Korea (27 page)

I ended up rather liking Mr Kwong, despite his outward
similarity to a snake-oil salesman. It was all an act, designed to impress his masters on the base. I think he knew it cut little ice with me, and so he dropped the pretence and became just an intelligent, acutely sensitive Korean. It is said that Koreans have an unusually developed
nunchi
—a deep sensitivity to the moods and attitudes of those around them—a very finely tuned set of psychological antennae. Mr Kwong had more
nunchi
than most, which is probably what has made him so adroit a liaison officer for the last quarter of a century, able to arbitrate between the conflicting cultures of the air base and the people on the two sides of the cyclone fencing. But the cultural divide was widening, without a doubt: his job was becoming more difficult, and he was shrewd enough to realize it.

I left the base later that day. One of the air force captains came to Kunsan City with me, and we took the ferry together across the Kum River (which had been such a Maginot Line during the early stages of the war, defended by the American Army, but crossed with depressing ease by the southward-racing North Koreans) to a grimy little town called Changhang. The captain had been stationed at Kunsan for the better part of a year, but he had never been on the rustbucket of a ferryboat, and he looked uneasily about him at the smoky little lounge, crowded with its very ordinary Korean passengers. ‘God, the smell of
kimchi
. I’ll never get used to it. Lot of our men come over here to the train station. They can get the train clear up to Seoul,’ he said. ‘But I never did. Guess it’s a lot easier to stay on base. Everything you need there, so long as you get to A-Town once every few days.’ He was still hung over from the night before, and grinned sardonically. We had left him in the Hollywood Bar with a girl twice his size, and he looked bruised and rather sheepish at what must have been the inevitable outcome of the encounter.

We stepped off the ferry on the Chungchongnam-do side. True to form, it had started to spit with rain. The air force captain had been planning to walk around town, but then said he thought he would feel a little easier going right back on the ferry to
Kunsan. I shook his hand and thanked him for all he had done. He took my picture and then stepped back onto the boat, timidity, I thought, having got the better of him.

I watched the ferry draw away into the grey mist, and his face disappeared gradually into the blur of the crowd on the rails. My last contact with America thus faded, I turned and confronted Korea once again. My expedition to Kunsan had brought me some way off to the west of the track of those long-dead Dutchmen, and I had some stiff walking to do to get back onto their trail.

There were hills ahead. The map showed that to the north lay an immense region of tightly packed contours and triangulation points, small, fast-flowing streams, and twisting roads. The horizon was ragged and blue where the mountains rose from the coastal plain. None of the hills was very high—a twelve-hundred-foot hill here, another at fifteen hundred, another at two thousand. The Kum River, over which I had just been uncomfortably transported, meandered its way lazily along the range’s eastern flank: the Dutch sailors had been ferried across it on their way up to the court, and I would have to cross it twice as I headed back onto their track.

About an hour out of Changhang—a grubby, mean little port that smelled of smoke and rancid fish—I climbed a small, pine-covered knoll for no more sensible reason than to switch on my little radio to see if I was beyond the range of the American
transmitters at Kunsan, and thus define the local limit of the base’s cultural influence. (I was almost out of range, twenty miles north as an F-16 flies: through the hissing and crackling of the overworked ether I could just make out a litany of college football scores and an announcement for an aerobics class that night in the base gymnasium.)

From up here among the pines I could see more clearly to the north the hills of Chungchongnam-do. To the south I could see the estuary of the Kum, and to the west, the battleship-grey mass of the sea. Between the wide waters and where I stood, the land was flat, and whenever the sun came out it glittered briefly on hundreds and hundreds of rice fields, like tiny mica mirrors. But there were no such glints of light to the north of me. The fields were larger, and there were cattle and the beginnings of another season’s tall field crops. It was beyond a doubt that I had left Korea’s rice country behind for good. I was getting within the penumbra of the now not-so-distant capital city, and the sights and the people, their standing and their attitudes, all were beginning to change.

I found a
yogwan
on the north side of a small and rather pretty market town called Sochon. It was a far cry from the kind of hostelry that greeted Isabella Bird, when she made the first of her celebrated Victorian journeys to Korea. ‘The regular inn of the towns and large villages,’ she wrote,

consists chiefly of a filthy courtyard full of holes and heaps, entered from the road by a tumbledown gateway. A gaunt black pig or two tethered by the ears, big yellow dogs routing in the garbage, and fowls, boys, bulls, ponies,
mapu
, hangers-on, and travellers’ loads make up the busy scene.

Low lattice doors filled in with torn and dirty paper give access to a room the mud floor of which is concealed by reed mats, usually dilapidated, sprinkled with wooden blocks which serve as pillows. Farming gear and hat boxes often find a place on the low, heavy crossbeams. Into this room are crowded
mapu
, travellers and servants, the low
residuum
of Korean travel…

The ‘low
residuum
’ of Korean travel is rather more kindly treated today. The
yogwan
is not the most basic of local inns—there is an institution called the
yoinsuk
where the rougher trade takes its nocturnal ease, but even the meanest
yoinsuks
are tolerably clean and welcoming. The
yogwan
, though, particularly if you are careful to ask for one that is
cho-un
(good) as I would do when feeling reasonably flush, is as comfortable and pleasant a place to spend an inexpensive night as any I have known anywhere. Indeed, it can fairly be said that the tradition of the Korean
yogwan
is the true tradition of the wayside inn, forgotten almost everywhere else, where a local family will take in the weary traveller almost as much by way of civic duty as for commercial gain.

The inn I found in Sochon was typical of the marque. I found it in the usual way—from some distance I could see the tall brick chimney, and closer to it I could see the red-and-white stylized sign for a steaming bath (a sign I always confused with a Viking ship; and I agonized for weeks over what possible links there could be between Eric the Red and the early Koryo kings). Both chimney and sign indicated the presence of a public bath, a
mogyoktang
, and more often than not, I had discovered, a
yogwan
came alongside a
mogyoktang
so that bathers could rent a room by the hour or so, the better to cool off and to relax.

The inn was a modern brick building of perhaps three floors, with what passed for a reception desk upstairs. Two old ladies—the venerable owner and her almost equally venerable daughter, it later transpired—were lying on the floor beside their tiny telephone switchboard. They were playing
hwatu
, the ancient game of ‘flower cards’ (known in Japan as
hanafuda
), and I was loath to interrupt them.
Hwatu
is a pretty game to see being played, with rules like rummy: the cards themselves are tiny, gaily coloured squares with pictures representing the various months—a pine tree for January, a plum tree for February, cherry for March, and so on. The players—who often stake considerable amounts of
won
on the turn of a card—become amusingly excited;
and when I approached the stairway of the
yogwan
I would hear the old ladies’ cries long before I found them.

But they broke off quite happily and took me off to see a variety of their rooms. This particular
yogwan
had only
ondol
rooms—some of the more modern inns have Western-style quarters, with beds and carpets, in the event of a wandering foreigner happening by—and the ladies seemed keen that, subject to this one limitation, I should have just the room I wanted. The first was pleasant enough, except that there were two men already lying on its floor, fast asleep. The second was about an inch deep in water, but I was shown in nonetheless, perhaps in case I was interested in floating myself to sleep. But the third room was perfect: the clock (all Korean rooms have massive clocks with enormous pendulums) had all of its hands lying in a heap at the bottom of the glass, but the rest of the facilities appeared to be working normally. I agreed to take it, paid up my 8,000
won
—about £6—and took possession.

The bathhouse next door closed at eight, and although there was a perfectly good shower beside my room, it seemed a waste not to try Sochon’s public facilities. There was a moment of confusion when I handed over my dollar and proceeded through the ladies’ entrance (the only difference in the two silhouetted heads being that one had slightly longer hair), but I was eventually upstairs in the proper side: I tucked my clothes into a locker, snapped the keychain around my ankle, and walked somewhat self-consciously—the postage-stamp-size, all-purpose towel held rather ridiculously around my middle—into the bathing arena.

A
mogyoktang
and its more modest relation, the
taejungtang
, or ‘masses’ bath’, are monuments to egalitarian cleanliness, reducing all who enter to the basic entities of bone and muscle, freed from all pretensions of riches or power. In a place like Sochon there can in any case be few enough who are rich, and I daresay all those in the bathhouse that evening were farmers and shopkeepers and clerks and their sons, with their wives and girlfriends and daughters behind the partitions next door. The traditional reason for the huge numbers of bathhouses in Korea is that until very
recently few houses had baths, or indeed water supplies, of their own: a person’s
mogyok
had to be taken in privately gathered and fire-warmed water, especially during the bitter Korean winters when the rivers would be frozen solid. Now, though, most houses have water, and a bath can be had at home with ease and economy. But the old ways die hard, and if Koreans no longer have to visit their bathhouses for reasons of frugality and space, they do so now in pursuit of that most Confucian of ideals, the civilized pleasure of the purest kind.

The main bathing room was immense, with a tough red tile floor and white-tiled walls, and mirrors, mirrors everywhere. It was a positive plumbers’ heaven: there were shower heads, taps, faucets, douches, spouts, plunges, fountains, sinks, basins, footbaths, bidets, sitzes, lavers, tanks, cisterns, buckets, baths, and other unnamed devices of steel and enamelled iron and vitreous china placed at convenient points everywhere. Thousands of gallons of hot water seemed to be running from everything—pure steaming oceansful of the stuff streamed, gushed, trickled, cascaded, sprayed, splashed, sluiced, sloshed, surged, foamed, bubbled up, poured down, raced across, and welled from under until everything and every surface, be it horizontal or vertical or sloping, curved or plane, smooth or rough, hirsute or bald, pink or yellow, was wet through and wonderfully warmed, with every pore wide open, every square inch of flesh glistening and gleaming and becoming brighter and more polished by the second, by virtue of its mere proximity to all these limitless acre-feet of cleansing water.

Once my eyes had become accustomed to the comfortable blanket of steam, I began to see the other figures who had come from their homes to wallow in all this warmth and wetness. There were perhaps eight men and two young boys. Each of them appeared to be obsessively fascinated, Narcissus-like, with making his body as clean and perfectly presentable as possible. One young man was scrubbing his back with a long loofah; another pared his toenails; two shampooed their hair; one rubbed vigorously at his legs with a chunk of pumice; the others—
including the boys, whose hands were grubby, from an afternoon of
taekwon-do
practice, no doubt—were standing under showers either hot or cold, covered with foam that came from the various liquid potions and the pink or green or yellow bars of perfumed soap that the management thoughtfully provided.

I was struck by how spare and rangy and fit the men all looked—there was no spare flesh, there were no thickened waists, no blotches or bulges of fat. They were all perfectly formed, Adonis-like figures—smaller than the average European or American maybe, but they looked a lot neater and more efficient. A sensible diet, long working hours, compulsory military service—probably all of these had conspired to whip their bodies into such enviably good shape; and the bathing probably helped too, by undoing all the evils of the drink that the Korean men habitually and conspicuously consume.

The walking had had its own effect on me, mind you. I was getting leaner, and I had a good farmer’s tan on my arms and face. So I didn’t feel too intimidated by the presence of these more ideally fashioned men as I began to scrub and soap and rub myself clean. My presence did cause a ripple of interest, however: Korean men’s bodies are almost wholly hairless, and the introduction into this naked world of a creature who even while clothed was thought of as a gorilla did trigger some consternation and alarm, though mercifully it evolved into nothing more than friendly curiosity. From the trajectories of some of the gazes I once suspected their interest to be uncomfortably priapic, but that seemed more my problem than anyone else’s, and after ten minutes or so the crowd’s attention wandered—the harder they stared at me, the harder I stared back, and that seemed to do the trick.

After the cleansing I climbed into the massive hot bath—my first encounter with a
mogyoktang
some months before had taught me the etiquette: I shall not easily forget the withering glares when I jumped straight into the common bath and began lathering myself there—and soaked for a while. Next, the sauna—far, far hotter than anything I had known back home, it seemed
heated with volcanic and sulphurous gases, and breathing was almost impossible. I staggered out after two minutes, my lungs cripplingly scalded, and leaped into an ice-cold plunge pool, then back into the hot bath, then under a cold shower, was tempted back into the sauna, and so on for two hours at least, until I was pink and glowing with good health and felt intensely reluctant to leave this womblike home and go back to the hard floor of the
yogwan
next door.

In fact, sensible to such needs, the management had provided a halfway house, an airlock in which the customers could slowly prod themselves back towards the real world. There was a long sitting-out room, a withdrawing room furnished with reclining chairs and a television, on which a mildly erotic film was unrolling, and from which pretty girls blindly blew kisses at the rows of sleepy, half-broiled bodies ranged around the room. I ordered a can of a much-advertised restorative drink with the unlikely name of McColl—it was ice-cold, but it tasted of a mixture of corn oil and methylated spirits and smelled of mercaptan, and if it did me any good it had a funny way of showing it, because I was very nearly sick on the spot. But maybe the actual effect was the intended one: I got up and left, collected my clothes and dressed, and then went out for a solitary dinner, curled up on my
yo
on the
ondol
floor, and slept like a top until dawn.

The old ladies woke me with breakfast at seven. I am still not convinced that the best way to start the day is with
kimchi
and rice. Day lilies, aralia shoots, royal fern bracken, bluebells, wild asters, broad bellflowers, mugworts, and sow thistles—all of which are used in dishes to spice up the average Korean day—I could just about imagine being placed before me at seven, with the morning’s
Korea Times
and a cup of
oksusucha
. But when the inn’s Mesdames Park placed their tureen of year-old cabbage and turnip soused in sour vinegar and brine, and with garlic and red chillies stirred in for good measure (which is what
kimchi
essentially is, though anything, not only cabbage and turnip, can be
kimchi
’d, in the same way that anything can be curried in
Hindustan)—when they placed that sorry-looking mess in front of me that morning, my stomach gave an unpleasant little nudge to the back of my throat, and I suddenly longed for a five-minute egg or a bowl of Weetabix and cold milk. It was the only incident of what I could actually call homesickness, and it vanished in a trice.