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
