My Korea - Kevin O'Rourke

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fading in the hearts of a few.

      I record the names

      of these priests of Melchizedek.

      I record them for the succeeding

      generations of Columbans,

      lest we forget.

      And I record them for the succeeding

      generations of the people they served,

      lest they forget.

      And there were so many great stories. One of my favourite stories describes two men storming into Hoengsŏng at the outbreak of the war in 1950:

      The commies are coming,

      the commies are coming!

      We’ll stay, we’ll stay

      for Christ and glory!

      Bejazus we won’t.

      We’re getting our butts in gear;

      we’re getting to hell out of here.

      Fourteen chickens wrapped

      the front axle of the jeep as it pulled into Hoengsŏng.

      Funny how a bottle of whiskey and a friend

      could dull even the most imminent threat.

      The Hoengsŏng incumbent refused to budge. ‘First things first,’ he said, ‘there’s a bottle to be drunk: then we’re off.’ Seoul fell before they left. They had to find an alternative road south, which they duly did.

      Then there was Pat MacGowan, alone in the records for keeping a cardinal out. This was the result of a failure in communication between Pat and Paul Ch’oe, a Seoul priest who enjoyed our company. Pat’s Korean wasn’t great. He spent most of his language study time trying to figure out the accusative case. This wasn’t much help because Korean doesn’t have cases. Anyway, the result was that the cardinal was kept waiting in the yard. Paul Ch’oe did not believe it was a mistake, but it was. Mistakes like this were easy because Pat guarded his sitting room and kitchen like the Bastille.

      Hunting was a very popular winter sport. There were stringent rules on guns, which were supposed to be kept in the local police station for reasons of national security. The ordinances were not always strictly observed. There are many stories about warming up jeeps to go duck and goose hunting on a winter’s night, fortifying body and soul with a good modicum of the warming brew, putting on numerous layers of clothes as insulation against temperatures that sometimes went to ten or fifteen below Fahrenheit, going back for a little more of the warming brew, and ending up switching the engines off at two in the morning, too tipsy to risk taking a gun anywhere. One of my favourite hunting stories had to do with a casual jeep trip on the East Coast on a cold January day. Hunting was far from every-one’s minds, but the guns were always at the ready at this time of year. Suddenly a pheasant struts by the side of the road. Already saliva is dripping. A roast pheasant was a luxury addition to the stark diet of the time. The jeep eased to a halt. One man said – one man always seemed to say – ‘Leave this to me!’ He readied himself, took aim, fired. ‘The bastard ducked!’ he cried in dismay.

      The doleful enunciation

      that the pheasant ducked

      on a wintry day on the East Coast

      always elicited delighted chuckles

      from padres pleased by any bird

      smart enough to cheat an arbitrary fate

      and mush the plans of the parish priest

      for an elegant evening plate,

      but it was the corroborating speech

      from the marksman in the front seat

      that invariably brought down the house.

      The magnanimity of judgment of the second marksman, who undoubtedly thought he should have taken the shot himself and was quite certain he would not have missed, was nothing short of extraordinary. We were not quite as confident of his abilities.

      These first fruits men had a wonderful rugged individuality. They were all characters, in the sense we once understood that word in rural Ireland, when every town and village had its population of ‘characters.’ A few drank more than was good for them. It wasn’t easy not to drink too much in the Korea of the time. In 1964 a bottle of Chivas Regal in the Foreigners Commissary in Seoul (a government sales outlet designed to get badly needed greenbacks) was three dollars, and a bottle of French wine was one dollar. Coke and Seven-Up were a dollar a can. You couldn’t afford NOT to drink the alcohol, and you certainly couldn’t afford to drink the Seven-Up and coke. A lady at the checkout in the commissary once spoke disapprovingly to one of our men when he bought a few cans of Wall’s sausages, a pound of butter and a case of scotch for his month’s provisions.

      ‘Oh, Father!’ she cried.

      ‘Lady,’ he replied. ‘There’s more nourishment in my basket than yours.’

      The men were generous to a fault, spending any extra money on people in need. School fees, hospital charges, and house rentals were the main headings of their expenditures. They were constantly on the road, ferrying people in and out of hospital, arranging for treatment, even surgery – harelip surgery in particular – and very often paying for it. And when they came into Seoul to unwind, I remember nights when they literally took the roof off the Columban central house. The atmosphere at the snooker shoot-outs was both hilarious and electrical, and the standard of the snooker had to be seen to be believed. These men were larger than life, the most giving, exciting men I’ve known in my life. On top of their selflessness, they had, to a man, an extraordinary sense of camaraderie. To pass a man’s house was the unforgivable sin. They entertained you with the best they had and for as long as you cared to stay. The parishes were isolated, lonely places. In the ’60s we went for a week several times a year to the East Coast. Sometimes we didn’t get past Kansŏng, the first parish at the northern end of the coast. But the full trip would require stops in Kansŏng, Sokch’o, Yangyang, Chumunjin and Kangnŭng. If you took the train from Seoul or Wŏnju to Kangnŭng, an overnight trip, then Kangnŭng, Mukho, and Samch’ŏk were de rigueur stops. You could get away with not going down to Uljin because it was so far and the road was so bad. Usually, the incumbent came up to Samch’ŏk when he heard we had arrived.

      24 S was the name of the military road from Wŏnt’ong (outside Injae) to Sokch’o, the forerunner of the present highway that runs past Paekdam-sa, the temple where Chun Duhwan chose to meditate on his past. In the old days only military vehicles were allowed to use this road, but sometimes we were able to persuade the soldiers to let us through. The regular road north to Kansŏng had two one-way sections, and if you were unlucky enough to meet a convoy or two, you could be there all day. 24 S took hours off the trip, but the last few hundred metres to the top of the pass were hair-raising. The jeep, growling in low-low, would slide inexorably across the loose shale towards a drop of at least a thousand feet on the driver’s side. At the top of the pass, a granny invariably came out of the bushes with a basketful of American beer, Budweiser usually. We never figured out how she got up there, but she was as grateful a sight as the flowers in May and invariably we bought the entire basket.

      I remember the East Coast road as the worst in the country. Huge iron trucks loaded with raw ore bound for Japan ploughed up and down several times a day. The washboard was gut-shaking, and you could get lost in the potholes. After Park Chunghee hard-topped the entrance to Sŏr’ak, Harley-Davidson enthusiasts would truck their bikes down from Wŏnju and Seoul and take off, three abreast, like bats out of hell, along the new road. Farmers beware! The road was barely ten feet wide. If the motorcycle road hogs travelled the southern route through Taegwallyong Pass and Kangnŭng on their way to Sŏr’ak, they might be tempted by a culinary delight advertised as ‘Nude Dog’ which was served in a food stand at the top of the pass. The term is so succinct, so

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