significant exception. As it is well-nigh impossible for a Korean to obtain a passport (the well-wornexcuse offered by the government being the need to conserve foreign exchange, the actual reason being far more complex and steeped in a political paranoia that I will discuss later), it is almost unthinkable for any Korean to travel abroad. (A businessman may, but he is obliged to hand his passport back to the government when he resigns or retires—the privilege of overseas ventures belonging more properly to his company than to him as an individual. Confucian respect for elders, however, allows passports to be kept by people over fifty, and soon, the government promises, by those over forty-five.) So most Korean couples, be they wealthy or working class, have almost no hope of spending their postmarital holiday anywhere abroad—no basking in the Balinese sun for them, unlike their Japanese or Hong Kong counterparts. The only serious trans-ocean adventure open to them is thus a journey to Cheju, the island ‘over there’. And so over there, by the tens of thousands, they flock. The Adirondacks and the Channel Islands may generally prove to be a convenient magnet for the less well-off in the West: Cheju is for everyone, with the entire spectrum of a generation there beginning its first, halting experiments in living and sleeping together.
Seven out of ten of the couples that Lawrence sees in his hotel—he reckons he sees some 36,000 a year (and to gauge the scale of this cottage industry one must note that his is but one of ten first-class honeymoon hotels on Cheju, and there are any number of meaner inns for the Korean Lumpenproletariat )—are brought together by professional matchmakers. Lawrence was not altogether approving. ‘I suppose it’s my hotelier’s greed, really. You see these wretched matchmakers sitting in the hotel coffee shops up in Seoul, with the groom’s family on one side, the bride’s on the other, and no one eating a thing. Oh yes, the matchmaker herself does; she’s not nervous at all. She’ll have chocolate cakes—they’re usually pretty fat, these old Korean women. But everyone else is scared stiff, and if they order one cup of coffee each, for the afternoon, we’re lucky. The young boy and girl probably only have a glass of water. They don’tknow what to say or do. They just sit there, looking at the table, fidgeting, looking at the backs of their hands. I’ve known café managers wanting to tear their hair out on a Saturday afternoon—every table full, seven people to a table, and no one eating anything! The manager’s lucky if he can pay one waitress’s wages for the day. Wretched women. Bane of my life.’
Usually the youngsters meet three times: once in a Seoul (or Pusan or Taegu or Inchon or wherever) coffee shop, for that initial encounter under their parents’ gaze; once at a formal dinner in one of the prospective in-laws’ homes; and once, if they’re particularly bold, on their own at a cinema or in a park or, if she’s lucky to have found a young man rich enough, in the prospective groom’s new car. (By this stage, if the arrangement has ‘taken’, the matchmaker gets her money, invariably from the parents of the bride: 5 million won in many cases—£3,000—and often a great deal more. In weddings arranged among the yangban , those who like to think of themselves as the relics of the Korean nobility, or in weddings where the prospective husband is a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant and is thus an excellent catch, the bride’s parents are commonly supposed to offer him ‘three keys’ as an inducement: a key to a new car, a key to a new apartment, and a key to the new office in which to practise his calling. Finding a suitable husband for your daughter is thus a tall order for even the most fortunate of today’s Koreans.)
The reason is a mathematical consequence of war and of the peculiar marrying habits of the Korean people. There is a custom of sorts
Seven out of ten of the couples that Lawrence sees in his hotel—he reckons he sees some 36,000 a year (and to gauge the scale of this cottage industry one must note that his is but one of ten first-class honeymoon hotels on Cheju, and there are any number of meaner inns for the Korean Lumpenproletariat )—are brought together by professional matchmakers. Lawrence was not altogether approving. ‘I suppose it’s my hotelier’s greed, really. You see these wretched matchmakers sitting in the hotel coffee shops up in Seoul, with the groom’s family on one side, the bride’s on the other, and no one eating a thing. Oh yes, the matchmaker herself does; she’s not nervous at all. She’ll have chocolate cakes—they’re usually pretty fat, these old Korean women. But everyone else is scared stiff, and if they order one cup of coffee each, for the afternoon, we’re lucky. The young boy and girl probably only have a glass of water. They don’tknow what to say or do. They just sit there, looking at the table, fidgeting, looking at the backs of their hands. I’ve known café managers wanting to tear their hair out on a Saturday afternoon—every table full, seven people to a table, and no one eating anything! The manager’s lucky if he can pay one waitress’s wages for the day. Wretched women. Bane of my life.’
Usually the youngsters meet three times: once in a Seoul (or Pusan or Taegu or Inchon or wherever) coffee shop, for that initial encounter under their parents’ gaze; once at a formal dinner in one of the prospective in-laws’ homes; and once, if they’re particularly bold, on their own at a cinema or in a park or, if she’s lucky to have found a young man rich enough, in the prospective groom’s new car. (By this stage, if the arrangement has ‘taken’, the matchmaker gets her money, invariably from the parents of the bride: 5 million won in many cases—£3,000—and often a great deal more. In weddings arranged among the yangban , those who like to think of themselves as the relics of the Korean nobility, or in weddings where the prospective husband is a lawyer or a doctor or an accountant and is thus an excellent catch, the bride’s parents are commonly supposed to offer him ‘three keys’ as an inducement: a key to a new car, a key to a new apartment, and a key to the new office in which to practise his calling. Finding a suitable husband for your daughter is thus a tall order for even the most fortunate of today’s Koreans.)
The reason is a mathematical consequence of war and of the peculiar marrying habits of the Korean people. There is a custom of sorts
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