There’s a scene in Parasite where fumigators come to the alley where the Kims live, spraying white clouds of insecticide. “Do they still do t hat?” someone asks. It was, among other things, a callback to Bong’s first movie, Barking Dogs Never Bite. In that film, kids ride their bikes in the poison wake of a fumigation truck, and a character disappears in the toxic fog. Those trucks were a real thing, at least in those days.
The unjustly neglected Barking Dogs was the first Korean film I ever saw. It was part of a Korean film festival in New York City in 2001, which I attended so I could learn something, anything, about the country I’d be moving to a couple of months later. No one knew much about Korea then. There wasn’t yet a Korean wave. No one talked about Korean fashion or makeup or hip-hop or dramas. All of that was in the future. But I was pretty sure I’d just seen a great film, and when I moved to Korea, it came back to me again and again. Somehow it captured perfectly the texture of Korean life in those days.
As the Korean wave crested, other films and directors got more notice, especially the brilliant Park Chan-wook. But for all the flash and dazzling weirdness of Oldboy and the rest of his Vengeance series, I was convinced that people were missing out on Korea’s greatest filmmaker. I went to see Bong speak at the Korea Society in New York a few years ago, and he drew a crowd of dozens. He was affable, charming, humble, and quietly very, very smart. Like his movies.
I’m glad that he’s getting the attention he deserves at last, and not for one of his crossover films — his English-speaking characters have always felt wooden to me — but for a movie rooted in the textures of actual Korean life (and starring longtime Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho). It’s a proud moment for Korean cinema and culture, and one that I hope will draw viewers to Bong’s other films, and to the work of other Korean filmmakers and artists.
I’m writing at a difficult moment. Today I woke up to the news that eleven Jews were murdered in Pittsburgh. I want to share this nice, happy thing in my life here in Korea because there is beauty and life in the world and I am committed to enjoying it. My first visit to Korea came less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, and many people asked me whether I still planned to come here and teach English for a year. My answer now was my answer then: as much as possible, I don’t ever want to let terrorists decide for me what to do or how to live.
Busloads of apples
Apple farmers selling their wares at the Yeongju Apple Festival.
Apple farmers line the streets, old ladies with paring knives handing out samples, crates of their wares spread out for sale. Young men with batons direct traffic into special designated parking areas, while bus after bus rumbles in, belching out Korean tour groups led by tinny amplified voices. There’s a stage set up and rows of white plastic chairs, but at noon the Yeongju Apple Festival is still not quite underway.
There are a lot of ways to know you love a person, but one way is when she looks at the Apple Festival, looks at you, and suggests you get out quickly and go somewhere else.
Autumn leaves
We’d come to Yeongju and Buseoksa Temple for the autumn leaves. We drove down on a Friday afternoon of spattering rain and dropping temperatures, crossing the Sobaeksan range in deep fog, but when we arrived at Road to Buseoksa Pension, the stars had come out. We were the only customers at a nearby restaurant, eating a dinner of fish and tofu while the owners and their friends grilled off-the-menu samgyeopsal in the other room.
In the morning we headed up to the temple, which boasts Shilla stone monuments and statuary, a Goryeo wooden building that’s among the oldest still standing in Korea, and spectacular views. It was interesting to see the unusual architecture of the Goryeo main temple hall, which has support structures that are related to, but different from, the typical Joseon Dynasty style you see nearly everywhere in Korea. Because there was so much destruction during the Imjin War in the late 16th century, examples of earlier architecture are rare.
Autumn view from Buseoksa Temple.The main temple hall, which dates back to the Goryeo Dynasty.
Here you can see the unusual support structure, quite different from the usual Joseon style found in most Korean temples.
The main columns have a “belly” shape, widening in the midsection and tapering again at the base.
Shilla stone Buddhas.More lovely fall colors from the temple.
We were lucky to get to the temple early. By the time we were leaving, around lunchtime, the busloads of tourists had turned this quiet autumnal refuge into a circus, or really just a low-grade Korean amusement park without any rides. It was time to get away.
Mountain mushrooms
Not far away, near Punggi, across from the Sosu Seoweon (Confucian academy), we saw a sign for a restaurant and decided to pull in. It was styled like an old hanok, and we were shown to a private room.
As we were entering, I saw — and smelled — a bubbling dish being brought to the next room over, a heady, rich brew of earthy mushrooms. “Whatever that is,” I said, “we’re ordering that.”
Wild mushroom jangol.
We had lucked into the last available seating at Dageum (다금), an apparently famous restaurant about which I can find nothing online. Not long after we arrived, two buses showed up, but with our private room, we hardly noticed the crowds. Each dish is handmade, and the man who runs the place goes out into the mountains to gather the wild ingredients. In the jangol, you could taste and savor each different type of mushroom: this one purple and astringent, that one almost like kelp, another woody and chewy. We had the jangol plus a wild mushroom pancake, plus a bunch of side dishes, all for 40,000 won.
Wild mushrooms gathered from the mountains.
We rounded out the day with a visit to Sosu Seowon, Korea’s oldest Confucian academy. Unlike Buddhism, Confucianism is no longer an active faith, and these places, which were always austere, are now a bit sad too. But the autumn leaves were just as beautiful there, and you could feel some sense of what it must have been like for the scholars to observe the passing of the seasons in this beautiful place dedicated to learning and practicing the virtuous life.
And then we drove home, back to Seoul, through the traffic and the city lights and up into an apartment tower, where we ordered in Chinese food.
