The Other Korea
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
1
18
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Cheorwon,
Korea Rep.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
There was also time for firsts, for new experiences and experimentations too though. I spent a week teaching an English-only summer camp to the best of the best students from each school in my city. This was my first contact with teachers that really believed in teaching, and students that really wanted to learn English. I found myself happy to wake up and stumble off to camp, happy to eat with the kids for as many meals each day as possible, happy to spend my free time avoiding the other teacher-creepers and hiding out with the students
how to stop a tank
. It was an unreal week - education is not usually like this. It was the other Korea where English is something actually worth knowing, and where kids have dream jobs like diplomat, judge and civil servant instead of pro-gamer, pro-gamer or pro-gamer.The wet season continued to sweep backwards and forwards across the country, scourging the rice fields and winnowing the corn stalks, flaying umbrellas in the streets and drenching me to the bone. But the rain was welcome; it was a re-assertion of nature over and against the sweat and grit of the concrete landscape. I collected bent and battered umbrellas and wrung out my shirts.
I said my final final goodbye to teaching, and found myself with two long and marvellous weeks in which to reconcile myself to Korea. It took less than a day to do this; the moment the shadow of work, and of life under a contract dissipated I found myself enjoying Korea immensely, rediscovering its food and its landscape, as well as uncovering new corners and dishes. Though this was the time for saying my heaviest goodbyes, it was also the time of many firsts, of many pleasant surprises.
My last weekend in Korea was full of firsts rather than lasts, or firsts that were also lasts
in front of them all
. I had assumed the final weekend would proceed much as all the others did; with singing and dancing following drinking following eating following squandering the daylight hours. This however was not to be, and the final weekend saw me instead joining a convoy of vans motoring through midnight away into the mountains of Gangwondo, on the very border between North and South Korea.This was the other Korea; one I had suspected must exist somewhere but had never quite managed to find. I and some twenty five others were the guests of Mr. Cha and his friends, the Mr Kims, in their enormous, empty pension up in the green hills. There was a drum kit, there was a karaoke machine, there was a barbeque, and there was a lot of floor space. From the rooftop we could see the steep folds of mountain that concealed North Korea and the DMZ.
I had spent my year teaching and - for a while - living in rural Korea. I know the rhythms of the rice harvest and of lives of the people that work them. This land we had come to was rural Korea, a patchwork of rice fields and the thin muddy roads linking them together, but it was still another world completely from that which I had known. In the morning the sky was a crisp blue, the clouds cleaner and whiter than any other clouds in Korea. In the afternoon the golden sunlight flooding the valleys picked out humming insects and blades of grass and cast long, warm shadows. Steep green hills rose up over the rice patches. There were no buildings taller than a couple of storeys. Butterflies the size of sparrows flitted among the flowers. Grasshoppers twanged about the fireplace. When it rained there was thunder and lightning over the hills, over the border.
me on the north side (JSA)
There was wilderness here; the land had not been swallowed up and paved over by concrete, the sky had not been diluted by exhaust and neon lights. The best rice in Korea is grown close to the DMZ, where it is washed by clean rain and watered by fresh streams. The people here feel different too. The pace of life here is slower, set by the rhythms of the rice and of nature. There is no industry, no competition. Mr. Cha, in his fractured English, talked of how crazy Korean life is, how obsessed with money and study and advancement. I've heard the same lament so many times, but never before seen any attempt to find an alternative lifestyle.
Up there by the border you can never forget just how close the DMZ is. There are army bases everywhere, and occasionally the road passes through a tank trap, giant concrete clocks poised ready to topple on invading armour. Skulls and crossbones are a popular motif. All the paraphernalia of war and division and invasion though is part of the paradise of the region. All that razor wire and the associations that come with it prevent the area from becoming crowded. They deter people, but nature passes through unfazed. Standing on a mountain observatory and looking down, the crooked squares of rice fields give way abruptly to overgrown wilderness at the border. There is another oasis within the DMZ, between the landmines and guard posts
Mr. Cha and the 2nd infiltration tunnel
.This weekend was my second visit to the border. The first time I had crossed a few steps into the official north at the JSA or joint security area, the village where north and south meet to bicker and parley. This is the public face of the DMZ, an increasingly popular tourist site. It is a war zone, and there have been incidents. There have been shooting and axings and emergencies and code reds, but the feeling of the place is that of little boys playing at war. The soldiers of the south walk rigidly and try to look tough because that is what they think the north respects. The soldiers on the north side preserve an air of jocularity and ease because they think that is what life is like in the south. The tourists that sweep through are given strict codes of dress and of conduct, but it is very hard to see why waving is prohibited but picture taking is not. The whole war, such as it exists today, has been reduced to these trivial gestures. There are still moments of hostility, there are punitive killings, but there seems to be nothing behind it nowadays. The fences themselves, the layers of wire and steel seem to exist for their own sake. The ideologies that separated the country have moved on and found new arenas to fight their wars in, but they have left their rusty remnants behind for the peninsula to grieve over and finally dispose of.
Away from the JSA though, back up in Mr. Cha's mountains, there is none of this tension. The tank traps are relics now, like the infiltration tunnels and the labour party headquarters. Their legacies are terrible, but they are terrible anachronisms, out of place in the world today. The so-called 'iron triangle' is now full of butterflies and rice fields and pension parties.
North Korean labour party building
The weekend came to its end bathed in golden afternoon light at a temple in the hills looking down over the deep green valleys. Once again the drone of ending filled my ears and I realised I was saying last goodbyes, taking my last subway ride, eating my last noodles, sleeping in my bed for the last time. It seems cruelly unfair that my first real experience of life on the border should also have to be my last. It remains for me as an idea of a sanctuary, a possibility for an alternative life within the clamour of vacuity that resounds through so much of Korea.
My time was up though, and the last day and the last hours crumpled in on themselves, given me too little time to properly pack up my life. I left six umbrellas at the door of my apartment, as well as half a box or cornflakes, half a bottle of mayonnaise, an unopened bag of rice, an unused jar of year-old jam. These are the traces I left of a year in Korea. These and perhaps somewhere a few foreign words lodged in the memories of a few kids. Everything else was taped into boxes or crammed into bags and hurled off across the waters to Australia. And I followed close behind, wedged into my last bus, wedged into a flight into the night, gripped by nostalgia not for the life I had lead but for the life I had had rare and powerful glimpses and tastes of, for that other life in that other Korea that I sometimes touched upon but could never quite apprehend.
