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| Dickensian, no? Down by the docks in Incheon, South Korea |
It was as an evangelist for Dickens and his enduring eminence (see passim) that I spent a
few days in Seoul this March past, at the kind invitation (per my excellent Buenos
Aires adventure) of the British Council. And the South Korean capital was
really a lovely, fascinating, rewarding experience for me. What did I learn?
Well, to speak of just a couple of dozen imperfectly formed impressions:
1) I arrived with the intention of looking with clean eyes, eschewing
cultural cliché... That said, it is a fact that the view from the window of my
(most comfortable) hotel room on the seventeenth floor was part occluded by
glowing SAMSUNG and DAEWOO signs. This, after a drive from Incheon Airport
through a mist so profoundly murky that for certain stretches I rather feared
we were heading north to the Demilitarised Zone – if not the Twilight Zone. (In
due course I came upon a popular local brand of bottled water called ‘DMZ’, and
had to wonder what it was aiming for, beyond name-recognition.)
2) For all that – if you were to ask me now which is the
neighbouring nation that casts the longest shadow over South Korea, against
which South Koreans harbour a distinct historical complaint and measure their
current levels of progress/success? Well, that would be Japan, I reckon. The
old colonial presence is still 'felt' quite strongly, and there is of course a clear sense of economic
comparison and competition.
3) There are maybe 25 million people in South Korea? And 12 million
of them are in Seoul? The city is hemmed by mountains as far as the eye can see
from a high vantage, and this certainly brings home to one the reason for the
city’s marked architectural verticality. High up you can also see more clearly
how the colonial Japanese re-planned the city, from east to west – in a
defiance of the former order that was no doubt wilful.
4) The weather did pick up notably while I was there – however
we did get one afternoon of spring snow, which was rather charming and,
naturally, put me in mind of Yukio Mishima.
5) Something I realised very quickly, i.e. on arrival at the
airport, as that our Dickens 2012 deliberations were only one big deal going
down in town that week, possibly the main one being the Nuclear Security Summit. As it
happened, Obama arrived in Seoul only as I was leaving, nonetheless I got to
observe the ‘Ring of Steel’ being put in place downtown, and steely it most
certainly was...
6) Of course I'd be inured to this had I ever visited Japan,
but it was just a bit grim to see Robert De Niro advertising the 'Paradise
Casino' on hoardings all over Seoul. But it’s maybe less demeaning than some of
those comedy films he’s done.
7) I picked up a bit of Korean history; and if you believe the
worst stories then getting buried alive was probably too kindly a fate for the
insane Crown Prince Sado (1735-1762).
8) Cosmetic surgery is undergoing a huge boom in Seoul, clinics
abounding in the heart of the city, a particular fad being for westernised
eyelids and noses and skin tones – ‘the erasure of any trace of Mongolian’, as
someone put it to me ruefully. Depressing stuff, however you cut it, and wont
to lead one to dark old-fashioned thoughts on vanity and morality. Bodily
aesthetics shouldn’t be subject to any kind of cultural cringe. I could easily
have set a more radical version of The Possessions of Doctor Forrest in Seoul.
9) I hear that the population of South Korea is in a slow steady
decline. One easy reason is that more and more women are going out to work.
Meanwhile, and not by accident, it seems that working class men (rural
especially) are ‘buying brides’ in greater numbers, from Cambodia and Vietnam.
This is social dynamite, obviously, as well as grim in itself.
10) I ate very well throughout my stay, Korean cuisine is
deliciously sharp-flavoured, spicy and moreish. Naturally I consumed a great
deal of kimchi, and found that it ranged from very good to great depending on
the core quality of the cabbage. (I did receive a bit of ribbing on my
chopstick technique: a Western 'pincer'-style that has always served me OK until now, but
which by Korean standards is the trait of a thoroughgoing rube.)
11) In the talks and symposia that I attended and spoke at, we
were of course much absorbed in questions of the novelist and the city, how
a writer 'takes ownership' of a built environment and its people, how urban
planning and literary fiction feed off each other. The oeuvre of Dickens lends
itself easily to all this, but a key text from the Korean side was Pak
T'aewǒn's urban odyssey 'A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist' (1934), which
was hugely influenced, like pretty much all of Korean literature in that era,
by Ulysses and high European modernism. I was given a most enlightening guide through
this text by dint of a walking tour across Seoul, organised by my hosts and
conducted by the critic Byungsik Heo, which retraced the steps of the eponymous
Kubo.
12) Our perambulation took us by the attractive Cheonggyecheon Stream,
a project of urban renewal spearheaded by Seoul’s former mayor – now South
Korea’s president – Lee Myung-bak. For some decades after the 1950s the stream was
reduced to a mere sewer concealed under concrete and asphalt, and its
restoration came at huge cost to the public purse. The irony is that what we
now see is a fake. In fact the old stream proved unsalvageable, and so the new
concrete channel is an artificial way, its current created by the daily
electric pumping of thousands of tons of water. Meanwhile, in the depths
beneath, the old sewer remains the old sewer... Such is the game of urban
regeneration, you might say – but clearly Cheonggyecheon offers us an easy
metaphor about city politics, heritage, ‘clean-up’, the authentic and the
superficial.
13) Political protestors on the city streets who wish to give cheek
to President Lee Myung-bak will sometimes don cat costumes. It’s not an obvious
stratagem, until you understand that some of the President’s strongest critics have given him the pungent
nickname of ‘The Rat’.
14) The British Council in Korea treated me to several fine
meals and considerately arranged for me to meet some really formidable local
writers and scholars. The brilliant Professor Hyejoon Yoon is both a novelist and academic, and the Korean translator of
Oliver Twist, inter alia. The remarkable and most venerable Brother Anthony of Taize has, since relocating to Seoul from Cornwall thirty years ago,
become probably the most eminent translator of Korean into English. And Gyeong Uk Kim, Choi Jae-Hoon and Yoon Seong-hee are three very smart and accomplished contemporary novelists, all just a couple
of years younger than me.
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| MacArthur in (Freedom) Park |
15) In the company of those
novelists I was given a wonderful guided tour of Incheon, the port town
that really opened Korea to the world, and (as I recalled from my O-Level History)
saw probably the hinge battle of the Korean War. That, of course, is why a
statue of General MacArthur stands in the former Park of Nations, which became Suh
Park during the Japanese occupation, then Jayu (Freedom) Park after the war of
1950-53...
16) On the slopes of Freedom Park is a wonderful Cultural Centre:
a late nineteenth-century clubhouse with polished walnut wood floors, leather
wingback armchairs, glass-cabinet displays on every wall, representing all the
great trading and seafaring nations of the 1890s... It was known as the Jemulpo Club, in the days when diplomats and businessmen came to sip their bitters or cordials, and
gaze meaningfully out across the bay toward the ‘Yellow Sea’...
17) Incheon is an old shipping town that has also been 'regenerated' in
the manner of a fair few old shipping towns one might speak of... As you get near
the docks you find former shipbuilders’ offices and granaries and bonded
warehouses that have become art galleries and theatres and rehearsal/studio
spaces, attractive places where one can also get a damn fine cup of coffee. I found all this very
stirring, and began to tell my companions (through my translator) some stories of the changing faces of post-war Newcastle upon Tyne, and a man called T Dan Smith...
18) Our last stop in Incheon was a shanty town that has existed
in various forms since the Japanese colonial period: now it’s a series of broad
alleys lined by homes made from breeze blocks, tarpaulins and corrugated iron, along
with some nicer-looking prefabs, and a mercifully foursquare kindergarten.
(There were a few too many exposed gas pipes for comfort, and the archetypal
black dog tied up to a tyre with rope.) Our local host brought us into the home
of a local shaman: a lady of advanced years, sat comfortably in her parlour before
a small telly, cell-phone and cigarettes placed at her side. Behind a sliding screen
was her altar, heavily incensed, festooned with all manner of charms, amulets,
scarves and sashes, where she also keeps the knives she will sometimes dance
upon for ceremonial purposes. Call it a throwback if you will, but port towns are
big on shamen, with good reason. Wherever men have set out to sea, you get a keen attention to
fates, augurs and omens. For me, a fitting place to conclude the cultural expedition.
19) I am most grateful to my hosts in Seoul, who could not have been more thoughtful: in particular to Yoonjoe Park, who put together the program for my visit with great astuteness and kind consideration; and to Jaeyong Park and Yoonna Cho, who took me everywhere and guided me in expert and most affable fashion, as well as offering copious and much-needed translations.
19) I am most grateful to my hosts in Seoul, who could not have been more thoughtful: in particular to Yoonjoe Park, who put together the program for my visit with great astuteness and kind consideration; and to Jaeyong Park and Yoonna Cho, who took me everywhere and guided me in expert and most affable fashion, as well as offering copious and much-needed translations.
