My Visit to Bongdong and Samnye, September 9-11, 2022

Determined not to obsess and worry about my ongoing prostate issues, I had a ticket to Jeonju in hand on Friday morning at Express Bus Terminal. The place was packed, as the Chuseok holiday had begun. Since traffic was stop-and-go nearly all the way, more than six hours were needed to cover those 204 kilometers.

Although Jeonju, a place I like very much, was not my destination, I would have spent some time there if my friends Karl and Naomi had been available. I attended their wedding early this year, and she is soon to deliver a baby boy. Family obligations prevented any such meeting.

A tourist information office adjacent to the Jeonju Bus Terminal proved quite helpful. I told the man there of my desire to reach Bongdong, a small town to the north. Simple, he said: Take the 999 bus to Jeonbuk Bank and then catch the 508, 536 or 545 bus. Amid delightful late-summer weather, I did not mind waiting nearly an hour to make the transfer. And what did I see just across the way but the main entrance to Jeonbuk National University! This is the school I had visited in February 1993 to interview Dr. Kim Soo-gon for my book Coming to Texas / International Students at the University of Texas. A big electronic billboard advertised it as the number-one “glocal” university.

The bus taking me from Jeonju to Bongdong was notable in that its Christmas decorations (little Santa Clauses, paper snowflakes, plastic Christmas tree needles, plastic cranberries etc.) were still up. I got off at the bus station, which was in fact no more than a bus stop. I walked hither and thither in search of a hotel, motel or minbak. I asked a lady in a jewelry store, a lady in a clothing store and a group of taxi drivers for assistance. In time, I got a room and moved in. I confess to having no knowledge whatsoever about Bongdong—and just a little about Samnye, which I would visit the following day—before heading down to North Jeolla Province. My time in Bongdong was pleasant and yet not remarkable. If parts of the main street looked distressed, it was no more than what I have seen in dozens of other Korean towns. I noticed an abundance of modern high-rises on the fringes of the city, so Bongdong, despite its agricultural nature, is not lacking in wealth.

My three favorite memories of Bongdong are (1) interacting with a wrinkled old lady who served me cheonggukjang at her restaurant, (2) walking over the bridge spanning the Mangyeong River that Friday night and gazing up at a full moon, and (3) encountering a friendly young man on my one-hour walk the next morning.

I got on a bus going to Samnye—this one minus any Yuletide bric-a-brac—and it took a rather circuitous route. I did not mind, as there are few things I enjoy more than seeing how rural Koreans live. By 12:30 p.m., I had arrived in this city of 17,000 and had a room in the Aria Hotel. At 60,000 won, it was more expensive and fancier than I would have liked, but I was glad to get settled.

While I walked the streets and through the market, and dined at a couple of sikdangs, that was par for the course. Don’t I do that everywhere I go? Far more important was my discovery of the Samnye Culture & Arts Village. Founded in 2013, it consists of a design museum, a visual media art gallery, a carpentry and leather shop, and a book museum. There are four wooden and two unreinforced masonry buildings that look like old-style warehouses. Indeed they are—built in the 1920s by the Japanese to hold vast quantities of rice and other forms of grain harvested by Koreans and sent back to Japan. (Samnye Station was erected [again, labor provided by the natives] nearby to facilitate that process.) The Japanese’ blatant plundering of the fruits of the Honam Plain a century ago really upsets me.

The visual media art gallery had been given over to an exhibit of the works of French painter Henri Matisse (1869–1954). One of the founders of modernism, he had a friendly rivalry with Picasso. I got a tour from Hanna Lim, a young woman employed at the Samnye Culture & Arts Village. She pointed out such masterpieces as Woman with a Hat, The Joy of Life, Nu Bleu, La Danse and L’Atelier Rouge; the title of the exhibit was “Henri’s Atelier.” Hanna was so personable that I gave a signed copy of Travels of an American-Korean (part 2) to her and a Jikji T-shirt to her teenage helper. She told me that a movie would be shown outdoors at 4 p.m., so I returned then. I did not stay for the whole thing, though, as it was some Korean “action” flick and did not have English subtitles. That left plenty of time to explore Samnye, read my book on the history of New York’s Central Park and watch the news about Queen Elizabeth having died.

Intent on avoiding a repeat of that miserable bus ride from Seoul to Jeonju, I purchased a ticket on the train for Sunday. I checked out of my hotel, next door to which was a sex shop presumably for male losers who have trouble relating to women. I stopped at a church where services would later be held. It was empty, so I went on in, bent the knee and donated 10,000 won. The train journey ended at Yongsan Station, which was infested with foreigners. Korea, like it or not—and I emphatically do not—is becoming more “diverse.”