Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (9 page)

... and you just can't find travel like this anymore.

DECEMBER 1987

When the kid in the front row at the rally bit off the tip of his little
finger and wrote, KIM DAE JUNG, in blood on his fancy white ski
jacket-I think that was the first time I ever really felt like a
foreign correspondent. I mean, here was something really fucking
foreign.

It wasn't even an act of desperate protest. Opposition candidate Kim Dae Jung hadn't lost the Korean presidential election yet.
KDJ was just giving a small pep talk to a group of well-wishershalf a million of them. They spread in every direction out over the
horizon, packed flank to flank and butt to loin, all standing at
attention in a freezing Seoul drizzle with serious, purposeful expressions on their mugs.

When a Korean political candidate does a little stumping, a
little flesh pressing, a little baby kissing, he puts on a sour face,
mounts a platform and stares at the crowd. He's surrounded by
Samoan-size bodyguards, his chap-sae, or goons, (literally
"trapped birds'). A couple of the goons hold an inch-thick Plexi glas shield in front of the candidate's face. The shield has handles
bolted on both ends like a see-through tea tray. The crowd shouts
the candidate's name for half an hour, then the candidate yells at
the crowd. Korean sounds like ack-ack fire, every syllable has a
primary accent: YO-YO CAMP STOVE HAM HOCK DIP STICK
DUCK SOUP HAT RACK PING-PONG LIP SYNC!!!! If the candidate pauses, the crowd responds in unison with a rhymed slogan or
with a precise fifteen seconds of waving little paper Korean flags.
There's no frenzy in this, no mob hysteria, and it's not a drill or an
exercise.

I'd never seen spontaneous regimentation before. And I don't
hope to see it again. I was standing on the platform, a couple of
goons away from "The DJ," as the foreign reporters call Kim Dae
Jung. And I was looking at this multitude, and I was thinking, "Oh,
no, they really do all look alike,"-the same Blackglama hair, the
same high-boned pie-plate face, the same tea-stain complexion,
the same sharp-focused look in 1 million identical anthracite eyes.
They are a strange northern people who came to this mountain
peninsula an ice age ago and have kept their bloodlines intact
through a thousand invasions. Their language is unrelated to Chinese or Japanese, closer, in fact, to Finnish and Hungarian. They
don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other
all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough
little bastards, "the Irish of Asia."

There was a very un-Irish order to that crowd, however, an
order beyond my comprehension-like nuclear fission. There is
order to everything in Korea. They call it kibun, which means, to
the extent it can be translated, "harmonious understanding."
Everything in Korea is orderly, except when it isn't-like nuclear
fission.

The speech ended, and every single person in that audience
pushed forward to be with Kim Dae Jung. I looked down from the
platform and saw the kid in the front row wiggle out of his white
parka. He was a normal-looking kid (but in Korea everybody is
normal looking). He had a sign reading, in garbled English, MR.
KIM DJ ONLY BECOME THE 1ST PRESIDENT OF THE WORLD, on one
side and the same, I guess, in Korean on the other. Then, with a
can-do smile, he nipped the digit and began his calligraphy.

The DJ, in a goon envelope, descended to meet his chanting
admirers. I tried, without goons, to follow him. I was cross-bodyblocked and stiff-armed and went down in a second. I was a oneman zone defense against a football team of 500,000. Squat, rockhard Korean bodies surrounded me in three dimensions. I was
squeezed and heaved and, most of all, overwhelmed by the amazing stink of kimchi, the garlic and hot-pepper sauerkraut that's
breakfast, lunch and dinner in Korea. Its odor rises from this
nation of 40 million in a miasma of eyeglass-fogging kimchi breath,
throat-searing kimchi burps and terrible, pants-splitting kimchi
farts.

I came to the surface of the crowd and went under again like a
toddler in big surf. I was squashed and tumbled. My foot came out
of my shoe. My pocket was picked. Finally, I was expelled from the
mass with one collective shove and kick.

This is what Koreans are like when they're happy.

And the Koreans were very happy with their first presidential
election in sixteen years. They voted like the dickens-an 89.2
percent turnout. But I couldn't get any of them to tell me why. What
was this election supposed to be about?

Practically everybody running for president was named Kim.
There was Kim Dae Jung, the opposition front-runner, Kim Young
Sam, ("Kim: The Sequel"), also the opposition front-runner, and
Kim Jong Pil ("Kim: The Early Years'), the opposition straggler.
Plus there was the non-Kim candidate, Roh Tae Woo (pronounced
"No Tay Ooh" and called "Just Say No" by the foreign press corps).
Roh was handpicked by the military dictatorship that's been running South Korea since 1971.

Everybody knew Roh was going to win because Kim the DJ
and Kim the Sequel had promised to unite antigovernment opposition behind one candidate, but then they forgot and spent most of
the campaign bickering with each other. And Roh was going to win
anyway because he had the constituency that votes with M-16s.
(When these boys make their voices heard in the marketplace of
ideas, you'd better listen up.) So the election wasn't about winning.

And the election wasn't about political-party allegiance, either. The distinctively named parties-Peace and Democracy, Democratic Justice, Reunification Democratic, and New Democratic Republican-all fielded candidates. If I were a hard-working
journalist with a keen eye for detail, I'd sift through my notes now
and tell you what Kim belonged to which. But that would be a waste
of everybody's time. A Korean political party exists solely to boost
the fortunes of its founding candidate and has the average life span
of a trout-stream mayfly hatch.

Campaign promises? Kims 1-2-3 promised to promote freedom of expression, work for reunification of North and South, fight
corruption, improve the country's god-awful human-rights record,
raise living standards, and lower taxes. But then that fascist pig
Roh Tae Woo went out and promised to do the same and lots more of
it. Nobody, Kim or un-Kim, said too much about Korea's near
absence of social-security programs, the $140-a-month minimum
wage, the seventy-two hour work week or the fact that it's illegal to
have an independent labor union. Kim Dae Jung is supposed to be
the big liberal in the bunch. When interviewed by a Canadian
business magazine, the DJ, that feisty champion of the common
man, was quoted as saying, "Of course we want to advocate some
social welfare, but we do not want to be excessive. . . . If trade
unions advocate extreme or radical demands, the law must prohibit
this." So the election wasn't about campaign promises.

Why was everybody voting so hard? The only answer I could
get from Koreans was "democracy."

"What's this election all about?" I asked.

"Democracy," they answered.

"But what is democracy?" I said.

"Good."

"Yes, of course, but why exactly?"

"Is more democratic that way!"

Well, this is heartening to those of us who prefer a democratic
system. But I still don't know what they're talking about. "Korea
must have democracy," my Korean friends told me. "Democracy is
very good for Korea." "Korean people want very much democracy."

I guess democracy is something that if you're going to be
really up-to-date, you just can't do without-like a compact-disc
player. (Actual South Korean experience with democracy, by the
way, consists of one thirteen-month period between the April 1960
overthrow of strongman Syngman Rhee and the May 1961 military
coup by General Park Chung Hee.)

On election day I cruised Seoul with an old friend from the
democracy fad in the Philippines, photographer John Giannini. It
was supposed to be a national holiday, but the Koreans went to
work just the same, the way they do six days a week, starting before
dawn and stopping who knows when. Rush hour doesn't even begin
until seven P.M.

Traffic in Seoul is a 50 mph gridlock with nobody getting
anywhere and everybody driving like hell. The sidewalks are
endless rugby scrums. Elbowing your way through a crowd is
Korean for "excuse me." The city is as gray as a parking garage and
cleaner than a living room. People stoop and pick up any piece of
litter they see. You can spend twenty minutes in an agony of
embarrassment trying to figure out what to do with a cigarette butt.
And they yell at you if you cross against the light. Everything is
made of concrete and glass and seems unrelentingly modern, at
first glance. But many buildings have no central heating, and the
smell of kerosene stoves pours out every shop door, mixing with
kimchi fumes, car smoke, sewer funk and the stink of industry. It's
a tough, homely stench, the way America's ethnic factory towns
must have smelled seventy-five years ago.

Giannini and I tried to find the slums of Seoul, but the best we
could do was a cramped, rough-hewn neighborhood with spotless,
bicycle-wide streets. Every resident was working-hauling, stacking, hawking, welding, making things in sheds no larger than
doghouses. Come back in a few years, and each shed will be
another Hyundai Corporation. We felt like big, pale drones in the
hive of the worker bees.

The voting was just what every journalist dreads, quiet and
well organized. There were no Salvadoran shoot-'em-ups, no Haitian baton-twirler machete attacks, no puddles of Chicagoan sleaze
running out from under the voting booths. People were standing patiently in line, holding their signature seals, their chops, at the
ready. Poll watchers from each candidate's party sat to one side,
rigid on a row of straight-backed chairs. A reporter who could
make an interesting paragraph out of this would get that special
Pulitzer they give out for keeping readers awake during discussions
of civic virtue. Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam said there was
massive vote fraud. But if there was, it was serious, orderly Korean
massive vote fraud.

Giannini and I did see one fellow getting roughed up by a
crowd outside a polling place. We shoved people, in the Korean
manner, until we found someone who spoke English. He told us the
fellow being kicked and punched was a suspected government
agent. The police came, punched and kicked the fellow some
more, and hauled him off. It was certainly the first time I'd ever
seen police arrest somebody on suspicion of being a government
agent. But that's Korea.

We went out in the country to find people voting in authentic
traditional funny clothes. But this, too, was a bore. So we gave up
and went to a restaurant-a few floor mats and a kerosene heater in
a tent beside the Han River.

The Han is as wide as the Hudson, and its valley is as
beautiful as a Hudson River-school painting-but more serious,
with a gray wash over it. The Koreans are serious about fun, too,
thank God. They're perfectly capable of a three-hour lunch, and so
are Giannini and I. We ordered dozens of bowls of pickles, garlics,
red peppers and hot sauces and dozens of plates of spiced fish and
vegetables and great big bottles of OB beer and mixed it all with
kimchi so strong it would have sent a Mexican screaming from the
room with tongue in flames. By the time we drove, weaving, back to
Seoul, you could have used our breath to clean your oven.

After the votes were counted, the Koreans were not very happy
with their first presidential election in sixteen years. Most citizens
responded in the Korean way, by going to work in the morning. But
some student-radical types decided they'd found a big vote fraud in
a ward, or gu, office in the industrial district of Kuro, in southern
Seoul.

As usual, I couldn't figure out what was going on. Korea has an infinite capacity to make you feel dumb. This is a whole nation
of people who did their homework on Friday night. Even when they
don't know what they're doing, they're doing so damn much of it
that they're still going to get an A.