10 things you probably didn't know about Korea

As you've probably heard, North Korea has entered "Combat Posture One" and the South Korean military has promised "strong retaliation" for any encroachment or aggression. It seems like that's all we hear about Korea these days—the latest traded threats and propaganda. That, and the U.S. fought some kind of war there against marauding North Koreans with nodongs and their Chinese buddies. Oh, and Kim Yu-na:

But here are some things you probably didn't know. A couple of them are pretty badass.

Number One: In 1597, in the most desperate hour of the Imjin War, Admiral Yi Sun-sin, Korea's most celebrated naval commander, fought a glorious battle against the invading Japanese fleet. The Japanese had 333 ships. Yi had 13, the shattered remnants of the once-mighty Joseon Navy. Using a combination of strategy, trickery, home-field advantage, technological superiority, and balls-out badassery, Yi won. He defeated the overwhelming enemy force and sent 'em back to their mamas. It's generally agreed that Yi's victory at the Battle of Myeongnyang effectively broke the back of the Japanese war effort. It's also the reason that naval historians refer to Yi as "the Nelson of the East."

Number Two: Would you like to know where "the world's most comprehensive and oldest intact version of Buddhist canon in Hanja script [Chinese symbols], with no known errors or errata in the 52,382,960 characters which are organized in over 1496 titles and 6568 volumes" is?

Of course you would. It's in Korea. It's called the Tripitaka Koreana, and it's the Goryeo Dynasty's hand-made copy of the Buddhist scriptures. All of them. Korean monks painstakingly carved them, without a single error or omission, onto 81,258 wooden blocks in the 13th century. The blocks are stored at Haeinsa, a temple in South Gyeongsang Province, and are intact and whole even to this day. Think about that for a moment. Eighty-one thousand wooden blocks. Fifty-two million characters. That must have taken some doing.

Number Three: You know the Burj Khalifa, the tallest man-made structure in the world? Guess who the primary contractor was?

Number Four: Historians across the globe disagree on precise dates, but evidence suggests that Korea invented woodblock printing and movable-type printing in the 13th century, many years before similar technology arose in Europe. Korea may have beaten Gutenberg to the punch!

Number Five: The Korean alphabet, Hangeul, is so logical, efficient and scientifically precise that it has been appropriated for use in cataloging and preserving unwritten and dying languages. With the addition of a few extra characters, of course:

Number Six: When South Koreans get to protesting, they don't kid around. Number six and number one in this article prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Just look at those guys. Number six covers himself in 187,000 bees and the dudes in Busan go up against a police water cannon and win, and then start knocking over shipping containers with nothing but grappling hooks and upper-body strength. I don't even care what they're protesting about, that's badass.

Number Seven: Lifted straight from About.com: "Since the early 1960s, South Korea has achieved an incredible record of growth and integration into the high-tech modern world economy. Four decades ago GDP per capita was comparable with levels in the poorer countries of Africa and Asia. In 2004, it joined the trillion dollar club of world economies. Today its GDP per capita is 14 times North Korea's and equal to the lesser economies of the European Union."

Of course, what isn't mentioned is that this amazing economic feat was kick-started by Park Chung-hee (the current president's father), a military man who seized power and ruled Korea as a political strongman until his eventual assassination. Park appointed all of his cronies to be heads of corporations, so that he could have what amounted to a nationalized economy with all the added benefits of free-market capitalism. Socialism in the guise of free enterprise. Oh well, it worked. South Korea went from a smoking crater to a trillion-dollar economy club member in the space of forty years. Boom. 

Number Eight: The Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) had undercover cops. Seriously! They were called Amhaeng-eosa (암행어사), or "undercover royal inspectors." Their job was to go around disguised as beggars and make sure that the provincial governors were not abusing their power. They'd wander the peninsula, dirty and ragged like homeless vagabonds, keeping their eyes and ears open for citizens' complaints. Though the Amhaeng-eosa were almost always young guys (the high'rups figured that younger men would have a strong sense of justice), their authority exceeded that of the provincial governors. They had the power to dismiss or arrest an official as they saw fit.

But here's the coolest part: these inspector dudes had badges. Über top-secret ID badges! They were called mapae (마패), or "horse requisition tablets." They were big and round and made of bronze, with a figure of a horse stamped on them, usually. Amhaeng-eosa also carried letters of commission from the king, called bongseo (봉서). If he discovered evidence of corruption, bribery, graft, or human rights violations, a secret inspector would flash his papers and his badge, roust out the local garrison and arrest the offending official in broad daylight. Then he'd march him back to Seoul for the king to pass judgment on, and make recommendations about which upstanding and intelligent peasants back in the province would make a good replacement. Isn't that neat?

Number Nine: While I've never seen anything larger than roe deer in Korea (and that was just Jeju Island), the Korean peninsula was once home to Siberian tigers. Yes, that's right. Tigers. They played quite a part in the development of Korean culture. They figure highly in many Korean folk tales, usually as the ravenous, dissolute villain. They often show up in Korean period films, or evidence of them at least: tiger traps, or dire warnings to solitary travelers to build big fires and keep their weapons handy at night.

There's a hammy scene in the film The War of the Arrows where several of the evil Manchu raiders are slain by a conveniently large tiger on Korean soil. (What do you mean, it's not symbolic?)

There's not a single tiger in South Korea outside of a zoo now, but rumor has it they still roam along the North Korean-Russian border. There are, however, still supposed to be Asian black bears wandering around the mountains in South Korea's national parks...

Number Ten: Y'know how Japan is always called "the Land of the Rising Sun"? Well, Korea has a nickname too. It's called "the Land of the Morning Calm." On that same note, have you ever wondered where the name "Korea" came from? Arab traders, that's who. As I've mentioned elsewhere numerous times, Korea has gone through several periods of strife, division, war, and reunification. Kingdoms and dynasties have risen and fallen many times. Arab merchants first came to these shores during the reign of the Goryeo Kingdom (918-1392), which also gave rise to the aforementioned Tripitaka Koreana. The Muslims inquired after the name of this fertile peninsula and were told that it was simply "Goryeo." The Arabs marked it on their maps as such, and the place eventually came to be known as "Korea" by the rest of the world. (If you're confused about how that happened, say the word "Goryeo," which sounds similar to "GORE-ya," six times fast. Makes sense now, right?)

There, that's all I could think of. You're now a little smarter. My work here is done. Good night! 

Korean myths and legends

Neither Miss H nor I had ever been to Seoul Tower by night. We decided that, on New Year's Eve (that's Western New Year's Eve, not Korean New Year; the latter is this weekend), we would go and look down upon the ocean of light which is Seoul by night.

The view was spectacular, and if I wasn't a cruddy journalist who keeps forgetting his camera, I'd post a picture or two here. But I am, and I can't. So there.

That's not what I want to talk to you about, though. I found this book in the gift shop:

EUREKA! Do you know long I've been trying to find something like this? I've wanted to read about Korean mythology for ages. I used to quiz my Korean friends and students whenever I got the chance, trying to find out more about the ancient legends. I met with varied success. But finally, just when I was least expecting it, a book appeared (in a gift shop, no less!) that enabled me to delve into the diverse pageant of peninsular fairy stories.

This is the best book I could have possibly found on the subject, too. It was written and published in 1952 by In-seop Jeong, a professor of Korean culture and history. He copiously collected these stories from all corners of the country, gleaning them from aged storytellers and childhood friends who remembered the old days of the Korean kingdom. Professor Jeong taught a course in Korean studies at Oxford University for many years, and was the first Korean man to make a deliberate effort to share his nation's culture with the world. He cleverly divided this book into sections: myths (which deal in the creation of the world and its pantheon of deities); legends (stories about human heroes which contain some historical facts); fairy tales (innocent stories for children); fables (which contain a moral); and old novels, which were autobiographies written by venerable ancient Koreans, and have become almost legendary in their own right.

What I have found within this book is most incredible, and it has answered many of the questions I had about Korea in general—and even cleared up some of the mysteries of their culture.

The reason they like fart jokes so much, for example.

Seriously. Anything involving poop or passing gas sends Koreans, old or young, into paroxysms of mirth. (They were like this before the American cinematic juggernaut inundated the world with fatuous bathroom comedies, too.)

I just read one legend called "General Pumpkin" about a boy who loved pumpkins so much that he bankrupted his parents trying to feed him. Not only that, but he broke so much wind that they kicked him out of the house. He traveled the peninsula for many years, working odd jobs (for pumpkins) until he happened upon a prosperous Buddhist temple. The monks saw how big he was and figured he'd be a good guy to have around, for this temple was always getting robbed by bandits. The boy (now a man) agreed to help in exchange for all the pumpkins he could eat. When the bandits attacked that night, "General Pumpkin" bade all the monks hide in the corners of the compound with drums. The bandits swarmed over the walls, and then the monks started beating the drums. General Pumpkin passed gas for all he was worth. The noise and the stench threw the bandits into a panic, and the wall collapsed and killed them all as they tried to swarm back over it. Pumpkin lived the rest of his life at the temple, and eventually died by crapping himself to death.

This is actually one of the least disgusting stories I've read in this book.

In general, I've found that the tone of Korean folk tales is not so different from the Japanese or Chinese myths that I've read. (Some of them were even inspired by Chinese or Japanese tales, just as Korean tales inspired theirs; there was a lot of cross-pollination.) There's just more of an emphasis on, um, gross bodily functions. Generally speaking.

That's not what I wanted to tell you about, though. I'd like to reveal the most momentous discovery I've made by reading Korean Folk Tales. Are you ready?

Ever since I came to this land, something's been bugging me. It's the word "Seoul." Seoul is, of course, the name of Korea's capital city. But the name is different from any other Korean city name I've seen. It just sounds weird. Seo-ul. Very few Korean municipalities end with the -ul suffix. Common suffixes are -cheon, which means "river" (Bucheon, Incheon, Gwacheon); -san, which means "mountain" (Busan, Ulsan, Ilsan); -ju, which means "province" (Gyeongju, Gwangju, Jinju); or -won, which I'm guessing means "valley" (Suwon, Namwon, Changwon).

But what was "Seoul"? The meaning was a mystery. I knew the word "seo" in Korean meant "west." So maybe the meaning of Seoul's name was "Western" something? Wikipedia and the Internet proved unhelpful. They vaguely stated that "Seoul" was derived from a Chinese word (as many Korean words are) which meant "capital city." I was forced to swallow this half-baked explanation until a better one came along.

Well, a better one did. Right after the fart-heavy "General Pumpkin" story, I read a little tale called "The Castle of Seoul." And it told me everything I wanted to know. Listen to this:

Apparently there was this Buddhist monk called Doseon, from the Silla Kingdom. He had prophesied that "the king of Korea shall be Yi," and that the "capital will be moved to Hanyang."

There were two problems with this prophecy. First, the king was not named Yi. Second, the capital was in a town called Gaeseong (which now lies just north of the DMZ, and is the site of an industrial complex jointly administered by North and South). "Hanyang," just in case you're wondering, was Seoul's original name. It wasn't officially known as Seoul until 1882, near the end of the Joseon Dynasty. It was called Hanyang during Joseon times.

But lo and behold, the prophecy came to pass. A man named Yi deposed the king. However, the old king's loyalists made it warm for Yi in Gaeseong, so he enlisted the help of a Buddhist monk called Muhak to find a location to build a new capital.

Eventually Muhak found the perfect spot, with mountains on three sides and a broad river to the south. King Yi was delighted and moved his court and ministers there at once, and built a city. They couldn't decide where they wanted to build the king's castle, however.

Then it snowed one night. In the morning, the king's men found a perfect circle of snow ringing the area marked out for the castle, and decided to built the wall along this line. And so the capital was nicknamed Seoul, which is derived from two ancient Sino-Korean characters: seol, the Chinese word for snow, and ul, an original Korean word, meaning "fence."

I sat back when I finished reading this story, and stared out the window. I felt like Indiana Jones holding the Holy Grail. Finally. I'd finally found the answer I was looking for. Now I understood why Seoul's name was so different from every other Korean city. It was a nickname from an ancient legend. The word meant "snow-fence"! That's why it ended in "ul," because ul means "fence"! All the other Korean cities ended with "province" or "valley" or "mountain" or "river"! But only Seoul ended with "fence"!

I had a serious geek-out right then. And now I'm sharing it with you. Enjoy. To heck with you, Internet! You let me down. The True Way is to be found in books: real, tree-paper books. Thank you, King Yi. Thank you, Muhak. One mystery solved.

singing in a house with plaster walls

When I was a kid I had a big book full of Aesop's immortal fables. Forget everything you know about sour grapes and golden eggs. This book had every fable the man ever wrote in it. Fables that never would've made it into a fifth-grade classroom or a kid's television program: fables which dealt with nasty things like grave robbery, diarrhea, big scary lions, crucifixion, shipwrecks, exploding frogs, and the like.

I loved that book. I sure wish I knew where it was. I'd probably get an even bigger kick out of it now than I did back then. It was unabridged, you see. It wasn't really a kid's book. Some dry wit had translated it right out of Greek in a clipped, academic fashion. Many's the time I had to stop and look up a word, or puzzle my way through a rather sinuous turn of phrase. But I understood most of it. Each page had the full text of a fable printed on it, and, italicized underneath, the moral. There were some fables which didn't pass muster, of course. Aesop believed that people's personalities could be judged from their physical appearance, and as we all know, that just ain't true (except in Disney movies). But most of them taught good common sense, and demonstrated it in a rather captivating way, which is why I was so hooked.

The very first fable in that little book was one I didn't heed at the time, because I hadn't yet realized its relevance. Later on, though, it came back to me, and it's recurred to me again and again over the years. Particularly now, as I shall tell you. But first, the fable. I'm afraid I don't remember what it was called. But it went something like this:

There was once a talentless singer who used to practice in a house with heavily plastered walls, which amplified the sound so much that the fellow imagined that he had a first-rate voice. But when he went up on stage to perform, he sang so badly that the audience chased him off the stage with catcalls and vegetables.

And so we see that the disparity between how good we think we are and how good we actually are is often greater than we care to admit.

That wasn't the moral. The moral in the book was shorter and more profound. But you get the gist, right? Seems like every time I read something new, my eyes get opened to a new aspect of writing—and invariably, I hope to incorporate it into my own scribbles. William Faulkner has drawn my attention to the most debilitating defect of my current novel (and my new WIP, second in the series): Voice. The voice in my writing bothers me. It's so...remote. Third-person omniscient the P.O.V. may be, but as everyone from Jules Verne to J.K. Rowling to Douglas Adams to Mark Twain has proven, you can write in third person and still have a personal, lively, engaging voice. My novel manuscripts are anything but. The writing is sterile. Formal. Distant. Puerile, too. It's as intimate as a chastity belt, as approachable as a porcupine.

I suspect this is the chief reason why I'm having such difficulty writing this second book, and why I had such tremendous difficulty with the first, which, as I've mentioned, went through something like 27 versions and took four years to complete. I'm not having fun when I'm writing this crap.

Say, this reminds me of a song. Namely, Frank Sinatra on "I Get a Kick Out of You":

My story is much too sad to be told,
But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
The only exception I know is the case,
When I'm out on a quiet spree,
Fighting vainly the old ennui...

The story is good; the premise is there; heck, the dialogue could be worse. Even the tone is starting to shape up. But the voice is awful. There's nothing there, no spark, no flash, no touch, no soul-to-soul resuscitation. Everything's leaving me totally cold, and I find myself, once again, "fighting vainly the old ennui."

I've got to fix this. I'm not getting a kick out of my writing. I need to relax and write the way I feel like, and worry about how it sounds later. I've got to settle back, get down to basics again, just have fun with the process of creating. Faulkner reminded me of that. Granted, The Reivers is told in first person, but still—the way it's written literally sucks me into the story. It gets me engaged, makes me a part of the world I'm reading about.

A little while ago, I read a quote on The Sharp Angle from an author who figures his (or her) writing is good because he (or she) becomes immersed in the tale he's (or she's) telling. It feels like the characters are real, and that sincerity comes across to the audience. Maybe that was that ancient Greek singer's problem. He wasn't sincere enough. He thought he sounded good bouncing off the plaster walls, but up on stage, it was a whole different ballgame.

I need to muster up some sincerity. You should, too, if you're writing. If you like what you're doing and (even more importantly) know what you're talking about, it'll come through in the writing, and you'll have a decent work on your hands. That's my other problem: ignorance. I've got some research I really have to do, quite a bit for both novels—historical research. I need to know a little bit more about what Wild Bill Hickok did with himself before he became a sheriff in Abilene—namely, his days of scouting and trailblazing. I need to know a little bit more about Nitenryu, the two-blade style of swordsmanship which the great Japanese duelist Miyamoto Musashi practiced. I've got a lot I need to find out about the ancient Akkadians. What they wore, the weapons they used in battle, just exactly how their subjugation of Sumer went, that kind of thing. The Epic of Gilgamesh was good, but it wasn't much on historical detail. Once I get some hard facts (and some other, more nebulous ones) confirmed, I'll feel a lot more confident about the quality of the work. Thus it'll be much easier to get personally invested and calm again.

And somewhere in between, I've got to remember to go outside and play fetch with my dog Harriet every now and then. A doughty challenge, but as I'm starting to learn, challenges look a lot smaller after you've passed 'em. I chronicle these thoughts not to complain, or hedge, or equivocate. I'm not fishing for compliments, or hoping to garner the sympathy of an electronic support group. You can take away whatever you want from it. This is for me, you might say. Years from now, when I'm an accomplished novelist, I want to remember these years of youthful insecurity, those long hours I devoted to a labor of the heart whose success was anything but certain. I suspect I'll laugh. Hard.

Now, if you want a real piece of poetic justice, the word "music" (which is central to the fable I related earlier) is a derivative of the word "muse," originating with the Nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and the patronesses of intellectual and artistic pursuits. ...like writing, for example.

So tell me, why should it be true that I get a kick out of you.

a Korean folktale

I took the hagwon's head teacher, Charles, out to dinner last Friday to thank him for giving me Korean lessons. We went to Chaban, a so-called "Korean fusion restaurant" which combines elements of Eastern and Western dining. You sit on the floor (an ondol, or heated floor, after the Korean style) at a low table, and are brought banchan, or sidedishes, which you snack on while you cook your meat at the grill in the center of the table. These side dishes include things like pickled cabbage, moistened seaweed, oysters, octopus tentacles and vegetables in a spicy red sauce, some form of devilled eggs, and two species of the ubiquitous and inherently Korean kimchi, which is fermented cabbage. At all the good restaurants you get two varieties: regular kimchi, which is liberally doused in pepper sauce, and white kimchi, which is simply steeped in water. Both have distinct and excellent flavors. The most popular variety of meat is samgyupsal, which is sliced pork belly.

The variety we tried that night was hangjeongsal, which was less fatty, but also less flavorful. With the meal, we drank soju, Korean firewater, a colorless liquor usually distilled from rice, although anything up to tapioca can be used. This drink is mild, only 20 percent alcohol, and is usually compared to sweet vodka in terms of taste. I don't much care for it, myself.

However, over drinks, I begged Charles to share with me some Korean folklore, a subject I am desperately behind in, as I am with most things Korean. Sometimes during our sessions in the library we'd take a break and Charles would share with me a Korean proverb or tell me a folktale. I am entranced by mythology of any kind, no less so by that from a country I knew next to nothing about before arriving. Charles agreed heartily, and with his usual mastery of English and his deft mental translation, related to me the following story.

Once upon a time, a long time ago when Korea was still wild and people slept in walled-in houses, there was once a married couple whose young child would not go to sleep. It lay awake, crying and crying ceaselessly. The parents were trying all sorts of persuasion, but the child would not relent. Outside the wall, in the dark woods, a tiger was walking by. He heard the crying and licked his lips.

"Mmm," he said to himself, "sounds like a delicious, tender young child! I think I'll have it for dinner."

He put his ear to the wall and listened, waiting for the right opportunity.

"If you don't go to sleep," he heard the parents threaten the child, "a nasty, horrid tiger will come and eat you up!"

This threat did no good. The child continued to wail. The parents tried a new tactic.

"If you go to sleep," they said sweetly, "we'll give you all the dried persimmons you can eat in the morning."

The child immediately clammed up, and presently dropped off to sleep. This bothered the tiger immensely.

"Why," he said to himself, "the child refused to stop crying when threatened with horrible death in my jaws, but when offered dried persimmons, he quieted right down! This is awful! Persimmons are scarier than I am!"

The tiger began to feel very afraid of persimmons. Unknown to all of them, on the roof of the house at that moment, there was a cattle rustler. He'd come to steal the family's livestock, and he heard the tiger moving about down below at the base of the wall.

"Ah-hah," he said to himself, "it's a nice big fat cow!"

He leaped off of the roof and landed full on the tiger's back. The foolish tiger automatically assumed the dried persimmons had his number and were attacking him. In a blind panic he raced into the woods as fast as he could go, the thief clinging to his neck.

"HELP!" the tiger screamed. "THE PERSIMMONS HAVE ME!"

"Hmmm," the thief mused, "this is a fast cow."

And so they went off into the night, the family went to sleep and everything turned out hunky-dory.

The moral of this story is that dried persimmons are stronger than tigers. Kindness is better than force. That sounds familiar...