Heju had been raised in Daejeon, about 160 kilometres south of Seoul. She had been a tomboy as a kid, and liked to play outdoors with the boys. She marched to her own drummer. She had little ambition to accumulate wealth, did not automatically ascribe that Korea was the centre of the universe, and enjoyed getting away on her own. She was impulsive, impractical, gregarious, and bossy, and there was little I could do about the latter, because every Korean female I’ve met, from age three to 103, is headstrong and commanding. I believe it’s in their genes, a Korean thing.
Heju was teaching English to Korean kids at a small academy in her hometown when I asked if she could join me on my proposed three- to four-month foray across the peninsula. She was noncommittal at first.
“You won’t have to pay a cent,” I exhorted, in an effort to convince her. “I’ll pay all expenses — accommodation, travel, food.” (It was not every day that the son of a Scottish mother and Dutch father acted so benevolently.)
She continued to hem and haw, so I unleashed my trump card, offering her a percentage of potential book royalties, though, of course, there was no guarantee that I would even finish the trip, let alone the manuscript. “If I sell a lot of books, you could become rich,” I assured her with near-total conviction.
Despite her normally buoyant outlook, Heju, like many Koreans, was imbued with a healthy dose of skepticism. “So, how much money would I make from royalties?” she countered more than once, in jest ( I think).
It was not long before the excursion was set to begin that Heju finally agreed to accompany me. Without her as a conduit, as an intermediary into the world of Koreans, I would have been in the dark, a fish out of water. She arranged a four-month leave of absence from her teaching job, and with my one-year contract at a local elementary school soon concluding, we would be ready to begin in mid-March the first segment through Seoul — two and a half years after first reading Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country.
March was the ideal month to begin. I wanted to complete the trip before the arrival of the brutally oppressive summer, when searing heat and humidity transform East Asia into a sauna. The unpalatable steam bath usually begins in May or early June, and lasts through August. It’s not until late summer, in September, that the humidity abates and temperatures reach a moderate level, with lovely high blue skies. March is a transitional month, when winter’s bitterly cold, dry air, conceived in Siberia and then sweeping south over Korea, finally loses steam, defeated by the warm air flowing north from the South China Sea.
We spent the first three weeks exploring Seoul on foot. The city had been the capital since 1394, the vortex of power and prestige, containing the Joseon Dynasty’s royal palaces and Neolithic settlements dating back about six or seven thousand years — Seoul was an ideal place to begin.
Most days we rode the Number 5 subway line west, under the Han River toward Old Seoul in the downtown core. The subway system in Seoul is outstanding, by the way, with fourteen lines comprising 775 kilometres of track, and shuttling an average of 4.2 million passengers daily around the vast city. In fact, it is the world’s third-largest system in terms of passenger numbers, behind only Beijing and Shanghai. The Seoul subway system is like a small self-contained underground city. Along lengthy subterranean corridors and halls that connect one line to another can be found all sorts of shops and itinerant purveyors offering myriad items for sale. I’ve even seen baby chicks being sold out of cardboard boxes. Subway cars are not impervious to salespeople, either, as sellers stride car-to-car, declaring with great gusto the merits of the flashlights, magnifying glasses, raincoats, or umbrellas they are offering for sale.
We predominantly took guided tours of palaces and historic sites in and around the city, not because we particularly relished such outings, but because they were the most efficient way for us to learn about the city’s grand traditional architecture and places of interest.
One tour was of Seodaemun Prison, where, between 1910 and 1945, forty thousand criminals and political prisoners were held by the Japanese. Many were tortured and executed at the site.
We also took tours of various Joseon palaces and were led up Bugak Mountain — the dominant thousand-foot ridge that rises up behind the Presidential Blue House and Gyeongbok Palace (the largest and most impressive of the Joseon palaces) — where we were afforded a marvellous view over the crowded city core and the surrounding mountains.
One bleak, chilly afternoon, Heju and I wandered through the grounds of the small, desolate Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery, which is located along the north shore of the Han River in Hapjeong-dong, in Mapo district, in the city’s far western reaches (Yanghwajin translates as “dock by willow trees and flowers”). The land for the cemetery was a gift in 1890 from King Gojong to the foreign community, who at the time were mostly missionaries.
In 1866, an estimated eight thousand Korean Catholics were beheaded or strangled to death during a state-sponsored purge. One of two main execution sites in Seoul was along the Han River’s north shore in front of this future cemetery. The spot is known as Jeoldusan Martyrs’ Shrine — jeoldu means “to cut off heads” and san is “mountain” (referring to the steep embankment).
We crouched in front of each headstone, some worn, some of the engravings faded, reading the inscriptions from the approximately six hundred stones, many of which dated from the late 1800s and early 1900s, though there were also a few from the later part of the twentieth century. I scribbled names and dates into my notebook, the list forming a veritable who’s who of missionaries, notable foreigners, and others who gave years of their lives to serving in Korea.
Arthur Ernest Chadwell’s gravestone indicated he arrived from England in 1926, was named Assistant Bishop to Korea in 1951, and was buried here in 1967. Henry Gerhard Appenzeller’s tombstone indicated he was the first Methodist missionary to arrive in Korea in 1885. Sadly, he drowned in 1902, at the age of forty-four, trying to save a Korean girl. His daughter, Alice Rebecca Appenzeller, born in 1885, was reportedly the first American born in Korea. She died in 1950 after spending most of her life teaching in the country.
In the far corner of the cemetery was the Underwood family plot: six black marble headstones representing four generations of Underwoods who have lived in Korea since 1885. The original patriarch was Horace Grant Underwood — brother of John T., the founder of the Underwood Typewriter Company in New York. Horace was the master of all Korean missionaries, and devoted his life to establishing schools, churches, and medical clinics and persuading Koreans to embrace Christianity on behalf of the Protestant Church.
While Horace wasn’t buried in this plot, his wife, American missionary doctor Lillias Stirling Horton, was. She wrote the book Underwood of Korea, about the couple’s life in the country. There is also a tombstone for Horace’s grandson, also named Horace Grant, who was born in Seoul in 1917 and who died in the same city in 2004 at age eighty-seven. He was the author of Korea in War, Revolution and Peace: The Recollections of Horace G. Underwood.
The Underwoods have been in Korea for 120 years. Their original two-storey stone home, in use since the turn of the nineteenth century in Yeonghui-dong at Yonsei University, is now the Underwood Memorial Hall Museum.
Some inscriptions were grim reminders of how fickle life could be a century ago, with numerous children of missionary parents buried here, many the victims of diseases such as typhoid, cholera, malaria, and tuberculosis. After entering Seoul in 1887, The Church of England Bishop for South Tokyo, Edward Bickerstet, wrote derogatorily, “I thought when I saw it that the Chinese town of Shanghai was the filthiest place human beings live on this earth, but Seoul is a grade lower.” Isabella Bird wrote of late-nineteenth-century Seoul, “For a great city and a capital its meanness is indescribable,” speaking of a quarter of a million people residing in a labyrinth of alleys beside foul-smelling ditches, where solid and liquid waste from houses was emptied.
There were three headstones in a row on a slight knoll, for Kim Ok Ja, 42, Kim Hankaul, 16, and Kim Scott Hansol, 14, all perishing on August 12, 1985.
We were puzzled. Had the trio, likely a mother and her two sons, been in a car accident? Later, I did some digging and discovered that Japan Airlines Flight 123 from Tokyo