While riding the bus from Seoul to Gongjiu with my son, to meet OhmyNews reporter Song Sung-young, I was worried about my feet. When you step into a Korean home, you have to take off your shoes. After two days of touring Seoul, ankle-deep in monsoon rain, my shoes had dyed my feet a dark blue, and my toenails a deep black. No amount of soap or scrubbing could rub it off. Plus, I had no dry socks left to hide my shame. What would my Korean hosts think of me? Of French manners?
Besides the feet problem, I was happy and excited. You never know a foreign country until you've shared time with a family in a private home. Song's invitation was a rare catch. We were introduced during an OhmyNews forum in Seoul, after his presentation about being a Korean reporter for OhmyNews. I was attending the forum as a contributing reporter from France. I traveled with my 17-year-old son, to show him the big wide world. And now, we were heading for the real stuff. A day at Song's farm. For us French, he combines a never-heard-of profile. He is a farmer and a citizen reporter (as well as a writer). A farmer? In high-tech Korea? And a citizen reporter? In the rice fields? Very exotic.
At the Gongjiu bus terminal, my son pointed out three computers in the hall. Insert a coin, and you have a broadband connection to the Internet for half an hour. For us French, this is pure science fiction. In France, there is no public Internet access in bus or train stations. Many people still suffer dial-up connections. Korea obviously did a great job of connecting every citizen to the Internet. And that solved part of the riddle: you can be a farmer and a reporter in South Korea, because you can connect to the Internet via broadband everywhere.
Song picked us up at the bus station in a big SUV. Strange. From his presentation, I had gathered he was very environment-conscious and not at all a SUV type. The answer came later. One of his brothers gave him the SUV before taking off to Tibet to become a Buddhist monk.
 | |  Song Sung-young on his farm | | | ©2006 Claire Ulrich | |
After a 20-minute drive in the rain, we turned into a dirt road. His farm lies at the foot of a typical Korean mountain. Typical, for French eyes, means cone-shaped, covered with thick unspoiled woods. The farm is not completely isolated. A few houses nearby provide neighbors. Climb a dirt path and you arrive directly in the farm courtyard, a U-shaped traditional Korean construction. And this is where we met Song's family. His wife, Jung Hea-jung, their two sons, Song In-hiyou and Song In-sang, 11 and 12, and the family cat and dog.
 | | | Song Sung-young, his wife, and two sons | | | ©2006 Claire Ulrich | |
Song is quite intimidating at first. You sense a man who stands his ground very firmly. And he is probably very shy, too. With his wife, you can say we fell right away into a friendship. Petite and fragile looking, I could see in her eyes she had a lot of fun scanning the pair of Westerners who landed from nowhere in her home. She reminds me of a bird, quick, resilient, and always looking for an opportunity to sing and chirp and be happy. She is a lovely soul.
By the open screens (doors?) of the boys' room, I noticed a computer screen. So they had broadband at the farm. Otherwise, they would not bother. And a piano. A piano on a farm? Unheard of. Then came the difficult part: taking off my shoes and showing my blue feet before tucking them under the low kitchen table where lunch awaited us. I stupidly felt I had to make excuses. From my long and rambling explanations no one understood, they probably concluded I had a rare foot disease.
Don't ask me how we managed to communicate during this day at the farm. Body language, a few English words, mimes, drawings on notebooks. We mimed the day through. Jung had a couple of spoons ready on the table, knowing that Westerners have a hard time with chopsticks. I noticed books lining one kitchen wall. The food was delicious, organic of course, fresh from the farm, and strictly vegetarian. The cat hovered around us, mewing desperately. Jung shut him up with a bowl of rice. I exchanged glances with my son. A cat in a vegetarian home? Surviving on organic rice? Terrible karma. Song guessed our concern and mimicked that mice were plenty on his farm, that we shouldn't worry about the cat's karma.
After lunch, Song's wife retired to her studio to prepare for her art lesson. Art lesson? On a farm? We just gaped. Soon, children from nearby houses arrived with books and tools to take their weekly lesson. Born in Busan, Jung is a painter. She showed us a painting inspired by Eastern and Western religions. I think I recognized the Virgin Mary. But I put it down to culture shock and did not investigate it further.
I loved our tour of the fields behind the house with Song, after lunch. I noticed cucumbers and many rows of salads I have never seen in Europe. At the far end of the fields, a dog on a leash stood watch. Apparently, animals from the woods nearby (deer?) dream of lunching every day on vegetables.
 | | | Song Sung-young tends to a pumpkin patch. | | | ©2006 Claire Ulrich | |
The dog's duty is to keep out greedy intruders. Song makes his own compost and carries crops, compost, and tools in a traditional Korean back-sling. No machinery. He rents the land. Ten years ago, when he moved to the country, there wasn't enough money to buy it. And now the price of land around Gongjiu has skyrocketed because Seoul City Hall is going to move its administration department and staff to Gongjiu, where office rent is cheap. This will bring great changes in the county. He has a hothouse, a modern tubular one, in plastic, for delicate plants. It snows every year. I wondered how they all survived, especially the children, in a very frail frame house, open to every wind. And, above all, I wondered what made Song tick.
 | | | Song Sung-young carries compost, tools, and crops with a traditional Korean backsling. | | | ©2006 Claire Ulrich | |
I knew from his presentation during the OhmyNews forum that he fled Seoul and its ultra consumerist lifestyle 10 years ago. He taught himself farming with books, the Internet, and advice from his neighbors. But was it a spiritual quest? A political statement? Had he tapped into a Korean Buddhist tradition of retiring from the maddening crowd? Or was he a lone prophet in a country marching to the sound of mobile phone ring-tones? I was still trying to fill in the blanks about Song. He has no mobile phone, he is a vegetarian, and he meditates. Yet he is very much connected to Korean society through his articles, his books, and his videos. It was difficult to fit him in a French conceptual box. Allow me to explain what "back to the land" means for us French.
In France, where 95 percent of the population used to farm until World War I, country life, its isolation and hardships, is something French people had been trying to escape. Up to 1968. Then, in the aftermath of the student revolution, young students from the cities set up farming and craft communes in poor and deserted parts of France, where rent and food were cheap.
To this day, we call them and the new lifestyle they created "baba cool." "Baba" in reference to their dream of going to India to meet their guru and study Eastern philosophy. "Cool" because it was a very new English word in France, freshly imported from California's flower children, and one they overused.
They created a marginal lifestyle where nature was sanctified, babies were born at home, and pharmaceutics and school education were creations of the devil. Few of those experimental communes survived. Those who stayed on integrated enough capitalism to sell goat cheese or pottery for a small profit.
Recently, another generation of French city escapers have left town to live in the country. They are called "altermondialistes," because they dream of another world. They are a blend of young anarchists, ecologists, and artists. Today, they plot blitz demonstrations against genetically modified crops, drink fair-trade coffee from Venezuelan farmers, and vote for extreme-left parties. They loathe globalization. They survive on social security paychecks. Their devil is called George W. Bush. I am sorry if I sound patronizing. Blame it on my being a 48-year-old who has heard many beautiful speeches, and seen very little accomplished by those communities.
In Korea, I was at a loss for subtitling Song's venture. He was not in the age group where a spell of "back to the roots" is common. And raising a family for 10 years in this frugal way is no small achievement. There seemed to be a coquettish pride in his voice when he said in English, "We are poor." But coquetry does not outlive 10 winters on a farm with no central heating. It was something else, something Korean.
Back at the house, we had tea in the courtyard. Suddenly, we heard the familiar notes of Beethoven's "Letter to Elise." Their eldest son was practicing piano with the very same tune my son had hammered on our Parisian piano. It was eerie, listening to an 11-year-old play the piano while we sipped green tea on a Korean farm thousands of miles from home, with the rain drumming on the roof and scarves of monsoon mist shrouding the mountains tops. Suddenly, Song produced a guitar from nowhere for my son. The children came out to listen to an impromptu flamenco session.
 | | | Ole! My son Lou plays flamenco tunes on a borrowed guitar. | | | ©2006 Claire Ulrich | |
What did they make of this longhaired French teenager, with a ponytail, playing Spanish tunes on the guitar at their Korean farm?
 | | | The audience: the children and a few friends wonder about those strange Westerners at the farm. | | | ©2006 Claire Ulrich | |
This is the sweet side of globalization.
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