basic meaning of excluding or exclusive the term has the additional meaning of cliquish. Cliques of one kind or another control everything and have done so since time immemorial. Examples abound: Yi Sŏnggye and the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty; Sejo’s usurpation of Tanjong’s throne; the factional squabbles in mid-Chosŏn and the purges that claimed countless lives; Taewŏn’gun’s henchmen; Queen Min’s inner circle; the various groups that curried favour with the Chinese, the Japanese, the Americans, the British, the French, the Russians and the Germans; the in-groups around Syngman Rhee, Chang Myun, and Park Chunghee; the insiders in the administrations of General Chun and General No; the henchmen of Kim Youngsam, Kim Daejung and Noh Moohyun; the in-groups in both government and civilian organizations and in the great chebŏl companies; the gurus in schools, hospitals and church organizations. Cliques are the arbiters of power. The foreigner just does not belong. Without malice, he is simply discounted. That’s one reason he finds it so difficult to do business here. The rules of exclusion hit him at every corner. He is constantly treated as if he has no feelings. Things are said at meetings that ignore his presence. I remember meetings with the chancellor of my school many years ago when I was foolish enough to say I disagreed with the august man’s view. There would be a stunned silence, followed by comments from various professors to the effect that I was a foreigner and didn’t understand. Often a well-meaning professor would beg forgiveness on the grounds that my Korean was very poor, oblivious of the fact that his defence of the chancellor involved insulting me. Then the chancellor would say, ‘No, no I like people to say what they think,’ and the uneasy professors would turn to me and say in chorus – as if I hadn’t understood what the chancellor said – ‘You may freely express your views.’ I always left these meetings giggling.
Another example of Korea’s excluding culture, which you may have noticed – how could you miss it? – is how very rare it is for an elderly foreigner to be offered a seat on the subway. It’s a matter of not being seen with the eyes of the spirit as opposed to the eyes of the flesh. Whenever I am offered a seat, it is invariably by a man who thinks I am much older than him and in much worse shape, while I am smilingly convinced of the opposite. The truth is we could both use the seat.
New Year’s Day: Year of the Dog
Whenever I see a white-haired old man with a stick,
I say to myself: ‘When I’m old, I won’t go out.’
What a laugh! Already I’m sixty-three;
old men offer me their seats on the train;
they think I’m in worse shape than them.
The indignity of growing old defies definition;
it’s the old Chinese shrimp thing in reverse:
sweet head, tail full of shit.
After a poem by Yi Chehyŏn (1287–1367)
When yangban talk occurs around me, I quickly point out that the O’Rourkes were kings of Breifne, which makes me royal stock (wangshil). Rourke, I always add, is a Viking word meaning the good king. People are always enormously impressed even if they laugh themselves silly at my insufferable foreign arrogance and impertinence. I always hasten to point out that the family came down a few pegs over the generations, not that I really believe this, but I know that a dust of humility is always good. My approach doesn’t get me much recognition, but it puts a quick end to yangban talk.
It’s important not to be too constrained in your ideas about the yangban system because the tradition takes some interesting twists. Many Koreans would be appalled to find out that King Yŏngjo’s mother was a maid in the royal kitchens. Her duties were to look after the water for the morning ablutions of the court ladies, an onerous duty, no doubt, given that court ladies tended to be a testy lot. But Yŏngjo’s mum rose from the ignominy of her station to become the bearer of the king’s son, a future king himself. Yŏngjo ascended the throne after Kyŏngjong’s brief reign, which ended in an allergic reaction to pickled crab – poisoned, no doubt. There are those who hint that elements close to Yŏngjo were responsible. As you might surmise, Yŏngjo had a bit of a complex about his parentage.
Kojong’s first son, Prince Wanhwa, was born to a chung’in palace woman. Taewŏn’gun, delighted by the mother’s lack of rank, which translated as an utter absence of indebtedness to ranking others, wanted to appoint the child crown prince. He even discussed the matter with Queen Dowager Cho. The prince died in childhood, ostensibly from measles, but there are lingering doubts about malicious intent.
In recent years my titular Dow Jones has taken a dip. I used to be shinbunim, kyosunim, sŏnsaengnim, but these days ajŏsshi or harabŏji is as much standing as I get. There was a guard in my apartment complex many years ago who seemed intent on cutting my pretensions to rank. When I parked my car in a way that outraged his finer sensibilities – and I seemed to do this regularly – he ya-yad me forthwith. Now I don’t like being ya-yad; ya-yaing is doggie talk to me, so I ignored him. Of course, no one likes being ignored. Inevitably the guard let me have both barrels. Now while I sympathize with a cruel fate that forced him to deal with an obtuse long-nosed fool, I did so wish he wouldn’t raise his voice. Next to being ya-yad, I hate this most. He shouted; I got mad, venom-quiet mad. He screamed about regulations; I asked about etiquette; did he know the meaning of white? He snarled about rules; I pointed out all the other cars blatantly in violation of his rules. I reminded him that his job was to make my life as ruffle-free as possible. He looked at me as if I had two heads. I played my final card: I proclaimed that I pay his salary. There was a moment of hair-on-end shock, of stunned disbelief. Our altercation stuttered to an eerie conclusion. He walked away in total disgust, his only other option being murder, and presumably the elusive sage still disapproved of violence.
I’m not too sure what my loss of status is all about, because I think I’ve gained greatly in dignity in the intervening years. Yeats says that men improve with the years. In the case of the great poet, ‘De mortuis nihil nisi bonum’ is the guiding principle, and when the time comes, I would hope for such treatment myself. At any rate, I now have a nice salt and pepper mop of hair in place of the original nondescript mousy brown. And while I’m not a natty dresser, I’m certainly not the slob I was as a young man. And in addition to a doctorate in Korean literature, and an honoris causa doctorate from NUI in Ireland, I have published more than twenty books, some in prestigious US university presses, I had a poetry column in the Korea Times for many years and subsequently in the Korea Herald, and I travel free on the subway because I’m an honorary citizen of Seoul. Not bad for a sangnom. Of course, none of this does me much good. Only those who know me well give me a title, and to tell the truth I’d prefer if people who know me didn’t use a title. For the rest, I’m harabŏji or ajŏsshi. I have been called much worse. An angry motorcycle policeman once called me a shipp’al shang nomsaekki, a phrase I’d rather not translate, but believe me it’s pretty bad. I don’t even know what my offence was, but I think it involved an illegal U turn at a time when U turns were part of the daily diet. How times change! We once bet our driver $20 he wouldn’t do a figure of eight around the policeman at the center of Kwanghwamun intersection. The nice policeman laughed and waved. If you tried this in the US or Ireland today, you would get a huge fine and maybe even a month in jail.
A little reading poked large holes in my ideas on status. I was shocked, for example, to discover that the monk was sangnom, and that for hundreds of years monks were barred from entering Seoul. It was actually the Japanese who permitted them to come back to the capital. The priest could not reasonably expect to fare much better in status politics, but I never knew one who thought for a moment that he might be sangnom. While priests always seemed to be treated with great courtesy, my reading introduced me to stories where the priest nom was a recurring character and the yasujaengi was very bad news indeed. Chungnom is
