Korea (18 page)

It was with some difficulty that I escaped a couple of hours later. But a young officer rescued me and put me into his jeep and drove me back into town. He had a sticker on his back bumper that identified him as belonging to an ordnance company. There was a drawing of an almighty explosion and in fluorescent yellow lettering the motto: We Leave Smoking Holes.

The following morning I went across to see the last of the Irish priests whose name had been given to me on Cheju Island: Con Cleary, a chubby man in his late forties who lived in a tiny parish about five miles out of the city. He, like the rest, had been in Korea for most of his life, though after the Kwangju incident, which he saw and remembers with graphic detail, he went back to Ireland, shocked and horrified. ‘I had to go home, to work things out, to think about what I had seen, what it meant. For those of us who were there that week, it was unforgettably awful.’

His cook made me lunch, and then we examined the maps, and then Con took me in his rusty old car to the road junction about a mile from home, away from the congestion of his parish. It was a little after two on a boiling hot afternoon. I was over the mountains now, on the northern side, and the only evidence of the city of Kwangju was a vague streak of pollution that seeped out along the valley towards the river. I would probably never go back again, but I would remember the place always. It was a city that had staged an event that Con Cleary, and all his friends, and half Kwangju, and half Korea, and half the world remembers—an event that, as Con had said, had been unforgettably awful—an event that had changed Korea forever.

And then, with my pack on my back, my stick in my hand, and the unfamiliar tightness of my boots back on my feet again, I stepped out for the north. The map told me to proceed for a mile or two along beside the river. I was in a meadow strewn with wild cosmos flowers and the first daffodils of spring. Ahead, some twenty miles off, a vague blue line on the far horizon, were the Naejang Mountains. I glanced at my watch and quickened my pace: 120 paces a minute, 3.6 miles an hour, an unvarying pace I had managed to sustain all these miles so far. I had to hurry, for I had a dinner appointment in the foothills—a dinner appointment with a Buddhist monk.

His name was Haedarng, he was something of a Shakespearean scholar, and I had met him a fortnight before near the summit of Halla-san. He passed me, coming down the hillside with a pair of companions. He was large, verging on the corpulent, though his figure was somewhat disguised by his grey, buttonless robes of a Chogye Buddhist monk. His head was perfectly shaven. ‘A very good afternoon, sir!’ he shouted as he strode past. His English was perfect, almost unaccented. I replied. He stopped. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. I am Haedarng, and I am a monk. Do you speak English?’

And once he knew that not only did I speak it but that I was English, he called over his companions to shake my hand, and he kept saying, again and again, what a
very great honour
it was to meet me, how
very wonderful
it was that I had travelled all the way from my home to visit his humble country, and though he possessed nothing that I might consider suitable, he would be
more than happy
to offer whatever he had. After two minutes of this he stood back, breathing hard and sweating a little. I expressed my gratitude, and told him that I might in fact see him later on, and told him of my plan. He was ecstatic. ‘You really must come, dear sir. I live in a house that is
terribly humble, terribly humble
. But it is on your way, in the mountains between Kwangju and Chonju. Please, sir, please do me the honour of coming to see my humble home. I will tell you about my Shakespeare project, you would be very interested. I would try to give you a wonderful time. You must
promise
that you will come.’

And I did so promise, and he wrote his name and address, in English, in my Alwych book: ‘Haedarng, Monk—Chonnam, Darmyarng Kun, Soobuk Myun, Oh Jung Ri.’ He added his telephone number and the name of his monastery—Kumtasa. I said I would do my best to get there, in about two weeks’ time. He blessed me profusely and went on down the mountain bowing and pressing his hands together in gestures of farewell.

It took a while to translate his address into something approximating the words I found on my map (although there were few enough romanized words on the chart—most words were in Chinese characters, a few were in
hangul
, which all made map reading even more difficult than usual). ‘Chonnam’, I realized after staring at it for a good ten minutes, was a compression of the word ‘Chollanam-do’, or South Cholla Province. It was then clear he had written his address backwards, as many old-fashioned Koreans still do. The next word, ‘Darmyarng-kun’, stumped me, until someone suggested that the monk, like many older Koreans, was employing a system of romanization called the Ministry of Education System, which was now hopelessly out of date. It had been replaced, since 1983, by the internationally accepted McCune-Reischauer System, and if I wanted to decode Haedarng’s language I had to substitute Ts for Ds, Ks for Gs, kick out all the superfluous Rs, stir the whole thing around a bit and, with luck, a real, recognizable word might emerge.

I did this, and, hey presto! for ‘Darmyarng-kun’ I read ‘Tamyang-gun’, and promptly found it on the map and in the
gazetteer—a small country town twenty miles north of Kwangju, the bamboo-growing capital of Korea. I never did find Soobukmyun, and I thought I might well miss his
ri
, his village of Ojung. But I now knew roughly where it was, and so, once I got near Tamyang town I planned to ask directions. This was not as easy as I thought: when I approached farmers and rice planters and schoolchildren with the enquiry: ‘
Ojung-ri odi isumnikka?
’ they may have wanted to help but clearly had never heard of the place and ended up making me more confused than ever. I quickly realized that salvation would come only if I was brave enough to try to read the
hangul
on the road signs. If I continued to shy away from any words that were written in King Sejong’s modish linguistic invention, I would never reach Ojung-ri, and a cold and uncomfortable night would be in store for me. So, with the sense of desperation I remembered as a schoolboy when told to stand up in class and translate a paragraph of
Civil War, Book Three
that I had omitted to read in homework the night before—with desperation much akin to that, knowing the consequences of failure, I set about trying to read every little granite road sign and marker I could find.

The Koreans are quite possibly the only people in the world who have a national holiday to celebrate the invention of their system of writing. (There is, so far as I am aware, no Cyrillic Day, no Devanagri Week, nor anything to celebrate Arabic, or Roman, or Katakana, or Chinese.) Shortly after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, a decree providing for such a day was handed down from Seoul. In essence, the declaration read as follows: Since during the entire time of the Japanese occupation, the use of
hangul
has been banned, and since with the defeat of the Japanese it will be possible for
hangul
to be used once again, then the date of 9 October, the anniversary of the first promulgation of our national writing system in 1446, shall henceforward be called
Hangul
Day, and shall be a national holiday for all the people of our country.

It is a system well deserving of a day of celebration. Its invention
has helped foster Korea’s remarkable sense of national unity, and it has helped make sure that nearly all of the Korean population, for the last two centuries at least, has been able to read. The astonishing advances in Korea’s economic standing in recent years are, of course, principally the result of hard work, determination, and shrewdness. But the fact of near 100 per cent literacy, and the fact of an almost wholly unified sense of national purpose (
pace
, of course, the young radicals’ loathing for the policies of the last government) must have contributed; King Sejong is well worthy of the reverence accorded to him and to his invention.

He began work on a replacement writing system in 1420. His reasoning was simple. Korean didn’t exist in written form at all; there was a very rich language being spoken out there, but no one could read or write in it because there was nothing to read or write it in. Those few people who could write had opted, some centuries before, to use Chinese characters—characters that, as a writing system for the Korean language, were entirely unsuitable.

The two tongues are wholly unrelated: Korean is a Ural-Altaic language, linguistically connected (though only rather vaguely) to Turkish, Mongolian, Finnish and Magyar. Chinese, on the other hand, is a Sino-Tibetan tongue, with ties to Burmese and Thai and Tibetan. Using Chinese characters to express Korean sounds would be like using Chinese characters to express English—it is technically possible, but is also clumsy, useless and philosophically out of whack. Chinese characters couldn’t begin to express the sounds and subtleties of Korean, and besides, whether they could or not, the Korean people just couldn’t begin to understand Chinese script.

It just didn’t make sense to them; the thought of using up to thirty-two brushstrokes to form a single character, and having to learn as many as fifty thousand characters that had appeared to have precious little logic behind their construction was anathema to most ordinary Koreans. The
yangban
and the scholar classes made an effort to learn classical Chinese script in order to communicate with each other, and, indeed, all literature and official
prose was written using it. But the ordinary people had nothing. A simplified version of Chinese was introduced in the seventh century—it was called
Idu
, or ‘clerk writing’—but it was still regarded as far too complicated, an unnecessary pile of artistic baggage with which to express the meaning of a beautifully simple language. So King Sejong, who was the fourth king of the Yi Dynasty (the dynasty that reigned until the Japanese extinguished it in 1910), decided that a new system was needed. He devoted all his efforts, and those of a scholarly body known as the College of Assembled Worthies, to the invention of one.

On Christmas Day 1443—though of course no Christmas was celebrated in Korea, since no Christian missionaries had yet reached Korea—the new script was unveiled. It was to be known, the great Sejong had decided, as
Hun min chong um—
‘The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People’. (An odd title for a supposedly simple script: he changed it three years later to
hangul
, which means ‘the Korean Writing’.)

‘Being distinct from Chinese,’ Sejong wrote, in the introduction to his proclamation (which was written in Chinese), ‘the Korean language is not confluent with Chinese characters. Hence, those having something to put into words are unable to express their feelings. To overcome such distressing circumstances I have designed twenty-eight letters that everyone may learn with ease and use with convenience for his daily life. Talented persons will learn
hangul
in a single morning, and even foolish persons will understand it in ten days.’

The king, who was forty-seven years old when his alphabet was completed, devised a system with seventeen consonants and eleven vowels. It was elegant, it encompassed all the sounds uttered by the Korean tongue, and it had its roots—like no other system known—in human physiology. Thus the consonant letters were designed actually to look approximately like the organs of speech. The letter
, for example, which represents the sounds of our letter
k
, was meant to show the shape of the back of the tongue blocking the throat while the
k
sound was being made. The shape of the tongue reaching up and touching the inner
ridge of the gums
, is the
hangul
symbol for our sound
n
, which is made in precisely that way. The simple squared-off circle,
, the script for our letter
m
, is said to represent the shape of the lips as the
m
is being uttered. And while I, as one of Sejong’s ‘foolish persons’, cannot boast of having learned it in a morning, I can say, in common with almost all others who stay in Korea longer than a week, that
hangul
is a delightfully easy script to learn. It may not be possible to understand what you have read, but to read and to come out with an utterance Koreans will recognize, is easily possible after only a couple of days’ practice.

There was some resistance to the introduction of what the Confucian elders called ‘the Vulgar script’. To create a new script ‘is to discard China and identify ourselves with the barbarians. This is what is called “throwing away the fragrance of storax and choosing the bullet of the praying mantis”.’ Sejong was unmoved by so withering an onslaught; both he and his son Sejo were determined to broadcast the good word, in concert with the Buddhism that the pair so ardently followed. There were setbacks, both for
hangul
and for the Buddhists, but within a century the script had taken a firm hold, and it was not until the Japanese tried to suppress it that its purpose briefly faltered.

It was simplified in 1933, when one of the vowels and three of the consonants were officially dropped. Essentially, though, the system that survives today has remained untouched, and enormously popular, for more than five centuries. Its popularity stems only partly from its simple elegance; more than anything, it represents to the Korean something that is
his very own
, an illustration of his cultural and linguistic uniqueness, a device that sets him apart from the Chinese, the Mongols and the Japanese who, for reasons good or ill, so often have occupied their peninsula and attempted to subdue, suppress and subjugate these more independent of Asian people.
Hangul
is a real and living symbol of the cussedness of the Koreans, of their unquenchable spirit, of their unwillingness to be subsumed by their mightier neighbour-nations.