“American doctor save my life,” he told me. “I always like America.”
I supposed that was as good a reason as any.
He’d landed a job on compound washing GI laundry, shining GI boots and making GI bunks, and had been here ever since. Somewhere along the line, he’d married and he now had two kids, both recent high school graduates. He was proud that he’d gotten them such a high-level education. Still, they were both looking for work, and so he continued to put up with abuse from obnoxious American soldiers.
Once I made the mistake of asking him about his family in North Korea. When the war ended and the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone was set up, it became almost impossible to escape from the Communist-controlled north. Hundreds of thousands of families were divided. Mr. Yim stopped shining shoes and looked at the ground. It was almost two minutes until I realized that a puddle of tears had formed on the cold cement.
I never asked him again.
– 11-
We gassed up the jeep at the 8th Army POL point (petroleum, oil, and lubricants) and crossed the Chamsu Bridge, leaving the Han River and the City of Seoul behind. We cruised south on the Seoul-to-Pusan Expressway, admiring the new road that had been completed little more than a year ago.
“Korea’s going to hell,” Ernie said.
He was alluding to the road. It looked almost like a Stateside freeway: two lanes in either direction with a ten-yard-wide divider in the middle. Much of it had been carved into the countryside, and the ridges on either side were lined with newly planted birch trees.
“Can’t even see the rice paddies,” I said.
Ernie nodded.
We preferred the old roads. Two-lane affairs that wound through pear orchards and passed craggy peaks and narrowed when entering farming villages, with ramshackle wooden buildings and homes covered with straw thatch and old men sitting on stone porches puffing serenely on long-stemmed pipes. Of course, this new expressway from Seoul to Pusan did cut the driving time by more than half.
“Look!” I pointed at a billboard with a giant picture of a pretty young girl about to chomp into a Choco Pie. Such advertisements were never allowed before.
“I told you,” Ernie said. “The road to perdition.”
About sixty kilometers south of Seoul we turned off the expressway, heading for the city of Pyongtaek. Before we reached it we turned west toward our destination. After passing a busy bus station and bouncing over a double row of railroad tracks, we entered the small village of Anjong-ri. As far as I knew, it hadn’t even existed before the Korean War. If it had, it was probably just a country intersection that wasn’t on maps. But after the war, it was settled that the US military would be using the flat plains in the surrounding area to construct a large helicopter base, and the town had sprung up like wet rice shoots reaching toward sunlight. First had been the bars, then the chophouses, and finally the shops: tailor shops, brassware souvenir emporiums, photography studios, sporting goods stores. And from there, the place had continued to grow. Rat-infested yoguans-Korean inns-and endless catacomb-like alleys where the business girls plied their trade.
One thing Anjong-ri did have was a brand-new white cement-block building housing the local office of the Korean National Police. We cruised past it, the flag of the Republic of Korea-its red and blue yin-yang symbol on a pure white background-fluttering in the cold morning breeze. I thought of the card Mr. Kill had given me for Lieutenant Kwon. I hoped I wouldn’t need it.
As we neared the front gate, pedestrian traffic increased: young women scantily clad, wearing just shorts and T-shirts with a sweater thrown on to protect them from the cold, plastic pans canted against their hips, on their way to the bathhouse; old men pushing carts laden with produce or hay or old pieces of junk metal that were somehow valuable to them; the occasional GI in civvies, rubbing his eyes and making his way back toward base.
At the big front gate of Camp Humphries, we were waved to a halt by an MP. Without a word, Ernie handed him our dispatch.
“CID,” the MP said.
“No,” Ernie snapped, “just Eighth Army Provost Marshal’s office. Nothing to be gabbing about.”
The MP handed the clipboard back to Ernie, who in turn handed it to me.
“ID,” the MP said.
We both showed him our military identification. Grim-faced, he waved us through.
Ernie gunned the engine. “In five minutes, every MP on base will know that two CID agents from Seoul have come to poke into their business.”
“Forget ’em, Ernie,” I told him. “We’ll be operating off base. They won’t bother us.”
“They better not.”
Ernie turned left into a row of angled parking spots. He switched off the ignition, lifted the chain welded to the floorboard, and wound it through the steering wheel. When it was knotted securely, he clicked home the padlock. We hopped out of the jeep and strode toward the pedestrian exit. The same MP glanced at our identification again and stared at us suspiciously, but waved us through.
The dirty neon of Anjong-ri flickered in the overcast afternoon, the village greeting us without emotion, like a sullen victim of domestic abuse.
It wasn’t difficult to find the Yobo Club. We wound around the narrow alleys past the Kisaeng Bar, China Doll Nightclub and Mini Skirt Scotch Corner until we found it. As we pushed through the single wooden door, a bell rang above us. A girl who had been dozing behind the bar sat upright.
The joints in Anjong-ri were much smaller than the spacious nightclubs of Itaewon, which made sense because they were catering to fewer GIs. Only a few hundred soldiers were stationed full-time at Camp Humphries. And Anjong-ri didn’t draw anyone other than GIs. No English language teachers, no tourists, no foreign businessmen, no Peace Corps workers on a Friday night out. What it had was GIs. GIs and business girls. And that was it.
“I love this place,” Ernie said.
Other than the girl behind the bar, the Yobo Club was empty. “You love the Yobo Club,” I asked, “or the whole village?”
“The whole village,” Ernie said, spreading his arms. “It’s so beaten up, so run-down, so depraved.”
“Like you,” I said.
“Like my ping-pong heart.”
We took a seat at a table against the wall. The girl came out from behind the bar. No sense beating around the bush. I asked her if she knew Miss Jo Kyong-ja. She shook her head no. I explained that Miss Jo had left Anjong-ri a few months ago, and the girl said that she’d only been working here a few weeks. She seemed pleased to be speaking Korean to an American, a new experience for her. She told me how difficult it was to understand the English the GIs spoke, so different from what she’d studied in middle school, but apparently the more experienced employees of the Yobo Club had told her she’d pick it up soon enough. She hoped that was true.
Ernie waited patiently while we talked and finally said, “Can a guy get a beer around here?”
The girl didn’t understand, so I translated.
She brought two brown bottles sporting the Oriental Brewery label. When I ordered a glass to go with mine she seemed surprised, but brought it back quickly. It was smudged and dusty, but I’d used worse.