Chapter 2
I had been living in Seoul for more than a decade when my Aunt Irene in Toronto sent me a book written by American Bill Bryson. I had never heard of Bryson, but I read the book, In a Sunburned Country, which is a comic narrative of his fascinating trip through Australia. I was smitten, cognizant of why millions of readers were hooked on this bestselling author. I had not thought a simple travel book — the genre, in my mind, reminiscent of wanderers writing dull prose about what should have been fascinating adventures — could be so breezy, humorous, and illuminating.
I read Bryson’s other gems: Notes from a Small Island, about his trek through Britain, and A Walk in the Woods, which recounted his long, exhausting hike along the Appalachian Trail. I had a walloping grand time tagging along with Bryson on these excursions, too. I got to thinking that he was most definitely needed in South Korea to trundle through the country, to put it on the map by writing another bestseller. Goodness knows the peninsula could use his help. Except for its immediate neighbours, China and Japan, very few others seem to visit the country for leisure or for pleasure. (In 2014, about 5.5 million Chinese and 2.5 million Japanese tourists visited Korea, representing about 80 percent of all incoming foreign tourists. Many arrive for shopping or gambling junkets.) Most of the rest of the world seemed to know little, if anything, about South Korea. It is dominated in the media attention department by its mad-hatter neighbour, North Korea — run currently by Kim Jung-un, one of our planet’s most notorious dictators. Compared to the North, South Korea is like that standup comedian who has to follow Jerry Seinfeld on stage; he is always going to be second fiddle. Not that the South Korean government seems to do much to promote the country for tourism. When was the last time you saw an advertisement on television or in print inviting you to visit one of its sandy beaches or its ancient Buddhist temples, or hike its craggy granite mountain ridges?
It astonishes me how little Westerners seem to know about the country. When I’m back in Canada and I speak with people about my time in Korea, they sometimes ask “North or South?” Koreans living in Canada have told me with a sigh that they have been asked if they’re from the North or the South. Well, more than two million South Koreans have emigrated to North America; while the number of North Koreans is miniscule. Chances are slim that a Korean you run into at a shop or on the street will be from North Korea.
One day, in the small town of Brockville, Ontario, I was at the local post office inquiring about sending a parcel to a friend in Korea. The clerk behind the counter checked a country list and announced with a hint of bewilderment that there were two Koreas. Well, no shit, Sherlock.
“Which Korea is the parcel going to?” she asked me.
“It can only go to one place; mail doesn’t go to the other,” I replied politely, hoping by simple deduction she would conclude the correct country. She didn’t.
“So …which one?” she asked.
“South Korea,” I answered. “You can’t get in or out of the North. There’s no international mail delivery there.”
She looked surprised. “Oh, I didn’t know that.”
Even people who read newspapers and watch the news, like my mother, were pretty much clueless about South Korea. She was a school librarian in Toronto for many years, and I would have thought that in her downtime she may have wandered to the East Asia section and perhaps taken a peak at a book on, say, South Korea, considering her son was living there.
Just prior to my parents’ visit to Seoul in the early fall of 2000, my mother phoned me to ask, concerned, “Do we need to get inoculated for disease before we arrive?”
Of course, Mom — we all suffer from dengue fever and typhoid in Korea.
She next wondered innocently, “Should we bring purification tablets to put in our drinking water?”
I sighed, shook my head, and said, “Mom, South Korea is not a third-world country.” When my parents arrived in Seoul, my mother looked at all the high-rise apartments and modern buildings, and remarked with surprise, “I didn’t think there would be so many buildings,” as if she had been expecting mud huts with straw roofs.
Poor South Korea; seemingly ignored and passed over. The country has always suffered from a lack of drawing power as a travel destination. Heck, it was 1882 before Korea opened her borders for the first time to international visitors and trade. In the previous five hundred years, the conservative, Confucian-based government kept the nation cloistered and sequestered, zealously guarding against any encroachment by foreigners. This was a country where, in 1653, the government would not permit the thirty-six survivors of the Dutch ship Sparrow Hawk, wrecked off Jeju Island, to depart. Had eight of Sparrow Hawk’s crew not taken a boat and escaped to Nagasaki thirteen years later, then to The Netherlands — the endeavour described by crew member Hendrik Hamel in Hamel’s Journals and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653–1666 — they may have never escaped the peninsula.
Lillias Stirling Horton, an American missionary doctor who arrived in Incheon in 1888, and became the personal physician to Empress Myeongseong (known as Queen Min), wrote in her 1904 book, Fifteen Years Among the Topknots, or Life in Korea, that “people back home [have] never even heard of Corea.”
It has really only been in the past twenty years or so that the words Korea and vacation could be reasonably uttered in the same breath. The country was a colony of Japan from 1910 to 1945. Then came the Korean War. This was followed, until 1988, by a period of rule by a series of authoritarian military-backed presidents. In May 1980, for instance, President Chun Doo-hwan sent the army in to Gwangju to brutally put down a civilian uprising, killing more than six hundred — hardly an environment conducive to a family vacation.
Even today, it is not an easy place for an individual backpacker or a family to travel through. Language is but one issue. Korea has also been slow to introduce amenities and accommodation that would fit North American and European tastes, unlike Korea’s southerly neighbours — the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. It seems Koreans and Westerners even view vacationing differently. We tend to go for quiet, and where nature and aesthetics loom large, maybe at a nice country cottage or place by the sea with activities provided. These are rare finds in Korea. Koreans love crowds and action and noise. The simple pleasure of being alone has not yet seemed to have made much of a dent in the Korean national psyche.
During my first summer in Seoul, my academy owner, Mr. So, invited me to join his family and friends on a camping trip for four days. He told me they would be pitching their tents by a stream in Seorak Mountain National Park in Gangwon Province along the east coast. I accepted. But once we arrived at the shallow pebbly river that wound its way through picturesque farmland, hills, and woods, we sat for excruciatingly long breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, served atop large mats laid out on the grass. The meals were prepared and served by the patient ladies in the group. Between meals we sat around some more.
On the third day, we were hustled into the van and driven to a nearby mountain, where there was a hiking trail. Wonderful, I thought, finally some activity. I was looking forward to jettisoning the bloated feeling you get after eating seemingly non-stop for three days. I hoped my blood — which had congealed into petroleum jelly — would begin to flow again on the challenging hike. We parked, walked along a clear narrow stream that flowed over granite rock, and