that decrees that a girl should marry a man about four years older than herself, once he has done his compulsory stint with one of the arms of the Korean military. Girls born in the mid-1950s were the first to discover that there was a problem: when it was their turn to marry, in the late 1970s (they were then in their early twenties), they looked around for men who were then in their mid—to late twenties—born, in other words, in 1952 or 1953. But thanks to the travails of the Korean War, almost no children were conceived or born in those years, and the girls in the class of ’56, as it were, found they had to look foryounger men. Like locusts, they descended on men born in 1954 and 1955, meaning that the girls poised for matrimonial bliss in the years below them suffered from what might vulgarly be termed a knock-on effect. There have, in consequence of the war, been many thousands of girls anxiously pursuing a very much reduced pool of men of the desirable age, meaning that, in order to win a traditionally suitable spouse, girls—or, rather, their parents—have to resort to extortion, bribery, and emotional grand larceny on a mighty scale. Hence the matchmakers, and hence the sobering fact that no Korean matchmaker who nailed up her shingle since the Panmunjom cease-fire was signed has ever gone to bed hungry.
The union thus arranged, it has to be sanctified and then consummated. The service in a wedding hall (everything rented by the hour—the wedding dress, the music cassettes, the videotape, the formal Korean hangbok the pair wear for a photograph that is taken against an acrylic painting of a traditional background) is, except for the more devout families, perfunctory and rather mechanical, and it culminates in the pair flying off, with unimaginative inevitability, to Cheju. Once island-bound, they place themselves in the hands of one of a small army of professional icebreakers, like the ever-beaming, ever-genial, and very small Mr Chu, who has worked in Lawrence’s hotel since it opened, and who, when we met, claimed to have been vicariously responsible ‘for the deflowering of more virgins than any man in Asia’.
‘It is a challenge just to get these people to talk to each other. They come down here quite tired, very tense, very shy. But I have worked out a formula, and it seems to produce results.
‘In the spring season we may get two hundred couples down in a night. They’ll be here for two nights, perhaps three if their husbands have very kindly employers. Usually, though, the husband has just finished his military service, and he’s now in his first job and he doesn’t want to spoil his work record. So he’s keen to get back to his desk. It means we don’t have much time.
‘So I get them all down to the disco—they’ll have had notesunder the door telling them when to come down. We give them trays full of trinkets—loving ducks [the Asian equivalent of turtle doves], bath salts, heart-shaped cakes, and small bottles of insam extract, as a bit of a joke for the boys [ insam is better known as ginseng, and the extract, a sweetish red liquid, is said to be heap good magic for a troublesome libido].
‘We play the only games they can all be certain of knowing—the games they played at school. It’s all very nostalgic for them; the men are all about twenty-six or so, the women twenty-two, and they won’t have played the games for ten years or more. But then I introduce slightly erotic forfeits—I get the girl to confess which film star she likes and why, or I get her to massage the boy’s neck, or I get the boy to drink ten sips of soju , so he gets a little drunk, and then I get him to sing Arirang or some song they all know, so they get a bit teary. By midnight they’re all in quite a sentimental mood, and the bolder couples slip away up to their rooms.
‘But there are always the problem cases. There are the girls who fall asleep at the bar because they’ve had such a long day, what
The union thus arranged, it has to be sanctified and then consummated. The service in a wedding hall (everything rented by the hour—the wedding dress, the music cassettes, the videotape, the formal Korean hangbok the pair wear for a photograph that is taken against an acrylic painting of a traditional background) is, except for the more devout families, perfunctory and rather mechanical, and it culminates in the pair flying off, with unimaginative inevitability, to Cheju. Once island-bound, they place themselves in the hands of one of a small army of professional icebreakers, like the ever-beaming, ever-genial, and very small Mr Chu, who has worked in Lawrence’s hotel since it opened, and who, when we met, claimed to have been vicariously responsible ‘for the deflowering of more virgins than any man in Asia’.
‘It is a challenge just to get these people to talk to each other. They come down here quite tired, very tense, very shy. But I have worked out a formula, and it seems to produce results.
‘In the spring season we may get two hundred couples down in a night. They’ll be here for two nights, perhaps three if their husbands have very kindly employers. Usually, though, the husband has just finished his military service, and he’s now in his first job and he doesn’t want to spoil his work record. So he’s keen to get back to his desk. It means we don’t have much time.
‘So I get them all down to the disco—they’ll have had notesunder the door telling them when to come down. We give them trays full of trinkets—loving ducks [the Asian equivalent of turtle doves], bath salts, heart-shaped cakes, and small bottles of insam extract, as a bit of a joke for the boys [ insam is better known as ginseng, and the extract, a sweetish red liquid, is said to be heap good magic for a troublesome libido].
‘We play the only games they can all be certain of knowing—the games they played at school. It’s all very nostalgic for them; the men are all about twenty-six or so, the women twenty-two, and they won’t have played the games for ten years or more. But then I introduce slightly erotic forfeits—I get the girl to confess which film star she likes and why, or I get her to massage the boy’s neck, or I get the boy to drink ten sips of soju , so he gets a little drunk, and then I get him to sing Arirang or some song they all know, so they get a bit teary. By midnight they’re all in quite a sentimental mood, and the bolder couples slip away up to their rooms.
‘But there are always the problem cases. There are the girls who fall asleep at the bar because they’ve had such a long day, what
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