Gangwondo

Today I returned to Seoul for my last weekend before going back to America. Erma's parents drove me up, and tomorrow they will take away all the stuff they lent me. We drove to Seoul through Gangwon Province (강원도 江原道). Not far north of the capital city, Chuncheon (춘천 春川), we passed this sign, which illustrates several features of Korean transliteration of French that I mentioned in my previous post. The Korean says Bongjyureu, rendering French Bonjour. We see the use of Korean ㅇ ng for the nasalized vowel of the French syllable bon, and the foreign-looking spelling 쥬 jyu for the syllable that is normally spelled 주 ju in Korean.

What's funny about the sign is that Bonjour has actually been misspelled as Bongjour at the top of the sign, no doubt because the normal romanization of Korean ㅇ is ng.


Beef is not the only meat that is making news here in Korea. Avian influenza has hit the chicken industry hard here, and huge numbers of chickens are being slaughtered. In order to try to protect the uninfected chickens in the north, the authorities have set up several stations along the roads that spray all cars that pass.

The stations look like this:


Here's the truck in front of us approaching one of these stations.


And now we are going through the spray.


(Full disclosure for journalistic integrity: The careful reader will notice that I've mixed pictures together from three different places.)

Here's a truck carrying a cow. Poor cow has no windows to roll up, and will get exposed to the spray.




I have no idea what the spray could be. An antibiotic wouldn't be of any use against a virus.

At this point we were above the 38th parallel, not far from the DMZ. Periodically along the road one sees these structures:

They are protective barriers. In the event of a North Korean invasion, those large columns will fall across the road, blocking it off and, hopefully, slowing down the tanks.


We stopped for lunch at a restaurant with a lovely view that specialized in salmon trout sashimi (song'eo hoe 송어회).



It also came with salmon trout spicy soup (mae'untang 매운탕). On the top are hand-shaven noodles.

Much packing to do now!

Nam-Buk Han

Today in class our teacher mentioned that the Korean war (1950-1953) is not actually over. Most of the students were astonished to hear this; they were not aware that hostilities ended on July 27, 1953 with the signing of a ceasefire, not a peace treaty.

Indeed, the situation here on the Korean peninsula is bizarre by any measure. Perhaps one of the most bizarre things of all is that life in South Korea is now so normal, despite the fact that the capital city lies only 30 miles from a highly militarized, delusional, dictatorial state that is technically at war with the South and has over 1.2 million men under arms.

Most of the time one is hardly aware of this state of affairs. It is forcefully brought home if one visits the DMZ (the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, 휴전선 休戰線). And in certain areas one sees a heavy military presence and defensive fortifications, like the ones I described in a recent post. But generally speaking this does not feel like a militarized society, or one that is concerned about the possibility of war. No one worries that living in Seoul is dangerous because of its proximity to the border, as the housing prices here will attest. One can travel the country freely, without showing ID or being stopped at military checkpoints. I only occasionally see young men in military uniform, and never in large groups.

It wasn't always like this. One of our teachers recently described what things were like in her childhood in the 1970s, when South Korea was still essentially under military dictatorship (under strongman Park Chung-hee 발정희 朴正熙, who ruled from 1961 to 1979). The anti-North Korean government propaganda machine was in full flower. Our teacher said that she truly believed that North Korean leader Kim Il-sung 김일성 金日成 had the face of a pig, as he was always depicted that way. She used to have nightmares about being attacked by wolves, which is how the North Korean soldiers were described.

She also said that mini-skirts shorter than a certain length were illegal, as was long hair on men. The police used to walk around with rulers, which they would whip out in order to measure skirt and hair length. Offending women would be arrested, offending men given an instant haircut on the street. In addition to the usual lack of political freedoms found in any dictatorship, South Korean civil society was itself highly militarized. Men were expected to look like soldiers.

To me, from the perspective of life in South Korea today, this all seems paranoid and ridiculous. (Though I don't mean to downplay the real possibility of a North Korean attack on South Korea at that time.) But I imagine that living through it must have been no joke. So what's surprising to me is that the teacher described all these recollections with great amusement; far from being bitter about the experiences, she seems to view them from a detached and comfortable perspective.

I am deeply impressed by the way that, since the late 1980s, the Koreans have peacefully transformed their society from a repressive military dictatorship into a free, open, and prosperous democracy. This has happened in Taiwan as well, but it's especially impressive here because it all happened under the unchanging shadow of the proximate North Korean threat. (The collapse of the Soviet Union, the major supporter of North Korea, certainly helped make it easier to change the political climate. And it should also be pointed out that mandatory universal military service for men is still the law here.)

All that being said, the utter absurdity of the political situation on the peninsula does occasionally leak through into daily life here in subtle but jarring ways.

Here's a simple example. A few weeks ago I decided to buy a large map of Korea to hang on the bare wall above my bed. I wanted one of the whole peninsula, both North and South. At the bookstore I found the map section; the folded maps were on a bookshelf, stored in cardboard envelopes which had the map titles printed on their spines. I kept seeing maps that said "Republic of Korea 대한민국 大韓民國", which is the official name of South Korea. (North Korea is the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea 조선민주주의인민공화국 朝鮮民主主義人民共和國". )But nothing was labeled in such a way to indicate a map of the whole peninsula, and I didn't want to buy one of just South Korea. Eventually, I opened one of these South Korean maps to see what it would look like, and realized that it was in fact a map of the entire peninsula. (I now suspect that it's not possible to buy a map of just South Korea, any more than you could buy a map of the southern half of the United States.)

Here's what my room looks like with the map up. As you can see, I've also put up some pictures of me and Erma from London, Venice, and Hong Kong.


If you are so inclined, you can compare the picture above with ones taken soon after I moved in, on this post.



So here's what the map looks like. It shows the peninsula as a single, undivided country, labeled "Republic of Korea". But surely, I thought, this map can't really be as delusional as it appears. The existence of North Korea must be acknowledged somewhere?


There are in fact two clues to the existence of North Korea on the map, but they take a practiced eye and a bit of interpretation to spot and understand. One is the small inset map on the lower left in the picture above, just above the map legend. It's labeled "Pre-1949 administrative units of the north Korean area". (The Korean alphabet lacks an equivalent distinction to upper vs. lower case, and there is no conventional way of signaling proper nouns in the orthography. I've chosen to translate the Korean phrase 북한지역 as "north Korean area" rather than "North Korean area" -- the difference is important. But I'm not sure if this aspect of my translation is correct.)

The other clue is a small dotted red line that runs across the center of the map. It cuts clean through the middle of Gangwon Province (on the east side, in green). In the image below, I've marked the beginning and end of the dotted line with arrows.


I've also highlighted Seoul and labeled Ganghwa Island, which I talked about here.

Although the dotted red line is clearly the boundary line between North and South Korea -- or, more technically, the armistice line -- it is neither labeled on the map nor identified in the legend.

In other words, this map -- and all others that I've seen here -- presents the illusion of a unified Korean peninsula under the government of the Republic of Korea. This strikes me as absolutely bizarre, as well as pointless. Is this meant as propaganda -- if so, who is being fooled by it? Or is it an expression of the citizenship's idealized hope for a reunified peninsula?

I wonder what maps of Korea in North Korea look like.

I tried to find some propaganda posters on the web depicting Kim Il-sung as a pig and his soldiers as wolves, but no such luck. The most interesting South Korean propaganda poster I could find was this one:

It's labeled "Communist Aggression" and depicts Russia (oddly not "The Soviet Union") as the force ultimately behind the aggression of the North Korean foot soldier, who looks to me like a somewhat sympathetic pawn in this image. I don't know anything about the provenance of the poster.

Ganghwado

This past Sunday I went to Gwanghwa Island. I was taken by the husband of a friend, a Korean woman who I met in graduate school. The island is located at the mouth of the Han River, near Incheon, and is an important historical and cultural site.

It was a cold and drizzly morning, which meant fewer recreation seekers and little traffic, so we were able to get there from Seoul in about an hour. The drive, along the banks of the Han River (한강 漢江), was interesting. For several miles there is barbed wire stretched across the south bank of the river, where the river marks the boundary line with North Korea. Inside the barbed wire there are numerous military guardhouses. Some of them looked unused, but some were manned by South Korean soldiers. I don't know if security has always been tight in this area, given the proximity to the North Korean border, or if an incident that occurred in March 1980, when three North Koreans attempted to infiltrate South Korea by crossing the river here, is partly responsible.

I managed to get only one blurry picture of a guardhouse from the moving car. I believe that in this view we are looking east, on a stretch of the river that runs north-south, so the opposite shore is not North Korea.



On the island we stopped first at a small fort, which is now a park with a historical museum. Because of its location at the estuary of the Han River, the island was an important defensive location, as it protected river access to the capital. It also served as a refuge for the royal court during times of land invasion. The island therefore played important roles over the last 1000 years during attacks by the Mongols, Japanese, Manchus, French, and Americans. Korea won some of those battles and lost others. The American marines soundly defeated Korean forces there in 1871, as part of an attempt to force Korea to open itself to trade. It was a short and lop-sided battle: about 350 Koreans were killed, while only 3 Americans died. You can read details here. Recently, America agreed to lease back to Korea the large battle flag that was captured during the battle.

Here's a picture of the flag:

Flowers were in full bloom on the grounds.


There are still plenty of old cannons around. I was reminded a little bit of the forts at Quebec, although the cannons here are much smaller.

That's the history museum in the background of this picture:


We next stopped at the local fish market for lunch. This was the kind of place, and the kind of food, that seemed likely to cause serious digestive ailments for a visitor. But I couldn't pass up the chance to have local, fresh seafood.

We got grilled shellfish. This astonishing dish arrived at our table:


We laid the shells over a charcoal grill to cook them. (This picture is worth clicking on and inspecting in detail.)


Our next and final stop was the famous Jeondeung Buddhist Temple (전등사 傳燈寺), said to have been established in the 4th century. It's set in a lovely U-shaped plateau nestled in the mountains in the south part of the island. The balloons are in celebration of the Buddha's birthday, a national holiday on March 12. The weather had cleared up nicely by afternoon.


Korean Buddhist temples often have a pavilion with bell, a drum, a fish, and cloud plate, all of which are sounded at certain times of day for various purposes, both mundane and spiritual.

In this shot you can see the bell (범종 梵鍾) and drum (법고 法鼓); the cloud plate (운판雲板) is hanging behind the bell.


And here's the wooden fish (목어 木魚 or 木漁).

I found three things on the island that connected to other experiences I've had here in Korea. First, there was a lot of information at the historical museum on movable type, which apparently was invented and developed on the island (hundreds of years before Guttenberg). I'd been learning about that in my philology seminar.

Second, the Tripitika Koreana, which I saw at Heinsa Temple, was carved on the island, while the Goryeo court was taking refuge there from the Mongol Invasion. Actually they were carved twice, as the first set was destroyed by the Mongols. The second set set was later moved to Heinsa.

Third, a branch repository of Kyujanggak, the royal library, was located at Jeondeung Temple. The building is still there, though it is empty now, as all its former contents are either in France, having been stolen by the French, or at SNU.

It was really satisfying for me to see all this historical and material connections, and link together various strands of my sojourn here.

Seongeo 2

A quick update on election results. President Lee Myung-Bak's party, the conservative Grand National Party (한 나라당), did not do as well as originally expected, but did manage to capture a slim majority in the legislature, with 153 seats out of 299. (I think these might be the guys in blue in my previous post, but I'm not sure.) The former majority party, the United Democratic Party (통합민주당), suffered serious losses.

Given his slim parliamentary majority, Lee Myung-Bak will probably be able to implement a good chunk of his domestic program, which includes business-friendly policies to help promote economic growth. He's also expected to take a harder line with North Korea than the previous more liberal administrations.

Turnout in this election was extremely low; there's been a lot of discussion of the reasons for such voter apathy, especially since the turnout was pretty high for the presidential election last winter, and there is widespread anxiety about the economic situation here.

The low turnout was despite the fact that the government was giving away vouchers for government-run museums and parks worth 2,000 won (about US $2) to anyone who voted!

(Sorry, no pictures this time!)
(By the way, this is Post #100!)

Daeseon

The South Korean presidential election will be held tomorrow, December 19th. It's always hard to understand the details of another country's politics, especially when there is a language barrier, but as our stay here coincides with the height of election campaigning, we've tried to take the opportunity to learn a little about it.

Official campaign activity began a few weeks ago, and each candidate was assigned an official number. All around town (and presumably around the country) you can see posters of the candidates and their official numbers, like this:


There are trucks that drive around the streets with people on board talking into loudspeakers and mini-rallies with music and dancing. These rallies seem to be rah-rah type events, and I wonder whether substantive information about the candidates' positions can be conveyed. The candidates all seem to have a theme song, and a theme color, and supporters wear matching outfits and dance along to the theme song.

In the crowded field of twelve candidates, there seem to be three serious contenders, Numbers 1, 2, and 12. Candidate number 1, Chung Dong-young, is the ruling party candidate. Like the current president, Roh Moo-hyun, Chung is considered to be a liberal and his main campaign position is to continue engagement with North Korea. However, Roh, who is wrapping up the single five-year term that he is limited to, is currently very unpopular and the members of his party have changed its name from the Uri Party (Our Party) to the United New Democratic Party in an effort to distance themselves from him. Despite the name change, Chung is running a distant second.

The apparent front-runner is candidate number 2, Lee Myung-bak, of the Grand National Party. A former businessman, he served as mayor of Seoul and instituted a number of changes that even we, as newcomers to the city, can see now. He completely reworked the Seoul bus system, changing the routings and installing bus-only lanes. He also oversaw the daylighting of Cheonggyecheon, a stream that runs through the center of Seoul which was covered by an elevated highway for about 40 years. Lee has been dogged by scandals, and the parliament has just voted to open an investigation into fraud allegations against him. However, many Koreans seem not to be bothered by potential ethical issues. Koreans seem to feel that the current economy is bad, and based on his track record as mayor of Seoul, many people see Lee as a pragmatist who can get things done.

Running a close third is candidate number 12, Lee Hoi-chang. This Lee founded the Grand National Party, and was the party's candidate in the previous two elections, but retired from politics after losing to Roh in a close race in 2002. In November, Lee suddenly entered this year's race as an independent, much later than all the other candidates. The most conservative of the three major candidates, Lee explained his un-retirement by claiming to be dissatisfied with Lee Myung-bak's candidacy, particularly his stance toward North Korea. The Grand National Party seems to have moved to the center since he left the party, and overall Koreans seem less concerned with the issue of North-South relations.

This is, of course, a very simplified summary of the election. I'd welcome comments from anyone who knows more about the subject.

Hanguk

All of my previous trips to Korea were brief, and my impressions largely superficial. On my first visit ten years ago, I am reported to have said (Erma has a good memory for such things) that Korea struck me as a cross between Japan and Taiwan.

I've now lived in Seoul for about three months. Although my contact with Korean people and culture is still somewhat superficial, I feel that I've started to develop a reliable sense of how Koreans in Seoul live.

One of the impressions that has grown deeper over the last few months is how prosperous Korea is. Seoul is full of people out spending money and having a good time. Cafés and restaurants are full to bursting. Koreans are sophisticated, worldly, and materialistic. (I don't intend the last descriptor to be pejorative.) They are incredibly technologically savvy. In many ways the country seems more advanced and functional than the US.

Prosperous Koreans strolling at Cheonggyecheon 청계천, the recently daylighted stream that runs through the heart of downtown Seoul

One negative characteristic of Koreans is impatience. (The Koreans themselves often describe their own national personality type as geup hada 급하다 "rushed".) They don't like to wait; they park illegally; they weave through traffic; they shove past people on the sidewalks. But even this characteristic seems to be ameliorating. Younger Koreans wait patiently on the subway platform while riders exit (even while their older compatriots shove their way on and fight for seats).

I don't know when Korea made the transition from being a developing country to a developed country, but it is fully entrenched in the latter category now. It also has a vibrantly functioning democracy, in contrast with the repressive military dictatorships that were the norm, with US support, through the 1980s.

Koreans no longer need to think about catching up to the West, or catching up to the States. Whereas before the '80s emigrating to the US was commonly viewed as the major pathway to an improved life, many Koreans can look forward to a better standard of living and greater career and educational opportunities if they stay here.

Freed from the need to catch the West, and freed from the burdens of political repression, Koreans now have the confidence and capability to shape their own future on their own terms. Where will they go?

Of course, Korea's current prosperity and freedom may be something of an historical aberration. Two serious dangers loom on the horizon.

The first is North Korea. Although technically it is still a military threat (the North Koreans could probably reduce Seoul to rubble if they made an all-out missile attack), war seems highly unlikely because of the fragile state of the isolated North Korean regime. And the North is certainly no longer a political threat, thanks to the end of the Cold War. South Korea was once obsessed with Communists, infiltrators from the North, a fifth column in the country. (One of our acquaintances said that when he went abroad to Scotland for a few weeks in college in the 1980s, he had to first watch a propaganda film about the dangers of fraternizing with any North Koreans one might meet overseas.) South Koreans and their government seem now to have realized that there is no need for all that paranoid nonsense now, and that for the most part it's better to just ignore the North and go about one's business. (This isn't to say that implementing a policy for dealing with the North isn't a major concern of the South Korean government; it certainly is.)

The true danger that is posed by the North is economic: should the regime fail and the South be forced to take over administration of the North, the economic and cultural strain will be enormous and potentially destabilizing.

The second, and in my view more serious, long-term threat is China. Korea is a very small country attached to a very large regional military power. China will eventually dominate Asia economically, politically, and militarily, and it's not clear how much true autonomy Korea will be able to maintain for itself. (In part it may depend on whether the US continues to station a large contingent of forces here and in Japan.)

This seems like a historically special time for Korea not only because it enjoys so much prosperity and autonomy, but also because it is culturally ascendant in Asia right now. When I lived in Hong Kong in 2001, I became aware of the widespread popularity there of Korean films and pop music. In China and Japan too Korean pop culture continues to be extremely popular. It's not just economic opportunity that is bringing so many foreign students to Korea to learn Korean; I've encountered many students at our language institute who are here because they love Korean television soap operas.

It is interesting for me to contrast these impressions of Korea with my impressions of China. Many Chinese people I've met are still deeply obsessed with nursing national grievances and with the perceived struggle to catch up with the West. I remember talking with a man in a bus in Fujian, when I was doing fieldwork there, who was bemoaning the fact that even though the Chinese economy was improving so dramatically, it would still be decades before China "caught up" with the West. I asked him why it was so important to "catch up" with the West, and what China would do after that happened. He couldn't really answer those questions; he didn't know how to think about them. In my experience in America and European countries, citizens don't worry about catching up to or comparing themselves with other countries. They worry about how best to improve their own societies. It seemed to me that it would be healthier for the Chinese to think about what they want their country to be like, and to work toward that, instead of viewing the world as a battleground for ascendancy between China and the West. (To be fair, I know that many intellectuals in America view a future conflict with China as an inevitable feature of the coming century.)

I think part of the mentality derives from a sense that China would never have become so backward if they hadn't been humiliated at the hands of Western imperialists in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This sense of grievance drives national attitudes in a way that often seems unhealthy and counter-productive.

This past weekend I was at a party at which several mainland Chinese were present as well as one Taiwanese guy. I'm used to educational settings in the US where there are students from both Taiwan and mainland China studying together, so I'd forgotten that for most Chinese it's a rarity to meet and speak to someone from Taiwan. This was the first time that these Chinese had had a chance to do so in their lives.

The first thing the Chinese were surprised to learn is that, contrary to what is reported in their media, it is not the case that all Taiwanese wish to reunite with the mainland. There was some further discussion about the political status of Taiwan, and then one of the Chinese guys said something that struck me as very strange.

"The reason we want Taiwan back," he said, "is because for centuries China has been bullied and humiliated by the West. Now China is finally strong again, and we can reclaim the territory that should have been ours all along. We got Macau and Hong Kong back, and we want Taiwan back too."

Nursing a grievance against 19th-century Western imperialism doesn't strike me as the best basis for formulating foreign policy today. Nor does it strike me as a justification for ignoring the interests and well-being of the Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. But I think in the minds of many Chinese the two simply can't be separated.

Not long after this conversation I read a passage in Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones that reminded me of it. In a discussion of the upcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, Hessler notes that the primary driving force behind Chinese international sports competition has been shame, not pride (p. 265). In his view, China competes not for the joy and pride of athletic success, but to erase perceived humiliations by beating the West at their own game.

I can't resist ending this blog entry by plugging Hessler's book. It's fantastic. It's the book that I and many of my friends who've lived in China have always wanted to write. Hessler's experiences reverberate because they are so similar in many respects to mine, and because as a gifted writer, he is able to distill and describe those experiences vividly and thoughtfully.

Hessler interweaves his observations about modern China with reportage about academic work on China's ancient past. He has interviewed many archeologists and philologists, and it's astounding how many points of intersection there are with my own life. Just a few examples: He profiles a guy who was a graduate student colleague in my department; he profiles the professor from whom I first learned to read oracle bones; he mentions some of my current colleagues and their recent work. Somehow he's taken these academic topics that I'd previously imagined could never be popularized and woven them into a compelling and thought-provoking account for the general reader.