Korea Travel: Meeting Mr Kim
Writer Jennifer Barclay Goes to Korea and Learns to Love Kimchi
Sep 6, 2008
There aren't many travel books about Korea. Travel here is still an unusual experience, and it remains one of the most intriguing countries in eastern Asia. Experienced writer and traveler Simon Winchester, whose own book about the country, Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles, first came out in 1988, is generous in his praise for Jennifer Barclay's travel writing debut:
- "It is high time that a new book be written about Korea, and Jennifer Barclay's fresh, amusing and light-hearted take on the country seems to be precisely the right approach."
Yet Jennifer Barclay's energetic account of her travels in Korea didn't happen as a result of a lifelong desire to visit the country, nor from one of those artificial reasons that many travel writers invent as an excuse to go somewhere. It happened, as most things do, by accident.
The author is living in Toronto and about to go traveling when she meets and falls for an Irishman who's a drummer in a band called Good Vibes.
Good Vibes are offered a gig in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seoul, and Jennifer Barclay follows her drummer boy out there. Watching the band playing the same songs every night, in a bar where she can hardly afford to buy a drink, soon loses its appeal, and Barclay starts to explore first the city and then the country. As a tall, white, western woman, speaking hardly any Korean and wearing what, to local eyes, was rather eccentric dress, she does not escape attention. She also receives, eventually, an overwhelming amount of kindness, and if the author comes out of the book well, the Korean people come out of it even better.
The Koreans she meets, while traveling away from Seoul to visit National Parks, Buddhist shrines and temples, beaches and ancient tombs, have a great pride in their country, and act with warmth towards this stranger in their midst. The reader can't help but wonder if a Korean exploring a western country, with little money and only a mangled handle on the language, would be treated in the same manner.
Korean food quickly becomes a recurring theme in the book, as the author is willing to try almost anything. She learns to love the national dish, kimchi, which involves cabbage, chilli, garlic, ginger, spring onions and a Korean fish sauce – she even provides a recipe at the back of the book.
If the author is less good at capturing landscapes in words, she is excellent at painting word portraits of the people she meets, from shy monks to the more extrovert members of Good Vibes. Indeed, the band's dynamics, along with the changing relationship with her boy-friend, give the book a bedrock in reality that most readers will relate to.
If Barclay isn't a Bill Bryson or a Paul Theroux, she's still very much a curious and enthusiastic traveler. She catches well those moments when a traveler has to say goodbye to someone whose life they have shared for a few days, who has invited them into their home and asked for nothing in return – the bitter-sweet moments when you say goodbye to someone you like enormously, knowing your paths will never cross again.
The author invites the reader to share her Korean world for a few hundred pages, and by the end there is that same bitter-sweet feeling: happy to have had the experience, sad that it has to come to an end.
Practical Information
Meeting Mr Kim by Jennifer Barclay is published by Summersdale in the UK at £7.99. See the Summersdale website.
 |
 |
