The moment of landing at the
international terminal in a largely unfamiliar country is one of
disorientation. You've probably not slept well, the language is new,
the airport is designed to push you through and out as quickly as
possible.
I arrived at Incheon International
Airport on a chilly autumn afternoon, and my introduction to the
nation is a sign five meters wide: “The world knows Dokdo is
Korea!”
This is the island knows to the Koreans
as Dokdo, to the Japanese as Takeshima, and to the English-speaking
world as the Liancourt Rocks, so named for the French whaling ship
wrecked there during the reign of Napoleon III -- an island which Korea has had full military control of for more than half a century, mind you. What to outside eyes
look like an uninhabitable igneous seamount, are to Japanese eyes an
integral part of national territory opportunistically seized during
the MacArthur Era, and to Korean eyes, the first place where Japan
began its encroachment upon the nation's sovereignty, and plotted its
imperialistic designs.
Every country has their national
narrative. The Americans and French built their polity on the ideals
of a long-ago revolution, the Russians and the Turks talk about their
position straddling Europe and Asia, the Japanese emphasize the
uniqueness of their island empire.
Each museum and each historical site I
visited seemed to have a single-minded focus, the Bad Things the
Japanese Did. Not just in the brutal colonial period of the early
20th Century, but over centuries. This isn't to downplay
that history – it is important, and outside of Korea, it is not
well-known at all – but I suppose I had expected more about the
Cold War, or the economic miracle of the postwar years, or the
formation of the early Korean kingdoms, or the long, difficult, and
heroic fight for democracy and labor rights in spite of constant
oppression and state violence.
But the struggle is much larger, and it
runs deep. This is a country that went from one of the poorest in the
world to fully developed in a matter of decades, and in which the
wealth one sees – and an image of wealth that is broadcast across
East Asia – is so recent.
Consider the famously untranslatable
Korean word “han.” A simple monosyllable, but one that contains a
whole range of emotions, sensibilities, and ideologies. The best way
I've had it explained to me is as an unspeakable and unresolvable
rage, sorrow, and resentment at the miseries of history.
You see a history of recent struggle in
how the people are dressed. The streets of Hongdae and Gangnam in
Seoul are filled with some of the most stylish people you'll ever
see. They're not wearing the almost cosplay-weird outfits of the pop
singers, but have the same elegance you see in Paris, in Tokyo, in
Manhattan. Yet the older people seem stuck in a perennial warp, with
all of the women dressed near-identically: permed hair, visor, neon
windbreaker, floral handbag, polyester slacks, shoddy-looking
athletic shoes. You don't see many of the elegant older men and women
you see in Japan, Thailand, Singapore – a reflection of the fact
that half of the elderly populace lives below the national poverty
line.
And you see the struggle in the
gastronomy, in a cuisine that reflects a nation with a bare minimum
of arable land and a frigid climate. The markets of Korea brim with
dried seafood of all sorts, vegetables pickled in every way
imaginable, kimchi both fermented and fresh, spiced and unspiced,
made from cabbages, daikon, spring onions, garlic stems. Instant
noodles aren't used as student poverty foods, but as a frequent
addition to soups and hotpots at restaurants – combined with
chopped up hot dogs and spam, they become budae-jjigae, the “army
stew” made from supplies scavenged from US Army bases during the
war. Even the tea is stretched out, pine needles, mulberry and bamboo
leaves, barley, buckwheat, and corn filling in for when the supplies
run low.
The architecture, too, is relentlessly
functionalist, with people crammed into Stalinist concrete high
rises, many of them with absurdly hopeful English-language names, and
many of them with paintings of cherry trees and peacocks on the side.
The suburbs of Seoul and Busan smell of cement dust, with new houses
standing on land just recently hacked out of piney hillsides. Like
Appalachia, each little town is crowned with a high steel cross, a
symbol of the Protestantism that came over with the New England
missionaries, and which found a fertile substrate in the old
Confucian hierarchies. And when the desire for novelty occurs, it too
often comes in garish, rainbow-colored lights streaming down the
sides of buildings, in love motels imitating bits and pieces of
Disney castles and French chateaux.
Beneath the veneer of the new, there
still also lies the ancient and the almost-primeval. Range after
range of gorgeous mountains run on endlessly, interspersed with scrub
land, most of the population living in the narrow arable valleys, and
increasingly in a handful of major cities as the country faces
serious rural depopulation. You see the remnants of an almost
Siberian sensibility in the shamanic rituals that are still practiced
in the mountains, in the rural shanties with stacks of firewood in
front, in the groups of hikers throwing back bottles of soju,
reminding me more than anything of cowboys swigging bourbon on the
trail.
Of course, I know this is not a thesis
statement, it is an impression, the impression of an outsider. As
palpable as the feeling of struggle was, it is one of many metaphors
I could have taken. I could have focused on the curious burial mounds
of Gyeongju, the delicious meal of grilled eels, cold beer, and chive
kimchi with fresh lemon I had above a fish market with a view of
Busan harbor, the boozy haze I found myself in each night in Seoul,
the way the quiet streets of Sokcho at night reminded me of a small
Midwestern city on an autumn night, complete with the aroma of
burning oak leaves. Or the nuclear paranoia of the moment, a small,
poor nation and a large, rich nation playing whose-dick-is-bigger on
a global scale. But the funny thing is, sense-perception doesn't
necessarily precede pattern recognition. The patterns quickly begin
to inform the perception.
My time in Korea ended with a hydrofoil
across the Tsushima Straits, to the old enemy nation across the
water, with the terminal showing none of the histrionic signage of
the airport. Rather, I was greeted by helpful trilingual staff
working for both Korean and Japanese ferry lines. Again in
antiseptic, deracinated space, a deep breath between one nation and
the next.
