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,
