surgeon, but when Admiral Rogers sent word to Korean officials that he would return the injured, he was told, “Do as you please with them.” The wounded were set ashore.
On July 3, after thirty-five days in Korean waters, the squadron set sail for China. The battle had garnered but a few paragraphs in American newspapers. The Daewongun, though, referred to it as a glorious victory for his country, having driven the enemy away.
Dr. Horace Allen, a Protestant missionary who arrived in Seoul from Ohio in 1884, and was employed first as a doctor with the U.S. legation, then as a diplomat at the legation until 1905, called the American attack an unfair and monumental mismatch, a “useless slaughter, one from which no good results ensued, and of which we have not since been proud.”
In the museum, we paused in front of the Sujagi. The flag had been taken back to America and had hung in Annapolis, Maryland, until it was finally returned to Korea in 2007. As we moved along, I was taking copious notes and asking lots of questions, which had to be translated into Korean by Heju, answered by the guide, then translated by Heju back into English. When the guide didn’t know an answer, Yun-ja would phone her tourism office to try to secure one for us. Thus, what normally should have been a two-hour tour ended up taking twice as long. It was close to three o’clock before we left.
We thanked the guide and Yun-ja, who had made a half-dozen calls on our behalf, and we apologized for taking up so much of their time. Yun-ja replied enthusiastically: “I loved so many questions — I learned so much today!”
After grabbing bowls of ramyeon (fried noodle soup) at the food hut by the museum, Heju and I drove the short distance west to Ganghwa town, which is located on a long bend in the island road that widens to six lanes through the town. On this tranquil island, the traffic here seemed incongruous, vehicles noisily motoring along at seventy or eighty kilometres per hour. Like many other towns and cities across the peninsula, this one was not what you would call pedestrian-friendly.
“If I was mayor, I’d reduce the number of lanes from six to two, and the speed limit to about twenty,” I decried to Heju. “It feels like we’re on a motorway.”
The town looked dusty and worn. We parked and strolled along the main street, past nondescript old shops that looked as if they’d been slapped together quickly with aluminum and concrete. I had naively envisioned the town as an attractive, historic little place, like one of those two-hundred-year-old colonial villages you would came across in, say, Massachusetts or Maine.
In the 1960s and ’70s, the country began modernizing and industrializing at a furious pace, transitioning from a primarily agrarian economy to one in which manufacturing played a major role. Sadly, the traditional rural villages of hanok dwellings constructed from wood, clay, tile, and granite gave way to inferior quality metal and concrete structures. In the cities, many of the hanoks and other one-storey homes were replaced with hastily built low-rise apartment blocks constructed of low-quality materials. Little attention was paid to aesthetics. Most communities were not well planned, and development happened haphazardly, particularly in big cities like Seoul, where millions had flooded to from the rural areas in search of employment. Seoul’s population in 1966 was 3.8 million; four years later it was 5.6 million. There were no heritage buildings of any sort that we could see as we strolled along the main road in Ganghwa town.
When British chaplain Mark Napier Trollope explored Ganghwa town in 1902, he described it as having four pavilion gates, a bell and bell-kiosk, and a number of other public buildings, though he did admit that they were in less than stellar condition: “The empty and ruinous public buildings, for which there is no further use, present a sad picture of decay,” he wrote. Except for the forts, which were for the most part constructed of stone, and the city gates, which are usually granite, almost everything in Korea’s long architectural history was built of wood and clay, which is prone to decay and fire. Trollope added, “Monuments, in a land where the most usual material for architecture is timber rather than brick or stone, have a way of not lasting.” He wondered why stonework — Koreans are excellent masons — had not played a larger role in their architecture.
For the trip, I carried with me the 1997 Lonely Planet Korea guidebook, among other guidebooks. It was quite uncomplimentary of the island, noting it was an “overrated” tourist attraction. “The tourist literature and some guide books to Korea go on at some length about Ganghwado’s attractions, giving you the impression that the island is littered with fascinating relics and ruins. To a degree it is, but you have to be a real relic enthusiast to want to make the effort.”
A tad harsh, I thought. The government had obviously spent time and funds to refurbish the forts on the island and establish the museum. There was real opportunity here to learn more about significant Korean history. I for one was content to absorb it in the short time we had on the island. It was getting late in the day, so Heju and I returned to the car and went in search of lodging, which we found in the town’s west end, in the form of the West Gate Inn (Samungjung), a plain three-storey “love motel.”
I had checked my parents into a love motel — the only accommodation available close to my Myeongil-dong flat — when they visited me in 2000.
“Why’s our bed heart-shaped?” my mother had asked me.
“Because love motels are for couples,” I replied simply.
In the West Gate Inn’s lobby, the clerk — her face hidden behind a pull-down window shade — asked if Heju and I would be staying for two hours. (This is a standard first question asked of guests upon their arrival at love motels.)
“No, we’re staying until tomorrow,” was our stock reply.
Our room had the usual well-stocked assortment of toothpaste, toothbrushes, hairdryer, hairbrush, comb, razor, shaving cream, aftershave, cologne, moisturizer, shampoo, and soap. A small fridge offered complimentary juice, and TV cable programming provided oodles of channels. I appreciated all the amenities. The only drawback was that the room had no bedside reading lamp. Love motels never did.
At least the bed wasn’t heart-shaped.
* * *
By late morning (we were slow-risers) we were back in the car. The sun was shining, a welcome reprieve from spring’s grey and chill that had been dogging us for most of the previous weeks, and this substantially improved the look of Ganghwa town, though not entirely: to me it still appeared dusty and crumbly. Heju informed me she wanted to return to the war museum to visit the Catholic shrine that she had noticed there the day before.
Heju attended Catholic Sunday mass whenever possible and sometimes reminded me that her Catholic name was Catherine, which she adopted while attending the private and Catholic St. Mary’s Elementary School in Daejeon with her elder sister. Few Koreans could afford such tuition in the 1960s and ’70s, but Heju’s father was a banker, a position near the top of the economic ladder, and of his four daughters and one son, he sent two to private school. “We had servants,” recalls Heju fondly. “They walked with me to school and did my homework for me after school”
So we headed back to the museum, though a visit to a shrine did not seem terribly titillating to me. When we arrived, there were twenty-one school buses in the museum parking lot, and groups of noisy young students were piling out of them. We walked to the far side, behind the museum, then up a slight knoll that overlooked Yeomha Channel. There was a slight clearing in which stood a statue of Mary. Heju stood in front of it and bowed.
“Bow to Mary,” she insisted sternly.
I was taken back. I wasn’t religious in any way. “I’m not Catholic,” I sputtered.
“It doesn’t
