The uncertainty of the twenty years between the French punitive campaign and Victor Collin de Plancy’s arrival reminded me of the photographs taken from outer space of the Peninsula, which showed the yellow glow of the Republic of K., the network of highway, city, and information, against the constructed darkness of the D.P.R.K. When I saw such maps in childhood, the darkened area reminded me of a cushion separating the Republic of K. into an island, framed on one side by that darkness and what my colleagues today called the Sea of Japan on the other. Previously, the diplomat’s career had fallen into question—could you remind me of your real name?—when it was discovered that the diplomat’s father, a person whose work continues to cast a shadow over events today, had appended the title de Plancy to the family name against the rules of French aristocracy, referring to Plancy-l’Abbaye (a minor region of France which nevertheless would invoke, in the minds of my colleagues, the charms of the French countryside to which they were eager to ingratiate themselves). Following the diplomat’s career, the Jikji would pass, through the robust rules of the transmission of property under the Napoleonic Code (the name that is passed down without change, and which, to the historic individual who is alive today, presents a rope connected to some darkened region in the past), passing to the jeweler and art collector of the Orient, Henri Véver, who, in his own will and testament, would transmit his possessions to the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1950, on the eve of the war that would separate the Peninsula into two parallel realities. This much I could easily ascertain from the Centre de Recherche in Quebec, another node of the French symbolic empire.
What I couldn’t discern was the connection between the Jikji and my own history—a connection that, I thought, against better judgment, would prove the universal heritage of humanity within me if it could only be described accurately enough. The modernizing efforts of Collin de Plancy were, undoubtedly, a continuation of the Hungarian and French Catholic missions of the nineteenth century, and the efforts to design a railway merely one current in a general flow that included the English lessons that my father had taken in the army and the English lessons that I had taken as a boy during my brief time in the Republic of K.—could you remind me of your real name, I imagined Victor Collin de Plancy being asked at the École des langues orientales vivantes—the English teacher who had, like the French diplomat, been on the Peninsula on some mission that was now lost, the window looking out onto the lights of nighttime Seoul, a city that, among the people I knew now, remained a symbol of historical division (as if the demilitarized zone were a landmark one could visit on a tour of postwar architecture or en route to a party around the Ringbahn) or simply a layover to another destination that was more frequently visited, Vietnam or Japan. I, too, have visited that country, I have heard world travelers say about the Republic of K., referring to extended layovers that were scheduled in Gimpo in the past and now in Incheon. I landed in Gimpo the way there and came from Incheon on the way back, these travelers might say, as if they had entered a room in a house by mistake, I experienced the history of the Peninsula in its entirety, from the roots of the old airport’s existence as Keijo New Airfield under Japanese occupation, built with the boulders that were carried over by manual labourers from neighbouring mountains and fields, to its fully modernized airport in Incheon, voted one of the best airports in the world. Having devoted a polite amount of time on the topic of the country that I came from, the traveler would then extricate himself from our conversation about airports to direct, across the circle, to someone who originally comes from Finland, questions about that country’s geography and culture. Was it a Nordic country, he might ask, as if he were suddenly relieved of a burden, or a Scandinavian country? These were places that, for reasons that were inscrutable to me, inspired a vigorous line of questioning, not to the political situation of a place but pertaining to the people, language, and food there, the half-remembered traditions of snatching puffins out of the sky and biting into their heads and baking Nordic breads whose recipes precede the global trade of sugar, that concentrated version of sweetness naturally found in berries indigenous to that region of the world, the berries’ tartness whose sugary enzymes would linger on the tongue as a faint aftertaste in their smiling bites. From the point of view of the tourist who visits the Republic of K. on a layover to somewhere else, landing for a few hours in the old airport that I still remembered, and, on the complicated route back, stopping over at the new airport made of glass, the country might have seemed to modernize between the three weeks that made up a trip to Vietnam or Japan, providing a glimpse of that wonderfully titillating experience of disorientation that my colleagues in the faculty celebrated in their discussions of global citizenship.
Improbably, even this limited vision of the Republic of K.—reduced to the old airport and the new airport and the transposed rocks that are around those air fields—seemed to contain my entire life, as those hours waiting in the respective air fields contains the view of the mountains that separate the halves of the Peninsula (the seasoned travelers in the faculty preferred to stay in one city over a week rather than string together multiple short visits, changing hotel rooms each night). In this way, it was as if the six months that a colleague spent in the Villa della Torre, studying sixteenth-century food and architecture (it was pure arrogance, this colleague said, describing his travels, to imagine that one can learn the ins and outs of Italian culture—a culture that spanned thousands of continuous years—in a week-long visit to that country, as so many visitors do, for it took a lifetime of dedicated eating, touring, and fornicating within a single small village simply to begin understanding its depth of culture), were telescoped into the three hours between airplanes experienced in the old airport and the new airport in the Republic of K., two places that seemed endpoints of my family history. Space itself seemed to transform according to the imagination of my colleagues. The airports that exist in the Orient behaved, in their minds, and therefore in my own, like ballrooms and apartments, places where coincidences are free to happen, where one might run into a friend or a neighbour unexpectedly, as in the story that I had once heard in my childhood, after my family had emigrated from the Republic of K., about a classmate who ran into the family of another classmate in the terminals of Narita International, the families approaching each other in the long concourse of the Japanese airport, and, unable to believe it, collapsing into laughter as the smiling women in kimono next to the duty free shops turned their painted faces to the family, the white neighbours laughing, shaking hands and hugging in astonishment at the coincidence, as in those passages of the Divina Commedia in which the poet looks down and recognizes distant cousins and old teachers in the preliminary stages of hell. This was the only part of the three-week tour of Japan the classmate seemed to remember, recounting his summer travel in front of the room at the teacher’s invitation (I pretended as if I had not visited the Republic of K. with my mother and my brother to visit my father, making up the story of an uneventful summer). By contrast, airports like Charles de Gaulle and Heathrow are rarely discussed other than as places of passing misery. They are not experienced as destinations intrinsically, but as pathways to somewhere else, a well-designed corridor exists to be forgotten, while the airports of the Orient can determine the traveler’s entire experience of a country.