In
the college where I teach, some of the students seem never
to have been out of Busan. Even in a country as geographically
small as South Korea, with an excellent transport system,
it is still true that your average hobbit doesn't go far
beyond the door of his burrow. Certainly, a couple of times
a year there are mass migrations such as the trek to ancestral
homes at Lunar New Year and Chuseok. And at the height of
summer, the Seoul-Busan expressway is a 500km crawl-way
to a nondescript beach or two at the end of the peninsular.
Nevertheless, when I asked around about the Daegu, the country's
third largest city and the next major metropolis up the
arterial expressway, there was a shaking of heads. Nobody
knew much about Daegu. Someone muttered that they had once
met two guys from Daegu and even they hated the place. There
was general astonishment when I asked about the Daegu subway
lines. Subway? Heck, they'd always thought the place was
a country town with smokestacks.
One Saturday morning in June it seemed about time to investigate
Daegu, for better or for worse. At Busan central station
they were a bit better informed than the college students.
A munwha class train ticket would set me back 6200
won (about US$5), and the trip was exactly one hour and
thirty-seven minutes. There wasn't long to wait. The train
was full, so some of these Busan and Daegu clans must be
on speaking terms. Would they talk to me? My neighbour turned
out to be a pudgy girl in a camouflage bush hat, with a
rucksack. Without a flicker of interest, she slumped into
a dough ball and fell asleep. Sigh. Well at least the scenery
would get undivided attention.
Like most large cities, Busan is not wonderful to look at
from the macro level of panoramas -- a kind of giant paw
with some green furry stuff along its bony knuckles, and
a rash of scaly grey concrete in the webbing between its
toes. However the train climbs and burrows through its ankle
bone. Presently you find yourself looking out on inland
river valleys where the sea is no more than a foreign rumour.
There is another kind of ocean towards Gupo -- wave upon
wave of what we used to call glasshouses, now plastic sheeting
houses for growing frost-free vegies. A broad waterway also
winds through this landscape, probably some modest river
fattened by a dam downstream.
We scarcely passed out of sight anywhere of huge concrete
pillars marching in procession, some capped with roads or
railways, some not. In a thousand years our cyborg descendants
will call them twenty-first century megaliths, and write
PhDs on the religion which might have given rise to them.
The powers who choreograph all this terra-forming also seem
to be making a new rail route by cutting tunnels straight
through the mountains. It will be far less interesting than
the present route which winds inefficiently around the valleys.
The rail of course is also infinitely more scenic than the
motorway. There is something in the karma of motorways which
locks your vision onto the roaring lanes of traffic, even
if you are sitting passively in a bus.
Daegu railway station is not so much a piece of architecture
as a kind of makeshift raft perched on steel trusses above
the rail lines. At least the concourse inside has human
scale, with rows of little stalls huddling against the walls, while in the centre
bolt-down plastic seats are full of folk going somewhere, or maybe
also with folk who have nowhere to go. Here they can watch
the TV for free. Hunting for a way out, on each side of
the lines I found some brutal steel steps that looked like
emergency exits, but turned out to be the main thoroughfares.
Later someone pointed out that there is indeed a grander monument to civic pride next door which should
be finished and opened with a fanfare sooner or later.
The station is in fact on a wide but rather quiet street
half a kilometer or more from Daegu's centre of action.
There were few cues for an illiterate foreigner, not even
a stream of bodies, so it took me several minutes to orientate
and guess what direction to explore in first. Even in these
initial moments, the whole ambience of the place seemed
to be quite different from Busan. Much more restful. It
was spitting a bit of rain, but the air was more or less
clear. This had worried me, because passing a couple of
times on the motorway there had seemed to be a miasma hanging
over the city. Busan's relatively clean air (most of the
time) has more to do with sea breezes than virtue, so a
Korean city like Daegu, sitting on an inland plain amid
a basin of mountains looked like a bad bet. On this day
though we were in luck.
Human beings in Busan are extraneous nuisances whom, you
feel, the city's masters would happily replace with cranes
and robots if they could find a way to get away with it.
Busan is crossed, criss-crossed and throttled by relentless
streams of cars, missiles amongst which humans venture in
mortal peril. Sidewalks are no haven, for often there are
no sidewalks, and where they do exist, they tend to be either
impassable storage plots for merchants, or short cuts for
the ubiquitous motor scooters which squark imperiously and
demand instant right of way.
For a shell-shocked refugee from Busan it was astounding
to find that the heart of Daegu was a no-car mall that seemed to extend for quite a few blocks.
Now closed street pedestrian malls are a town planning fashion
item that slowly spread to America and Australia as the
Anglos fought a losing battle against al fresco dining,
buskers, and other filthy European habits brought in by
post WWII immigrants from the Old World. Often they were
also a do-or-die response to the large indoor shopping centers
which have massacred strip retailing in the West. Nevertheless,
these street malls were built frequently over the protesting
bodies of conservative mainstreet merchants who shrieked
they'd be bankrupt in a year, and howls of outrage from
motorists. Anyway, the rest of us found we rather liked
to shop quietly in the sunshine, with nothing more threatening
than a kamikaze skateboarder or two to worry about.
Good ideas are infectious. I was delighted to see closed
street malls blossoming in the joyless wastelands of a few
Chinese cities, a notion no doubt picked up with Gucci accessories
by the swarms of Chinese aparatchiks who wrangle overseas
"business" junkets. These efforts (like their Western models)
tend to be prestige display exercises where the city fathers
blitzkrieg anything not smelling of yuppy culture and franchise
chains.
The Daegu mall area is different, a sleepy, down-at-heel
compromise where the cars have been kicked out, but the
slick operators, by and large, haven't moved in. I liked
it. Maybe the money is just not there for ostentation (as
with the railway station). South Korea by reputation is
one of those countries where all glory goes to the capital,
so perhaps the no-hopers left back in number three city
have a more comfortable, but less funded set of values.
At their best, shop window displays are a kind of pastiche
printout of a shopkeeper's brain. There is a limit to what
you can do with bottles of soya sauce or apples, but even
then if you are kinky enough to look at the layouts as semiotic
detective stories, the variations can be intriguing. (Conversely,
the sense of intellectual smog that settles on your brain
as you walk into your thousandth franchised shopping mall
in the West is a direct result of all personality being
sterilized out by the corporate marketing gurus). If eccentric
window displays are a positive sign, Daegu is on the road
to fame.
One shop featured old optician's equipment and spectacles within a skeleton
pyramid that made me wonder if it was all a coded message
to some cult of pyramid numerologists; ( there's a bunch
of folk out there who reckon that the world, the universe
and everything is explained by geometric codes built into
the Egyptian pyramids...). Judging by the layers of dust
covering it all though, the vision business must have been
slow.
Nearby was a window of coffee grinders oddly mixed with sundry junk, another
place with high narrow windows full of glasses, and numerous camera shops, mostly selling traditional
film cameras which are rapidly becoming unsaleable. Maybe
all their expensive stock, like the spectacles next door,
will wind up as crazy pyramids gathering dust. Daegu
is big too on displays of plastic cyber-heroes, wizards, muscled killer hunks, and ready-to-assemble
plastic battle ships. There are also some stunning displays
of synthetic wigs. Why Koreans might need wigs is a mystery
since they seem to have no hesitation about dying their
native hair (or their pet mini-dogs) purple, green, bright
orange or dazzling yellow. The wigs, perhaps, are a first
experiment for the faint-of-heart.
The local tourist authority in Daegu has been capitalizing
on the traditional Asian division of towns into trade districts.
That is, the giveaway map is marked up with sometimes optimistic
labels like "Cultural Street", "Jewelry District", and even
"Motorcycle Street". Without planning I stumbled upon a
couple of blocks of little electronic shops (a personal
fascination). I have been toying with the idea of buying
an electronic Korean-English dictionary, not only for personal
use but for student rescue; (in China it seemed to be a
rare tertiary student who didn't have one of these things.
Every last one of my Korean college kids has a mobile phone,
but dictionaries of any kind are hardly seen). Anyway, in
Busan not many places sell them. In fact one Nampadong shopkeeper
chased me out of his shop hissing "No! No! No!" even as
I pointed at his window display. The idea of selling to
a foreigner had been too much... So it was a pleasant surprise
to find shops in central Daegu with just such trinkets.
I hadn't come cashed up for that sort of investment -- electronic
dictionaries are grotesquely overpriced -- but it was nice
to know where to find a selection (especially since buying
one overseas isn't an option - basically they don't exist
internationally. Unlike Japanese or Chinese, or even Thai,
Korean still seems to be on hardly anyone's must-learn list.
Now there's a puzzle..).
As I stumbled out the back of the electronics blocks, well
away from the main drag, the body machine suddenly made
it known that it wanted stoking a bit with messy food stuff.
Bodies are a nuisance, aren't they, but they won't be denied.
The streetscape didn't look promising. We were a long way
from "Restaurant Street". At this point though, my nose
put my legs on autopilot, directing them unerringly to a
humble corner shop whose owner had no idea of marketing
eye-candy, but had managed that delicious aroma of a genuine
fresh bakery. He was a young man, much preoccupied with
his ovens. After a few minutes wait while he got on with
more important matters, he finally found time to sell me
four fresh yellow buns and some milk for a thousand won.
Mmm. They were scrumptious.
The
map I had of Daegu planted me in one tiny corner. Although
I slogged around on foot for several hours and made grand
assumptions about having cased the downtown area I could
just as well have been looking at some satellite development
without knowing the difference. A couple of years ago I
had dinner with a well-educated Chinese man, freshly returned
from a business trip to Australia. He was amazed, he confided,
at how tiny Sydney was. It turned out that he'd strolled
around part of the central business district. The poor fellow
had no idea that Sydney has a diameter of perhaps 75 kilometers
or more. My pleasure in Daegu was that at least some part
of it was adapted to the old fashioned scale of a man on
two feet. So still assuming that its core could be reached
in this fashion, I re-tracked to what had looked like a
main street -- a place where cars and somewhat more
bustling crowds were to be found. Here, Busan style, was
a shortish underground arcade and the mythical subway.
The
arcade began in some style with a circular shopping area
under an intersection. Two cardboard cutout soccer hooligans
from the British midlands pounced on me the moment I appeared.
With pink hairy legs in droopy shorts, shaven heads and
enormous rucksacks they had no doubt cowered half of Korea
into submission before Koreans became invincibly armour
plated by winning a few World Cup soccer matches. By now
the kimchi had worn them down, and they were desperate for
cash. Where, they asked plaintively in funny accents, could
they find a money changer? Jeez, did they think it was Hong
Kong or Bangkok? Koreans don't stoop to money changers.
You go to a real proper bank where the teller, if she doesn't
like you, will use up some of the expensive real estate
in your passport with a silly stamp, just to make sure you
know you're being watched. Anyway, the chums were out of
luck because Korea has just decided to close the real proper
banks on Saturday afternoons. They could go hunting for
one of those (not too plentiful) machines that recognize
foreign plastic, if their credit cards hadn't been cancelled
by the casino, or they could eat grass until Monday morning.
Although
this arcade was swish at the big end of town, a few meters
down the tunnel appearances frayed rapidly. Evidently, like
so much else, ambitious beginnings in this spot would have
to await an oil rich Arab prince, or perhaps a President
who happened to be born in Daegu. The walls became pasted
with ratty, roughly built little stalls of cheap clothing,
and several instant computer-portrait shops of the kind
that are now popular amongst desperate start-up entrepreneurs
in the dusty arcades of Chinese cities. The most conspicuously
prosperous merchants fronted a few glass counters of electronics
gadgets.
Back
in the upper world, I cast around for some of the icons
of Korean retailing. Yup, there was a Migliore store, all
brash front just as in Busan. Through the big doors, things
were definitely on the quiet side. Stall after stall begging
for business. I found the basement almost entirely occupied
by tables of books, a large area that hadn't quite made
up its mind to be a formal bookshop. There wasn't a single
customer in sight. I picked through the books
listlessly, well as intelligently as one could without actually
being able to read most of what was there. Almost as an
act of pity I bought 'Gateway to speaking Korean', pub.
1993; (it's time to stop buying language learning books
and actually plug the stuff into my head -- this is a remorseful
resolution each time I acquire yet another guaranteed mastery
of the language in three days or three months ....) Ah well.
'Gateway' has a very conventional format, but is more useable
than some prettier offerings. Edited by one Moon Yea Lim,
the introduction claims that "the Korean language tends
to be weak in logical expression, but has an abundant vocabulary
of sensitive emotional expressions". Even to my primitive
linguistic understanding, this smells suspect. It is the
kind of myth pedaled by colonials, expatriates and communal
ghettos in hundreds of locales around the planet. In this
instance it may fit well with national mythmaking, for a
similar belief is popular in China. A number of Chinese
have put exactly this proposition to me about Chinese, citing
it as a virtue against the coldly rational Japanese (another
cultural myth). I have actually been struck by the fondness
of Koreans for logical connectives like kurom . Oblivious
to such exotic quibbles, the three lonely sales staff were
more interested in my origins than the transaction, a situation
probably familiar to most foreigners in this very monocultural
country. It is not unusual for my scratchy "oelma imnika?"
(how much?) to be answered with a prying "Russian??".
This time I got adventurous and tried "jeonin hoja saram
imnida". The young man wrapped my book slowly, and responded
with elaborate care in English, "thank you very much".
We were equally fragile.
Where
to go next? The afternoon was slithering away. I tracked
down the main drag out of the centre. Very soon we were
back to typical blocky looking Korean architecture. Beyond
the downtown shopping area, at a major intersection the
subway still seemed to be under construction, with the road
made of metal boiler plates. At random, I turned hard right,
and came almost immediately upon a forlorn, isolated department
store with little sign of custom. Bravely, a brass band
of drum majorettes was practicing in the forecourt, but
upstairs the manager must have been wringing his hands.
Going on seemed a bit pointless, so I circled back through
some minor streets. There was the usual evidence of competing
Christians with their schismatic cathedrals (a phenomenon,
like banker's palaces, found everywhere from Cologne
to the remotest Pacific island). The immediate area, according
to my tourist map, was supposedly a traditional medicine
market. Indeed a few lonely shops of herbs slumbered on,
and one place had large glass jars of ginseng in formalin
(???). What on earth for? They looked like those creepy
exhibits of human brains and body parts I can remember from
museums as a kid.
It
was probably time to go home. I hunted for the street back
to the railway station. Right on cue, two women and a man
approached to ask what I was looking for. Well, I knew where
the station was, but after a day of muttering fantasies
to myself, this was too good a chance to pass up. Damsels
in waiting aren't the only ones who can feign distress.
They were a rollicking group, who took two seconds flat
to decide to actually walk me back to the station. Soon
it emerged that their good intentions were not entirely
spontaneous either. I was a lucky accident. They had freshly
emerged from a meeting of some club called "I-Korea" --
evidently an organization devoted to making contact with
foreigners; (hmm, not too many members in Busan .. ). My
Australian origins seemed to be a special bonus, since they
had just said goodbye to a lady Australian teacher. Two
of my new friends burbled on happily, but one was silent,
an awkward looking, clumpy girl in glasses. "She is a new
member and only speaks a little English", they explained.
The
man, thirty something, crumpled his long, pock-marked face
with easy humour. His English wasn't bad, but his initial
pose as an English teacher soon retracted to "a bit of part-time
teaching at night and watching the World Cup in the daytime".
Was he a boyfriend to the third woman? It wasn't clear.
Probably not. She was slender, articulate and rather attractive.
I asked if she were a student, to their great amusement.
The lady confessed to being 36, but was obviously flattered
and gave me her card. It was tastefully embossed with the
address of some model agency. Well, whatever a model is,
she made it clear that we should get better acquainted and
invited me for 'homestay' next time I'm in Daegu. Hmm. None
of them had been overseas. I suspected that these folk were
part of a scarily large but socially hidden group in Korean
society -- unemployed or semi-employed graduates. In a way
this strata are direct descendants of the huge superstructure
of Yangban (aristocratic) gentlemen at the end of the Joseon
Dynasty, who were socially precluded from manual or even
commercial labour. Of course, this is not the sort of thing
you can raise with a group of cheerful, kindly strangers.
There
was no trouble getting another munwha ticket back
to Busan. They stood about with me for the 15 minute wait
on the concourse while we fished for conversation topics.
Let's face it, I'm really a very boring person, more at
home talking about national statistics than the World Cup.
By way of being cosmipolitan, I told them about the transition
of Australia in my lifetime from 97% Anglo to less than
70%, so that the idea there of being 'foreign' has become
almost meaningless; (OK, OK, not to certain persons like
one Pauline Hanson and Australia's lamentable Prime Minister..).
They were surprised at my suggestion that being constantly
called a 'foreigner' to your face was a lot less neutral
than the label 'non-Korean', if the matter had to be raised
at all. Well how are these poor Koreans ever going to know
if you don't tell them ... but, hmm, I wasn't being thrilling
or funny enough ...
Again
the train was full. It took a ticket show-and-tell to claim
my seat, and company was the archetypical peroxide blonde
addicted to powder puff & phone. Seating mix-ups are
a built-in part of plane and train life. At the end of the
carriage an old man in a white suit & panama hat and
his best gold teeth seemed to encapsulate an age that had
passed. Even he was not inviolate. His embarrassment was
painful to watch when a middle-aged lady in respectable
black, toting a small girl, showed up with his seat number.
She had the grace to work out his proper seating and slowly
led him away hobbling on a cane. Back ten minutes later,
she was mindful of the foreigner's watchful eye.
So
what had the foreigner seen on his poor man's tour of Daegu?
He could not say that he had 'done the city'. Hard experience
had taught him in scores of cities that next time around
the light would be different, today's important bits would
seem unimportant, and all kinds of missed elements would
suddenly be revealed as critical to even a basic understanding
of Daegu, if you can 'understand' a city. In short, he was
dealing in illusions, but as illusions go the first take
on Daegu hadn't been too bad at all.
* Note on personal
names: all names in this Diary have been changed to protect the
privacy of individuals, unless stated otherwise.
"Daegu Is On The Map"...
copyrighted to Thor May 2002; all rights reserved
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