From: Peter
Wynne-Willson <pwynne@nuri.net>Subject: Another change of address!
Date:
Wednesday 24th
November 1999 08:53
Owing to sad loss of notebook
computer, I can no longer be reached on pwynne@nuri.net. Please send e-mail to this address
[pwynne@knua.ac.kr] until 20th December, after which I'll be back at home.
All the best
Peter Wynne-Willson
Thursday 25th November
So, as you will have gathered
from my short message to the world, my precious little notebook has been
stolen. The big policeman with a gun
who came round says that someone used a ladder to climb through the
window. Personally I don't go with the
theft theory at all - I think it was suicide.
It just couldn't bear the thought of being pounded with any more long
messages home, saw that the window was unlocked, and jumped. The tragic thing is that it took my camera
with it - perhaps the strap was tangled with the mains lead. Also if it had just waited for two days,
then Ali would have been here, and it's life was due to become much
easier. Still, no point in regrets, it
had a short but blistering life, packed with travel and adventure. I am very glad to lose it now, rather than
four or five weeks ago, when it was crucial - now I am close to my office and
can do e-mails from here. Yes, normal
service is being resumed.... so if it
was theft after all, and one of you had put out a contract in the hope of
stemming the tide and saving space on your hard disk, you should have realised,
it will take more than a little break-in to stop me.
I am sad about one
thing. There was a film poised
infuriatingly on the 35 mark in the lost camera, much of which was taken on a
fantastic day on Tuesday, when I climbed up Pukansan, the biggest mountain in the
Seoul Area. The cold snap that I think
I mentioned in my last letter, snapped back to warm, and I had walked in the
morning to Dream Land - a slightly faded theme park with impressively big
roller-coaster, to check it out for Eddie.
It was about 2.00, and the weather had become quite spring-like, so I
thought I really ought to take my last chance to go on a little walk, hailed a
taxi, and asked him to take me near to Pukansan. On my map, it looked as if I could pop up to a kind of hill-fort
comfortably, as a gentle way to spend such a nice day. The 'pop' turned out to be two hours of very
steep climbing indeed, much of it on rock-carved steps, through very similar
tree-covered terrain to the other hills, but really quite craggy at the
top. There were just enough people
around for it not to feel foolhardy, but it was still relatively empty. The fort on the map was really on the summit
ridge of one of the three summits of the mountain, and by the time I got there,
at about half past four, it was quite breathtaking. Trees for once left behind, fairly sheer drops on both sides, and
a gaudily painted wooden gate house, with dramatic stone ramparts, and stunning
views of Seoul below, and the other peaks to each side. You will have to take my word for it,
because some Seoul sneak-thief has the pictures! The trip back down was very steep indeed, racing against the
falling sun, but I was so glad I went.
This version of the climb
actually misses out a little salutary episode near the top. I was following signs all the way up, which
after quite a long way suddenly announced 2km to go. I was getting pretty tired by the time I saw the wall on the
ridge, and I was really pleased to get there.
I had asked someone to take a photo of me, and after he had done this he
gestured me to come on along further. I
tried to insist on going back down, but he wouldn't let go, and so with
pictures of a night on the summit in my head, smiling but thinking 'silly man'
to myself, I went on. In fact, the wall
where he had taken the photo was ten minutes below the actual top, which I've
described above, and I would have stopped short, satisfied with a perfectly
nice little building, not realising I was so close to a quite staggering
sight. Not for the first time, silly
little foreign person turned out to be right after all.
Other highlights of this the
last week before the invasion have included a trip to the extraordinary
Namdaemun Market [which I will have to return to with Ali's camera, and maybe
with her too] finally getting paid some money [I am a millionaire, having
received 3,000,000 Won - not counting the 2.5 million loss of possessions!] and
the moment when Yumi, after I said something vaguely funny as she was leaving,
stopped the car to get out and say, 'Peter Sonsaengnim, I very much love your
joke'. Now you see some people would
just have laughed, and many, sadly, not
even that.
The scenes around the
burglary were quite funny. 'Halmoni',
the landlady at the flats, was extremely upset, when I went to tell her about
it. She shuffled frantically round my
flat, showing me the window locks, and talking very fast indeed. I really didn't want her to be upset, but it
was difficult to know what to do or say.
I was trying to ascertain what the procedure was, about the police. At one point she paused, but only long
enough to belch very loudly, then she looked at me, and I had some difficulty
deciding how I should respond. Fortunately she resumed rushing round, and
beating her chest. I managed to get
JeongHwan on the phone, to talk to her, and try and calm her down, but she came
back four times later in the evening, each time doing the same rounds of window
locks. I have to admit to saying things
in English just to make myself feel better, while maintaining the concerned
sympathetic look. 'Yes, I know, but do
you think you could just be quiet now, please.
Leave me alone, perhaps? After
all, it was my computer wasn't it?'
Everyone at the university
was absolutely mortified, too. I was
congratulating myself on not letting it get to me, which I think I'd done OK,
but as news spread this morning, wave on wave of apology and sympathy
arrived. I just kept repeating to
different prostrate people that it could have been a lot worse, that it wasn't
their fault, that things like this happen.
Yumi of course offered me her camera.
By the end of the morning this had had the effect of making me want to
scream in the canteen that I didn't care about the bloody computer, and would
everyone please stop apologising. I
will not hold it against the Korean nation in perpetuity, and didn't they have
insurance companies here. Somehow I felt nobody could understand why I hadn't
spent the morning keening. I'm afraid
part of this is to do with being used to a bit of theft, isn't it?
I am nearly ready for Ali,
Eddie and Jim now, and am getting more and more excited. It has seemed like a long time apart. I expect for the next three weeks there will
be no long e-mails, and perhaps the traditional, telling you about it over the
photo album when we get back will
prevail [obviously their pictures, because I won't have any - well except for
the five or six hundred already assembled!]
It has been a strange five
weeks, alone in this contradictory and elusive place. Every time I seem to understand something, I am confounded by its
contradictions. The Koreans hate the
Japanese, with anyone over 60 remembering their repressive rule here, but
Japanese fashion dominates the shops.
They resent the Americans, whose massive and patronising military
presence here defaces the peninsula, and yet in some ways they cannot move fast
enough down the american highway. This
last issue fascinates me. For the
states there is an appealing nostalgia in staying here. The Cold war is still present, in a nice simple
Communist Threat that they can somehow understand. When I asked about american attitudes to Korea, one of my
students mentioned M.A.S.H. What do you
remember from that series as the picture of Koreans? North or South.
Exactly. The vast majority of
the population want the country to be re-unified, but it is still a major crime
to speak positively about the north [actually I think it is in London as well,
isn't it?]
People I've met have been
extraordinarily courteous, or inexplicably rude, excessively concerned or
supremely uninterested. There are
gestures, traditions, behaviours, stories which are exact equivalents of
familiar ones, and others that are entirely alien. At times I have felt like the King of Siam, and at others I have
felt like a lost child. I have got used
to feeling like a bull in a china shop, in places with tiny crowded aisles
stacked high, like china shops for example, where I suppose strictly speaking
I've just felt like a bull. I have got
used to some smells I thought would turn my stomach forever, and some weird
tastes. Some I have failed to get used
to. I have got used to a level of
noise, of crowding and of visible activity which only a few weeks ago seemed
likely to induce epilepsy. I expect the
culture shock of getting home will be as great as that of arriving here,
adjusting to altered colours and smells, being able to focus on things more
than ten feet away, seeing pink, brown, black three-dimensional faces, and
having a Patterdale-sized bath. But
what am I talking about? I'm not coming
back yet. I have marked off the days to
the twenty-seventh on my calendar as though I am finishing then, but no. It is the beginning of the next big
adventure.
Thank you to all of you for being
a collective therapist for me, while I've been here on my own. If you start getting messages now from Ali,
claiming to tell the truth, and in any way contradicting any of my previous
accounts, please ignore them as ravings brought on by jet-lag. I have told the
Seoul truth, and nothing but.
I have had to reconstruct my
address list from information sent to me, because it was all on my notebook, so
if there are any problems receiving this, let me know - except of course if
there are any problems you won't have received it - still you know what I mean.
Off to bend down and sweep
the flat for the family arrival.
Love to you all
Pete