An Affair with Korea: Memories of South Korea in the 1960s

14: Re-encounter

14 Re-encounter I am on my way back to Sŏkp’o twenty-five years later; it is September 1992.1 The crumbling road high above the sea has been fixed up enough so that buses and trucks can use it safely. Seven regular buses a day connect Sŏkp’o with T’aean. From the seaward window of the bus I can look almost ninety feet straight down and see waves breaking against the rocks. Distant islands on the western horizon still beckon mysteriously. A couple of miles offshore a big tanker heads north. I remember the two-masted junk with tattered brown sails that was working its way slowly but steadily to windward when I first came this way on foot so many years ago. As we jounce noisily along, nearing the last shoulder of the mountain, my chest tightens, and my eyes fill. I let myself go, welcoming the unexpectedly strong emotion. Abruptly we are around the last bend, and I can see the entire village in the afternoon sunlight, with surf breaking on the beach and rocky coast beyond, a cluster of boats in front of the Big Hamlet, and the wooded hills building up to a high saddle behind my house. The light reflects brilliantly off the water in the sheltered bay. At first glance it is all unchanged, as beautiful as ever. The bus heads steeply down, and I watch eagerly for the place where the path to Teacher Yi’s house drops off the road down into the pines. I know that the new and imposing grassy tomb with a marble slab in front, just where I used to start my climb up the mountain before breakfast, belongs to T’aemo’s father. T’aemo told me about it before I left home. Down on the flat, as we enter the village, crossing what used to be the sandspit, I am suddenly disoriented. The changes are overwhelming. On the right the whole big circular arm of the bay that used to come up to the sandspit and that was mud at low tide, is now ripening rice fields. Everywhere concrete utility poles have sprouted, with myriad wires stringing off of them Vincent S. R. Brandt 216 in all directions. Houses are now mostly made of cement block, covered with brown or white stucco, and the roofs are brightly colored tile, metal, or some sort of corrugated composition. Rutted dirt roads have replaced the footpaths. Trash lies about everywhere, not collected or piled up at all, but just casually discarded, wherever the plastic bottle, candy wrapper, torn fish net, broken pail, eel trap, engine part, cement bag, or tin can ceased to be of use. After honking its way through the middle of the Big Hamlet, the bus makes its final stop just below my house. I climb the narrow footpath that still provides a shortcut up the hill, wondering who will be there, and how he or she will feel about my return. My house is now surrounded by a cement block wall with a rusty iron gate, so I have to bang on it, shattering the afternoon quiet. Dogs bark from nearby houses. A stocky, pleasant-faced young woman opens the gate and greets me simply. She is a daughter-in law of Kim Ŭigon, wife of his second son, Kim In Nam. She serves me a cup of instant coffee on the veranda, and we talk easily. Thinking that some tension might exist regarding their occupation of the house, I am relieved by this casual welcome. I had some reservations about moving in with Kim Ŭigon’s family, but Teacher Yi insisted I should stay here while in Sŏkp’o. It would be strange, he said, if I didn’t live in my own house. The day before, on my way down to Sŏkp’o from Seoul, I had stopped at Sŏsan to see Teacher Yi. Sŏsan, formerly a dusty, somnolent county seat of 20,000 people, has now, with a population of 100,000, been promoted to the status of city. Teacher Yi and I met at the cozy coffee shop near the bus terminal , and it seemed to me that he had changed very little—a big, shy, awkward man who has perhaps finally begun to realize his own worth. As we walked to his house, we talked only about ordinary things, and I found no way to break through his cordial formality and...