but these men are real; many of them I knew,
and those I didn’t are mythically mine,
warp and woof of the Columban thing
with which I identify.
I marvel at these earthen vessels:
lovely, misshapen, bulgy presences,
each a unique firing in the master kiln.
Moulded from the first earth,
they stand in stark contrast
to our peas in a pod times.
Theirs was a harsh theology:
the flesh the enemy, the battle bitter.
Yet the harshness of the moral view
was tempered by a humanity that shone
like the finest glaze, warm, familiar, true.
Selfless, crucified men,
they were their own Heaven and Hell:
only the innocent could be so.
Monsignor McPolin, a tall, thinking, iron man, was first ruler of the roost in 1933. He taught patrology in Dalgan Park, the Columban seminary in Ireland, when I was a student. Bishop Quinlan, old tyrant, leader of the Columban advance from Chŏlla to the northern province of Kangwŏn, was wise as an owl; he was loved, feared, and admired. His priests entertained him with salmon-trout, bananas, marmalade and bus loads of flattery and fuss; I always thought a tumbler of whiskey would have done as much. Harold Henry was the flamboyant bishop of Kwangju, the southern diocese, which was the first Columban territory in Korea. He was known in Dalgan Park as the Lucky Strike bishop because he invariably had a pack in his top pocket. Not the greatest of card players, his favourite gambit was to jump to three-no-trumps, which said much about his style and personality. Brian Geraghty, a Galway man, big in heart and deed, felt that salvation would be inevitable if he got the people to sit on seats rather than on the floor. P. Dawson, with his Sŏ Chŏngju style corncrake voice and infectious laugh, was a snooker player of real quality. He was famous for shouting sandpaper defiance at his Japanese jailors: he’d wash in no Jap water, he cried.
Pat was sentenced to five years imprisonment for spying and saying inappropriate things about the emperor. Of the second charge he was undoubtedly guilty. When he got to jail, he was asked ‘Are you a bishop?’ The query sought the reason for his five-year sentence whereas his two companions, T.D. Ryan and Jerome Sweeney, got three. The simple answer was that Pat’s offensive remarks about the emperor probably rated a fifteen year sentence! Within the prison he wasn’t any different. Assigned to clean the latrines, he always did the chore to the tune of the Japanese national anthem! Pat Dawson’s real claim to fame was that he put innumerable Korean kids through school. I remember walking with him in Myŏngdong the last time he came back before he died – he was in his eighties. It took two hours to walk from the Midopa Department Store to Myŏngdong Cathedral. People ran out of every alley, fell to their knees and cried ‘Shinbunim! Shinbunim! (Father, Father!)’ tears gushing from their eyes. Daw, as we called him affectionately, was enormously embarrassed. I was humbled. I knew I was looking at a great missionary who would only be remembered by the people he had helped. Daw spoke panmal, low form, children’s language. Cardinal Kim had a story about Bishop Quinlan telling a minister of state that he’d be talking panmal because that was all he knew and for the minister not to take offence but to talk panmal in return. I never knew Bishop Quinlan use panmal to adults. I think the cardinal was mixing him up with someone else. It could have been any one of half a dozen others. Our collective language skills were not great. In a famous speech, one of our more colourful parish priests lumped together the governor of the province, the city mayor and the county chief under the generous heading of yŏrŏgaji yangban (assorted gentry)! T.D. Ryan, a laughing Buddha priest, was skilled in all the wily ways. He was noted for keeping a special section in his notebook titled ‘Words not to be remembered.’
Next, the martyrs, a special group, I know them only by repute: Tony Collier shielded his catechist from a bullet in Ch’unch’ŏn. Tony died but the catechist lived. Paddy Reilly, betrayed by his hairy arms, was shot to keep an accountant’s books straight – there weren’t supposed to be any foreigners north of Mukho, a town on the East Coast. The communists made sure Paddy didn’t disturb the bookkeeping. Jim Maginn sent a boy to get a battery for his Zenith radio in Samch’ŏk and was apprehended as a result. Frank Canavan, of Death March fame, died just before he was due to be freed. He had his final wish: Christmas dinner in heaven. Monsignor Brennan, Tom Cusack, and Jack O’Brien, were part of the holocaust inventory in Taejŏn; their remains were never found.
Bishop Quinlan, Phil Crosbie and Frank Canavan were the three Columbans on the Death March. Phil Crosbie tells the story in Three Winters Cold, and it is a gripping read. It was translated into Korean in 2004. Philip Deane, a journalist, who also experienced the Death March tells his story in I Was a Captive (1953). Deane gave a talk in Dalgan Park some years ago. He told of a day in North Korea when George Blake, the famous (or infamous) triple agent (British, Russian, and Israeli) came in from the yard where a North Korean captain had just shot an ailing American soldier. Blake, who was reputedly a good linguist, began to curse in a dozen languages. He cursed God, the world, the war, the cruelty of men. Bishop Quinlan put his arms around him and said gently, ‘That’s enough, that’s enough, George! If I had had a son, I’d have wanted you to be him.’ Then he turned to Philip Deane and said, ‘Sorry, Philip, you’d have had to be content to be number two.’ It’s a Zen moment in the history of the Columbans, pure poetry.
There were so many characters: Pat Deery, who built the cathedral in Wŏnju, renowned for imprecating his love of the bishop; Frank Woods, a hugely popular foxhole chaplain and hunter supreme; anyone fool enough to shoot the lead goose – and there often was one – risked the scorn of this intrepid priest.
Tom Kane, a noted wit and contributor to the word hoard, coined many of the popular Konglish expressions in use among us; the roll of the tongue, he said, controlled the dice of language.
And finally, a vessel from a later firing, the most cultivated man of all, Dick Delaney.
Sanctity
He was a saint; a brilliant man
buried in the back of beyond.
He had no attachment to material things.
He loved his general factotum,
he loved Jesus and he loved a shot.
His only other concession to this world
was his insistence on a cigar
to ease his morning business out.
Dick was one of the best read men I’ve ever known. He spent his life in a mouldy Cleary’s suit, puffing the odd cigar, deep in his beloved books. A Korean priest once said, ‘There was only one priest ever in P’ungsuwŏn.’ It was a magnificent tribute, one I never heard given to another missionary, especially since the parish was one of the oldest in the country and had produced more priests than any other parish. Dick was dearly loved. The fact that he only had fifty Korean words in his vocabulary was irrelevant. He radiated the light of heaven wherever he went and everyone felt its warmth. He is clearly out of season in this company because he came later in life after a career as a professor in Dalgan. The men who knew him there said he was a boring prof, but when he talked about a book he liked over a few whiskies, he was wonderful. On reflection, it was only when Dick came on a visit to Sŏngshim College in Ch’unch’ŏn that he had an audience for his inner world. I include him because he epitomized what was best in the earlier giants. More than once he lost his month’s maintenance in a poker game and smiled.
Spring Scents
Spring scents fade:
the glory of these men too
is a diminished thing, a memory
fast fading in the hearts of a few.
I record the names
of these priests of Melchizedek.
I record them for the succeeding
generations of Columbans,
lest we forget.
And I record them for the succeeding
generations of the people they served,
lest they forget.
And there were so many great stories. One of my favourite stories describes two men storming into Hoengsŏng at the outbreak of the war in 1950:
Wisdom
The commies are coming,
the commies are coming!
We’ll stay, we’ll stay
for Christ and glory!
Bejazus we won’t.
We’re getting our butts in gear;
we’re getting to hell out of here.
Fourteen chickens wrapped
the front axle of the jeep as it pulled into Hoengsŏng.
Funny how a bottle of whiskey and a friend
could dull even the most imminent threat.
The Hoengsŏng incumbent refused to budge. ‘First things first,’ he said, ‘there’s a bottle to be drunk: then we’re off.’ Seoul fell before they left. They had to find an alternative road south, which they duly did.
Then there was Pat MacGowan, alone in the records for keeping a cardinal out. This was the result of a failure in communication between Pat and Paul Ch’oe, a Seoul priest who enjoyed our company. Pat’s Korean wasn’t great. He spent most of his language study time trying to figure out the accusative case. This wasn’t much help because Korean doesn’t have cases. Anyway, the result was that the cardinal was kept waiting in the yard. Paul Ch’oe did not believe it was a mistake, but it was. Mistakes like this were easy because Pat guarded his sitting room and kitchen like the Bastille.
Hunting was a very popular winter sport. There were stringent rules on guns, which were supposed to be kept in the local police station for reasons of national security. The ordinances were not always strictly observed. There are many stories about warming up jeeps to go duck and goose hunting on a winter’s night, fortifying body and soul with a good modicum of the warming brew, putting on numerous layers of clothes as insulation against temperatures that sometimes went to ten or fifteen below Fahrenheit, going back for a little more of the warming brew, and ending up switching the engines off at two in the morning, too tipsy to risk taking a gun anywhere. One of my favourite hunting stories had to do with a casual jeep trip on the East Coast on a cold January day. Hunting was far from every-one’s minds, but the guns were always at the ready at this time of year. Suddenly a pheasant struts by the side of the road. Already saliva is dripping. A roast pheasant was a luxury addition to the stark diet of the time. The jeep eased to a halt. One man said – one man always seemed to say – ‘Leave this to me!’ He readied himself, took aim, fired. ‘The bastard ducked!’ he cried in dismay.
Smart Bird
The doleful enunciation
that the pheasant ducked
on a wintry day on the East Coast
always elicited delighted chuckles
from padres pleased by any bird
smart enough to cheat an arbitrary fate
and mush the plans of the parish priest
for an elegant evening plate,
but it was the corroborating speech
from the marksman in the front seat
that invariably brought down the house.
The magnanimity of judgment of the second marksman, who undoubtedly thought he should have taken the shot himself and was quite certain he would not have missed, was nothing short of extraordinary. We were not quite as confident of his abilities.
These first fruits men had a wonderful rugged individuality. They were all characters, in the sense we once understood that word in rural Ireland, when every town and village had its population of ‘characters.’ A few drank more than was good for them. It wasn’t easy not to drink too much in the Korea of the time. In 1964 a bottle of Chivas Regal in the Foreigners Commissary in Seoul (a government sales outlet designed to get badly needed greenbacks) was three dollars, and a bottle of French wine was one dollar. Coke and Seven-Up were a dollar a can. You couldn’t afford NOT to drink the alcohol, and you certainly couldn’t afford to drink the Seven-Up and coke. A lady at the checkout in the commissary once spoke disapprovingly to one of our men when he bought a few cans of Wall’s sausages, a pound of butter and a case of scotch for his month’s provisions.
‘Oh, Father!’ she cried.
‘Lady,’ he replied. ‘There’s more nourishment in my basket than yours.’
The men were generous to a fault, spending any extra money on people in need. School fees, hospital charges, and house rentals were the main headings of their expenditures. They were constantly on the road, ferrying people in and out of hospital, arranging for treatment, even surgery – harelip surgery in particular – and very often paying for it. And when they came into Seoul to unwind, I remember nights when they literally took the roof off the Columban central house. The atmosphere at the snooker shoot-outs was both hilarious and electrical, and the standard of the snooker had to be seen to be believed. These men were larger than life, the most giving, exciting men I’ve known in my life. On top of their selflessness, they had, to a man, an extraordinary sense of camaraderie. To pass a man’s house was the unforgivable sin. They entertained you with the best they had and for as long as you cared to stay. The parishes were isolated, lonely places. In the ’60s we went for a week several times a year to the East Coast. Sometimes we didn’t get past Kansŏng, the first parish at the northern end of the coast. But the full trip would require stops in Kansŏng, Sokch’o, Yangyang, Chumunjin and Kangnŭng. If you took the train from Seoul or Wŏnju to Kangnŭng, an overnight trip, then Kangnŭng, Mukho, and Samch’ŏk were de rigueur stops. You could get away with not going down to Uljin because it was so far and the road was so bad. Usually, the incumbent came up to Samch’ŏk when he heard we had arrived.
24 S was the name of the military road from Wŏnt’ong (outside Injae) to Sokch’o, the forerunner of the present highway that runs past Paekdam-sa, the temple where Chun Duhwan chose to meditate on his past. In the old days only military vehicles were allowed to use this road, but sometimes we were able to persuade the soldiers to let us through. The regular road north to Kansŏng had two one-way sections, and if you were unlucky enough to meet a convoy or two, you could be there all day. 24 S took hours off the trip, but the last few hundred metres to the top of the pass were hair-raising. The jeep, growling in low-low, would slide inexorably across the loose shale towards a drop of at least a thousand feet on the driver’s side. At the top of the pass, a granny invariably came out of the bushes with a basketful of American beer, Budweiser usually. We never figured out how she got up there, but she was as grateful a sight as the flowers in May and invariably we bought the entire basket.
I remember the East Coast road as the worst in the country. Huge iron trucks loaded with raw ore bound for Japan ploughed up and down several times a day. The washboard was gut-shaking, and you could get lost in the potholes. After Park Chunghee hard-topped the entrance to Sŏr’ak, Harley-Davidson enthusiasts would truck their bikes down from Wŏnju and Seoul and take off, three abreast, like bats out of hell, along the new road. Farmers beware! The road was barely ten feet wide. If the motorcycle road hogs travelled the southern route through Taegwallyong Pass and Kangnŭng on their way to Sŏr’ak, they might be tempted by a culinary delight advertised as ‘Nude Dog’ which was served in a food stand at the top of the pass. The term is so succinct, so much more exciting than Hot-dog-hold-the-bun!
My first visit to the East Coast was in the summer of 1965. We had just finished language school and were going on a holiday before reporting for duty in Ch’unch’ŏn. We hired an ancient hapsŭng, which broke down repeatedly. I remember half the engine on newspapers somewhere near Hoengsŏng. How the driver ever got it together again was a source of amazement. He turned the key and the engine fired. We took off again, broke down again. More newspapers, more genius. Back on the road again. It was late by the time we got to Kansŏng where we spent the night. The parish priest prided himself on his skill in making martinis. He always made them in the kettle. The recipe was simple. He poured in a bottle of gin and followed it with two teaspoons of martini. Add ice, shake like hell, pop in a few olives or cocktail onions. They were wonderful.
Next day we went on to Sokch’o. The priest’s house in Sokch’o was the only house in Kangwŏn Province that you could say was beautiful. The beauty, I should add, was all on the outside. The location was wonderful; the house was perched on a height overlooking the sea, with a lovely bay window on the sea side. House and church were reputed to have tank tracks in the walls, courtesy of the American army who helped with the construction. Both buildings were whitewashed. A Cinderella house in an anything but Cinderella world. The house featured Bishop Quinlan’s usual back-of-an-envelope, multi-door design; a central living room with doors off it to every room in the house. The frugal nature of the previous incumbent had resulted in a paint job of the interior that had to be seen to be believed. Walls and ceiling were diarrhoea green, and I remember the woodwork as an awful brimsy brown. The paint was American army paint, guaranteed to be rust proof, damp proof, and virtually indestructible, which made it irresistible to the pastor, a practical man for whom colour was a very minor consideration. The new parish priest, a lamb of a man affectionately known as Frankie Ferocious, had done nothing about the décor. He probably wasn’t even aware that it was offensive. But some of his guests were very offended. Over a few cocktails and an endless succession of beers, they announced that something would have to be done. First thing in the morning, runners were sent to the market to buy paint and replenish the beer. Work began. It was hot thirsty work. More beer than paint was poured. By early afternoon, the eager workers, no longer quite so eager, declared a holiday. The project continued sporadically throughout the week. By Friday, half the ceiling was done and most of the walls. There was a problem. Danny Chi was due to be consecrated bishop of Wŏnju next day, and the leaders of the paint gang, after much theological toing and froing, had decided to go to the celebration even though they lacked the appropriate wedding garments. The ceiling was left unfinished in the style of Naeso-sa Temple in North Chŏlla. I’m afraid none of the painters had any idea of the Naeso-sa story, with its wonderful symbolism of the beautifully incomplete. Sŏ Chŏngju tells the story:
Painting the Great Worship Hall in Naeso-sa
Painting the Great Worship Hall in Naeso-sa entailed man power, bird power, and tiger power; and even that was not sufficient so that it remains unfinished today. On the West side, along the top of the inner wall, a master sits in meditation. Take a look at the mind-blowing incompleteness of the unpainted blank space beside the master. That’s what I want to talk about.
When the Great Worship Hall was built and the search was on for a master painter, a nameless wanderer came from the west in the twilight of the day and accepted the painter’s task. After painting the outside, he moved within the shrine, locked the door securely from within and cried:
‘Let no one dare enter this place until I have completed my task.’
But in the mundane world and in the temple, it is the foolhardy that cause the trouble. Thus, one foolhardy monk, unable to control his curiosity, stole over, bored a hole in the paper window and peered within. The wandering master was nowhere to be seen. Instead a lovely bird fluttered in flight across the ceiling, brush gripped in its beak. It dipped the brush in a dye that came from its body, thus painting the shrine, beautifully, beautifully. But at the sound of the intruder, the bird cried in bitter dismay and fell flat to the floor where it stretched four paws listlessly out: bird had become tiger.
‘Tiger Monk, Tiger Monk, rise!’ The monks called on the tiger in their local dialect, just as they would call a fellow monk, but the tiger did not move. All they could do was wish the tiger reanimation in the next life. With this in mind, they called the temple Naeso-sa, meaning resuscitation in the future. Across the centuries the monks go up morning and evening to bow and bow again toward the blank unpainted spot.
Two of the men involved in the aborted paint job took the wrong train in Samch’ŏk on the Saturday morning and ended up in Pusan, where they went AWOL for three weeks! The house in Sokch’o has been remodelled and extended several times since. Little of the old magic remains and there is no need to bow to the blank spot on the ceiling.
A lot of water ran under the collective Korean cultural bridge between Tan’gun’s legendary founding myth and the momentous arrival of the Columbans in 1933. Tan’gun’s place is secure; I’m not so sure about the Columbans. Their memory, of course, will remain in the hearts of the friends they made and the people they served, but if the past is any guide to the future, you can be pretty sure that the great Korean collective memory will swallow their contribution without a gurgle. Of the foreigners who left a mark on Korean society, Hamel’s name is probably best known. I stress the name bit because apart from his name most folks know very little about him. Among the knowledgeable unknowledgeable, some say Hamel and his crew were responsible for the red tint in Korean hair; others cry, ‘Nonsense! The red tint came from washing the hair with beer.’ Take your pick. I have no idea when the red tint first came to the fore, or when beer was first made in Korea, but I can assure you that the beer in the ’60s would turn more than your hair red. You see the odd photograph of Paul Georg von Molendorff, dressed in court clothes, but he’s not much more than an image any more. Molendorff served as director of the maritime customs and as deputy foreign minister to King Kojong.
No one remembers the Irishman John MacLeavy Brown, another director of the maritime customs and Kojong’s chief financial adviser, although his name adorns a plaque in Pagoda Park. William Franklin Sands’ book At the Court of Korea is an intriguing account of Korea’s people and institutions around 1900, a must read for anyone interested in colonial Korea, but man and book are long forgotten despite the reprint by RAS in the eighties. Horace Allen, missionary and diplomat, introduced Western medicine to Korea. He was physician to the court and a confidante of Emperor Kojong. Korea has made little effort to ensure that the memory of these foreigners survives. The Protestant missionaries fare only marginally better. Yonsei University preserves the Underwood name, but Gale, Trollope and the other prominent Protestant missionaries are mostly names in history books, known to historians and literature buffs but for practical purposes forgotten. Francesca Rhee, Syngman Rhee’s wife, is well remembered, but I doubt if very many Koreans (or foreigners) know her maiden name. When I tried to write an obituary for Phil Crosbie, who had been on the Death March with Bishop Quinlan, one of the big Seoul English language dailies refused to print it on the grounds that no one would know him.
I suppose the tendency to forget is part of the loss of inshim, the natural benevolence on which Koreans traditionally pride themselves. Inshim has been in steady decline over the last forty years, part of the fabric, I believe, of rapid industrial development. I’ve noticed the same thing in Ireland. The loss of inshim resides in a fundamental intolerance, an obsession with my rights and an insensitivity to yours. Money takes over; traditional values die. In the old days Korean folks were always very helpful; they smiled all the time. The immigration office was not yet the most dreaded office in the land. In fact, you never had to go there in person. I was once top of the most wanted list in Korea for failing to renew my residence permit, a designation I maintained for six months. I was living in Ch’unch’ŏn at the time, and Mukho was the port of entry for Kangwŏn Province, which meant that papers for renewal of residence filed in the provincial office in Ch’unch’ŏn had to be sent to Mukho to be processed. My residence permit lay in the bottom of an official’s drawer in Ch’unch’ŏn for six months. The residence thing was so relaxed that it didn’t even occur to me to go and pick up the permit until someone – enjoying himself enormously, I should add – told me I was listed with hoodlums anonymous on the walls of Mukho Immigration Office under the title Most Wanted. I was threatened with jail at first, but eventually I was exonerated and my good name was restored. The O’Rourkes of Breifne were respectable again. My only regret was that the official in Ch’unch’ŏn lost his job. His offence seemed small enough.
On another occasion I was called in to the local office to vouch for the identity and good standing of the parish priest. The parish priest was a ten-years-in-the-orient veteran, a man who prided himself on his considerable experience and who regarded curates as useless baggage imposed by bishops on long suffering, hard working pastors. He did not appreciate this kind of public demeaning, especially as he knew the curate would have the story all over the diocese in a matter of days and all over the country within the week. I think he would gladly have gone to jail rather than be exposed to the ordeal. You will appreciate that I savoured the occasion to the full and was very slow to commit myself to any declaration of recognition much less approval.
There is a hilarious story from Japanese times about a foreigner who went into a ranking bureaucrat’s office in Kangnŭng city administration. Without looking up from his voluminous sheaf of papers, the official asked, though not directing the question at anyone in particular – to formally note the presence of the foreigner would have been an unspeakable indignity – ‘And what brought the long nosed nom here today?’
The reply was equally acerbic.
‘The long-nosed nom came to see the short-nosed nom.’
Note how this knowledgeable foreigner kept his reply in the non-personal third person. History, fortunately, recounts no more of the details of the incident.
In the ’60s and ’70s police smiled and waved at minor and sometimes major traffic goofs. When you didn’t know any other way home, it was normal to ask the traffic policeman to reverse the traffic on a one-way street, and invariably he obliged. The police on occasion drove us home after curfew when there was no other way of getting there. Parking lot attendants put up with everyone’s mistakes. Public anger was relatively unknown. The arrival of the cap and whistle as symbols of authority put an end to all this serenity. The cap and whistle brigade do not take prisoners.
President Chun Duhwan’s name is not exactly synonymous with accepted notions of freedom, but in 1982 he ordered the lifting of curfew restrictions (midnight to 4.00 am), which were first imposed by American occupation troops in 1945. I recall the curfew with affection. On weekends, we liked to go downtown to one of the new saeng maekchu (draught beer) houses in Myŏngdong (the OB Cabin was very popular) as an antidote to the drudgery of formal language learning, and at the same time as a forum to practise what we had learned at school in the previous week. Myŏngdong was always referred to by its Irish equivalent, the town of the lights. ‘Let’s go down to Baile na Soilse and quaff a few schooners,’ was all the spur that was necessary to get us moving. These were the days of tramcars, old battered shibal taxis and the ubiquitous hapsŭng minibuses. Shibal taxis and Blubirds were relatively difficult to catch at night.
The hapsŭng was the most readily available form of transport, but there were difficulties. To catch the last hapsŭng – I can still hear the ringing of the hapsŭng girl’s nasal cry in my inner ear: ‘Chong-no, Hae-wha-dong, Sam-sŏn-gyo, Ton-am-dong, Mi-a-ri, Su-yu-ri’ – meant rushing the last pint, a dire deed to anyone of Irish sensibility. I don’t know that we always tried very hard because four foreigners piling onto the last hapsŭng were liable to cause a lot of confusion. Our bum expanse was considerably larger than the local variety and the hapsŭngs had not been built with us in mind. As a result we often missed that fatal encounter with the last hapsŭng and were forced to seek alternative routes home. People were invariably very kind. Taxis rushing home stopped to help us, private citizens often gave us lifts, and at times, as noted already, the police were kind enough to escort us home. But inevitably there were the nights when fate was not so kind and we had to walk the last stretch home. I don’t ever recall, however, having to hoof it further than from Shinsŏldong to Tonamdong, a thirty minute walk.
I remember vividly the last frantic rush of cars at 11.50 and the eerie silence that descended on the city at 12.05. It was now curfew time and the city was dotted with police and military barriers. Getting through the barriers was always exciting. Invariably when challenged, ‘Where you go?’ we replied, ‘Ŭijŏngbu.’ And invariably the policeman or soldier said ‘Okay, you go.’ We lived close to Tonamdong Intersection and there was always a barrier there. One night when challenged with the invariable ‘Where you go?’, one of the group gave the standard answer, ‘We go Ŭijŏngbu,’ though our house was only fifty metres away and the guard must have known it. However, when the guard saw us turn for home, he made an unexpected response. He said, ‘You no go there Ŭijŏngbu,’ whereupon one of the group said, ‘Ah, the trouble with you, sir, is you only know one road to Ŭijŏngbu!’ The witty response became a catch phrase for those who think they have explored every avenue in dealing with a problem and are now in a position to offer a neat solution, a sure recipe for disaster in Korea. As one astute man used to say about Korean politics: ‘When you have studied the matter inside out, examined all the possibilities and come to a reasonable conclusion, the only thing you can be certain of is that you’ve got the wrong answer.’ Two plus two was never four in Korea.