Bus stop in Uljin
By Nam Sang-so
Sugok, a farming village in Uljin along the east coast whose name translates to Riverdale, still holds its primeval landscape. The county must be the most isolated region in the country as the majority of the people have not even seen a railroad.
Yet, the beautiful Korean pine trees on the shoreline at some points along the old Route #7 would remind us of the ancient road leading to Rome, dotted with the same pine trees that Gen. Marcus Vinicius rode past on the chariot to meet Emperor Nero in the MGM film “Quo Vadis.”
My father, then 28, and mother, 16, had taken a southbound bus to go to Japan, while my mother's brother, Chang, had taken a northbound bus to go to Manchuria. It was in the summer of 1926.
In 1946, I, 13 years old, came to Riverdale with my parents after the United States defeated Japan in the Pacific War. Fast forward again, on a warm spring day in 1993, a woman in her mid-40s was standing at the door of my house in Seoul when I answered the doorbell. “My name is Chang, your cousin. I came from Shenyang, China,” declared the poorly-dressed woman.
“You live well, and I have lived so poorly in China because my father had taken the northbound bus,” lamented my newfound cousin.
“That's the difference between capitalism and communism,” I said.
Once upon a time in 1853, the U.S. Navy steamed four warships into the bay at Tokyo and threatened to attack Japan if it refused to trade with America. That incident woke up the isolated samurai Japan which smelled the western air, and after being defeated in 1945, Japan had to endure the occupation policies of the United States.
Japan, however, now has become rich and one of the most important allies of the United States. In the meantime, China had lagged behind in modernizing the continent but after Hong Kong was returned to China, it has become an independent state by employing a free market system and the nation has become the second-largest economy in the world.
Twenty-six years have passed since my Chinese cousin's escape to Seoul. She was expensively dressed when she parked her foreign car in front of my house and knocked on my door rather proudly, showing off her wealth gained by running a trading business in Qingdao and Seoul.
“Why don't you drive down to Uljin? The same bus stop which runs southbound and northbound buses only is still there. There you'd know what Quo Vadis meant in 1926 and would mean now,” I said.
The writer (sangsonam@gmail.com
) is a Korean War veteran who had served as civilian engineer for the U.S. Navy in Vietnam for three years in the peak of the Vietnam War.