THIS BOOK IS not an autobiography; I shudder at the thought for I am a private man. Nor is it a novel though much of the material is presented in story form; for I am not the flamboyant novel-writing type either. It is something in between, what I call, rightly or wrongly, a miscellany. It aims not so much at simple as symbolic truth, a kind of correlative to forty years of cross-cultural experience.
I came to Korea in 1964. I came from an Ireland that was one of the poorest countries in Europe; outside toilets and houses without running water or electricity were still fairly common. I remember the marvel of the tilley lamp when I visited my aunt’s house in what we termed ‘the country’, and my cousin, still visibly excited by the mystery of electricity, following me up and down the stairs to turn off switches I had extravagantly turned on. And I remember a confrere on Korea’s East Coast telling me that a tilley lamp was a better reading light than any bulb. I remember the first oranges and pears in the shops after the war and the excitement of gum bubbles big as a football exploding in my face. I remember the adventure of crossing Glangevlin on the way to Bundoran. The talk for days before the trip was about the state of the road and the thickness of the fog on top of the mountain. Bundoran was a magic place for kids in the nineteen forties and early fifties. The Horse Pool, the Priests’ Pool, the Nuns’ Pool, the caves, the cliff walks, Shane House and the Green Barn are engraved indelibly in my memory. The Imperial Hotel and Shell House represented modernity and elegance. We didn’t dare dream of the august heights of the Central or the Great Northern.
Despite great changes in the forties, fifties, and early sixties, Ireland was still a backwater when I left in 1964. I did not realize this for a long time because 1960s Ireland was a paradise compared to 1960s Korea. In the intervening fifty years, Ireland has been transformed by the Celtic tiger and retransformed by the collapse of same; and Korea has moved from being a medieval land of total insignificance in world terms to being a highly developed modern country and a major player in world economics. Even the wildest extravagances of the Celtic tiger pale in comparison with Korea’s development in the last fifty years. And I have seen it all happen. In 1964, Seoul was a city of three million people with three bridges over the Han and one ten-storey building in the heart of the city, the New Korea Hotel – it’s still there, beside City Hall. I have lost count of the number of bridges over the Han, and Seoul’s skyline is like Manhattan’s. Kangnam was paddy-fields as was the entire city beyond Suyuri, going north, and T’apshimni, going east. People have even begun to speak of Seoul as a beautiful city, citing Namsan, Sajik Park, Inwangsan, the Pukhak Skyway, and Lee Myungbak’s redeveloped Ch’onggyech’on as visible proof.
Parts of Tŏksu Palace, the widening of Chongno and the construction of Pagoda Park may have been the brainchild of a Lisburn man, John McLeavy Brown, Chief Commissioner of the Korean Customs and Financial Adviser to Kojong, but most of what happened here is rooted in 1500 years of cultural history and in the Korean character that grew therein. I seek in this book an imaginative correlative for my experience of Korea. It is a poet’s account, what the heart has taught, and it should be interpreted as literature not history, philosophy or sociology. Much of the account is true; much is half true. Some of the characters are real; others are amalgams of several characters; still others are products of the imagination. Most of the stories have some basis in fact, but they have been altered and expanded, not just to protect privacy, although that was sometimes a concern, but also to contribute to the creation of an imaginative version of fifteen hundred years of assimilated history and culture.
The account features neither plot line nor sequential time. The text is peppered with my own poems, stories and essays, and with poems and stories from the Korean. Much of what I know of the Korean cultural experience came courtesy of the poems of Sŏ Chŏngju, a great poet who should have won the Nobel Prize. His name dots the pages of this book. A bantam cock of a man, his raucous voice still rings in my ears. He gave me an imaginative entry into Korean history and culture for which I am eternally grateful. Most Koreans approach history and culture as exercises in sociology. Their accounts are framed in an abstract idiom that misses the heart of the matter. Opinions tend to be a rehash of the opinions of professors fifty years ago. Sŏ Chŏngju’s stories of old Korea are different, primarily because they are not shackled by fixed notions of people and events. They are pure poetry, the best introduction I know to Korea’s cultural mother lode. I use the poems freely, combining them with narrative and exposition in an attempt to present living in Korea as a process of growth in cultural exchange. During forty-plus years trying to take in and interpret an intense personal and public experience, my quest has always been for understanding, for what the people of Shilla called ‘the light of heaven’. Most of my missionary colleagues came here to teach. I figured early on that there were more than enough of them for the task. For my part, I found there was much more to learn than to teach.
Korea is home to me. When I go to Rosslare in Ireland, I’m on my holidays. I arrive with a contented grin. When I get back to Inch’ŏn Airport, I’m home. I heave a contented sigh and look forward to the pleasures of living in my Seoul apartment again after months of being pampered by my family in Ireland.
Loving Korea does not blind me to certain grating aspects of the Korean experience. Sŏ Chŏngju (1915–2000) writes:
In this land, at this moment in time, someone of our race is doing a shameful deed, selling short his being human. What of it! One extra-cleansing bath, one meticulous assuaging of the heart and again we can stand tall between earth and sky, for we are possessors of a tradition of great pride, something to be supremely grateful for: we are the people whose country gets the first seep of morning light.
If you think Korea is beyond the shameful deed, think again. Korea has had more than her share of soiled moments. If you think Japan is uniquely the land of the rising sun, think again; Korea also lays claim to the first light of the sun. And if you think selling humanity short is anything less than a universal sin, think again. Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are tips of the iceberg, historical symbols of the inhumanity of man.
Sŏ Chŏngju had a keen awareness of modern man’s penchant for the shameful deed, but he also had a great ability to see the beauty of old Korea.
Dolmens
The people of old Chosŏn were too pure-hearted to commit any of those ugly, seedy sins that bring pain to the world after death, so when they breathed their last and crossed into eternity, they had no bitter remorse, no teeth-grinding rancour. Eternal life in the role of Immortals and nymphs, however, was so interminably protracted that sheer excess of boredom sometimes brought an itch, and when this happened, they would ask the most beautiful among the nymphs to scratch the itchy spot.
Mago was famous as the nymph who best scratched the itchy spot. As a consequence of her fame, even Chinese Immortals in later ages pleaded their cases with her.
This is why those old dolmens from Tan’gun Chosŏn – beds with ceilings that dot the northern frontier – have always been called Mago Houses.
Sŏ Chŏngju (1915–2000)
Some people see only what they want to see. I see the ugly as well as the beautiful. Living the spirit of the Tao Te Ching is not easy. I have great difficulty in seeing the ugly as a dirty window that can be cleaned with a rub of a cloth. Manil-sa, a nondescript temple in the south built on an incredibly beautiful site, is a paradigm of the mysterious turns that the beautiful takes in Korea:
Manil-sa
The king’s seal teeters in air;
mountain tops are geese in flight.
This is a magic place, made for monk things.
The temple site is perfect
though nothing that stands there is old
except the stone stele inscribed with
the names of Yi Sŏnggye and the founding monk.
A blue plastic can spoils
the mountain god’s shrine.
Why seek out the ugly?
Does not the beautiful suffice?
Vision is never just black and white.
Ugly and beautiful are sides of a coin;
they need each other to get the balance right.
If you want to see Korea’s traditional beauty, you must go to the temples. At the same time be aware that few man-made artefacts in Korea, including temple buildings, are very old. Wars, fires, and the elements have seen to that. And those ugly plastic cans are everywhere.
The awareness of Korea’s natural beauty is a fairly recent phenomenon. In the nineteenth century when Korea was still a hermit kingdom, the tops of mountains and headlands were denuded, and the countryside, at least what was visible from the sea, was deliberately made ugly in order to discourage interest on the part of foreign devils. From the beginning of vehicular traffic at the end of the nineteenth century, until Park Chunghee began the modern hardtop road system in the late ’60s, the country was permanently shrouded in a layer of dust. In 1964, there were a hundred kilometres of paved roads in the entire country: Seoul to Osan, Hongch’ŏn to Inje, and part of the Seoul to Ch’unch’ŏn road. A recent Hwang Sŏg’yŏng novel notes that there was hardtop in Yŏngdŭngp’o. I was not aware of this. In the ’60s and ’70s, buses and trucks roared along country roads filling the air and lungs with grit. It was a lot of fun getting where you wanted to go, but you arrived with dust embedded in every pore. Natural beauty was not a typical topic of discussion. Modernization brought roads, and roads ended that all-pervasive cloud of dust, except, that is, for the Gobi Desert dust storms, loaded with various types of insidious Chinese goo that continue to bedevil us every year.
Modernization inevitably brought destruction in its wake. Most of the interesting parts of downtown Seoul have disappeared. In the ’60s and ’70s the area around City Hall had lovely winding alleyways dotted with teahouses and drinking establishments where artists and writers held court. You could walk into a tearoom and meet Kim Tongni or Sŏ Chŏngju or any one of a dozen of the most important men in the arts. The greats sported their fame; they didn’t feel the need to hide behind the veil of anonymity.
Kim Sŭngok’s ‘Seoul 1964, Winter’ was the cult story of the decade; it proclaimed a new post-war existentialism, very exciting and very avant-garde, which sent me looking for the scratch on the door of the toilet in the Yŏngbo Building in Chongno 2 ka, the street lights that weren’t working in Pyŏnghwa market, and the dark windows in the Hwashin Department Store. I hate what the City has done to the area between the old Hwashin and Kwanghwamun, and what it has done to all of Mu’gyodong and the area at the back of City Hall; and I regret the gutting of one of the last bastions of old Seoul, Sajikdong, between the old Naija Hotel and Independence Gate. There is much talk of the glories of Pukch’on, a village of hanok houses in Chongno, but much of Pukch’on has already suffered the indignity of developers’ bulldozers. North Ahyŏndong, Wangshimni, Tongŭimun, Chŏngnyangni and Kirŭmdong are all being remade. When these new town projects are complete, hardly a stone of old Seoul will be intact. The cultural loss is colossal, but Seoul’s heart beats on.
Loss
I grieve with you
in grieving over the past:
the felling of a world tree,
leaves scattered
who knows where.
Yet the tree lives on,
a shredded jigsaw
carved on
memory’s bone.
Until recently Korea didn’t really care about such cultural loss. More significantly her people rarely raised a word of objection. In the last few years, the newspapers have featured a spate of articles calling for conservation in Wangshimni, Tongŭimun, Kirŭmdong and other new town centres. The call for conservation comes too late for the road along the Han to Ch’unch’ŏn, and the road by the P’aldang Dam to Yang-dŏg’wŏn and Hongch’ŏn, which have been defaced by ugly kalbi houses, love hotels, and cafes. The same fate has befallen the road north to Kŭmhwa through Ildong and Idong, a scenario that has been repeated throughout the country wherever new roads to tourist destinations have been made. High-rise apartments have turned the village of Masŏk into an eyesore; it was once one of the most beautiful village landscapes in the world. And I shudder to think of what’s been done to Tonamdong, that lovely old residential area in Seoul. The light of the sun has been denied forever to its residents. If you want to know what the old Tonam Market was like, you have to have been there or read Pak Wansŏ. Thank God for one or two people with sensibility who regret the sacking of the lovely old in favour of the biscuit tin new. And thank God for those who have preserved the old beauty in those alleys near An’guktong Rotary, across the road from the entrance to Insadong, with their lovely hanok houses, wine bars, and teahouses.
The area is a rarity in modern Seoul; indeed very few people even knew it was there until four or five years ago when the boom in restaurants, cafes, wine bars, and small boutiques began to pick up speed. I remember Sŏr’aksan when it was pure magic. If you stood below the temple and looked up, the mountain soared above you on all sides. One gigantic parking lot destroyed the landscape; space replaced mystery. There’s a temple near Songch’u, with a bell tower from the seventeenth century and a main worship hall that looks even older. An elephant painting, and other abstract paintings on themes I haven’t seen elsewhere, adorn the outside walls of the main worship hall. The paintings are on plain timber, none of the usual red and green tanch’ŏng colouring. It’s a beautiful building but spoiled by the new buildings and the modern granite Mireuk on the hill behind. The Korea I know and love has always mixed liberal doses of the ugly with the beautiful. I’m not sure how such exquisite taste can be combined with such appalling lack of taste. Hundreds of temples throughout the country attest to this. Until recently no one seemed to notice or care. When Pak Wansŏ mourned the removal of a hill in her village, she was the exception. One can only hope that the movement for conservation will gain momentum and salvage something from the indiscriminate destruction.