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6: Getting There
- University of Washington Press
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6 Getting There It wasn’t so far in distance from Seoul, perhaps only 150 kilometers, but in every other way going to Sŏkp’o was like falling over the edge of the farthest horizon. Every couple of months or so I would go up to Seoul from the village to see my wife and youngest child, eat steaks, take hot showers, and get rid of lice. After a few days of extravagant pampering and luxury I would then load up my rucksack with whiskey, batteries for my radio and tape recorder, and presents for the villagers and go back down (in Korean any time you leave Seoul to go anywhere, it is always “down”) to the village. In 1966 there were four distinct stages to getting there, with the entire trip taking about ten hours. (Today it takes about three hours.) A subtle shift took place at each stage, transporting me (in a science fiction sense) farther and farther from the modern city. Every dimension, even time, was different. Gradually different rules applied, voices and dialect changed, clothes became more ragged, and the smell of unwashed bodies more pungent. All hurry eventually disappeared , money counted for less, manners improved, and ancient rules of respect for the aged took precedence over nearly everything else. The first four hours of the trip were by way of a slow, ordinary train— crowded, dirty, noisy, and full of the camaraderie of travel. This stage served as a sort of cultural bridge between the metropolis and provincial towns. Most people who boarded the train were well provisioned with both food and drink. Travel was an adventurous break in the ordinary austere routine of life, and it was just as well to make the best of it. Once we got moving, there was a certain enforced intimacy right from the start, because our knees and hips were all pressed tightly together on the hard, third-class benches. Most of my traveling companions took obvious pleasure in showing off the good things they had brought and sharing them Vincent S. R. Brandt 88 with the foreigner. In return for the hard-boiled eggs, the dried squid, the pickled oysters in hot sauce, and the rice wrapped in seaweed that were continually thrust at me, I supplied soju, which was sold in small bottles at every station . The train jounced slowly along, making lots of stops, and it was easy to replenish the supply. After an hour or so of travel, the soju really loosened things up. Everyone seemed to feel sorry for me. The idea of a foreigner traveling alone in a strange land seemed tragic to Koreans, who live in a world where nearly every aspect of life is determined by intricate networks of relatives , friends, and neighbors. They grieved for my presumed loneliness, and many of them were determined to do something about it. There were times when their attention and generosity became overwhelming, and I longed for the tranquil anonymity of the solitary traveler. But the only way to get that on the Seoul–Hongsŏng line was to travel second class (there was no first class), and the social anthropologist’s creed of sympathetic participation usually (but not always) kept me from that. On the train I discovered, or rather experienced, a close, although inverse, correlation between social class or status and insim. Passengers who wore coats and ties were townsmen. They were usually pale and plump, and either ate and drank by themselves or whooped it up on the train with colleagues. They left me alone. My companions on the third-class benches, however, were entirely different. They were always thin and burned dark by the sun. The skin on their hands was hard and deeply cracked. In South Korea in the 1960s most farmers were subsistence peasants, “subsistence” meaning that there were barely enough calories available in the village diet to sustain them Figure 6.1 A member of the Yi lineage singing (chanting) sijo into the tape recorder. (1966) Getting There 89 during their long hours of hard work. But they could not ignore the socially deprived creature who sat among them. They shared their food. This kind of experience, multiplied over the years on South Korean trains, buses, interisland boats, and footpaths in the mountains, has given me a sort of radicalpopulist outlook on South Korean society; I’m still a little prejudiced against the provincial middle class. After four hours or so of soju and togetherness...