I arrived in Jeju, halfway between
Japan and the Korean peninsula in the midst of a heat wave. I'd known
that this wasn't an ideal time to travel in this part of the world,
especially given my love of autumns in East Asia, but I'd feared
typhoons more than anything else. Which was why I didn't go to Taiwan
or Okinawa or Luzon, all other options I'd considered, but here.
It's a peculiar little island,
well-known in this part of the world owing to its frequency as a
setting in KBS soap operas, but completely obscure outside of it. I
knew little other than that it looked pretty, with a complex volcanic
landscape, that flights were cheap, and that I had a few days to
spare. So with little preparation, I packed up my tweed suitcase,
downed three Tigers, an Asahi, and a Gordon's and tonic, and boarded
a redeye.
The heat of more continental climates
is somehow more oppressive than the tropics, where the sultry
humidity is balanced by afternoon showers. It's a heat and a sunlight
I'd largely forgotten, that I associate with the Middle American
landscape I grew up in. I'd forgotten the sort of heat that demands
an ice cream after a long walk more than a beer, the sort of heat
that leaves sweat streaming down my face instead of lightly gathering
at my temples.
And in spite of it, I did what I always
do when I travel by myself, and, as so often occurs, I'm not really
sure what the fuck I'm doing where I am -- I wandered.
Of course, I did the expected tourist
things -- I saw the mountains, the crater lakes, the lava tubes, the
“sea” of fir trees, the waterfall where the sage Xu Fu reflected
on his journeys, having been sent by the Emperor Qin Shi Huang to
look for the elixir of life, and where he finally said “fuck this,”
sparked a fat blunt, and booked it back to the motherland.
And I ate the expected regional dishes,
the abalones and the sea urchin noodles. I drank makgeolli, the
viscous rice wine of the region, flavored with peanuts and with local
Hallabong oranges. I had the famous barbecued black pork, which
tasted like any other decent quality pork. And most memorably, I went
to the central fish market for a raw fish feast, where the ajumma in
charge insisted on rubbing her mitts all over my sashimi, wrapping
it into shiso leaves and spreading it with ssamjang to show me how to
eat it properly.
But to talk about all these things is
to miss the heart of the place. They are the window dressing, the
superficial level. What interested me far more were the
micro-textures of the island.
Each evening, I walked down the road
past the city hall, past rows of concrete buildings with makeup shops
blasting Seoul's latest pop anthems, chicken-and-beer joints,
shuttered storefront evangelical churches, posters for sex shows, all
the trappings of a provincial Korean town. Night after night, I
watched the waves crash over the breakers in the harbor, young
couples on dates, groups of friends drinking on tarps, black cars
gathered outside the casinos with signboards showing grotesquely made
up lady croupiers, tinny electronic music pulsating from the rooftop
discos on the hotels with their bisexually pink and ice-blue
floodlights, all punctuated with the screams from the kids on the
boardwalk rides, the flashing neon of the seafood palaces reflecting
across the harbor.
And then I walked back up the hill, to
a sort-of-dive bar that had a selection of local craft beer -- the
kind of “American”-themed joint that has Texas truck license
plates on the wall, chips with “guakkamol” on the menu, and the
world's last surviving Big Mouth Billy Bass, something like a diner
in Arkansas filtered through a Chili's filtered through the Republic
of Korea – to write down my impressions, and to read my book for
the journey, Gary Indiana's Three Month Fever,
an account of Andrew Cunanan's youth defined by a spiderweb of
infinite lies, culminating in a murder spree across the country
ending in Miami Beach, where he hid out at a hotel that:
“... was faced
partly in black glass, and had a ground floor of vacant storefronts.
As with many buildings in Miami Beach, it was impossible to tell
whether the Clarion Suites was being finished or undergoing an
extremely languid demolition.”
A blank spot on a
map for Westerners, a dramatic landscape immortalized in film and
television for millions of Asians, and for Koreans, their personal
Blackpool or Jersey Shore, connected to Seoul by the world's single
busiest air route.
I thought it made
sense, more or less.
I got to the
airport, having had a nice trip, ordered a drink, and turned on the
in-flight entertainment.
What I didn't know
was that the hills I traipsed around held a secret. In 1948, under
the auspices of the Syngman Rhee government, and concomitantly that
of my own country, more than 10 percent of the island's residents
were slaughtered, with whole villages on the slopes of Hallasan burnt
to the ground, their bodies thrown in those lovely craters. A further
several thousand fled to Japan, where many of them were fully
radicalized, a number of their modern descendants still forming a
miniature resistance group adhering to the Juche ideal, widely mocked
by the rest of the world, and frequently harassed by Japan's version
of 4chan lowlifes. And those who survived the purge and remained in
Korea are still awaiting compensation, even as the Seoul authorities
gleefully brand Jeju “the island of world peace.”
We form our ideas
about what something is, and history always manages to thrust the
knife into your gut.
