Yeah...
About a week ago I had the day off and went with a friend to check out an "arts village" a longish bus ride out of town. It was really cold, and the place had kind of quieted down for the winter, but it was still nice to spend some time outside and be out of the city. Saw a few cool things too (although mostly in books on design in the bookstore). Still, ideas are always good.
But one of the coolest, in a way, things about the trip was that, if I'm not mistaken, it took me about as close to North Korea as it's possible to get while still being a relatively normal person (and not a resident). On the northern edge of the highway there was a barbed wire fence, with guard posts every so often, and beyond that was a big river, probably the Han. It was a beautiful late fall day, low-angle sunlight after everything's turned brown, so the sky was a clear blue, with a few clouds, the river was a bright, cold green-blue, and the opposite shore was all golden hills, with a small, blocky city nestled among them. It almost didn't look real, the way the light was shining it might have been a dream. Of course, this necessitates that I fail to take my camera out.
I've been having the occasional conversation about the North with people here, and it seems that people's feeling here is much different from that in the US, or from what people in the US would think. Maybe it's my imagination, but I think that we (people from the US) tend to see the Korean War as protecting the south from the aggression of the north. Now we think of it, for better or worse, as a rogue state (or at least a rogue leader). And I'm pretty sure that in some way those perceptions are true. However, the split between the two seems to have caused a minor crisis of national identity. Indeed, this is a country that has seen some of the longest-ruling dynasties in the history of the planet, and mythologizes its unification some 1450 years ago. What people here are most interested in is reuniting with the North. I don't think that's seen in any practical way, but there's hope that it will happen within 20 years. There was an editorial in a paper I read on a plane not too long ago arguing that the country needs to get tougher on North Korea, while encouraging the US to be more moderate. When I was at Bowdoin, there was always a table sometime during the winter raising money to help victims of North Korea's famine (keep in mind that famine is a man-made phenomon, although often exacerbated by natural conditions). The students who ran the table were always students from S. Korea. It's funny, because you'd think that these would be the people most afraid of Kim Jong Il going nuts enough to actually attack someone, but they're not. That's a matter of government. As far as people are concerned, there seems to be no difference.
Not to paint too pretty a picture, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence (fortunately I don't yet have any personal proof) that Koreans in general are xenophobic, ethnocentric, and racist. I can say however, that if there are empty spaces on the subway, the one(s) next to me are just about the last to be filled. Speaking of which, I think they've started running by now. Time to head home.
