I

Korea goes on vacation all at once. During the hottest week of the summer, its factories, schools and major businesses shut down and everyone heads for the beaches, which are as densely packed with roasted bodies as Michelangelo's Last Judgment. Even if you're heading inland, it's a lousy time to travel. The trains are booked solid, the highways are sclerotic, and, well, it's really hot. Given the choice, we would have gone to see Korea at some other time of year. Spring is nice. But we weren't given a choice. Our contractually guaranteed vacation time had long ago evaporated, so this would be our only chance to get out of Seoul and see the rest of the country.

Of course, if you're Korean, then there's some advantage to having everyone go on vacation at once, because it means all your friends can go with you. Like the Japanese, Koreans like to travel in packs. As for us, it meant that our colleague Suky would come along and be our guide and interpreter.

There was plenty about this trip that made us nervous. For one thing, it would mean eating Korean food almost exclusively for a week. It might sound pathetic to fear the local cuisine, but anyone who has traveled in an alien culture will understand just how important it becomes to find meals for which you don't have to brace yourself. Complicating the matter was Suky's tight budget and her insistence that we cook our own meals for the first few days, which meant I was now involved in planning menus and buying the necessary groceries to throw a couple of dinner parties for five people (Suky's husband and nephew were coming, too), all to be prepared on one pan and a portable stove. Then there was our exhaustion with Korea. We knew we ought to go see the country, but we didn't feel any excitement about it. And finally, we were worried that despite our attempts to explain our philosophy of travel — go slowly, absorb the rhythms of a place, linger over details — we would be pushed to see as many discrete, officially sanctioned sights as possible in the least amount of time, which seems to be the tao of Korean tourism.

Our first destination was Gyeongju, the only Korean city I've seen that is actually beautiful. Like every other city in the country, it has a bland downtown of identical groceries and banks and motorcycle shops, and its population is spilling over into soulless beige apartment towers. But large sections of the city still consist traditional houses, their tile roofs sloping in elegant curves over round wooden beams, and someone seems to have given actual thought to the aesthetics of the place, so that even gas stations are given charming tile roofs with dragons on top. And the city is less dense than others, punctuated with large tracts of rice and other crops that shimmered green and buzzed with cicadas. It wasn't Paris or Kathmandu, but at least it felt organic, with a history you could actually see and feel in the landscape and the architecture. Most Korean cities keep what little remains of their past locked away in fenced parks, while everything else looks like it was built as cheaply and quickly as possible since 1970. Which is because it was.

In fact, it's not just the cities but the historical sites themselves that have been built since 1970. A surprising number of Korea's temples and palaces are actually new structures rebuilt to match ancient specifications. Of these, a substantial number were not built to replace structures lost during the Japanese occupation and the war, but to recreate buildings that hadn't existed since the Japanese invasion of 1592.

In many ways Korean culture simply ground to a halt for 370 years or so. The Hideyoshi invasion of 1592 was followed by a vengeful sacking by the Manchus of China; after that Korea closed its doors and kept them shut until they were blown open again in the beginning of the 20th century. Then, of course, Korea fell under Japanese domination, and that was followed by the Korean War and the immediate struggle to rebuild in the aftermath. It wasn't until the 1970s that a modern South Korean state had the wherewithal to think seriously about its heritage and its future.

So far, the two have been kept almost entirely separate. In Europe, it's not surprising to find a Roman ruin next to a Rafael next to a Bernini, or to have an I.M. Pei glass pyramid on the grounds of the Louvre; in Korea, there are some modern buildings that are meant to blend in with the old — the National Museum in Gyeongju is a good example — but for the most part the old buildings and their meticulous reconstructions are kept separate from the modern urban developments, and there is no sense of play between the two. Korea is in desperate need of an architectural movement.

*

It was well after eight when we finally pulled into our hotel. The place was taken over by high school students who were in town for a major taekwondo festival, and the central courtyard resounded to the sound of feet and hands smacking against vinyl punching gloves. As for the rooms, they weren't much. We were in a windowless basement cell with no furniture but a built-in cabinet with a TV on top. Sleeping would be done on blankets on the floor, which is the traditional Korean style. It was a curious feeling to find myself in an Asian hotel for the first time since I left India four years ago, in a room that was spartan in a way you'd simply never find in America. It brought back memories, not all of them pleasant, and I felt a wave of apprehension at the six months of travel we have ahead of us.

The next morning we set out for Bulguksa, which the Lonely Planet calls "the crowning glory of Silla temple architecture." As with everything else in Korea, the original buildings were destroyed by the Japanese in the 1590s; thus, depending on how you look at it, Bulguksa was either built in 528 and expanded in 751, or else it was built between 1970 and 1972. Whatever. It's a marvelous temple complex, each building's eaves a lavish universe of intricately carved and painted interlocking wooden beams. Its exuberance and loveliness far outstrip anything in Seoul, whose Jeoson-dynasty palaces, built during Korea's long isolation, look downright dowdy in comparison.

Hidden in the mountains behind Bulguksa is the small cave temple of Seokguram, home of Korea's most famous Buddha. After the collapse of the Silla dynasty in the ninth century, Seokguram was forgotten, and it was only rediscovered in 1909. The occupying Japanese tried unsuccessfully to steal the Buddha; when they failed, they began a restoration of the temple that destroyed much of it. Fortunately the inner chamber remains, a circular room with a domed ceiling and carvings along the walls. At its center sits the most compelling Buddha I've ever seen, intimately human yet with the sleekness of a Brancusi. I've gotten to know the sculpture from a black-and-white poster I bought at the National Museum in Seoul, and it was curious now to see it in the living yellow sandstone, a touch of long-faded red paint still lingering on the lips. Unfortunately, visitors must view the Buddha from behind a glass wall twenty feet away; the reflecting barrier and the press of tourists filing by managed to make the experience less intimate than simply looking at my poster at home.

*

Monday was hot in that way that makes it impossible to remember what real cold feels like. The thick mists of the day before were gone, replaced by a relentlessly blue sky and air so humid it seemed to have surface tension, clinging to the edges of objects and blurring them.

Suky's husband had left the night before, taking the car with him, so that afternoon we boarded our first bus; our destination was the folk village of Hahoe, but first we would have to stop in Andong, which turned out to be a grim industrial town. By the time we arrived, the last bus for Hahoe was gone. Tired as I was, I hoped this meant we would simply find a hotel nearby, then go into town for dinner and maybe spend some time at an Internet cafe. I'd caught sight of a Pizza Hut and it had set my mouth watering. But Suky's nephew kept accosting strangers until he wrangled a ride from a local who didn't mind driving two hours out of his way for a few strangers.

Hahoe sits in a great bow-curve of a wide river that runs up against rough-surfaced red and brown cliffs on the far side. The village itself consists of tiled and thatched houses — the former for bureaucrats and nobility, the latter for peasants and servants — all kept discretely behind tile-topped mud walls of at least shoulder height. We found our way to a minbak, or homestay, in a beautiful old house that formed a ring around a central courtyard with a wooden platform at its center. Privacy was obviously not a major goal in its construction, as just about every room was linked to the next by a paper-covered wood-frame door. Still, we had our own little room complete with mosquito net and fan, and the halmoni (grandmother) who ran the place was kind enough to lead us to yet another minbak where we could have dinner.

By the time we finished it was dark. Back at our minbak Jenny crawled into bed, but I wasn't yet ready for sleep, so I invited Suky and her nephew out for a walk. We wandered for a while along the dirt paths of the village, then found some rocks by the side of the road and sat down to talk and look at the stars. It was a long time since I'd seen the stars. Despite the orange halo of a nearby street lamp, you could see hundreds of them, even the Milky Way, which the Koreans call the Silver Water River. And there was the Big Dipper, a spoon in Korea as well, not a plow like it is across Russia and much of Europe. Suky asked exactly what a dipper was, and I realized we never use the word except to talk about the stars.

*

Breakfast was enourmous, a flotilla of side-dishes: mini-omelets, whole fish, kimchi, soup, things I couldn't identify. Suky had advised us to "eat breakfast like a farmer, eat lunch like a king, eat dinner like a beggar," and we were certainly on her diet plan this morning.

After breakfast we wandered through the village. We found ourselves in the front yard of a tiled house where an old man in a white T-shirt sat in the main room, whose doors were thrown wide. We weren't sure whether we were invading his privacy — Hahoe might charge an entrance fee, but it's still an actual village where actual people live — but he beckoned to us, so we went up the stairs and joined him. The small room was decorated with gorgeous calligraphy paintings, black ink and red stamps on white paper, and the old man was sitting on the floor creating more of the same. He asked where we were from and we told him: "Miguk saramieyo. We're Americans." He laid down a few quick strokes on a sheet of paper, then explained to Suky that they meant "America and Korea working together as friends," or something to that effect. Then he put his stamps on it, folded it up, gave it to us, and proudly told Suky that normally he sells these things for a hundred dollars.

A little while later Suky's nephew led us to a small museum, a sort of shrine to Hahoe's ancient hero, the commander of the Korean forces that repulsed the Japanese invasion in 1592. There were his armor, his spear, his shoes — he was apparently a very big man — all preserved in glass cases, along with reams of ancient paperwork. The documents of the general's life tell a remarkable story, beginning with his Confucian exams. There the characters are stacked neatly, each one formed with the conscientiousness of a nervous student; later, once the war has begun, his handwriting becomes loose and fluid, the emotions visible in his letters to his wife and family. There are also maps, some of them crudely drawn in the heat of desperate campaigns, showing the lay of the land and the placement of enemy fortresses. And not least are the royal decrees that punctuate the general's life, great broad sheets with five-inch-high calligraphy and the great red stamps of the royal seal. These proclamations rapidly raise the young man to general, then to supreme commander of Korea's forces, and then just as quickly banish him from the royal confidence when he is accused of treachery by two of his soldiers. In the end, several years after the war, the general was exonerated and his rank reinstated, but the intervening years must have been bitter as he watched others receive credit for the victory he orchestrated.

By lunchtime we'd seen what there was to see in Hahoe, and the momentum of this vacation didn't allow for an afternoon spent sitting by a river and staring into space. From the start we'd been dragged about at a furious pace, and by now I was nearing my limit.

We took the three o'clock bus to Andong. The plan was to go to from Andong to a different folk village that was supposedly just like Hahoe except unpopulated. There we would get hotel rooms, leave our bags and return to Andong, then get on another bus to see a Buddhist temple, double back yet again to Andong, and finally take the bus back out to the folk village to sleep, only to leave first thing in the morning. I tried to find out, as politely as possible, why the fuck I would possibly want to drag myself and my backpack to this folk village that we didn't even plan to stay in long enough to see. Weren't we in a folk village this morning, if that's where they wanted to spend the night? Why did we need to go to another one, and haul our bags and ourselves all over the place in the process? And where was dinner in all of this plan?

Jenny and I agreed to be firm this time: we would stay in Andong and have ourselves a Western dinner. We argued that it would save us four bus rides, and Suky relented, but she seemed startled and a little hurt by our insistence. Suky and her nephew didn't want Western food, so Jenny and I had dinner on our own that night. We couldn't find anything better than Pizza Hut, but Pizza Hut was heavenly, and it gave us our first chance in days to spend some time together and really talk. I asked Jenny whether she thought I'd been awful to Suky; I felt like I'd been too demanding and difficult, but I wasn't sure how it looked from the outside.

"You've been hinting at things a lot," Jenny told me, "and then you get frustrated when Suky doesn't pick up on it. But it's really hard for her to pick up on your hints."

It was true. I'd meant to be polite and avoid being pushy, but the result was the opposite of what I intended, because my subtle hints went right past Suky until I got snippy and complained in a way she could understand. The same thing, in fact, had happened back when she and I had worked together on the kindergarten's Winter Festival. I resolved that from now on I would stop hinting and start speaking directly. If I wanted something, I would just say so in the simplest way I could. Sure enough, that was the end of my conflicts with Suky. As an unexpected benefit of this vacation, I'd learned a vital lesson about diplomacy.

*

For reading on the road, I'd brought along An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan, an astonishing book by Jason Elliot. In it he writes:

"In ordinary life you know yourself from your surroundings, which become the measure and the mirror of your thoughts and actions. Remove the familiar and you are left with a stranger, the disembodied voice of one's own self which, robbed of its usual habits, seems barely recognizable. It is all the stronger in an alien culture, and more so when the destination is uncertain. At first this process brings with it a kind of exhilaration ... but once it has run its early course a deeper feeling more like anguish begins to surface, until the foreignness of your surroundings becomes too much to bear."

Compared to Elliot's death-defying ramble into a war zone, of course, my little zig-zag around civilized Korea was about as daring as a trip to the A&P for a pack of Skittles and a jerky stick. But it was also the first time I'd tried to match so closely the rhythms of someone so foreign, which made it in some ways more challenging even than the months I spent traveling alone through India. There I was always master of my own mental space; when India became too much, I could pull back inside myself and feel shitty about everyone and everything around me. Here I was a guest with a guide who was trying very hard to give me the best her country had to offer, and I was obliged to maintain a degree of respect not just for the places I was in, but for the way I was taken to visit them.

Korea is deceptive. After ten months in Seoul, we thought we knew what Korea was about, and much of it felt like a kind of down-market American metropolis, all Internet and karaoke and schmaltzy wedding halls and churches and grotty machine shops, lightened here and there with bits of Chinatown snazz. It's easy to forget how very far away Korea really is from the West — so distant that Marco Polo missed it entirely. It imported most of its culture from China, then closed its doors for hundreds of years. When it was forced open again, it was by the Japan, that other Asian nation that sometimes gets mistaken for a European power. But for all its gun factories, Japan was no more Western than Germany was Indo-Aryan, and it wasn't until after World War II that Korea began its engagement with the West. (To be fair, the missionaries got here back in the 1880s.) A few pop bands and T-shirts and white wedding dresses can make Korea look agreeable to European and American investors, but it's only a costume. I was beginning to realize just how different Korea is from the West once you pull back the veneer.

II

Having finished with our historical tour, we were headed today for Suky's village, a long bus ride from the northeast to the southwest of the country. The aircon was faltering at best, and I was drowsy in the sticky heat, leaning against the window and letting my thoughts wander.

We emerged from the mountains of the Andong region and entered the city of Gumi, a long string of high-tech factories dominated by a Phillips-LG plant large enough to have its own street signs. On one of the buildings was the slogan (in English): "Look at the future." I looked, and it did seem like a kind of progress. This wasn't one of those Chinese cities you think of when you hear the word "globalization," full of choking smoke and exploited workers. The apartment blocks outside each factory were shiny and new and presumably full of all the latest amenities. Still, as in Seoul, I got the sense that this was all a step toward something else — that Korea is unfinished, in transition. For the last four days I'd been following the brown road signs to the reconstructed landmarks of Korea's past, and now one of Korea's corporate giants was exhorting me to look at the future. I felt like Korea was conspiring to keep my gaze from settling on the present. I even began to wonder whether there was such a thing.

*

Suky's family lives in Jeollabuk Province on the southwest coast. Susan, the Korean-American at our school, has declared that she would never marry someone from Jeollabuk-do because they don't have good hygiene, and Suky told us that in old Korean TV shows, bad guys always had Jeollabuk-do accents and good-guys always had Seoul accents, even if they were from the same village. (This pattern changed once Jeollabuk-do's native son, Kim Dae-jung, became president.)

Jeollabuk-do is also the home of pansori, Korea's traditional vocal style, a melodramatic wailing that sounds like flamenco without the guitars. By sheer luck we arrived in the city of Jeongup on the night of its annual free pansori festival.

For once we were hearing traditional Korean music that was being played for a discerning audience of Koreans, not for foreign tourists. The musicianship was of a different order than anything we'd heard in Seoul — like the difference between a jazz band that plays at the Blue Note and a jazz band that plays on a cruise ship. A performance by a percussion ensemble had the syncopated funk and intensity of good Latin jazz, and the drummers' faces glowed with the universal joy of musicians who are in top form and who know they're laying down a righteous groove. They were followed by a pansori singer whose plaintive flourishes and keening high notes brought shouts of enthusiasm from the crowd, like Spaniards shouting "Olé!" She sang four or five songs; at the beginning of each, the gentleman next to me leaned over and explained that in this one she was waiting for her husband, until I began to imagine some poor businessman on the F line in Queens, looking mournfully at his watch as the train ground to yet another halt. Like Ella Fitzgerald, the singer managed to convey the mournfulness of her songs whie still sounding like she was having a marvelous time.

Late that night we finally arrived at Suky's family home, where we were greeted by her 73-year-old mother and her 88-year-old father, as well as by various aunts and uncles who wandered over to take a peak at the foreigners. Suky's mother was clearly the matriarch of the family, directing the flow of traffic, ordering this or that relative to bring us food or drink, laughing gleefully every time we used our bits of Korean politesse. "Kamsa hamnida," we would say — "Thank you." "Ah!" she would shout, eyes glittering. "Kamsa hamnida!" And then she would dissolve into laughter. When she recovered herself, she would put her hands to her face and praise our good looks. When we returned the compliment — she was, indeed, a beautiful old woman, her thick hair still naturally black and pulled into a tight bun, her face remarkably smooth, with only the subtlest of lines to mark years of squinting against snow and sun as she worked the fields — she dissolved again into giggles, flirtatiously hiding her face in her hands. I noticed that they were big, muscular hands, the hands of a farmer; everyone in the family had big hands.

We all sat in the main room, eating watermelon and trading family histories. Suky is the ninth of ten children (the first three were born to her father's first wife, who died in childbirth), and the walls were covered with photos of children and grandchildren, as well as ancestors in black-and-white photos of the sort I'd only seen in documentaries about Asia. On one wall was a plaque that was given to Suky's great-grandfather by the local government to honor his filial piety, which involved sleeping in his father's tomb and not changing out of his mourning clothes for three years. On another there was a row of graduation portraits, and Suky told us that all of the kids had gone to university except her eldest brother, who still lived with his wife in a small second house behind this one. He had arrived to video and audio-tape the evening's proceedings, which was disconcerting at first, but apparently the family had grown used to his curious way of interacting with the world, and soon we did too. (Later we were shown his house, where he told us proudly that he has 500 video tapes and another 500 audio tapes, which comes out to something like 155 days of footage. The next morning we caught him videotaping the bushes.)

Suky was worried that we wouldn't like her home, that it was too rustic and ordinary, what with its outhouse and its cows around the back. But we thought it was wonderful. Shamanistic and Buddhist inscriptions were pasted above the doors like mezuzahs to ward off bad luck, calligraphy paintings hung in the kitchen, all the rooms were furnished beautiful old trunks and cabinets of dark wood and bright brass. Her family, Suky told us, had lived in that place for 380 years, though the house wasn't quite so old. On the floor of our room was a computer; in the main room, the TV sat next to a great big old wooden writing desk with a phone on it. Here the new blended with the old, which blended with the ancient, and I felt at last like I was somewhere real, neither cut off from the past nor frozen in it.

*

We didn't have any set plan for the next day. In the morning we took a short walk around the farmhouse to see the cows in back and the pepper fields in front, where Suky's mother and a half-dozen other old women were already hard at work picking the ripening crops. Suky pointed out a path that she used to have to keep clear of weeds; it was overgrown now.

Then we piled into Suky's brother's battered old car — he filmed us getting in — and headed out to explore. To give Suky a sense of direction, I'd picked a tourist destination almost at random from my guidebook — a temple about two hours away — but what we really wanted to see was just the ordinary life around us. Suky's brother drove us first to the family's rice fields at the edge of town, and again we caught him filming vegetables. He also wrote down the time and location on little slips of paper every time we stopped.

From the rice fields we drove up into the thickly forested mountains to a small temple. Inside the main hall, a monk chanted and rang his bell; a middle-aged woman performed her silent prostrations next to him, and Suky joined her. (Her brother filmed outside.) Jenny and I slipped off our shoes and went inside too, admiring the dragons in the ceiling. Scattered around the grounds were several other small shrines, each decorated with a series of paintings. One series depicted the arhats of the Buddha — his disciples. One clutched a sack of money, another wrestled with a leopard; here an arhat had a stick in his ear and was staring dreamily into space; next to him another was completely absorbed by a mountain of books, and next to him a sad little fellow peered into an empty liquor bottle. And these are the Buddha's very disciples! The Buddhist tradition delights in subverting our preconceived notions; here we were being reminded that every human being no matter how revered, has basically the same set of frailties and distractions. If you feel like a failure because your mind wanders during meditation, just look at what a hash the arhats made of themselves. And if men as crass as that could get it together, then so can you.

Next we went to a set of dolmens, big rocks under which prehistoric Korean chieftains were buried. From there we drove to the rocky coast, where we found an uncrowded beach and climbed out to a pine-covered island that was accessible because of the low tide. Young men in broad-brimmed rice-straw hats fished from the rocks below, and from small dhows on the water, and further out we could se more little islands. Grandmothers dug at the ground with little hooked picks, searching for clams. Cumulus clouds bunched themselves in lines over the ridges just inland.

We stopped for lunch at a seafood restaurant where I tried my new communication method. "Suky," I said, "we like seafood, but we don't like squid or octopus."

"Okay," she said. She ordered us the mixed seafood stew without squid. It was delicious.

When we finally reached Seonunsa Temple that afternoon, it was a little disappointing to be back among the throngs of tourists. The ancient forest and river were gorgeous, but the temple itself was disappointing and we were beginning to feel the heat.

On our way back to the house, we stopped at a sauna. Suky and Jenny went off to the women's side, while Suky's brother declined to join me, so I spent an hour on my own, soaking in the hot water and cleaning away the sweat of the day. The men around me were obviously farmers, their bodies smooth and pale and muscular, the skin turning suddenly red and leathery at their necks and wrists. From Jenny I received a report on the female version of the sauna experience. They get all the squishy babies, she said — the boys don't accompany their fathers until they're a bit older — and also that she saw a lot of naked grandmothers, a genre she describes as "cool-looking."

That night we spent more time with Suky's family, and again I had the sense of being anchored. As the capital, Seoul was pulverized in the Korean War, and it has since faced the most relentless modernization campaigns. Here in Jeollabuk-do, though, far from the seat of power, where the war passed by only briefly, like a brushfire, life stretches back in an unbroken line right into history. It's no small thing to keep your family in one place for 380 years. Three-hundred eighty years ago is about the time that the first permanent European settlements finally took root in North America. Isaac Newton was having good ideas back then; I have no idea where my family might have been. Yet Suky could point to the house where she grew up and know that she was the twelfth generation to live on that land. Here, at last, Korea seemed to cohere. University graduates, video tapes, paper walls, Confucian awards for filial piety all jumbled together in the unruly manner of real life, without signboards to designate it as historical or bulldozers to wipe it away.

Still, as Suky's brother showed us the video he'd made — it was surprisingly good, especially the shots of vegetables, and we were grateful when he gave us a copy — I began to wonder how strong the anchor really was. After all, the children all lived elsewhere now, and who could know whether any of the grandchildren would want to give up city life for labor on the land? The burden of twelve generations behind you is a heavy one, especially when there's a plaque on the wall to honor your great-grandfather's filial piety. For the grandchildren, it might turn out to be a burden they'd rather not carry. For Suky's brother, it had become a kind of sacred duty to record everything in forms that could be passed in case the land was not.

*

The next day was the last of our trip. We would head back to our home in Anyang that afternoon, but first Suky wanted to show us her family shrine. It was a simple wooden building with nothing in it, but once a year, on the anniversary of its construction, they would open its doors and set a feast for their ancestors. Up the hill was her grandmother's tomb, whose location had been selected by a shaman. It was a good resting place, Suky said, because you could see the river from there. Below it were more of the family's rice and pepper and sesame fields; today Suky's brother would go through them spraying pesticides. In the distance I could see more fields, a village or two, the mountains beyond, and running through it all the highway that would carry us back to Seoul.