Portraits: Anmyeondo

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.