When your father and mother are alive, do not journey far, and when you do travel, be sure to have a specific destination. - 4.19 The Analects

Everyone seemed to know exactly where we wanted to go. I’d copied down the name in Han’gul, Korea’s phonetic alphabet, and so when periodically either I or my friend Jesse got tired of peering down one of Myeongdong pedestrian mall’s darkened backways, we’d grab one of the few people left milling around after midnight, and watch as they’d shout in recognition before starting to point frantically down another line of darkened, multifloor designer stores. With only rows and rows of uniform Han’gul signs hanging from the building’s upper stories to mark our progress, the directions, and even a map someone had sketched out for us, fell fast apart. Dozens of brimming barrels of half-eaten food that awaited the garbage men, the bar’s pungent remains of that night’s banchan all along the street. By 1pm, we were lost.

I’m not much for planning when I travel. When people in Taiwan asked what I was planning to do for a week in Korea, I’d just shrugged. I didn’t know much about Korea, that seemed like as good a reason as any. In truth, I got the idea a year ago in Shanghai, when a pair of beautiful Korean girls and I circled each other through club after club before they finally left with a German pop star. I heard the girls are pretty - not exactly the answer I wanted to give people.

As a matter of fact, no matter what I told my adult English students in Taiwan, they would have reacted to my going to Korea the same way: coldly. As best as I can tell, ever since a hotly disputed call in an international baseball game, your average Taiwanese has harbored a bitter little sore patch towards all of Korea, something the disposition of your average Korean doesn’t seem to help any. For now, just know that Korea has a reputation around East Asia for an intangible funk, a certain smugness that might be best called Koreatude. The odd habit of Korean nationals laying claim to miscellaneous parts of Chinese culture, such as the dragon boat races, only burns Taiwanese that much more, so that every time I mentioned my plans, I’d had to listen to a litany of illusionary trespasses.

Invariably someone would say, “You know, they don’t like foreigners that much.”

The other reason I had for visiting Korea was about as useful an explanation as the first. I’d heard from a professor in college that while Confucian thought had influenced all of East Asia, Korea had taken to and applied it on a much greater scale than in any other country, including China. A few weeks previously, I’d lost a debate with a philosophy professor when I was forced to admit I’d never read the Analects. Though I love Asian philosophy, I’d avoided all Confucian doctrine out of a conviction that they were dry, classist putterings, a prejudice the discussions in University and Taoist counter-arguments had only deepened.

“Hmph,” the professor snorted as I left, “if you don’t know Confucius, what’s there to discuss?” So, I’d taken my leave, and packed a translation of the Analects along with my Korean guidebook. Thongs and theory. My kind of vacation.

Twenty-four hours after arriving in Seoul (in which time Jesse and I had circled the drain in the pathetic and well-soiled foreign district Itaewon), we were both dirty and tired. It seemed the perfect time to find one of the jjinmjilbang we’d both read about: traditional Korean bathhouses and saunas done up luxury-style with lounges and internet access, places where we could scrub away the grit of travel, soak our now tired feet and coordinate online the trip from Seoul to come. The plan had seemed perfect, but as we walked, and more and more lights clicked off, we were running out of ideas.

In exasperation, we flagged down a cab and handed him the paper. The man sat poking at a dashboard computer, tapping each syllable of the name after running through his choices on the screen with a pointed finger, a process that was rapidly turning arduous, when for the first time a Korean stepped forward to volunteer his help.

Sunchaul sent the driver away with a quick wave of his hand and offered himself and his girlfriend as guides, instead. With tussled cheek-length hair and a pair of smart glasses, he didn’t paint the picture of a typical Korean. Moving ahead of us with haphazard strides, he walked with a clear disregard for the direction, saying over his shoulder that finding places in Seoul was hard, particularly with no address. When I asked if the guidebook had been right in saying that house numbers in Seoul weren’t sequential, he added that even with addresses it was still very difficult. We’d been walking for less than five minutes when he suddenly broke his air of high-minded repose and shouted “Let’s just get some beer!” I seconded it.

As I would learn, Sunchaul had a habit of doing this, shattering his typically restrained composure with sudden eruptions in a moment’s excitement that left him waving his hands in the air wildly and yelling, before just as suddenly stepping back into his cool, unhurried, and often silent conduct. Along the way, his girlfriend stopped to ask directions of two workers on the street, and Sunchaul noticing her absence behind us, wheeled around and shouted a sharp Korean reproach that sent her skittering to catch-up, but answering him with an easy and unhurried explanation.

We arrived at a street-side stand, with fold-away tables and plastic chairs set out on the vacant sidewalk in front of a mall that by day would be crammed with windowshoppers. As we drank, Sunchaul asked diplomatic questions and offered authoritative explanations. His girlfriend proved the more curious of the two, though with limited English hung back and pressed for a detailed explanations only when a break in the conversation allowed for her to interject. Thin, pretty, she dressed conservatively and wore her hair modestly. Though generally reserved, I could tell from a few tiny gestures and her easy posture that she was comfortable sitting there, and happy to have met us.

Asian reservation has many gradients, and to the unfamiliar may seem smug, standoffish, or awkward. Often, it’s only by the way a person will hold their shoulders, or look you in the eyes, that lets you know if the goodwill is genuine or forced. The conversation grew more loud as the finished bottles began to add up, and I wondered how much her reticence stemmed from gender roles. As I’d never have another chance to speak with her, it’s hard to know.

As we drank, it came out that Sunchaul was an associate professor at two Seoul universities, including the reputable Korea University, and that in any given semester he taught as many as eight classes, most of them on Korean literature. Not believing my good luck, I began drilling him for details on Korean literature. He told me hastily that there was only one book I had to read understand Korea, but that he couldn’t remember it’s English name. Taking my notebook, Sunchaul started to write. After a few misprints, he passed the book back to me. In a free-form hand he’d written 論語, the Chinese name for the Analects.

I shouted in surprise before nearly knocking the small table over in a gesture to mime my having the book with me, here, in Korea. For all my excitement Sunchaul sat back placidly, nodding in slow approval. So muted was his reaction, I doubted he had understood me. Still, it was a fantastic coincidence, and must have made an impression on him, because after I’d calmed down, he offered us the use of his remaining vacation time and his car for a road trip down the Korean coast. We agreed instantly. Each time he mentioned the trip thereafter, his girlfriend visibly cooled. In soft, low tones, she spoke to him with gentle Korean, which he ignored.

Sunchaul began to show signs of fading, and it was clear the drinking should soon end.
Knowing the customs in Asia, Jesse and I went about covertly trying to pay the bill ahead of our hosts. All over Asia, there are great races to pay the bill, but after his welcome and generosity, we both felt we had to pay the tab. Thinking we’d staged a friendly coup, as in Taiwan, I laughed and slapped him on the back when he started protesting with the shopkeeper, having found his money was no good.

Sunchual’s shoulders dropped, and his protests fell away with the pitiable candor of a drunken man. His voice had grown surprisingly weak, and Jess and I instantly realized we’d made a mistake. Defeated, he raised a last meek complaint before falling into a long silent stretch. “But . . . I’m older . . .”

A line of police officers had been marching up and down the street all evening long. Helmeted, with riot shields, and in a train at least a hundred men-strong, they walked in silence on silent streets. The beef riots, spurred on by an TV journalist’s investigative report that claimed mad cow disease targeted those of Korean decent with savage ferocity, still commanded the attention of many residents. Sunchaul pointed and laughed darkly. Silent officers on an empty street. It was all ridiculous. With that, we shook hands, and promising to call tomorrow to arrange our trip, parted ways. In the cab, we passed the officers sitting on thee sidewalk, still in their marching lines.

The only tourist site I had time to see in Seoul was Inwangsan, a sacred mountain where for generations Korean shamans (analogues to China’s Taoists and Japan’s Shinto) have evoked the spirits of the mountains with famously piercing, supernatural songs.

Like most sacred mountains in Asia’s great cities, the foot of Inwangsan had been quickly filled by networks of eddying alleyways early, so now the way up is hard to find, unmarked, and along curving spaces between tight housing. At last mounting a great concrete stair, you find the lower slopes have been packed tight with towering and dismal super-block apartment buildings, clustered in a group of at least twelve, the sides of the buildings numbered, colossal, faceless as steel shipping crates and making of the landscape aisles in a big-box store. The road up is steep, well paved, with the apartments stone silent to one side and a massive concrete retaining wall leaving you about three feet of sidewalk. The wall rivals the towers in size, rough to the touch as though a sticky grey gum had been smeared on the mountainside with a cake knife, and left to bulge and sag.

At length, up a nearly-vertical driveway, a temple joins the road and the mountain path. Like any number of I’ve seen in Taipei, the ungainly buildings and uneven walkways fold into themselves layers of traditional gates, clay eves, rusting sheet metal and recycled rebar, drawing the elements from the city like fumes, all the while nestling deeper into the mountain.
The first mountain trail out of the ramshackle cloister climbs quickly with bitingly small stone steps, before opening into thickets of squat junipers and running across granite boulders big as cars. I stopped and looked out over Seoul, which filled the lowlands and swelled around green mountains, cropping up higher in pockets of towers indistinguishable from those passed on the way up, their corrugated sides mauve and drab. Into this scene I thought I heard a shaman’s singing (as promised by the guidebook), so set myself to listening, hoping to catch a sense of the mountain. The wind carried snatches of the song nearer, and slowly a melody resolved. Paul McCartney was singing Michelle, my bell from the squeaky single speaker hooked on the hip of a solo hiker.On the way down I caught sight of an old women in bright sweatpants spitting mouthfuls of rice wine into the concrete-lined stream. Her movements were smooth and exaggerated, part of a ceremony I had no way of understanding.

The next day, the ride in Sunchaul’s Korean SUV was a fury of discussion, with Jesse’s childhood friend Barret’s arrival the night before setting the three of us into hurried and dauntless conversation. There was little space in the discussion for the two Koreans, Sunchual and his cousin, who sat in front in virtual silence.

Feeling the need to include our host, I leaned forward and told him what I’d thought of Inwangsan and its disappointments. In his typically brusque way, he told me we’d be going to a different mountain temple, a very old one, and that this one would be better. Four hours later, we parked the car in a glen just off the road and proceeded towards Sanghangsan on foot.

A storm was threatening, so the air was dense as we walked along the wide dirt road, lined with fruit stands and one-room kitchens that served the pilgrims and tourists. Through a massive, unpainted wooden gate the road lead into the forest and to steep steps cut from stone. Here or there a drop of rain would fall, and across valleys in the distance, thunder would break and race up the stairs as if running low to the ground.
At the top of the wooded stair is Gyasimsa (The Temple of an Uplifted Heart). First built in 654, the temple remains one of the few in Korea never to have been razed or burned to the ground. A stilted bell house stands outside the main gates and overlooks both the path to the temple and the valleys of the smaller mountains that run beside. Monks still live at Gyasimsa, sweep the path daily free of pine needles and shake the great silent bell from the stillness that seen first-hand seems to radiate brooding strength. Sunchaul says the bell is rung twice a day, with the goal of waking the world.
The temple itself was open, and though a stray monk or layperson would slide a door open and step back into the shoes they’d left on the stone walkways that connected the buildings, only the main hall had its doors open invitingly. Sunchaul told me that Korean shamanism had based much of its beliefs on the spirits of mountains, that communities had seen their local mountains as lords and patron gods, and that this belief had crept its way into the Buddhist temples in the door guards and painted motifs that surrounded the gilt Buddha and Chinese sutras. Wandering into the back houses and vegetable gardens of the monks, I heard in a grief-stricken woman weeping loudly, here seeking comfort and council from the resident monks. I didn’t linger.

The rain that had broiled and threatened the edges of the mountain never broke, and we left Sanghangsan even as great drops seemed poised to fall. The threat of a downpour charged the atmosphere, so I felt as though we walked a boundary, tiptoeing along some verge. Mountains have a special power over all of us. Seated in both grandeur and reservation, they swallow all the prickling notes of life’s minor moments, calming each and making from them a single, drumming cord. The resonate part inside all of us hears this, and knowing its sister tone, slows our trembling meter to harmonize.

This road, through pine groves and down a stone path that had no litter or the trashcans to collect litter, must have been the way to Inwangsan once, too. The small stalls and kitchens were the forbearers of the convoluted city neighborhoods, the walled homes and shuttered driveways. Our cities hums along so literally we forget the faces of towers and the walls at our sides ring with their own definite timber. What is the music of our landscape that flows into the hollow parts inside us which gather feelings like sound? In Asia, a great grey and spreading sea of mega-housing is growing across the ground like a mold, leaving mountains like islands in the quick.

It looked just like an ink painting - blocky rocks, weather-stretched pines - but the handful of tourists and students picking their way uneasily across barnacled stones were tiny in comparison to the scene that was the horizon. One could feel themselves entering a poster on a travel agent’s wall, and this felt at once both greater and yet hugely less profound than the feelings communicated by those works of art (the feeling being that now-common sense we each have of the grand and beautiful scenes we come upon as belonging to the ages, and then the postcards we flip through reminding us what such immortality really entails).

I didn’t, though, feel the other tourists were intruding on the scene, as travelers almost always do. There was a pair of motorized hang-gliders that puttered like areal lawnmowers across the sun-streaked seascape, and along with the kids digging for shellfish and highschoolers in terrible haircuts taking pictures of one another, made the scene somehow better, unpretentious at least, totally approachable. I liked it all, the quirkiness, the immediacy, the dignity of the classical rocks, the fact that tomorrow and the next day this would all be repeated over again against other glorious sunsets, as though everyday really could be a good day.

The sun set like a falling star, and having watched this, and each of us having taken portraits with Korea in the backdrop forever ablaze, and the mild breeze soothing our minds and reminding us of life’s gentler possibilities, there was nothing left but to get drunk.

Korea prides itself on being one of the heaviest drinking nations on earth. While other places I’ve been in Asia also choke down bottle after bottle of (sometimes explosively vile) rice wine until rendered useless and sopping in a corner, I’ve always seen it approached with humor as everyone takes turns playing the fool. Settling in with a stack of six-packs on the beach, I saw Sunchaul grow visibly stouter, and his juniors adopt similar poses of resolve, and I remembered what the guidebook had said about Korean drinking pride: there were stakes. For the three foreigners though, sitting on wet sand in the dark on a stretch of family-friendly beach, it was the opposite: we had nothing to lose.

We’d dragged our hosts down there, ignoring a few protests and the fact that no one else was here drinking, which meant we were probably violating yet another social grace that in Seoul had looked out scornfully from the faces of elderly women or restaurant employees. We did this often, and whenever pulled into such a situation, Sunchaul would stretch his usually flat expression slowly, raising only his eyebrows before usually deciding to say nothing. Often an edge-wise criticism would come well after the fact, and only then would you realize all the while he’d been chewing on that one taboo or faux pas.

All through the hours-long conversation, which consisted of myself, Barret and Jesse telling escalating stories of hazey nights out in different cities and down certain alleys, Sunchaul’d sat silent. Suddenly clearing his throat, he began to protest loudly that he was no slouch when it came of drinking himself, that he was Korean, afterall, and that we’d better take him seriously. He then told the following story:

For four months, he’d been studying at a seowon, a private Confucian Academy that once operated all over Asia and had been the sole form of formal education. Built in the mountains, the walled school was in the old-style, with low dormitories and stilted lecture halls. The schoolmaster, an elderly man (the oldest instructor by a matter of course), held the same rank and stature as he would have two hundred years ago, granting him near-infallibility. Only in religious centers can you find a similar level of perfect authority (something I’ve also seen firsthand).

The seowon term ended with a massive banquet lasting nine hours. The purpose was to mark the students’ graduation not from a school or a program, but like any rite of passage, served to usher them in as members of the community, as men and irresponsible children no longer. In Confucian terms, they were now ‘walking the path.’ Like anything Neo-Confucian, the banquet was highly ritualized, particularly the drinking, which, this being Korea, was still ludicrously heavy. The schoolmaster, though, in his advanced years could not fulfill his duties to drink well-wishes with each student in turn or lead the many group toasts that were dictated by hundreds of years of custom. To help, a designated drinker was appointed, and our man Sunchaul was it.

He couldn’t stop or complain, but remaining always besides the schoolmaster on bent knees, received drink after drink with head bowed. I didn’t ask if this was an honor or a punishment, but I suspect in a seowon, everything is both. When at last he was allowed to take a run to the restroom, after hours of abuses, Sunchaul rushed into the courtyard and straight to the well that supplied the school its water supply, before vomiting his swaying guts out.

We finished on the beach, and went on back to the room we’d rented to play cards and figure out the morning, when the three Koreans would drive back to Seoul, and we’d find ourselves a bus inland. That night, the drunker I got, the more I tried to pull Sunchaul into the conversation. Now and again I’d force from him one of his odd outbursts (that singular trait that had made friends of us, as no one else in Korea ever offered help to me unasked), but still he maintained a distanced view overall, and detached, like someone studying the features of a landscape. The next day, driving us off the island to the nearby town and its bus depot, he prepared English versions of the Zhuangzi and the Analects for me as gifts. They were the classic translations, and brick-sized. I couldn’t possibly carry these around with me for the next four days, so discretely, without saying anything, I left them on the floor of his car and said my goodbyes.

As if to make some final point about the strangeness of his own position, as representative of a culture of which he was so clearly an aberration, as leader of men who didn’t want this Korean form of friendship, but something closer to their own, Sunchaul walked around the back of the bus and finding me in my window did a stoic about face before suddenly jumping into the air and flailing his hands wildly, eyes wide and mouth open, silently miming a loud scream. And like that, he fell still again, gave one quick nod, then walked briskly back to his car.