This is the third in a series of articles featuring the 10 Most Wonderful Things about Korea.
By Jon Huer
Korea Times Columnist
City folks have their strong points. They are sophisticated, speak English and enjoy foreign wines and coffee.
To foreigners who truly love Korea, the city is not the place where they may find true Korea. For ``true Korea,'' witness to the earthly and heavenly decree that created Korea is found in the country and among country folk.
The modern Korea represented in city life is neither truly ``Korean'' nor truly ``modern,'' while all appearances suggests that it is both.
Everything in the city is a bastardized mishmash of foreign imports made in a hurry and for a short-term effect. Korea's city has no authenticity, as that part of Korea is perhaps false and mostly phony.
The country is where one still feels, sees and discovers true Korea, still preserved and felt. Country folk, mostly agricultural and dairy farmers, still under pressure from city-based absentee owners and land-speculating city slickers, are the keepers and witnesses of the way Korea was and is.
Perhaps ``country life'' and ``country folk'' are more of an image than reality to much of Korea. Highways intrude into farming country, developers eye their next apartment complexes, and country folk themselves break up under import-export vagaries and trade policies and the ensuing hardships of life.
But it is only in the country that old Korea is still found and enjoyed, its very authenticity nowhere else seen.
The world of machines and concrete buildings, alien entertainment and fads, will continue to come and go. But Korean country folk, as long as they survive and exist, will be the living testament to Korea in everyone's nostalgia and longing in the heart.
I would strongly recommend that foreign visitors wander into the Korean countryside, where they will find true Korea and Koreans before they disappear.
Korean Fighting Spirit
The recent celebration of the March 1 Independence Movement Day is merely one example of Korea's most celebrated trait: its irrepressible heart, its fighting spirit, and its rebellious soul. I believe all Koreans are born rebels, fiercely dedicated to their free spirit, and remain so from birth to old age. They fight, they revolt, and they rebel at the slightest grievance or injustice. Sometimes they wait until the situation becomes intolerable. Then they explode.
Often to their regret and frustration, the famous Korean fighting spirit is greatest among those who refuse to accept fate or impossibility.
The Korean heart seethes at what it considers injustice. The Korean spirit rises over and over again from the ashes and often from the dead, and the Korean soul never accepts defeat or domination, at least not for very long.
Korea is the only bona fide former third-world colony that has broken through the ranks of the world's top nations. Koreans themselves often don't realize what they have accomplished.
Still, when they are aroused, when their hearts, spirits and souls rise up to meet the issue, real and imagined, the earth shakes and their foes tremble, for there is nothing quite like the Korean Spirit, which stirs to action to meet its destiny.
This is where the divine and human combine, and Heaven and Earth blur.
jonhuer@hotmail.com
[출처 : 코리아타임스]
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