Korea Read online

  I saw, I think, a kind of innocent gentility to the place, a misguided pride in the crackpot philosophy of juche—self-reliance, the guiding principle of the Kim dynasts—and I discerned, dare one say it, a feeling of the essential purity of the Korean-ness of those bleak lands and towns that lie north of the 38th parallel.

  I feel about North Korea much as I do about today’s Cuba—that however grim and impoverished and unfree it may be, there is some credit to be given for the fact that it has as yet not been entirely swallowed up by the globalized Coca-Cola culture of its neighbours, that it labours still to be entirely free from influence from America, that it manages, however weirdly, to limp along without much help from the world beyond. This does not mean that the people are solely anti-American—they are anti-just-about-everyone. North Korea’s newspapers do not permit, for instance, a single character of Chinese print to sully the purity of the hangul script in which they are written: the South Koreans by contrast have no problem with their former suzerains, and are as free with inserting the Chinese language into their newspapers as they are inserting Wal-Mart and Safeway on to their streets and suffering the huge impress of the American military everywhere from Panmunjom to Cheju-do. South Korea is most decidedly a part of the outside world; North Korea is not—it remains, albeit cruelly and menacingly, Korean only, and for that I offer, for what it is worth, my half-grudging admiration.

  So, my esteemed Columban Father of Kwangju, I never did make it up to Paektu-san, true. But I did make it into the heart of Chosun Minchu-chui Inmin Konghwa-guk, and I heard the bands there play ‘A chi mun bin na ra I gang san’ (‘Shine bright, O dawn, on this land so fair’). If I close my eyes and try to forget for a moment the discordant awfulness of the Leaders Great and Dear, I can hear in the rhythms of North Korea, if all too faintly, the sighing of the grass and the weeping of the birds, and I can feel a hint of the ineffable sweet melancholy of all Korea, a melancholy that is all too easily drowned out by the honking of the car horns and crash of cash registers and the relentless pulse of techno music in a South Korea that often, and in many cases, no longer feels like Korea at all.

  SBAW

  Sandisfield, Massachusetts, January 2004

  Author’s Note

  Throughout this book I have generally used the McCune-Reischauer system of transliterating words originally written in Korea’s hangul script. In addition, and to help make the acceptance of many unfamiliar Korean words a little easier for the innocent reader, I have left out all but the most essential hyphens and all of the apostrophes and other diacritics with which romanized Korean is liberally littered. I hope purists and linguists will forgive this deliberate lapse, which was perpetrated with the very best of intentions.

  In a while, with good luck and a fair wind, the people of South Korea will enjoy a high degree of human rights. But for now it is a sad reality that they do not. So to protect a small number of people who were good enough to talk to me during my journey, but whose remarks might well cause offence to some of the more sensitive members of the republic’s hierarchy, I have changed some names and muddled some identities. The events they described, however, remain unaltered.

  1. In the Seamen’s Wake

  The Kingdom known to us by the Name of Corea, and by the Natives call’d Tiozencouk, and sometimes Caoli, reaches from 34 to 44 Degrees of North Latitude, being about 150 Leagues in length from North to South, and about 75 in breadth from East to West. Therefore the Coresians represent it in the shape of a long square, like a playing Card. Nevertheless it has several Points of Land which run far out into the Sea. It is divided into 8 provinces, containing 360 Cities and Towns, without reckoning the Forts and Castles, which are all on the Mountains. This Kingdom is very dangerous, and difficult for Strangers…

  From The Description of The Kingdom of Corea, written in 1668 by Hendrick Hamel—the first Western account of the ‘Hermit Kingdom’

  This story starts a very long way from Korea—indeed, very nearly halfway across the world from Hendrick Hamel’s ‘dangerous and difficult Kingdom’—on a gloomy, rainswept, industrial street in Newcastle upon Tyne.

  Newcastle was where I had my first job on a newspaper in the middle sixties: it was a grimy and then rather depressed old place tucked away up in the far northeast, a place of deep coal mines and half-closed factories that were worked by men (the luckier ones, that is—many had been out of work for years) who still wore overalls and cloth caps, drank the strongest beer brewed in Britain, and had a tradition of making the sturdier items of advanced society—things made of iron and brass and heavy alloys, things like battle tanks and cantilever bridges, artillery pieces and cranes, telescope mirrors, power-station turbines and railway locomotives.

  But it had a softer side, too. As robust and no-nonsense a place as it might have been, the Newcastle I came to know was a city surrounded by and shaped by a wild and starkly beautiful countryside, and a place whose whole life and economy and folk history were dominated by two mighty waterways that were born high up in the nearby hills, the River Tees and the River Tyne.

  The Tyne! Such—or so it seems at this distance—such a grand old river and such grand old memories! The Tyne remains for me, and probably for anyone who has ever fallen under the subtle spell of what they call the Geordie country, one of the great streams of the world. It is neither a very long nor in truth a very great river, yet somehow in its brief passage from source to sea it manages to capture all the alluring mixtures and contrasts that make England what she is—grace and power, rustic charm and ironbound sinew, breeze-ruffled heather and hot industrial oil, lonely moorlands and bustling factory gates. These contrasts exist in many river passages, perhaps, but in the case of the Tyne seem to represent so accurately all that for which the country once stood and all that had been for so long part of the leitmotiv of Empire.

  The Tyne rises high in the broom-covered hills near the border between England and Scotland. It chuckles merrily through narrow gorges and across small waterfalls. It matures and lazes through meadows and prosperous suburban villages. It washes grandly between the great old cathedral cities of Newcastle and Gateshead, cities of grey sandstone and marble monuments, vaulted railway stations and imposing city halls; and finally it passes by the low-lying, swampy slakes of Jarrow and Wallsend—the latter named for the eastern end of the mighty wall Hadrian had built to protect Rome’s English dominion—on its way to the cold and grey heavings of the North Sea. And in those last ten miles of its brief course, by which time it has widened and deepened and slowed to a kind of majesty, the River Tyne became over the centuries the home for an industry that perhaps more than any other has made the northeast of England famous throughout the world: on the lower reaches of the River Tyne they build ships.

  Vessels of war and passenger liners, gritty little tramp steamers and sleek container ships, ugly grain haulers and bulk carriers, motor vessels of every imaginable type that now ply between faraway ports, Baltimore and Capetown, Pago Pago and Papeete, Shanghai and Port Moresby, Colombo and Mombasa and (with a cruel irony that will shortly be apparent) the Korean ports like Inchon and Pusan, and a thousand places besides. Anything that was made of iron, and that floated, and that was made in England seemed to have some inevitable association with the River Tyne. So many of these ships in their uncountable armadas have, on some ’tween-deck bulkhead, an oval brass plate with the engraved name of the shipyard and a final phrase of simple geography that still stands out proudly like a mariners’ seal of approval—made, the plaques say, in Newcastle upon Tyne.

  When I arrived there as a reporter in 1967, they had just started work on the last family of truly great ships ever to be built on the river. The first, the flagship, was called the Esso Northumbria, and she weighed in at something like a quarter of a million tons—a supertanker, everyone called her. The people of Wallsend, where she was built, were glad indeed after many months of short orders and short time—for the Tyne was suffering from a near-terminal case of slump—to hav
e won the order to build her. I was fascinated by her construction. (I had been brought up in Dorset, and the biggest boat I had ever seen was a six-man whaler built of teak.) Each weekend I, along with scores of other local people, would drive down to Wallsend to watch her progress. I would walk down to the tiny lanes of terraced houses where the shipyard workers lived, and I would watch her mighty hull rise behind them.

  Week after week a wall of steel, fireworked by rivet throwers and welders, resonant with hammering and flecked with red lead and rustproof paint, would rise higher and higher, blocking out the view, the light, and the wind. Wallsend housewives who were normally muffled to the eyes would walk to the shops in summer dresses. The icy gales that so often roared across the river had been stopped in their tracks by the Northumbria’s ever-growing hull, which, within its cobweb of cranes and scaffolding, climbed higher and higher into the sky.

  And then one day in early May 1969, Princess Anne came by, a young girl in a big yellow hat and a warm yellow coat, and ended it all. She cracked a bottle of champagne over the bows of the mighty new ship. With a roar of drag chains and a muted roar of pride from her Geordie builders, the Esso Northumbria was let go. She gathered speed down the slipway, slid effortlessly into the dark waters of the Tyne, performed the traditional curtsy of buoyancy to the thousands waiting on the riverbanks, and proceeded downriver to be fitted out and to undergo her sea trials. Then, probably (for I lost track and now cannot find her in Lloyd’s Register of Shipping), she took off for the distant destinations for the petroleum trade, like Kharg Island and Kuwait, Philadelphia and Kagoshima, and all the oil ports of the world. Newcastle upon Tyne would never see her again. (She was broken up in Taiwan thirteen years later.)

  The housewives in Wallsend complained that night that their protective wall had suddenly vanished and that cold gales blew grittily up their terraced streets once again.

  What the women of Wallsend may then also have vaguely suspected, and what the months and years ahead would confirm, was that Newcastle upon Tyne, and indeed the River Tyne itself, would never see so great a vessel again. It was not simply that the Esso Northumbria and her sisters were the last of the massive supertankers to be built there; they were also the last really big ships to be built in the English northeast. The Northumbria’s launching and the empty slipway she left behind were powerful in their symbolism. They represented in a mournful way the formal close to a lengthy and glorious industrial era—the end of a historical chapter for the Tyne, for Britain, for Europe, and, one might say, for the once-ascendant countries grouped around the Atlantic Ocean. As each tanker vanished downriver and out to the ocean, so it became the turn of the nations grouped around the Pacific to take up the duties of the Old World and begin to accept the benefits and the responsibilities of being the world’s new industrial powerhouses, for the remainder of the century and beyond.

  Sixteen years after the Northumbria had gone I travelled on assignment for a newspaper out to that Pacific Ocean, and I spent a couple of weeks in the Republic of South Korea. On the Wednesday of my second week I flew down to a small seaside town in the deep south of the country, an unlovely place with the unlovely name of Ulsan. And in Ulsan I came to realize in an instant just why the River Tyne, so very far away and to these people so very unknown, was in the throes of dying.

  For here, on a huge plain below a heather-covered bluff jutting into the Sea of Japan, was the headquarters of the shipbuilding division of a new Korean ‘miracle’ company called Hyundai. I was shown around, as I remember, by a young man named Lee Seong Cheol (though some of his cards gave his name in the more Westernized style: Mr S. C. Lee). He was an assistant in the company’s protocol division. What he showed me would make any Tynesiders—any Europeans, indeed, and many Americans too—shiver in their shoes.

  Any one of the yards on the Tyne, in the river’s heyday, could possibly manufacture four or five ships at once—in wartime, perhaps, or during a period of grave emergency or extraordinary prosperity. The Hyundai Heavy Industries Company’s shipyard at Ulsan, however, could make forty-six ships at once. And it could do so without any of the romantic Victorian nonsense of tallow and drag chains and bottles of champagne and princesses in flowery hats. Out here it was all much more businesslike—the yard had seven immense dry docks, and when a hull was finished the dock was simply flooded and the monster was floated away. In one of their docks—the biggest—they could build a million-ton tanker; two more of them could hold a 700,000-tonner apiece, two more still could each build 250,000-tonners like the Esso Northumbria, and one dock each could accommodate a 400,000-ton and a 350,000-ton monster—or any combination of smaller vessels that the buyers appeared to need. Three million six hundred and fifty thousand tons of shipping could thus be manufactured at any one time in the Hyundai yards.

  And superquickly, too. From the moment the immense plates of steel were cut in the foundry shops until the moment the dry-dock sluices were opened and the sea waters were allowed to float a new behemoth away, took the Korean workers only nine months. With a further nine months spent in the fitting-out yard, this meant that any new Hyundai vessel took just a year and a half to make. A ship order placed at Hyundai took half the time it would in a European yard—and at a price a good 10 per cent lower than the nearest-priced competition (which happened to be, rubbing in the prosperity of the New Pacific, just across the sea in Japan).

  Eighteen thousand men worked at the Ulsan yard. They worked six days a week. They started at 6.30 a.m. with thirty minutes of compulsory jogging. They then reported for work at the yard at 7.30 a.m., and laboured uncomplainingly until they were allowed home at 5.30 p.m. They had an hour off for lunch—invariably they would be handed a plastic box filled with the mess of Korean pickled cabbage known as kimchi (which now has so much status as the country’s national dish that a museum has been dedicated to it in Seoul). They were permitted two ten-minute breaks, one at ten, the other at three. A worker of average diligence, competence and seniority was paid about £300 a month. (Although, two years later in this story, this sum came to be regarded as so derisory that Korea suffered a period of major industrial unrest, with rashes of strikes and riots, back in 1985, when I made my first visit, the workers seemed docile and content and behaved peaceably enough.)

  They enjoyed, in any case, many fringe benefits. The men lived in Hyundai dormitories and ate at Hyundai canteens. They wore Hyundai clothes—even Hyundai underclothes and Hyundai plastic shoes—and were given, at appropriate times in the year, appropriate Hyundai gifts. They had a Hyundai motto: Diligence. Co-operation. Self-reliance. (The word hyundai simply means ‘modern’.) They read Hyundai newspapers. They watched Hyundai films. Every possible need, from the moment of a young man’s application until the moment of a foreman’s retirement, was taken care of by Hyundai. And further, to ensure that an employee, a member of the Hyundai family, spent as little time as possible in the uncomfortable and unknown world beyond Hyundai’s protective wings, he was allowed only three days’ holiday each year—and many of them seemed reluctant, so Mr Lee informed us with gravity, to take even those.

  I daresay most European shipbuilders could have learned a great deal from a visit to Hyundai—about styles of management, about efficiency, about the means of inculcating keenness in a work force. But the Europeans I met didn’t seem to want to know. They just seemed overwhelmed and rather miserable. During my expedition through the yard I had an instructive conversation with one shipowner from the Old World, a Swede, as lugubrious a man as a caricaturist might wish. He had come to Hyundai to inspect his company’s new ship, a 160,000-ton bulk carrier called the Nord See—a vessel that might once have been built on the Tyne but was now being finished in Hyundai’s Dry Dock Number Two.

  I stayed with him for a good hour as he shinned up the Nord See’s companionways and clambered down her bulkhead ladders, peered at her tracery of pipework, measured the officers’ swimming pool (‘Nice time they’ll have in this, eh?’ he grinned, rather bitterly
I thought), idly polished the brass journal at the end of her waiting propeller shaft, and knocked at the solid oak of the wardroom door.

  Then he came out into the hot late-summer sunshine, and we clambered down the steps onto the dockside, and he looked admiringly up at the great wall of rust-red steel with the fireflies of welding torches glittering here and there along its immense length. He turned to me and said, with a note of very real sadness in his voice: ‘You know, I think that Europe is quite finished.’

  I prompted him to explain. He warmed to his miserable theme as only a Scandinavian could: ‘There was a time, you know, when we were past masters at building things like this. Ships so grand, so beautiful…But now, looking at this…Oh, sure, from my owner’s point of view I’m pleased. We’ve saved some money, we’ve got a ship delivered on time, everything’s fine in the balance books. But seeing how they do it, these Koreans—I just can’t see how we back in Europe can continue to make ships, how we can continue to have any real industry at all. I suppose what I mean to say is, I don’t see how Europe can survive in the face of competition from miracle workers like the people here. For that’s what this is—it’s a sheer, bloody miracle.’

  And that, I suppose, is when my fascination with Korea began.

  I knew, as my Swedish companion had, that Korea had quite literally risen from the ashes of recent ruin. Just thirty-two years before this particular autumn day, a war that had lasted for three years, claimed 1.5 million casualties, and raged quite pointlessly up and down the playing-card-shaped Korean Peninsula, had been concluded: a cease-fire had been announced, a truce that divided a nation in two and separated it by barbed wire and minefields and ever-vigilant guards was put into effect. And South Korea, utterly devastated and demoralized, an emasculated shambles of a country, started shakily to get up onto its two feet again.