The Adventures of Laura Drumm

Dear Family and Friends,

The city of Jinju is beautiful. Well, almost beautiful.

Ok, pause for a second here: have I ever, in your recollection, intimated that a city in Korea is beautiful? Uh, NO! And that is because I have yet to discover ascetic beauty in any Korean city – Daegu, Seoul, Busan, Gyeongju. Indeed, being instantly repelled by the appearance of this place has been a struggle for since arrival: the plethora of apartment buildings, the steaming rusted smokestacks, the tangle of neon signs in Hangul, the squat trees which do little to relieve all directions of dusty concrete. “It all looks the same and it is all so ugly!” I thought - which immediately lead me to chastise myself for shallowness, for being too caught up in my own Western cultural-informed ideas of ascetics, for being judgmental. Eventually I tamped my reaction down but I had to sternly repeat to myself that there was no use in experiencing other cultures if I was going to condemn what I saw out of hand.

But further exploration and repeated self-admonitions didn’t improve my outlook so I began to cast about for an explanation or more likely, a rationalization. After all, ascetic beauty is subjective and rather shallow. Perhaps there was something more that I was looking for?

Consider this: cityscapes are our own graphic history books – their layers of history allow us to derive a place’s story based on its buildings. Personally, I feel that I learned this on rural roads leading to cities. Farm houses of gray cemented stones continue in fields as they have for hundreds of years. Light-colored churches with upfront steeples have pews polished by masses of Sunday best and ghosts of baptisms and funerals. Fenced in grave markers have their names worn away and yet are still able to speak of village inhabitants. Water wheels rest in rivers, attesting to early industry. All things move closer together as the city approaches, the houses shift to “McMansions” then boxy developments to single story wooden slats with picket fenced yards next changing to brownstones with character, eventually giving way to unrelieved apartment buildings. Factories smoke, supermarkets callout their sales, strip malls glare. Downtown, squatter skyscrapers boast shiny brass fittings and art deco points, towering glass boxes epitomize modernist ideals while post-modern buildings unashamedly mix all aesthetics. Together these buildings tell of a country, first formed of little agricultural communities and then came industry, perhaps a bit tardy due to civil war devastation but then full-throttle into progress with big and bigger factories and shifting homes into city apartments into today’s modern day metropolises, which sometimes are ugly, oftentimes dirty, and yet occasionally sublime. Through buildings I learned our history, our story almost without noticing. But even while taking considerable notice of everything, I found that I couldn’t form of a story of Korea’s history through the buildings that I saw.

I'm not saying that Korea doesn't have its own architecture and it is important to remember that here almost everything old has have been rebuilt from the ashes of various wars. But frankly, in my experience, there are mainly two kinds of buildings here: old temples and utilitarian boxes. The temples, inspired by Korea’s proximity to China, are positioned well within the landscape with buildings of boldly painted wood enclosing gleaming Buddhas. While the utilitarian boxes are manufactured in two heights: quite short or quite tall and there are endless numbers of the bloody things. However, slowly I’ve come to the realization that actually these buildings too tell of a country, first and so long formed of little agricultural communities and isolated from western progress. Next came tight control by the (also) western-eschewing Japanese followed by a thorough country-wide razing in the form of civil war. Western culture began to seep into Korea’s buildings at perhaps the worst time architecture-ascetic-wise (in my opinion), when concrete was considered synonymous with attractiveness. I now suppose that Korea’s utilitarian boxes are tell-tale signs of a country needing to recover from war, eager to spring into the future and doing so by utilizing a factory system of buildings where the prime design features were immediacy and practicality. Perhaps Korea has been concentrating so hard on becoming an economic force to reckon with that it has been slow to move from habitual utilitarian architecture to buildings that are something more. Perhaps there is more to the story than I now suppose. I cannot definitively say. But what I can say is that that establishing an understanding of the utilitarian ascetic that I’m surrounded by hasn’t much helped my outlook.

Anyway, as I was saying, the city of Jinju is almost beautiful: a still silver river, shadowed by an old fortress and surrounded by a quiet city. Favorable first impressions of the city came from a friendly cab driver whose English equaled my Korean, night-time bridges with colored lights spanning the river, and an almost attractive performance hall in the distance. The river was reflective as I paced it the next morning in an attempt to gage actual distance illustrated on the city map. And despite no English, the people were terribly friendly.

In fact, my best travel story of the week occurred first thing that morning. There was this moment when I found myself standing midway up one dusty hill, surrounded by other dusty hills, my hair lifted by a slight breeze, the buzz of farm equipment in the distance, on a path that seemed to lead nowhere, asking an old man with browned teeth for directions to an old bronze bell.

You see, the prospect of seeing one “Goryeo Bronze Bell of Samseonam” had seemed promising just a few minutes before when my taxi driver had driven straight to what seemed the correct district to see this ancient bell - the first sign of trouble came when he rolled down his window for directions. I wasn’t unduly alarmed by this as every old lady he asked seemed to have an opinion, chattering at the taxi driver and nodding her head knowledgeably, but the result of several opinions was only more driving.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was in the midst of what is euphemistically known as a travel adventure so I settled into the backseat just as the taxi took off across a cliff with unforgivably narrow road. Alarmed for the first time, I closed my eyes and hadn’t decided whether prayer would save us from toppling when we reached the other side. We spent several more minutes bumping over potholes and skittering over gravel until we dead-ended on a farm road, in an orchard with three old men chatting and squatting around a fire. My driver got out for another conversation with knowledgeable head nodding - and that is how I ended up midway up a dusty hill, with my taxi driver anxiously watching from the base of the hill to see if I’d locate this special bell. I was part up a most unpromising path when the man with browned teeth told me that the bell wasn’t at the top of the hill (I don’t know how I understood this but I did). The old man then shouted to my taxi driver and escorted me back down the hill. Now just along for the ride, I listened to their detailed discussion and eventually resumed the backseat. The taxi driver took off – backwards! – down the farm road, completing a u-turn just before cliff road. We safely inched along the cliff and after a few more minutes, located a traditional wooden Korean building over which a sign announced that this was the home of the Goryeo bell. But the gates were locked. I climbed out and circled, hoping to circumvent the gate, alert for an entrance and very alert because the neighbor’s dogs were madly barking at me. The bell was tightly locked away. My taxi driver found an intercom and rang. No one answered. He looked me. I looked at him. I sighed. I laughed. I gave into the inevitable. So I asked my game driver to instead take me to Jinjuseong - the city fortress.