Читать книгу South Korea - Mark Dake - Страница 7

I had been living in Seoul for more than a decade when my Aunt Irene in Toronto sent me a book written by American Bill Bryson. I had never heard of Bryson, but I read the book, In a Sunburned Country, which is a comic narrative of his fascinating trip through Australia. I was smitten, cognizant of why millions of readers were hooked on this bestselling author. I had not thought a simple travel book — the genre, in my mind, reminiscent of wanderers writing dull prose about what should have been fascinating adventures — could be so breezy, humorous, and illuminating.

I read Bryson’s other gems: Notes from a Small Island, about his trek through Britain, and A Walk in the Woods, which recounted his long, exhausting hike along the Appalachian Trail. I had a walloping grand time tagging along with Bryson on these excursions, too. I got to thinking that he was most definitely needed in South Korea to trundle through the country, to put it on the map by writing another bestseller. Goodness knows the peninsula could use his help. Except for its immediate neighbours, China and Japan, very few others seem to visit the country for leisure or for pleasure. (In 2014, about 5.5 million Chinese and 2.5 million Japanese tourists visited Korea, representing about 80 percent of all incoming foreign tourists. Many arrive for shopping or gambling junkets.) Most of the rest of the world seemed to know little, if anything, about South Korea. It is dominated in the media attention department by its mad-hatter neighbour, North Korea — run currently by Kim Jung-un, one of our planet’s most notorious dictators. Compared to the North, South Korea is like that standup comedian who has to follow Jerry Seinfeld on stage; he is always going to be second fiddle. Not that the South Korean government seems to do much to promote the country for tourism. When was the last time you saw an advertisement on television or in print inviting you to visit one of its sandy beaches or its ancient Buddhist temples, or hike its craggy granite mountain ridges?

It astonishes me how little Westerners seem to know about the country. When I’m back in Canada and I speak with people about my time in Korea, they sometimes ask “North or South?” Koreans living in Canada have told me with a sigh that they have been asked if they’re from the North or the South. Well, more than two million South Koreans have emigrated to North America; while the number of North Koreans is miniscule. Chances are slim that a Korean you run into at a shop or on the street will be from North Korea.

One day, in the small town of Brockville, Ontario, I was at the local post office inquiring about sending a parcel to a friend in Korea. The clerk behind the counter checked a country list and announced with a hint of bewilderment that there were two Koreas. Well, no shit, Sherlock.

“Which Korea is the parcel going to?” she asked me.

“It can only go to one place; mail doesn’t go to the other,” I replied politely, hoping by simple deduction she would conclude the correct country. She didn’t.

“So …which one?” she asked.

“South Korea,” I answered. “You can’t get in or out of the North. There’s no international mail delivery there.”

She looked surprised. “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

Even people who read newspapers and watch the news, like my mother, were pretty much clueless about South Korea. She was a school librarian in Toronto for many years, and I would have thought that in her downtime she may have wandered to the East Asia section and perhaps taken a peak at a book on, say, South Korea, considering her son was living there.

Just prior to my parents’ visit to Seoul in the early fall of 2000, my mother phoned me to ask, concerned, “Do we need to get inoculated for disease before we arrive?”

Of course, Mom — we all suffer from dengue fever and typhoid in Korea.

She next wondered innocently, “Should we bring purification tablets to put in our drinking water?”

I sighed, shook my head, and said, “Mom, South Korea is not a third-world country.” When my parents arrived in Seoul, my mother looked at all the high-rise apartments and modern buildings, and remarked with surprise, “I didn’t think there would be so many buildings,” as if she had been expecting mud huts with straw roofs.

Poor South Korea; seemingly ignored and passed over. The country has always suffered from a lack of drawing power as a travel destination. Heck, it was 1882 before Korea opened her borders for the first time to international visitors and trade. In the previous five hundred years, the conservative, Confucian-based government kept the nation cloistered and sequestered, zealously guarding against any encroachment by foreigners. This was a country where, in 1653, the government would not permit the thirty-six survivors of the Dutch ship Sparrow Hawk, wrecked off Jeju Island, to depart. Had eight of Sparrow Hawk’s crew not taken a boat and escaped to Nagasaki thirteen years later, then to The Netherlands — the endeavour described by crew member Hendrik Hamel in Hamel’s Journals and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653–1666 — they may have never escaped the peninsula.

Lillias Stirling Horton, an American missionary doctor who arrived in Incheon in 1888, and became the personal physician to Empress Myeongseong (known as Queen Min), wrote in her 1904 book, Fifteen Years Among the Topknots, or Life in Korea, that “people back home [have] never even heard of Corea.”

It has really only been in the past twenty years or so that the words Korea and vacation could be reasonably uttered in the same breath. The country was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. Then came the Korean War. This was followed, until 1988, by a period of rule by a series of authoritarian military-backed presidents. In May 1980, for instance, President Chun Doo-hwan sent the army in to Gwangju to brutally put down a civilian uprising, killing more than six hundred — hardly an environment conducive to a family vacation.

Even today, it is not an easy place for an individual backpacker or a family to travel through. Language is but one issue. Korea has also been slow to introduce amenities and accommodation that would fit North American and European tastes, unlike Korea’s southerly neighbours — the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. It seems Koreans and Westerners even view vacationing differently. We tend to go for quiet, and where nature and aesthetics loom large, maybe at a nice country cottage or place by the sea with activities provided. These are rare finds in Korea. Koreans love crowds and action and noise. The simple pleasure of being alone has not yet seemed to have made much of a dent in the Korean national psyche.

During my first summer in Seoul, my academy owner, Mr. So, invited me to join his family and friends on a camping trip for four days. He told me they would be pitching their tents by a stream in Seorak Mountain National Park in Gangwon Province along the east coast. I accepted. But once we arrived at the shallow pebbly river that wound its way through picturesque farmland, hills, and woods, we sat for excruciatingly long breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, served atop large mats laid out on the grass. The meals were prepared and served by the patient ladies in the group. Between meals we sat around some more.

On the third day, we were hustled into the van and driven to a nearby mountain, where there was a hiking trail. Wonderful, I thought, finally some activity. I was looking forward to jettisoning the bloated feeling you get after eating seemingly non-stop for three days. I hoped my blood — which had congealed into petroleum jelly — would begin to flow again on the challenging hike. We parked, walked along a clear narrow stream that flowed over granite rock, and two minutes later, entered a wooden chalet, a restaurant, it turned out, where we all sat down for a two-hour lunch. After our meal, we were driven back to the campsite to sit some more. I don’t think I’ve eaten as much and used fewer calories over four days in my entire life.

* * *

I arrived in South Korea on June 1, 1995. I had departed Los Angeles International Airport in the early afternoon, and what always seems surreal to me, the almost ten-thousand-kilometre, twelve-hour flight touched down at Gimpo International Airport in northwestern Seoul that same afternoon. We flew in low over Seoul. The day was clear and sunny. I peered out the window at the beauty below: a smattering of craggy, rugged granite ridges covered in the full bloom of trees, in stark contrast to the innumerable clusters of white, high-rise apartment buildings. The juxtaposition: nature versus concrete, of two dominant vivid colours: dark green and white — was visually stunning. I immediately liked Seoul.

For the first few months, I lived in Cheonho-dong, in the eastern reaches Seoul, along the shore of the Han River, which divides the city into approximate north and south halves. When I looked across the kilometre-wide Han from Cheonho-dong, my view was of the long, low ridge of Acha Mountain that followed the river. The academy where I taught was in nearby Myeongil-dong.

I soon discovered that within a ten-minute walk of my front door, I could find almost anything I could possibly desire. There were drycleaners; supermarkets; hardware, grocery, convenience, drug, and clothing stores; chicken, pizza, and Chinese food delivery restaurants; barbers and hairdressers; academies; saunas and fitness clubs; and outdoor markets supplying fresh fish, vegetables, and fruit at good prices. Nearby, there were also wooded trails, red earth tennis courts, and a multiplex movie house. Olympic Park, site of the 1988 Olympics, was within a twenty-minute walk. Running alongside the Han River was a forty-kilometre walking and cycling path. In my free time, I’d rollerblade along the path or play tennis on the courts.

But the day I arrived, this was all unknown to me. The sun was setting, darkness enveloping the city as I was dropped off on the main street by the Cheonho subway station, and headed toward my little room in a yeogwan (old traditional inn) located along a back lane near a bustling outdoor market.

Cheonho-dong at night is abuzz with lights and colours, of rapid movement and palpable energy. I had never seen such packed sidewalks. Many in the crowd were young women decked out in the latest fashions — often miniskirts and high heels. There were schoolchildren in smart uniforms coming and going from the various academies, and women out shopping or socializing in ubiquitous coffee shops. The streets were crammed with old city buses, cars, and taxis, horns honking. A constant stream of buses screeched to a loud, squeaky halt at the bus stops. The sound of traffic, of bus and car engines, was a constant, and at night the haze from the diesel hung in the yellow illumination from street lamps like a cloak of London fog.

I was not used to all this energy and mass of humanity. Not at all. I loved the urgency and visual delights. The multi-storied commercial buildings that lined the streets were plastered with neon signs in greens, oranges, reds, and yellows, advertising coffee shops or restaurants or other businesses. Red neon crosses rose high above small churches across the city.

In residential suburbs across the West you don’t see people out on neighbourhood streets. After arriving home by car from work, a North American won’t be seen again until the following morning. They camp out for the night in their carpeted basement rec rooms on their recliners and surf 150 channels on their big-screen televisions while eating TV dinners. Maybe the room has a bar and a billiards table. During winters — November to March — such citizens hibernate and perhaps do all sorts of unnatural acts. You rarely see them outside, though occasionally they’ll poke their heads out the door to see if spring has arrived.

To me, it is the opposite in Korea. People view their apartment/homes as a place to simply lay their heads for the night. When I visit apartments there, often the only furniture in the living room is a sofa, chair, and a big flat-screen TV on the wall, not much else. I think Koreans prefer to be with friends, to talk and have fun out and about at coffee shops, cafés, restaurants, saunas, bars, and shops. That’s perhaps why the streets, cafés, and restaurants are busy well into the night.

About 10.5 million people live in Seoul, and about 26 million — half the country’s population — in the Seoul Capital Area, which includes satellite cities built with armies of high-rise apartment buildings. Consider that Australia, seventy-seven times larger in area than South Korea, has just 24 million people.

Korean cities employ a concept that I find appealing: residential and commercial areas intertwine, so that from my flat in Myeongil-dong, I could walk to the hardware, convenience, or grocery store, tailor, barber, bike shop, restaurant, or outdoor market along adjacent lanes in a jiffy. Having people out and about is how a residential place is supposed to be. I enjoy the interaction, hearing kids squealing in delight, school students gabbing loudly, housewives chatting, grandfathers debating. If North America decided to upgrade their moribund and tomb-like suburbs from their current catatonic status, to one in which people out for a walk don’t feel like the last human on Earth, they ought to check out the Korean system.

There are lots of positives about living in Korea. It’s generally a safe place. There are stringent laws here to ensure that owning a gun is a near impossibility. A good thing, too, I say, because with Koreans’ quick temperament and penchant for drinking, there may not be many people left in the country if purchasing a firearm was as easy as applying for a library card, the way it is in America.

For reasons I can’t explain, the homicide rate seems to be a closely guarded secret. I had asked my good Korean friend, Heju, to try to acquire the statistics, and she visited several local police stations. Officers informed her that they weren’t at liberty to divulge the information. To obtain it, they insisted, she’d need to fill out a form and send it to the “Shady and Secretive Department of Homicides.” She didn’t bother. But judging from newspapers, homicides are certainly not an everyday occurrence, and those that are committed seem often to be a crime of passion.

Young kids freely play outside and have little fear of approaching, for example, a stranger like me, to have a go at practising a few words of English. On subways and buses, strangers who sit down beside mothers holding babies or with young kids will sometimes touch or hold the little ones.

Korea has historically been a peace-loving nation. Unlike countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, Japan, Russia, and the United States, Korea never attempted to colonize a weaker nation or to plunder another’s natural resources and riches. Korea did not send armies to Japan or China. It did not seek grand foreign conquests of land or power. For the longest while, in fact, it was an international outcast, like the school loner who sits off to the side and keeps to himself. I suppose this could be viewed as a collective lack of curiosity and sense of adventure. If every other nation engendered a similar inward-looking ethos, North America, Australia, and other major land masses might still remain largely unsettled. Historically, Korea’s citizens rarely ventured past neighbouring China and Japan.

* * *

I was smitten with Korea. It would be a while, though, before I was aware of why I had an instantaneous attachment to the people and the country. My eventual conclusion: Chaos. Disorder. Energy. Koreans are hustlers. Not in the sense of Paul Newman in the classic film of the same name, but in a positive way. They bust their butts to succeed and rely on guts, determination, and sheer will.

After I read Bryson’s books, I realized there wasn’t a similar English-language travel book about Korea. Roger Shepherd, a New Zealander, penned Baekdu Daegan Trail: Hiking Korea’s Mountain Spine, in 2010, but it was predominantly a hiking guide. British international travel writer Simon Winchester walked the length of the country and published Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles in 1988. Without the benefit of a translator, though, the view seemed to be of Korea from the outside. Perhaps owing to the fact that from 1910 to 1945, Korea was a colony of Japan, and from then until 1987 it was ruled by a series of authoritarian military governments, there seem to be no travel books that I was aware of written during this period. One of the most thorough and accomplished travel adventures written was by British intrepid world traveller Isabella Bird, who after trekking through Korea’s interior and conveying inland along the Han River by boat and on foot, riding on horseback along the east coast Diamond Mountains — and after four separate trips to Korea between 1894 and 1987 — published Korea and Her Neighbours in 1898.

Before her, in 1884, American George Clayton Foulk completed a nine-hundred-mile, forty-three-day journey being carried across the peninsula in a palanquin chair, and being one of the few Westerners to speak Korean at that time, gained an immediate and intimate knowledge of the people. He jotted nearly four hundred pages of notes, though it wasn’t until 2007, when Canadian writer Samuel Hawley, author of the acclaimed book The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China, published two books about Foulk. Hawley had discovered the George Clayton Foulk collection at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and had the American’s notes and letters sent via microfilm to Seoul. Due to Foulk’s truncated and messy handwriting, it took Hawley many months of poring over the pages to fully comprehend the content.

I somehow doubted that Bill Bryson would find his way to South Korea and write a bestseller. So it fell to someone else to explore and write about this uncut diamond of a country. Why not me? I had done a bit of writing. My university degree was in mass communication with an emphasis in journalism. I’d been a sports reporter at the Tahoe Daily Tribune in Lake Tahoe, California, in 1985. In 1997, I spent a year employed as a copy editor at the Korea Herald newspaper in Seoul. Yes, I’d do it, I decided. I’d devise a practical and assiduous long-term plan for a pan-Korea trip. But unlike my gritty, trekking predecessors — Foulk, Bird, Winchester, and Shepherd, among others — I’d use a car!

South Korea is smaller than thirty-seven of America’s fifty-one states, including Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Italy is three times larger. Slender Cuba and little Iceland are fractionally bigger. Yet I realized the preparations and the actual trip would not be so simple. Much of the country is mountainous. It also has 17,268 kilometres of undulating and indented coastline and more than three thousand offshore islands. Its long history was mostly a mystery to me, its culture and people puzzling.

I began to read up on my subject, and so began to frequent new and used English-language bookstores, buying up any titles I could find with information about the country and its history, geography, geology, culture, famous people, architecture, and wars. I joined the Korean branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) and began attending its twice-monthly lectures. Talks were presented in English by Korean and foreign professors, intellectuals, authors, and diplomats, and covered a diverse range of topics, from tea-making, traditional architecture, Buddhism and missionaries, to the Korean War, North Korea, Japanese colonization, and yangban (Joseon upper-class gentlemen). The lectures were highly informative.

I ordered home delivery of the Korea Times, the Korea Herald, the English-language edition of the JoongAng Daily, and the International Herald Tribune. Nightly, I clipped and chronicled articles about places and things I would be interested in seeing. I do not mean to disparage Korea — God knows the last century alone has been difficult enough — but it seemed that regularly the papers contained new and novel forms of social oddities and sometimes just plain weird stuff that I believe only happens in Korea. For that reason alone, I eagerly perused each issue.

The Korea Times, for example, for a time published contributions by an American doctor who practised in Seoul. The good doctor would describe snippets of his life, and, being single, he included stories about dating Korean women. In one piece the doctor wrote about his secretary, a young Korean woman who he described as pretty, intelligent, single, and seeking a marriage partner. He concluded that if any single men were interested in courting her, they were to contact him. A day or two later the secretary’s lengthy remonstration appeared, in which she lambasted him for being a nutcase and implied that hell would freeze over before she would seek his assistance in this regard.

There was also the story of a thirteen-year-old boy, Kim Sung-ho, who was allegedly trapped for twelve hours in his bedroom under masses of test papers, notebooks, and text books. Sung-ho’s mother had enrolled him in nine different after-school private academies (hagwons), and his room was stacked sky-high with books. One Sunday evening, the boy was standing up, memorizing facts for a test, when he accidently nudged the tower of books and the entire mass came crashing down around him. On Monday morning, his mother, unable to open his bedroom door, called the police, who needed an axe to break it down. It took thirty minutes to rescue Sung-ho, and fifty garbage bags to lug out all the paper.

There was more. I would see photos in the newspapers of seemingly annual National Assembly clashes, where the two opposing political parties squared off in the chamber, engaging in giving each other half nelsons and the occasional uppercut or left hook.

Sometimes the news was tragic. A man was arrested in Seoul for stabbing to death his former teacher. The student, now thirty-eight, had held a grudge since age seventeen, when the teacher struck him with a wooden rod for allegedly cheating on a test. The student had contacted the teacher to demand an apology. When it was not forthcoming, he stabbed him. Or the story of a sixty-eight-year-old priest in Seoul who stabbed a fellow priest from another church. Both priests were angry for reportedly being slandered by each other. The victim of the stabbing wrestled the knife from the perpetrator and proceeded to stab him! Luckily the injuries were minor. Priests no less!

Often it was close to midnight by the time I’d finished perusing all four newspapers.

I sought an English-speaking Korean national to accompany me, not just to translate, but to pose questions, so I could try to capture the unvarnished heart, soul, and spirit of the local people. Had I put in the time learning to speak Korean, I would not have needed a translator, but as it stood, I had only a perfunctory understanding of the language, for which I accept all of the blame.

Korean, like Hungarian and Finnish, belongs to the Ural-Altaic language group, the genesis of which is hazy, but thought to be central Asia. Though its grammatical structure is very similar to Japanese, spoken Korean bears no resemblance to spoken Japanese. And although it contains many Chinese words, Korean grammar and phonics are completely different. Clearly, the Korean language was invented by aliens. Chinese was Korea’s written language until the twentieth century, despite Hangul, the Korean writing system, devised by scholars under King Sejong between 1443 and 1446. Hangul has twenty-four phonetic symbols that can be learned quickly. The Korean elite preferred writing in Chinese, however, to keep them distinct from the semi-literate masses who could not comprehend the complicated Chinese characters.

Patricia Bartz, author of the august 1972 book South Korea, which documented in excellent detail the country’s geology, geography, and flora and fauna, wrote that it was not until 1945 that Hangul came into widespread use, and not until 1971 that the government ordered all documents to be written in Hangul.

According to the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, Korean is one of the four most difficult languages for an English-speaker to learn, along with Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin), Japanese, and Arabic. To gain proficiency in Korean takes, on average, 2,200 class hours over eighty-eight weeks. To put that in context, learning French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish — languages similar to English — requires just 575 class hours over twenty-four weeks.

Korean language word-order is opposite to English. For example, the English sentence “I eat a hamburger” translates in Korean to “I hamburger eat” (Hamburgeo meogeoyo). In Korean, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence. In theory, Korean shouldn’t be that difficult for me to master, since my brain works backward. But after several years of making a quasi effort to learn, I felt overwhelmed when I realized that I had only acquired a mere handful of words and still had about 300,000 to go! At that point, I essentially jettisoned my quest to learn the language.

At the time I was undertaking my travels, my spoken Korean consisted of being able to change a handful of verbs to past, present, and future tenses, though my listening comprehension was pretty near nil, probably because I was never a very good listener, even in English, and to my ear, spoken Korean was harsh and choppy, as if an angry Russian was chattering at me in Arabic.

The only real choice for translator was my good pal of four years, Kim Heju, who I had met while I was travelling in Yeosu along the south coast. Sadly, six months before our encounter, Heju’s Canadian husband, whom she had accompanied to Japan, China, Australia, and Korea, where he taught English, had died of cancer.

Heju had been raised in Daejeon, about 160 kilometres south of Seoul. She had been a tomboy as a kid, and liked to play outdoors with the boys. She marched to her own drummer. She had little ambition to accumulate wealth, did not automatically ascribe that Korea was the centre of the universe, and enjoyed getting away on her own. She was impulsive, impractical, gregarious, and bossy, and there was little I could do about the latter, because every Korean female I’ve met, from age three to 103, is headstrong and commanding. I believe it’s in their genes, a Korean thing.

Heju was teaching English to Korean kids at a small academy in her hometown when I asked if she could join me on my proposed three- to four-month foray across the peninsula. She was noncommittal at first.

“You won’t have to pay a cent,” I exhorted, in an effort to convince her. “I’ll pay all expenses — accommodation, travel, food.” (It was not every day that the son of a Scottish mother and Dutch father acted so benevolently.)

She continued to hem and haw, so I unleashed my trump card, offering her a percentage of potential book royalties, though, of course, there was no guarantee that I would even finish the trip, let alone the manuscript. “If I sell a lot of books, you could become rich,” I assured her with near-total conviction.

Despite her normally buoyant outlook, Heju, like many Koreans, was imbued with a healthy dose of skepticism. “So, how much money would I make from royalties?” she countered more than once, in jest ( I think).

It was not long before the excursion was set to begin that Heju finally agreed to accompany me. Without her as a conduit, as an intermediary into the world of Koreans, I would have been in the dark, a fish out of water. She arranged a four-month leave of absence from her teaching job, and with my one-year contract at a local elementary school soon concluding, we would be ready to begin in mid-March the first segment through Seoul — two and a half years after first reading Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country.

March was the ideal month to begin. I wanted to complete the trip before the arrival of the brutally oppressive summer, when searing heat and humidity transform East Asia into a sauna. The unpalatable steam bath usually begins in May or early June, and lasts through August. It’s not until late summer, in September, that the humidity abates and temperatures reach a moderate level, with lovely high blue skies. March is a transitional month, when winter’s bitterly cold, dry air, conceived in Siberia and then sweeping south over Korea, finally loses steam, defeated by the warm air flowing north from the South China Sea.

We spent the first three weeks exploring Seoul on foot. The city had been the capital since 1394, the vortex of power and prestige, containing the Joseon Dynasty’s royal palaces and Neolithic settlements dating back about six or seven thousand years — Seoul was an ideal place to begin.

Most days we rode the Number 5 subway line west, under the Han River toward Old Seoul in the downtown core. The subway system in Seoul is outstanding, by the way, with fourteen lines comprising 775 kilometres of track, and shuttling an average of 4.2 million passengers daily around the vast city. In fact, it is the world’s third-largest system in terms of passenger numbers, behind only Beijing and Shanghai. The Seoul subway system is like a small self-contained underground city. Along lengthy subterranean corridors and halls that connect one line to another can be found all sorts of shops and itinerant purveyors offering myriad items for sale. I’ve even seen baby chicks being sold out of cardboard boxes. Subway cars are not impervious to salespeople, either, as sellers stride car-to-car, declaring with great gusto the merits of the flashlights, magnifying glasses, raincoats, or umbrellas they are offering for sale.

We predominantly took guided tours of palaces and historic sites in and around the city, not because we particularly relished such outings, but because they were the most efficient way for us to learn about the city’s grand traditional architecture and places of interest.

One tour was of Seodaemun Prison, where, between 1910 and 1945, forty thousand criminals and political prisoners were held by the Japanese. Many were tortured and executed at the site.

We also took tours of various Joseon palaces and were led up Bugak Mountain — the dominant thousand-foot ridge that rises up behind the Presidential Blue House and Gyeongbok Palace (the largest and most impressive of the Joseon palaces) — where we were afforded a marvellous view over the crowded city core and the surrounding mountains.

One bleak, chilly afternoon, Heju and I wandered through the grounds of the small, desolate Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery, which is located along the north shore of the Han River in Hapjeong-dong, in Mapo district, in the city’s far western reaches (Yanghwajin translates as “dock by willow trees and flowers”). The land for the cemetery was a gift in 1890 from King Gojong to the foreign community, who at the time were mostly missionaries.

In 1866, an estimated eight thousand Korean Catholics were beheaded or strangled to death during a state-sponsored purge. One of two main execution sites in Seoul was along the Han River’s north shore in front of this future cemetery. The spot is known as Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine — jeoldu means “to cut off heads” and san is “mountain” (referring to the steep embankment).

We crouched in front of each headstone, some worn, some of the engravings faded, reading the inscriptions from the approximately six hundred stones, many of which dated from the late 1800s and early 1900s, though there were also a few from the later part of the twentieth century. I scribbled names and dates into my notebook, the list forming a veritable who’s who of missionaries, notable foreigners, and others who gave years of their lives to serving in Korea.

Arthur Ernest Chadwell’s gravestone indicated he arrived from England in 1926, was named Assistant Bishop to Korea in 1951, and was buried here in 1967. Henry Gerhard Appenzeller’s tombstone indicated he was the first Methodist missionary to arrive in Korea in 1885. Sadly, he drowned in 1902, at the age of forty-four, trying to save a Korean girl. His daughter, Alice Rebecca Appenzeller, born in 1885, was reportedly the first American born in Korea. She died in 1950 after spending most of her life teaching in the country.

In the far corner of the cemetery was the Underwood family plot: six black marble headstones representing four generations of Underwoods who have lived in Korea since 1885. The original patriarch was Horace Grant Underwood — brother of John T., the founder of the Underwood Typewriter Company in New York. Horace was the master of all Korean missionaries, and devoted his life to establishing schools, churches, and medical clinics and persuading Koreans to embrace Christianity on behalf of the Protestant Church.

While Horace wasn’t buried in this plot, his wife, American missionary doctor Lillias Stirling Horton, was. She wrote the book Underwood of Korea, about the couple’s life in the country. There is also a tombstone for Horace’s grandson, also named Horace Grant, who was born in Seoul in 1917 and who died in the same city in 2004 at age eighty-seven. He was the author of Korea in War, Revolution and Peace: The Recollections of Horace G. Underwood.

The Underwoods have been in Korea for 120 years. Their original two-storey stone home, in use since the turn of the nineteenth century in Yeonghui-dong at Yonsei University, is now the Underwood Memorial Hall Museum.

Some inscriptions were grim reminders of how fickle life could be a century ago, with numerous children of missionary parents buried here, many the victims of diseases such as typhoid, cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis. After entering Seoul in 1887, The Church of England Bishop for South Tokyo, Edward Bickerstet, wrote derogatorily, “I thought when I saw it that the Chinese town of Shanghai was the filthiest place human beings live on this earth, but Seoul is a grade lower.” Isabella Bird wrote of late-nineteenth-century Seoul, “For a great city and a capital its meanness is indescribable,” speaking of a quarter of a million people residing in a labyrinth of alleys beside foul-smelling ditches, where solid and liquid waste from houses was emptied.

There were three headstones in a row on a slight knoll, for Kim Ok Ja, 42, Kim Hankaul, 16, and Kim Scott Hansol, 14, all perishing on August 12, 1985.

We were puzzled. Had the trio, likely a mother and her two sons, been in a car accident? Later, I did some digging and discovered that Japan Airlines Flight 123 from Tokyo to Osaka had crashed into 6,500-foot Mount Takamagahara that day, killing all but four of the 524 passengers aboard. The passenger list indicated there were three Koreans aboard. Were they the three Kims in the cemetery? The evidence seemed to point in that direction.

After three and a half hours, and with darkness upon us, I finally scribbled the last inscription into my notebook. I couldn’t feel the fingers of my right hand; they were cramped from writing and the cold.

Cemeteries to me represent the end of lives. They weren’t fun places for me.

* * *

After three weeks touring historic places in Seoul, Heju and I were itching to get out on the road and motor through the country. I had recently bought a used and inexpensive red 1994 Hyundai Scoupe. The car’s most salient features were its bucket seats and ample leg room, the latter in short supply in most Korean compact cars. Granted, the car’s shock absorbers were kaput, and if I drove up a mildly challenging hill, the engine would inevitably overheat and the temperature gauge would shoot up to “extremely dangerous” territory. But the Scoupe cost just 1.5 million won (US$1,250), and I only needed it for a few months anyway.

I didn’t even want a car. There are already about twenty million vehicles on South Korea’s roads. Comparatively, Ireland has just 1.5 million. Canada — one hundred times larger in area than South Korea — has just 13 million. Seven million vehicles are registered in Seoul alone. But if we wanted to travel to all the destinations we had planned to, trains and buses were not the way to go, particularly for those places located off the beaten path.

The month before we started out, I had to sit three separate tests to earn my Korean driver’s licence. The first was a written one, followed by driving on a controlled course, and finally on the road. The second was conducted on a long, narrow swath of pavement next to a creek that fed the south shore of the Han River. The circuit had an S-curve, a stop sign, a traffic light, a crosswalk, and a parallel parking area. I was hustled into a little compact car at the start line. On the dashboard was a small electronic screen showing the number 100 in red. Suddenly, the car started blurting loud nonsensical Korean phrases at me.

I cursed. I had paid 60,000 won (US$50) to take the test, and I had the sinking feeling that I was already behind the eight ball. I craned my neck back and forth trying in vain to find the source of “The Voice.”

Beep, I heard, as the number on the screen dropped to 95. I hadn’t even stepped on the gas pedal yet. Then there was another voice coming from a loudspeaker outside the car; I guessed it was my cue to begin the test. I worked the clutch and slowly proceeded forward. Beep, the number fell to 90 at the S-turn. Beep again at the traffic light: 85. Another beep as I went through the lights. Now 80. Then I was suddenly accosted by a startlingly loud whining blast from a siren inside the car. I almost had a heart attack. I stopped the car.

I swore again, furious that my test was now doomed for sure. “What’s going on?”

Beep. The red number changed to 75 and a young man suddenly ran across the track toward the car like a storm trooper. He flung open my door and told me to get out.

I was fuming. “I’m not going anywhere!”I retorted, refusing to budge, but the fellow practically pulled me out, then got behind the wheel and drove the car off the track.

I made a beeline to the track-side office, where I informed an official, in both Korean and English, that this was the most moronic test in the annals of world driving history! I looked out over to the track and noted a young Korean woman driver being unceremoniously pulled out of her car, too.

Not ironically, sometime after this, I came across a weekly Korea Times column entitled, “Seoul Help Center for Foreigners,” and in it a Canadian complained about taking the same test on the same track. “I had a very bad experience today going for my driving test,” he wrote. “I was thrown into the car with everyone knowing that I don’t speak Korean, but during the test, the car spoke Korean to me. The examiner did not provide guidance, and no one told me I would have to wait for a Korean voice to go ahead. I have ten years of driving experience in Canada, and I know that I drive better than a lot of Koreans. I really hope something can be done about this terrible situation.”

The Seoul Help Center had printed the reason why the Canadian had failed: he didn’t use a turn signal, failed to fully stop at an intersection, didn’t check the white line while parallel parking, and did not stop within two seconds when the emergency siren rang. Everyone is required to score over 80 to pass. “Please study Korean driving rules and try again.” The article failed to address the fact that they fail to warn you that the test will be conducted in Korean.

A week later, I paid another 60,000 won to take the test again. This time I brought along my pal Moon (“Moonie”) Seok-mo as a translator, and I passed. You’d think Koreans would be safe and circumspect drivers after all this rigorous testing. Yet, the moment they get onto the road, it seems many drivers, men in particular, miraculously transform into Formula One champion wannabes.

Heju and I loaded up the Scoupe’s trunk and back seat with cardboard boxes containing hundreds of clipped newspaper articles, travel brochures, maps, newspapers, and books related to Korea. Into our bags we stuffed sundries and clothes (Heju’s also seemed to contain a high percentage of skin creams, ointments, lotions, and potions, I noticed). I had with me my “Bible” — the trip’s engine, the Holy Grail, which contained a summarized chronological list of hundreds of places we would stop at along the way. It had taken me two years to populate and organize “The Bible,” and it was essential. Bryson may have driven more than nine hundred unfettered kilometres in a single day, from Daly Waters to Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. That is equivalent to driving the length of South Korea, twice. If we attempted a similar marathon drive, not only would we complete the entire trip in two days, but we’d bypass everything worth seeing.

I would motor (Heju did not drive) slowly, purposefully, and assiduously as if I were a retired gentleman navigating a Winnebago across North America. This was not only for safety reasons, but because we didn’t want to miss out on the local scenery and points of interest.

The plan was to first head northwest from Seoul, then move counterclockwise: south down the western flank of the peninsula, east along the south coast, north up the eastern shore, and finally west along the border back to Seoul. The country is not wide, so we figured we could sneak inland to visit places of interest without too much difficulty.

We had neatly packed the car to capacity. But for reasons I can’t fully explain, when it came time to depart Seoul, stuff was lying unpacked around the seats and at Heju’s ankles. We seemed to be travelling in a veritable market on wheels.

“We’re finally ready to go!” I announced triumphantly.

Heju glanced at the overstuffed Scoupe and replied cynically, “It looks like we’re homeless and living out of the car.”

Her pessimism sometimes aggravated me. We were finally ready to rock ’n’ roll though.