Before her, in 1884, American George Clayton Foulk completed a nine-hundred-mile, forty-three-day journey being carried across the peninsula in a palanquin chair, and being one of the few Westerners to speak Korean at that time, gained an immediate and intimate knowledge of the people. He jotted nearly four hundred pages of notes, though it wasn’t until 2007, when Canadian writer Samuel Hawley, author of the acclaimed book The Imjin War: Japan’s Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China, published two books about Foulk. Hawley had discovered the George Clayton Foulk collection at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and had the American’s notes and letters sent via microfilm to Seoul. Due to Foulk’s truncated and messy handwriting, it took Hawley many months of poring over the pages to fully comprehend the content.
I somehow doubted that Bill Bryson would find his way to South Korea and write a bestseller. So it fell to someone else to explore and write about this uncut diamond of a country. Why not me? I had done a bit of writing. My university degree was in mass communication with an emphasis in journalism. I’d been a sports reporter at the Tahoe Daily Tribune in Lake Tahoe, California, in 1985. In 1997, I spent a year employed as a copy editor at the Korea Herald newspaper in Seoul. Yes, I’d do it, I decided. I’d devise a practical and assiduous long-term plan for a pan-Korea trip. But unlike my gritty, trekking predecessors — Foulk, Bird, Winchester, and Shepherd, among others — I’d use a car!
South Korea is smaller than thirty-seven of America’s fifty-one states, including Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Italy is three times larger. Slender Cuba and little Iceland are fractionally bigger. Yet I realized the preparations and the actual trip would not be so simple. Much of the country is mountainous. It also has 17,268 kilometres of undulating and indented coastline and more than three thousand offshore islands. Its long history was mostly a mystery to me, its culture and people puzzling.
I began to read up on my subject, and so began to frequent new and used English-language bookstores, buying up any titles I could find with information about the country and its history, geography, geology, culture, famous people, architecture, and wars. I joined the Korean branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS) and began attending its twice-monthly lectures. Talks were presented in English by Korean and foreign professors, intellectuals, authors, and diplomats, and covered a diverse range of topics, from tea-making, traditional architecture, Buddhism and missionaries, to the Korean War, North Korea, Japanese colonization, and yangban (Joseon upper-class gentlemen). The lectures were highly informative.
I ordered home delivery of the Korea Times, the Korea Herald, the English-language edition of the JoongAng Daily, and the International Herald Tribune. Nightly, I clipped and chronicled articles about places and things I would be interested in seeing. I do not mean to disparage Korea — God knows the last century alone has been difficult enough — but it seemed that regularly the papers contained new and novel forms of social oddities and sometimes just plain weird stuff that I believe only happens in Korea. For that reason alone, I eagerly perused each issue.
The Korea Times, for example, for a time published contributions by an American doctor who practised in Seoul. The good doctor would describe snippets of his life, and, being single, he included stories about dating Korean women. In one piece the doctor wrote about his secretary, a young Korean woman who he described as pretty, intelligent, single, and seeking a marriage partner. He concluded that if any single men were interested in courting her, they were to contact him. A day or two later the secretary’s lengthy remonstration appeared, in which she lambasted him for being a nutcase and implied that hell would freeze over before she would seek his assistance in this regard.
There was also the story of a thirteen-year-old boy, Kim Sung-ho, who was allegedly trapped for twelve hours in his bedroom under masses of test papers, notebooks, and text books. Sung-ho’s mother had enrolled him in nine different after-school private academies (hagwons), and his room was stacked sky-high with books. One Sunday evening, the boy was standing up, memorizing facts for a test, when he accidently nudged the tower of books and the entire mass came crashing down around him. On Monday morning, his mother, unable to open his bedroom door, called the police, who needed an axe to break it down. It took thirty minutes to rescue Sung-ho, and fifty garbage bags to lug out all the paper.
There was more. I would see photos in the newspapers of seemingly annual National Assembly clashes, where the two opposing political parties squared off in the chamber, engaging in giving each other half nelsons and the occasional uppercut or left hook.
Sometimes the news was tragic. A man was arrested in Seoul for stabbing to death his former teacher. The student, now thirty-eight, had held a grudge since age seventeen, when the teacher struck him with a wooden rod for allegedly cheating on a test. The student had contacted the teacher to demand an apology. When it was not forthcoming, he stabbed him. Or the story of a sixty-eight-year-old priest in Seoul who stabbed a fellow priest from another church. Both priests were angry for reportedly being slandered by each other. The victim 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