Untitled Document

17 February 2001

Namdaemun

Seoul is a city that lives on commerce.

The ancient capital of the Land of the Morning Calm has been reinvented many times.

The Japanese did it in their days of colonial rule- the ugly monolithic buildings still got under the thick Korean skin. They ripped down the Japanese-built National Assembly that called to mind the Diet Building in Tokyo.

We Americans helped reinvent Seoul, too, as we reinvented Pyongyang. Both towns were leveled in the process of changing hands during the unpleasantness of the early fifties.

Seoul fell twice, and what was built after the war consists of anonymous three and four story blocks of small businesses and apartments. I got to know the city on foot, since I did not drive the fourteen months I lived here. It was too dangerous. The common wisdom was that elderly Koreans would throw themselves in front of American vehicles to provide an insurance stipend for the family and cover the burial expenses.

But with an open afternoon we faced mounting shopping fever. Most members of the delegation had not purchased anything in Japan or China. They were going to have to act fast to prove that they had actually been somewhere. The issue of the day was over where to shop. Itaewan is where the westerners usually go, and it is where we used to hang out almost exclusively twenty years ago.

But since the Olympics, the merchants have been charging a premium to westerners, and they won't dicker like they used to. All the stuff you see in Itawean, all the counterfeit Adidas and Dooney and Burke and Louis Vuittan, is all bought somewhere else. And that place, the place the Koreans shop, is the Namdaemun Market. It is located almost directly across the mountain from Itaewan, and that is where we determined to do our shopping. We would eliminate the middle-man and rake in huge savings. Or so was the plan.

Four of us piled into a white cab (the Post Exchange (PX) used to run a cab service- they took American money and the rates were fixed- but that apparently is long gone).

Our Korean driver was as frustrated as everyone else in town. We went right to go left, and the two mile drive took forty minutes. We used to hoof it, walking over the mountain from our hooch at Yongsan and through the city until we reached the Naija Hotel, the Army R&R lounge, restaurant, and rooms place located adjacent to the now vanished National Assembly.

There we would drink our fill- and more, on occasion, with a cast of colorful expatriates (one, an insurance specialist in the junior enlisted military market, had the same business in old Saigon. He explained that Armed Forces Radio Vietnam had worked it out so that when the city was going to fall in June of 1975, they would play Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" as a secret code to get to the Embassy as fast as possible for evacuation).

Interesting cast of characters. There was the blind author, who devised a system by which different denominations of money went into different pockets…or at least they did until he became too drunk. The Atta-chi behind the bar would scold us for buying him drinks.

There was the Warrant officer who drove the Army's fleet of boats- he had been a sailor, a Chief Petty Officer, but left to become his own Captain. Gone from the States for a decade or more, lost after the War. Or Sergeant Major Jim, a jovial Irishman who I got to know fairly well- or thought I did.

Each time we talked some layer of the onion would be peeled back- he was actually a Colonel, counter-intelligence- he had been a British Officer, a prisoner in China during the Korean Police Action. He was married to a woman who claimed Field Marshall Kesselring as her father and had the Marshall's Baton to prove it.

The more I listened, the stranger his story got -- finally it got too weird even for me. There were at least six different clandestine services working the city and I had no idea how many of them they might be working for. My thesis was that he was an Irish revolutionary with Nazi connections who had been brainwashed in the PRC…and after a session with Jim it was always a challenge to find a cab in time to beat the nation-wide military curfew at 11:00 PM.

But Namdaemun always lay between us and the intrigue of the Naija. It is the heart of Seoul, and its pantry. When the cabbage crop came in from the country, it was piled in thirty feet heaps in the streets. The frenzy to get the cabbage to begin the fermenting of kim-chi was all consuming. Every home had at least one and as many as ten big kim-chi pots outside the back door.

The pots are normally brown, and fat bellied, tapered slightly toward the foot. They wear a downward-lipped heavy top resting on the neck, sealing out the world, but allowing the delicious garlic and vinegar and red pepper to bubble with the cabbage and gently belch the excess pressure to the atmosphere.

Don't think for an instant that life in an older Korea was not a full-out assault on the olfactory senses. Look out for the little white lozenges in the bowl on the bar. They look like Japanese rice snack crackers. They are garlic cloves. And the assault continues. It's true today, even in the arctic blast as we emerge from the cab and enter the market.

The alley is festooned with banners in Hongul, the uniquely Korean characters, most followed by exclamation points. Crowding the street are pushcarts piled with trousers or a riot of scarves. Great bales of unidentified clothing move as if by themselves between the tightly packed aisles. Stalls are piled with backpacks and handbags and luggage. I buy another backpack, since my three existing bags are now straining at the seams. There is pottery and cookware and eyeglasses and food. There is food that is identifiable, dried fish and fresh fish and strange fish. With them is a whiff of ammonia even in the frigid air.

Then there is food that is not identifiable, and will for today, remain so. There is shouting and moving handcarts amid the piles of merchandise and the merchants themselves are bundled like astronauts. There are gas fires to warm the astronauts, and the wind blows right through it all, clean and penetrating to the skin.

It is crowded and authentic. Jack is looking for a tortoise-shell eyeglass case, which we find, but he must buy new eyeglasses to go with them. I am hatless, and after trying several stalls as much to get out of the wind as find a new chapeau, I find I am really looking for a counterfeit Burberry's scarf. I wind it around my neck and head like a babushka to protect myself from the wind.

My fingers are freezing inside their leather gloves. The cold doesn't cut, it slashes. The food merchants have slung plastic around their carts and as you pass within, nostrils burning from the cold, you are assaulted by warm garlic and indecipherable pots of boiling things- eels, perhaps. Red things and white things and sauces to go with them. Clouds of steam rising from great kettles of fish, lightbulbs dangling from cords.

We lasted about two hours, short time by Korean standards. And we didn't find much- since Namdaemun is where the Koreans sell to each other, not to the West. It is a place more for performance art. But as we drank OB beer in a bistro which seemed surprised to see Americans, and which Val rated as substandard in the restroom amenities department, we noted that there was still time to hit Itaewon. And after a couple beers, we did.