I must have been living in Japan for a month or so when I first overheard my Japanese host mom sneer under her breath at a woman in the cosmetics store where she worked, “she smells like a Korean,” by which she meant “of garlic and kimchi.” I already missed eating garlic, which is so rare in Japanese cooking. The woman seemed aroma-free to me and no different in appearance or carriage than my host mom. The second time I overheard her, I realized the “smell” she was referring to was the pungent aroma of bigotry wafting off her own body.
Another whiff came over my Thanksgiving break. Two friends and I took the overnight bus to Tokyo, arriving before dawn, and went straight to the Tsukiji Fish Market to see the action. I asked a fishmonger what they would do when there were no more bluefin tuna left. (I must have been feeling especially fearless, self-righteous, and sleep-addled, because what an insensitive question to ask someone about their livelihood.) He answered, straight-faced, in the largest bluefin tuna marketplace in the world, “it wouldn’t be a problem if the Koreans would stop eating them.”
There is a long and ongoing history of animus between Korea and Japan. Even though most Japanese likely descend from Koreans, one million Koreans are permanent residents of Japan, young Japanese love K-Pop, and each loves the other’s horror flicks and remakes them, and remakes them again.
After living in Japan for four months, I did not want to spend the holidays there. I wanted to go to Korea.
The first thing I did when I landed in Seoul was find a restaurant and eat bibimbap. An older woman sitting near me began hissing in my direction. She hissed and lifted her spoon, and I realized that in Korea you eat rice with a spoon. By eating rice with chopsticks, I had revealed my indoctrination in Japanese culture. I felt exposed and embarrassed.
The second thing I did in Seoul was freeze. It was unbelievably cold—a sharp, violent cold that made me feel naked, stripped even of my flesh, like a skeleton walking through blue flames. Based on how freezing South Korea was in late December, I could not imagine the biting temperatures and winds of North Korea. Whenever I became too cold, I would duck into whatever building I was near and warm up: an arcade filled with students practicing musical instruments; a museum of animation; a lifeless bank lobby; a market selling ginseng roots encased in glass jars that looked like embalmed fetuses; a brand new movie theatre playing a rom-com, which I slept through; a spa filled with hot tubs, thank god; a restaurant with individual grill tables where you didn’t even have to order because they just began bringing food for the grill; a museum about the history of war. I felt like a reincarnated soul trying on lives.
It would be disingenuous to say that I was in a healthy state of mind. I had been feeling very lonely and worthless that fall in 2005 in Japan. Although I was the only audience for my antics, it made perfect sense to me that on Christmas morning, I should book a spot in an organized tour to visit the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Christmas alone in an unpeopled landscape shaped by war. It felt oddly fitting.
Christmas morning was freezing. I found a street food vendor sheltering under a tarp on my walk to the bus stop, and he made me an amazing breakfast sandwich: egg and cabbage tucked into fluffy white toast with a thick spread of mayonnaise. He let me huddle near him, away from the snow that had begun to fall, while I ate.
I boarded the bus with the other tourists who thought it was a good idea to go on a seven-hour tour of the DMZ on Christmas. Our first notable destination was an overpass bridge we were about to drive under, which the driver told us with much fanfare might blow up, killing us all. He described in lurid details all the plans the North Koreans had to infiltrate the South—the landmines, planted bombs, surprise attacks. His descriptions left me wondering not about my safety but my sanity—why had I thought I wanted to participate in war tourism? But I was also haunted by how little I knew about the Korean War, a war the US played an outsized role in.
In its simplest form, the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, was a struggle between the visions of socialist leadership and capitalist leadership. Both versions on offer—Kim Il-Sung in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South—were autocratic. The Soviet Union backed the North, the US the South—two mammoths breathing fire against each other without having to scorch their homelands. The fighting ended with an armistice that permanently turned one nation into two and created the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, a ribbon of land between North and South Korea that both countries have agreed is off limits. It’s a buffer zone, 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide, that cuts the peninsula in half—their physical embodiment of severance.
Our second destination was the Third Infiltration Tunnel, an underground passageway discovered in 1978, purportedly one of four the North Koreans dug for a surprise ground attack. We wore hardhats and walked down the steeply inclined path to intersect the tunnel, like worms burrowing into the earth. This ancient, long abandoned tunnel was part of an often-told story of aggression by the North. It had been almost 40 years since the tunnels were discovered. For the sake of both tourism and national mythologies, the past was being resurrected as if it were fresh at hand. So why did I felt like I was being entombed?
For our final stop, we visited a newly built train station. Inside, it was completely empty, save for one lone popcorn stand, where a man was handing out popcorn for free. A few guards wearing full camo stood emotionless, barely moving, like war mannequins. A train arrived from Seoul, also completely empty, and after some amount of time, departed, heading south again. The tour guide explained that this station had been built as part of a plan made by both North and South Korea for a train line that would travel through both countries into China and all the way to Europe. The two countries had been working for many years on the line, one step in a process of rebuilding their relationship. But after September 11, 2001, US President George W Bush had named North Korea one of three countries within an “Axis of Evil,” and South Korea was forced to stop its negotiations. America’s War on Terror had disrupted this thoughtful process of reconciliation. But the South Koreans didn’t want to let the spirit die, and so every day they ran an empty train to this station within the DMZ as a symbol of their hope, someday, to go further north.
Outside of the station, the names of all the South Korean families who had contributed money to build the station were carved into stone—families who longed to see their relatives in the North. The snow was pounding down on my head, but I stood and looked at the wall of names, so many names. Even after many decades apart, these families yearned to reunite.
My family has a very specific Christmas morning tradition. My mom’s mom, Franny, started it. She would make yeasted donuts from scratch. My mom made the tradition her own by making the donuts with sourdough. She feeds her sourdough starter the night before and then wakes up before the rest of us, listens to Handel's Messiah, and forms the donuts she will let rise for a few hours until it’s time to heat up her little black cast iron pan and fry the donuts and their tiny holes. She fills a paper bag with granulated sugar, and as they come out of the oil, golden and crispy, she tosses them inside and shakes them. “Franny’s donuts,” my mom will announce proudly, conjuring her mother, as we eat donut after donut. My family is not religious, but this is a sacrament.
That holiday in 2005, I was separated from my family by choice. I had the freedom to make myself this miserable. But Korean families were separated by global forces. The US had decided it was the “good guy” of the world, the proselytizer of capitalism (sometimes but not always cloaked under the banner of democracy), and so it deemed itself responsible enough to bear nuclear weapons. How could any leader with an appetite for something that monstrous and destructive be trusted with it? And here, I am speaking of the US. We were protecting the world? Yeah right, I thought, as the wet snow soaked into my coat. I didn’t trust us either so who was I to blame another country for its skepticism and fear, even if I did not want North Korea, or any country, to have nuclear weapons? And honestly, over all these years, who has been hurting whom?
All day long, I had been trying to decide if I should go find a donut when the tour was over. Should I replicate some small part of my family’s tradition? But I knew that almost all donuts are sold cold. It’s wild how a fresh, hot donut will be light as air, almost like it could fly into your mouth, but a cold donut is leaden. I decided it would be worse to have a cold imitation. I would wait. Instead, after the bus dropped me back in Seoul, I found a place to eat soft tofu and oyster stew, which soothed me enormously.
I kept imagining these trains. The route might have taken them from South Korea, through North Korea, into China, maybe Mongolia, then Russia, and beyond. I saw it as a river, flowing, bringing water to two islands. One, North Korea, is severed from the world by politics; the other, South Korea, is isolated by land—the DMZ is its only land border. Maybe someday, that river would flow and Korean families, separated for decades, would share a meal together again.
Bravo!!!
I really enjoyed this article. Thanks for sharing your story.