LITMIR.BIZ

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were respectable again. My only regret was that the official in Ch’unch’ŏn lost his job. His offence seemed small enough.

      On another occasion I was called in to the local office to vouch for the identity and good standing of the parish priest. The parish priest was a ten-years-in-the-orient veteran, a man who prided himself on his considerable experience and who regarded curates as useless baggage imposed by bishops on long suffering, hard working pastors. He did not appreciate this kind of public demeaning, especially as he knew the curate would have the story all over the diocese in a matter of days and all over the country within the week. I think he would gladly have gone to jail rather than be exposed to the ordeal. You will appreciate that I savoured the occasion to the full and was very slow to commit myself to any declaration of recognition much less approval.

      There is a hilarious story from Japanese times about a foreigner who went into a ranking bureaucrat’s office in Kangnŭng city administration. Without looking up from his voluminous sheaf of papers, the official asked, though not directing the question at anyone in particular – to formally note the presence of the foreigner would have been an unspeakable indignity – ‘And what brought the long nosed nom here today?’

      The reply was equally acerbic.

      ‘The long-nosed nom came to see the short-nosed nom.’

      Note how this knowledgeable foreigner kept his reply in the non-personal third person. History, fortunately, recounts no more of the details of the incident.

      In the ’60s and ’70s police smiled and waved at minor and sometimes major traffic goofs. When you didn’t know any other way home, it was normal to ask the traffic policeman to reverse the traffic on a one-way street, and invariably he obliged. The police on occasion drove us home after curfew when there was no other way of getting there. Parking lot attendants put up with everyone’s mistakes. Public anger was relatively unknown. The arrival of the cap and whistle as symbols of authority put an end to all this serenity. The cap and whistle brigade do not take prisoners.

      President Chun Duhwan’s name is not exactly synonymous with accepted notions of freedom, but in 1982 he ordered the lifting of curfew restrictions (midnight to 4.00 am), which were first imposed by American occupation troops in 1945. I recall the curfew with affection. On weekends, we liked to go downtown to one of the new saeng maekchu (draught beer) houses in Myŏngdong (the OB Cabin was very popular) as an antidote to the drudgery of formal language learning, and at the same time as a forum to practise what we had learned at school in the previous week. Myŏngdong was always referred to by its Irish equivalent, the town of the lights. ‘Let’s go down to Baile na Soilse and quaff a few schooners,’ was all the spur that was necessary to get us moving. These were the days of tramcars, old battered shibal taxis and the ubiquitous hapsŭng minibuses. Shibal taxis and Blubirds were relatively difficult to catch at night.

      The hapsŭng was the most readily available form of transport, but there were difficulties. To catch the last hapsŭng – I can still hear the ringing of the hapsŭng girl’s nasal cry in my inner ear: ‘Chong-no, Hae-wha-dong, Sam-sŏn-gyo, Ton-am-dong, Mi-a-ri, Su-yu-ri’ – meant rushing the last pint, a dire deed to anyone of Irish sensibility. I don’t know that we always tried very hard because four foreigners piling onto the last hapsŭng were liable to cause a lot of confusion. Our bum expanse was considerably larger than the local variety and the hapsŭngs had not been built with us in mind. As a result we often missed that fatal encounter with the last hapsŭng and were forced to seek alternative routes home. People were invariably very kind. Taxis rushing home stopped to help us, private citizens often gave us lifts, and at times, as noted already, the police were kind enough to escort us home. But inevitably there were the nights when fate was not so kind and we had to walk the last stretch home. I don’t ever recall, however, having to hoof it further than from Shinsŏldong to Tonamdong, a thirty minute walk.

      I remember vividly the last frantic rush of cars at 11.50 and the eerie silence that descended on the city at 12.05. It was now curfew time and the city was dotted with police and military barriers. Getting through the barriers was always exciting. Invariably when challenged, ‘Where you go?’ we replied, ‘Ŭijŏngbu.’ And invariably the policeman or soldier said ‘Okay, you go.’ We lived close to Tonamdong Intersection and there was always a barrier there. One night when challenged with the invariable ‘Where you go?’, one of the group gave the standard answer, ‘We go Ŭijŏngbu,’ though our house was only fifty metres away and the guard must have known it. However, when the guard saw us turn for home, he made an unexpected response. He said, ‘You no go there Ŭijŏngbu,’ whereupon one of the group said, ‘Ah, the trouble with you, sir, is you only know one road to Ŭijŏngbu!’ The witty response became a catch phrase for those who think they have explored every avenue in dealing with a problem and are now in a position to offer a neat solution, a sure recipe for disaster in Korea. As one astute man used to say about Korean politics: ‘When you have studied the matter inside out, examined all the possibilities and come to a reasonable conclusion, the only thing you can be certain of is that you’ve got the wrong answer.’ Two plus two was never four in Korea.

       3

      LEARNING THE ROPES

      OVER THE FIRST FEW MONTHS we were given an introduction to Korean mores. Our pastoral counsellor talked from his own personal experience. Like most of the early missionaries he was colonial in his mindset, which meant that whereas he had no great affection for the Japanese, he thought they were a necessary evil and an inevitable part of Korean economic development. Many foreigners were tarred with the ch’inil (pro-Japanese) brush because of attitudes like this. He also had negative attitudes about Korean abilities to do things the way he thought they should be done. He felt the screw was never given the last turn, equipment was inherently flawed, bits and pieces inevitably fell off. He didn’t know it, but he was also pointing out the flaws of Japanese merchandise in the first years of Japan’s industrial development. Learning is a long process. Korea was at stage one while Japan had moved on to stage two. Our counsellor had forgotten Japan’s stage one.

      Along with a colonial mindset, the older missionaries had a flawed view of the Confucian legacy, which I believe came, in part at least, from the early French missionaries and Dallet’s book on the Korean church. Dallet never set foot in Korea. He compiled his book on the basis of letters sent home to Paris by the French missionaries. The book is amazing for the wealth of information it contains on Korean institutions and mores. The shorter English version should be compulsory reading for those who don’t read French but who aspire to live long-term in Korea. Dallet reached some wrong conclusions, inevitably so, I suppose, since he was relying on second-hand information. One of the areas where Dallet got it wrong was in dealing with the Confucian tradition. Korea in the 1800s had a large population of dispossessed yangban who for one reason or another could not get posts in the bureaucracy. To work was beneath their dignity, but they retained the right to complain and criticize. They were a constant drain on society and a thorn in the side of the developing church whose appeal, despite yangban beginnings, was egalitarian. The Catholic church tended to attract the more disadvantaged people in society: chung’in (a middle group between yangban and commoner), commoners, kisaeng, butchers, and so on. Dallet made the mistake of judging the great Confucian tradition by the attitudes and actions of a disgruntled, dispossessed minority. Gale and Allen shared this jaundiced view. Our counsellor had inherited Dallet’s view of Confucian culture, but he had a great sense of humour and a bottomless well of fun stories, and he regaled us with all his skills. The general advice he gave, and sage advice it proved to be, could be summarized in three propositions. Don’t try to be more Korean than the Koreans. Make friends rather than enemies because in Korea friends and enemies tend to be for life. And if you have some extra money, give it, don’t lend it. Money lending is destructive of human relations.

      Trying to be more Korean than the Koreans was not a problem in the ’60s and ’70s. We lived distinctly Western lives, in Western space, speaking a lot of English. Our lifestyle

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