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

Prologue

When visibility is good, the approach to Kimp’o Airport just outside Seoul provides spectacular scenery. It also brings back all sorts of wonderful memories that have piled up in the course of a great many trips to Korea since 1952. Seoul has always been for me both exotic and familiar, a place where unexpected adventures were usually lying in wait, but where I could also count on old friends to put me up for the night—or for a week—without advance notice. During the Korean War, I was a young diplomat at the American Embassy, first in Pusan and then, from February of 1953, in Seoul. Those were the very worst of times for Koreans, but a halcyon period for me. In the Pusan area of the south I had a fascinating job, roaming through the most distant and isolated parts of a mountainous countryside with a Jeep and interpreter. My assignment was to check up on the distribution of relief grain and run down reports of rural starvation that appeared frequently in the Pusan newspapers. Perhaps halcyon isn’t quite the right word to describe the experience of being shot at by guerillas. On one very memorable occasion we were driving along a deserted mountain road at dusk. One bullet hit the hood of the Jeep and another broke the windshield. The terrified driver whipped the Jeep around and headed back the way we had come without any orders from me. Combat police at the nearest town told us this only happened late in the day when the guerillas figured they were safe from pursuit by Army helicopters. After that we stopped driving well before suppertime and no longer spent the night in isolated villages. In those towns and villages, my interpreter, who became a close friend, introduced me to rural life and entertainments. I learned to eat with chopsticks , sleep on the floor, and take baths out of a giant cauldron with a wood fire underneath. I learned to drink various homemade alcoholic beverages and to sing folk songs along with the local female entertainers. Because American Prologue Vincent S. R. Brandt 2 officialdom firmly believed that all Korean food was dangerously unhealthy, each time we left Pusan the Jeep was loaded with C-rations. Instead of eating these, we benevolently distributed them to local farmers in return for information , directions, food, drink, and lodging. In place of canned pork and beans we ate fresh greens with hot bean paste sauce and kimch’i or tofu mixed with various vegetables and meat. On one occasion when the sub-county magistrate was being particularly hospitable, the meat turned out to be dog. In the city of Pusan, between trips to the countryside, I fell in love with a North Korean refugee and sailed a small boat among wooded islands off what must be one of the most beautiful seacoasts in the world. I also met one of South Korea’s most celebrated traditional artists, who was then a penniless refugee like nearly everyone else. He introduced me to the pleasures of painting bamboo leaves and rock orchids and plum blossoms on rice paper with ink and an oriental brush. More than that, he taught me how to sit crosslegged for long periods and compose my mind. Immersed in chaos and deprivation, the Koreans struggled to survive, while I reveled in my first encounter with a whole new civilization. During the intervening years, I have always come back to Korea with agreeable anticipation, expecting fresh adventures and a renewal of warm associations . And I have usually not been disappointed. But this time—it is September 1992—I find myself for the first time wanting to postpone my encounter with Seoul, wishing that we could just keep making giant circles over the metropolitan area instead of landing. I know there are ten and a half million busy, determined people down there, and I will have to compete with them for limited space on sidewalks, buses, and subways, as well as for the chance to breathe some of the brownish, bad-tasting cloud that hangs over the city. South Korea today is a prosperous, dynamic, industrial country, and most people are no longer interested in the past or in Americans. I know that my few dollars can no longer buy the fantastic luxuries that used to be easily available thirty years ago. Then, a Koryŏ celadon bowl was still within my reach in a tiny, cramped Insa-dong antique shop...