On maps, South Korea appears to be a peninsula.
But this is an illusion.
Why? Because although 52 million South Koreans inhabit a homeland that juts irrefutably, like a giant thumb, into the Pacific Ocean, they remain cut off from the Asian mainland by their border with archenemy North Korea. Thus, the citizens of South Korea occupy an ambiguous geography of apartness, with horizons both outward-looking yet also self-contained; a place surrounded, proscribed, and walled-off by natural edges (salt water) and unnatural barriers (minefields). In this way, South Korea more accurately resembles an island. And, like all island cultures, it incubates some lively contradictions, ironies, paradoxes, incongruities. It took me months of walking—through 650 kilometers of traffic jams and golden rice paddies—to finally grasp this odd reality. It helped explain things.
A hot day in summer.
Walking partner Junseok Lee and I totter into a family eatery. It is a small and simple place on a hilly back street on Ganghwa Island, near the Demilitarized Zone. The owner is Mr. Yeom.
Mr. Yeom has been fermenting traditional, handcrafted Korean cooking pastes and sauces for decades—since 1982, in fact. He is a maestro of a chili pepper-soy sauce called gochujang. He serves us bowls of noodles. He chooses for us one of his homemade condiments that is fiery and tar-dark. It is his oldest gochujang: his masterpiece. It has been fermenting in a clay pot in his backyard for 22 years. The taste is impossible to describe. Complex, layered, and super-dense: a concentration of earthy flavors—mineral, organic—that dazzle and confuse the taste buds, ultimately overwhelming them, until they surrender, intoxicated. Then comes a building, subterranean, volcanic heat. I sit at Mr. Yeom’s table blinking in shock. It is like spooning the Earth’s very core into your mouth.
“I am up at 5:30 checking on the onggi,” Mr. Yeom tells us, referring to the scores of oblong, earthenware crocks, some nearly tall as a man, arrayed under the sun behind his restaurant. “I check on each sauce by smelling it. You can tell with your nose if something is wrong. Sometimes, I open up a jar to air it a bit. Sometimes, I seal it up to let it sleep. You can’t teach this. I work until 7 pm.”
Mr. Yeom sweeps his arms dramatically across his restaurant. “You have to be honest with your food! Your food cannot lie! It has to be pure, clean!”
A friendly and talkative man of 62, muscular from constantly shifting about his clay jars, Mr. Yeom says he has taken only three days off from his kitchen since opening his restaurant 29 years ago. The sauces are living things. They cannot be abandoned. And while he may look strong and vital, he tells us, the fermented soybeans have exacted a heavy toll: All the lifting has ruined his back. He is in chronic pain and eager to retire.
Will he pass on his magic to an apprentice? Is there a wizard training in the wings, perhaps?
Mr. Yeom grimaces and shakes his head.
“I have a son who wants to try, but I won’t let him. No way!” he says emphatically. “This life. It is too hard!” He peers out the window at his metabolizing pots, his big brown eggs, and frowns, and then laughs.
Mr. Yeom is perhaps the happiest unhappy man I have met in my foot travels across the planet.
Waypoints in the riddle called South Korea:
We trudge southeast. We follow thousands of kilometers of well-maintained rural bicycle paths. This vast biking network was built in 2012 as a sop to voters following a much-condemned national dam project. The dams have proven environmental disasters. But the cycling paths have turned South Korea into an international biker’s paradise.
In Seoul we shelter at cheap hotels.
Asking for a late checkout at these lodgings is like requesting an impromptu kidney donation. The clerks’ faces harden. It is an impossibility. Hopeless. Out of hand. Perhaps even criminal. Every guest must vacate their room by 10 a.m., on the dot, or pay a hefty extra fee. No exceptions. Staff dial the rooms at 9:45 a.m. “Are you checking out now?” they ask tersely, almost accusingly. Check-in times, meanwhile, are often pushed back to 4 p.m., or even later. (“Life is cruel in Korea,” says a Korean photojournalist friend.)
We enter pedestrian tunnels. Motion sensors activate loudspeakers that play Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major. We exit the tunnel. The music shuts off.
We pause to rest at a gas station beside a busy highway. The station is located at the site of a particularly bloody battle in the Korean War. (The U.S. Air Force bombed local caves filled with terrified civilians.) The gas station attendant cannot fathom why we are on foot. He brings us chairs to rest on. He provides us with free bottles of ice-cold water. He stands and waves long after we walk away.
We navigate around mysterious blurs on the satellite images of South Korea in our phones’ navigational maps.
“What are they?” I ask my walking partner, Lee.
“Sensitive industrial or military sites,” he says. “They blur them out to hide them from North Korean missile attacks.”
“Why wouldn’t North Korea just target the blurry spots?”
Lee smiles wanly and keeps on walking.
We encounter an army of car campers on a small green river near Danyang.
It is the Korean summer break. Over the same long weekend, urbanites by the tens of millions flee the confines of their small city flats and alight like thistledown across the countryside. The vacationers park side-by-side in clogged roadside camping grounds. The strength of the Korean family is on full display. Thousands of children are having a ball, splashing together in the shallow creek currents. Parents collectively watch over them.
An old uncle in shorts swings in a hammock under a nylon sunshade. He has arrayed a circle of eight large, humming, freestanding fans about him. Each fan is plugged into large battery. I imagine this man’s energy footprint showing up as a bright heat spot on a satellite map. It is probably blurred.
We walk into a farming hamlet.
Sunlight rings down our heads like a nine-pound sledgehammer. Almost nothing at the small crossroads is open. Korea has arrived at an advanced stage of globalization, of hyper-urbanization. The countryside is depopulated. Shuttered. We find no place to shelter from the heat. No grocery. No convenience store. No café. There is an air-conditioned bank. But it seems silly to sit, dusty and sweating, next to the wary tellers and the ATM.
“What about there?” I point to what looks like a derelict tavern. The plate glass windows facing the empty main street are blackened over.
Lee shrugs and leads the way into the tea house or “room salon.” The interior looks like a threadbare diner. White vinyl booths. A house plant droops inside a pot. It is empty except for a pleasant, middle-aged woman who nods to us in greeting. She is washing dishes in the kitchen. We drop our backpacks and order iced coffees. We have stepped into a relic from another era, from the pre-internet age. Prostitution is illegal but tolerated in South Korea. Yet this business is not a brothel. It is a faded entertainment center for lonely, antediluvian men. The employees serve drinks and meals and will sit and chat for a surcharge. Five hundred years ago, they might have recited poetry and played a Korean zither, the geomungo. Under Japanese colonial rule, they likely would have been enslaved. How can such an enterprise endure today? In this boondocks?
“She probably knows all the old farmers around here like friends,” Lee says.
The woman’s mobile phone rings. She talks into it, takes off her apron and rubber gloves, and disappears into the bathroom. She reemerges in makeup and a miniskirt. She buckles on a motorcycle helmet. She is making a beer delivery to a client.
“Can you guys do me a favor?” she asks us, smiling. “Please pull the door closed hard after you leave. It will lock.”
We deposit our coffee payment on the counter. We lock the door. We walk on.
We hit the edge of the unseeable island called South Korea, Lee and I.
We arrive at land’s end.
Standing on the concrete docks of Busan, the country’s second-biggest city, we look out on the Sea of Japan. Soon, I will ride a ferryboat onward to Japan. But I will return to Seoul, too, to open an art exhibition.
The exhibition, held in a warehouse in the capital’s largest vegetable market, is overshadowed by an attempted coup. The Korean president has abruptly ordered the army to block off the parliament with troops. A video goes viral: A young woman grabbing the muzzle of a soldier’s rifle, shouting “Don’t you feel ashamed!”
The night before the art opening, reeling with astonishment, I push with Lee into the huge crowds of citizens protesting the worst anti-democratic threat South Korea has faced in a generation. At least a quarter million souls throng the downtown plazas. Thousands of young people wave K-pop concert light sticks.
What are they protesting for? The wide-open bazaar called Korea? The booming and globalized economy that exports Hyundai cars to synchronized K-pop dance moves to every corner of the Earth? The South Korea so ultra-polarized that it has pioneered gender divides in politics, with men lurching right and women sprinting left? The Korea of Academy Award-winning movies and high suicide rates? The inward Korea of conservative Confucianism slamming into the outward Korea of dazzling, cosmopolitan creativity?
In the night sea of chanting heads, I suddenly recognize a face: the talented young curator of our art exhibition, Sooyoung Leam. How improbable is this? What are the odds? Another Korean mystery.
“I have never experienced this before,” Leam hollers into my ear. Her glasses are askew.
I nod.
This is exactly the place to be, I want to tell her. Poised as we all are, right now, at the precipice of a trembling, uncertain century: Here is a very good place to stand, in this paradox, this contradiction, this portal of the future called South Korea.
