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GUEORGUI PINKHASSOV FOR TIME
Celebrating the World Cup in Seoul
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The afternoon sun dances with undifferentiating delight upon the migratory birds and tank barrels at the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). I cast an aching glance through the tour-bus window at the squat rail bridge that should be taking me across the divide between South and North Korea and on to Beijing or Moscow—if wanderlust so moved me—but remains as impassable as it's been for half a century. Two years ago, when the leaders of the two Koreas proclaimed their "Sunshine Policy" of peace and reconciliation with twin grins and clasped hands, they agreed to repair the 20 kilometers of railroad track that alone uncouples Paris from Pusan. But today, 2 million troops still glare at each other across 240 kilometers of the barbwire-fenced frontier. Meanwhile, North Korea has gained a privileged place in President George W. Bush's "axis of evil," the railbed remains strewn with land mines, and I'm trapped listening to South Korean propaganda in a tour bus. In the DMZ, it seems, even the brightest sunshine is deceptive.
Such was my first sobering lesson as I prepared to make my way across South Korea and up the spine of Japan by train. But fleeing the DMZ, I would find myself pursued first not by gloom but by an overpowering sense of elation. There's an almost religious conviction, from the heart and not the head, that South Korea may finally be ready to escape the ordeal that was its 20th century: 35 years of Japanese colonial rule, followed by fratricidal war, corrupt dictatorships and a cold war logic that still separates whole families more than a decade after the Berlin Wall went down. It's the economy that has blossomed as erstwhile conqueror Japan's has wilted. It's the extreme Web connectedness of every South Korean train station and two-bit hotel. It's the explosive pop culture taking the rest of Asia by storm. It's the afterglow of South Korea's astonishing World Cup run. At its most intense, this euphoria would seem ready to bend even the sun's rays to the twin aims of reunification and peace.
After traversing a Korea fighting to overcome its past, I would plunge into a Japan struggling to subvert the gloomy forecasts of its future. Muster a bitter smile, Japan, as Moody's spits on your bonds, reducing your credit rating below that of Botswana's. Stop your ears as the international banking community urges you to embrace economic tough love. To measure these evocations of a diminished Japan against reality, I would mainly explore areas too remote or underpopulated or impassable to be within reach of the country's storied bullet trains, which hurl you with such confidence from Tokyo to Osaka. On regional lines and two-car mountainside spurs, I would proceed at the more uncertain pace that is now, allegedly, Japan's own.
Alas, for the time being, I remain incarcerated in the DMZ tour bus as it shudders along the absurdly named Freedom Highway, watching the razor wire, concrete bunkers and artillery emplacements as they billow up ever higher against my window. Once I reach the Joint Security Area, I'm treated to a tragicomic buffet lunch in the commissary. The tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, limp spaghetti and sallow potatoes—everything but the kimchi has been proudly prepared and airlifted from the U.S. to make this unhappy meal. In the conference room, where North and South meet, I'm kept company by South Korean army Taekwondo experts standing frozen with flexed biceps, like nameless villains about to be thrashed by Mr. T on some ancient episode of The A-Team. Then it's to the gift shop, where I buy my wife a Joint Security Area aerobics tank top and a faux-bronze bottle opener shaped like a border patrol soldier. I won't linger long enough to feel the DMZ's craziness as acutely as does South Korean army Corporal Kevin Park. "It's peaceful here, too peaceful," he tells me. "You get numb to it. You need a reality check because there's someone on the other side who wants to shoot me in the head."
That evening, I squeeze into Seoul's Kwanghwamun intersection and watch the scene unfold as South Korea launches its string of World Cup upsets by vanquishing Poland. Maybe half a million people are singing and dancing beneath the Jumbotron at a downtown office tower. Passion verges on fever pitch. I'm awash in alcoholic orange soda, "Win, Korea!" lyrics superimposed upon J.S. Bach melodies, and 200,000 South Korean flags painted on as many radiant cheeks. Next morning, sluggish after the night's jubilation, I catch a train south from Seoul Station. The train, green and yellow and punctual, plows through the swelter of the Korean countryside. The surface of the flooded rice paddies shines like the earth's bald pate, the young shoots rise like some vast, verdant hair transplant.
My pharmacist in Los Angeles grew up in Korea, and when I told her my first stop after Seoul was the southwest Cholla region, she wasn't encouraging. Of course, she told me, everyone knows that those people are too headstrong, too dissatisfied, too prone to violence. My pharmacist is not alone. Other South Koreans from more prosperous areas gave me a like description of the Cholla people. Prejudice justifies rough treatment, and until the 1997 election of Cholla native Kim Dae Jung as the country's President, the province had been alternately neglected or brutalized by whoever happened to be in power.
At the train station in Kwangju, the capital of Cholla, I'm greeted by a van blaring political propaganda for a sullen, bespectacled candidate for mayor. "I hate that guy," says Choi Man Jae, my young Cholla guide, his spiked hair bristling. Given the region's history, political cynicism is a bumper crop second only to Kwangju's prized watermelons. On his backpack strap, Choi wears half a dozen buttons showing a flame-headed cartoon creature. It turns out this is Nuxee, the official mascot of the 1980 Kwangju people's revolt against dictator Chun Doo Hwan—an emblem rooted in past political repression so severe that it makes all politics an ongoing anathema to Koreans like Choi. The insurrection was brutally suppressed by Chun's henchman, Roh Tae Woo, who followed Chun into South Korea's presidency, and eventually to jail for their combined roles in the massacre as well as for bribery (both were later pardoned). At the Kwangju Uprising cemetery, Choi and I approach the memorial tower commemorating this massacre in which thousands may have died. Rising up among the modest graves, two austere concrete pincers hold an enormous egg of resurrection. Perhaps Beijing's Tiananmen Square will one day have a monument so majestic and ambiguous. Whether the egg is ascending to the heavens or about to be crushed by an enormous pair of pliers isn't immediately clear.
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