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backwards), and I remember his words about the flickering fires in the oil drums left on the ice, and the young soldier from Tennessee nearly freezing to death, and all the participants in this strangely awful drama wondering just what they were doing and where they were going and, indeed, exactly where they were.
    And then the shutter snaps shut and the image, such as it was, halts its meagre progress. After 1953, the year I vaguely recalled as the date of the cease-fire between the two unhappily and perhaps permanently divided Koreas, there is no real image at all. A few names of people and places and events swim in and out of memory—Syngman Rhee, President Park, Koreagate, Kim II Sung, the KAL 007 disaster, Pyongyang, the Rangoon bombing, the green baize tabletop at the town of Panmunjom. But otherwise nothing. Just a distant memory of merciless and pointless fighting, a hazy knowledge of stunning economic miracles having been wrought in the subsequent years, and, pervading everything, a vague and haunting impression of a Korean face as somehow being a face that represents all that is mysterious, impassive, and vaguely frightening about the East.
    Ian Fleming’s Oddjob, in the Bond books, was a Korean—because to the most perceptive of Western popular writers, and, later for Hollywood casting directors, the Korean and the Korean face epitomized Asian menace, a face and a persona perfectly designed to induce a sense of fear. And then again, hadn’t I read that the Japanese always used Koreans to guard the very worst of their concentration camps, because Koreans would undertake tasks that even the Japanese might be too squeamish to perform? It might not have been true (though in fact it was), but it was an idea that added to the overall impression—that of an inclementand menacing place, far away and unknown, a country at eternal war with itself or with others, peopled by strange and unforgiving Orientals, a secret and forbidding country that was probably best kept a secret, filed away and forgotten.
    And then, that autumn day in 1985, I travelled there, and stayed for two weeks—the two weeks during which I journeyed down to Ulsan and to that mighty shipyard that first sparked my curiosity. But it was more than mere ships—much more—that changed my perception of Korea.
     
    I had not really wanted to go. It was a last-minute decision, prompted by a characteristic piece of newspaper-office idiocy. One Monday morning an editor came up with the not-unreasonable scheme (from my point of view) that I should fly immediately to Western Australia for a fortnight and from there to Manila, to write essays on Perth (before the America’s Cup) and the Philippines (before the fall of President Marcos). But then, later that afternoon, another, more senior editor discovered that the newspaper’s medical correspondent had flown off to a remote town in northern Japan to interview the ‘world’s oldest man,’ and had taken no less than £7,000 in cash with him, breaking all records and, to the chagrin of the accountants (for on most newspapers these days, accountants hold more sway than editors), all departmental budgets as well.
    Down came the predictable ukase: no more foreign trips to be made until the medical correspondent was found, his explanation given, and the cash returned. In vain did I protest that flights had been booked, appointments made in Perth and Fremantle, luggage packed, sobbing families comforted. I railed and I argued. In the end I was told to go to the airport, check in, and call the editor before the chocks were pulled away. I did just that, only to be told that someone else had been asked to write about Perth, and that while I was expected in Manila three weeks hence, would I kindly now go to Seoul instead and write an essay on the country that, someone had just remembered, was planning to stage the Olympic Games in 1988. A hurried change of planes—no longer Qantas to Perth but British Airways to