Untitled Document

18 February 2001

The Expeditor

Mr. Kim had serene and unlined face of indeterminate age. Iron-dark hair, French cuffs, a gray suit and fashionable black tasseled pumps. Mr. Kim knew everyone in a phlegmatic sort of way, and had a way with a gesture. Mr. Kim knew all manner of bolt-holes and blank doors and staircases. He knew the front and the back of the house. Mr. Kim was assertive, authoritative. Mr. Kim was The Man at Kimpo International.

Mr. Kim was an Expeditor, and man, could he expedite. He worked for the Army- insofar as he seemed to work for anyone. Hew was entrusted with getting the various dignitaries who come to Korea effortlessly through the perils of international travel. If you are a normal traveler, you take your lumps with everyone else.

You queue up with the Third World and everybody gets the same shot at Visa Check and Immigration and Customs. You wait in the lounge for the flight with everyone else in tourist class. As you know, travel can be dull and grating, and gets worse with distance. When you finally arrive at your foreign destination, having crossed an ocean, you have been movied, snacked and complimentary-cocktailed within an inch of your life.

I had a friend who contracted with an outfit in Korea and had to travel there at least once a month. It nearly cost him his marriage and his sanity, though I cannot speak for which he valued more.

An Expeditor can make an enormous difference in the quality of your international travel experience. Mr. Kim worked for the Army- or somebody. His job was to make things easy, and he did. When we arrived he scooped us up and our bags were first off the carousel.

We left the baggage claim through the "Crew" lane at Immigration. We were out of the airport and into the van in about ten minutes. A breeze. That was the last we saw of Mr. Kim until it was time for us to leave. We had been entrusted to the care of a dedicated Air Force Major, who clearly reveled in his role, and was on the verge of becoming one of the Delegation. He was clearly a bit misty when he collected us from the Shilla Hotel

Mr. Kim had a challenge with us as we prepared to leave the Republic of Korea. We were about to Split the Delegation, sending Linda back to Washington, while we plowed on to the swaying palm trees in Hawaii. That meant Mr. Kim had to work his magic with two airlines and two sets of VIPs. He was up to the challenge, though. I was absolutely confident of that.

We were relatively rested and relatively ready to go. Val and I had stayed in Itaewan after completing our shopping the day before. I was wearing a splendid Polo Turtleneck which I had purposed off the heating grate near the Burger King for $10 U.S.

It felt like the old days. I would have bought more of them, if I had been confident that it was indeed first quality and not a knock-off or a second. The sky was black and the wind was cold. Traffic was snarled going up the hill. We tried to hail a cab but no-one was taking. We looked up at the row of bars on the second and third floors. We were across from the New Hamilton Hotel.

It was a presentable successor to its seedy and espionage-cloaked predecessor- one where more wasted hours were spent than I care to remember. The lounge was a dark and vile place that smelled of old beer and smoke. The men's room had a ripe Korean sort of smell and vaguely Asian fixtures, though not the traditional ben-jo style floor slit. It was a place you wound up when nothing else was available, which was sort of the way I felt about the whole country at times.

But it had changed. The bars were slick now, fully Western, and we decided to duck into a place called Nickleby's on the second floor above the street, climbing out of the arctic blast and into a snug English pub. The crowd was about half-and-half, Western and Korean.

There was a small minority that might have been military, but for the most part it was prosperous Koreans and sleek American business types. We got a booth next to the pool table and I began to realize that we had walked into a wedding reception. Neither the management nor the party seemed to care about us strap-hangers, so we slurped excellent OB beer and watched things with great interest.

The Korean Bride was stunning, her glossy black hair gathered in a French braid. She wore a Gone-With-The-Wind hoopskirt in a luminous gold satin, topped by a silken tight fitting bodice. She was at her best on the pool table, setting up behind the back shots and sinking balls with sharp clicks. She seemed to be beating someone who could have been her new American father-in-law. The Ladies in waiting were knock-outs, too, imperially slim and in black leather trousers. I tried to make all the connections work in my head. However this relationship came to be- none of my business- it wasn't the way things used to work here in Itaewan.

In the old days, a hard-working Korean girl would snag a G.I. and work her way up into his ration allowance for precious commodities like cosmetics, sugar, liquor or mayonnaise. If it was played right, she would be a bride by the end of the G.I.'s one year tour, and the way to the land of the Big PX was open. A girl has to do what a girl has to do.

Now there were no ration controls- or, if on the books in some dusty Eighth Army publication, they were no longer enforced. The Koreans seemed to have fixed their economy. I contemplated just how far and how deep the changes had been since we stood watch in an old Japanese bunker on the compound, certain that the North Koreans were going to arrive soon.

They would come from mini-submarines on the coast, or parachuting from antique Russian biplanes too slow and fabric covered to be detected by our sophisticated radars. These days it seems the South is about to move north, preceded by a barrage of Nike sneakers and Sanyo personal electronic devices. And the dim Americans are still peering across the wire, looking for Kim Il Sung.

Our Mr. Kim was a splendid exemplar of the New Korea. He greeted us at a secret VIP entrance to the airport. There we were whisked up an elevator and into a private suite to await our flight. We smoothly slid through the ticketing process, Mr. Kim guiding the process like we were marionettes, this Staffer here, another to a waiting clerk ahead of some tourists patiently waiting.

He floated us through Immigration again, magically producing our exit documents for the impassive gray-uniformed clerk. With a wave of our official passports we were ushered to the moving walkway and into a very short line to march down the jetway. At each step was the ubiquitous Kim, chiding us to keep up, gesturing to keep us on the straight and narrow. I looked back over my shoulder as we headed down into the Japan Air Systems jet for the first installment of our all-night, back-over-the-dateline flight to Aloha-land.

Mr. Kim lingered just long enough to ensure that he was well and truly done with this batch of travelers, and with a thin smile turned to move on to his next challenge. He was a lot like his country.