I've spent my life living on two islands, Ireland and Taiwan. The idea of getting in a car and driving to another country is, pardon the pun, foreign to me. I regard international travel as having to involve either a boat or a plane. It means crossing a sea which defines my home.
Currently I'm living on the Eurasian landmass but I still feel like I'm on an island. As a friend pointed out to me, South Korea is the only continental country in the world out of which it is impossible to drive. The fact of the closed border with North Korea distorts my worldview. I've started to think of China and Russia as over the sea, even though they are part of the same landmass as South Korea. Were this a "normal" peninsula, it would be possible to take a train to Beijing or Vladivostock. But this peninsula is not normal, so the only way to visit these cities is by plane. In spite of being on a continent, I'm still on an island.
It's easy to think in this way as if South Korea was an island off the Cinese coast, as if the North didn't exist. I rarely think about the DPRK, it just doesn't seem relevant to my life. Viewed from afar, there would seem to be every reason to think about the North. The crisis over the communist state's acquisition of nuclear weapons, when viewed from Europe, seems at best worrying, at worst terrifying. It certainly seems like something worth thinking about. But when you're actually here, thirty miles from the border, it doesn't seem like a big deal at all.
The nuclear crisis is not something which either Koreans or foreigners often talk about. The English language papers here make little mention of North Korea, though, to be fair, it can't be the most hospitable country for foreign journalists to work in. I don't know why this is the case. Maybe Koreans are just natural optimists who know that worrying doesn't add a single second to your life. Or maybe the thought of a nuclear attack on Seoul is so terrifying that it's better to blank it out of your mind for the sake of your sanity.
Economically too, the Koreas are on different continents, different planets even. Back in 1962, the South was the sixth poorest country in the world. Now it is one of the world's richest, comparable to Western Europe. South Koreans can expect to live long and helathy lives. They live a life of comfort which their grandparents couldn't comprehend. Meanwhile the North is going backwards, marooned in a 1950s mindset. Just thirty miles away from the world of concrete and neon in which I live, there is another very different world.
In the South food is plentiful and cheap. When you order a meal it comes with so many pan chan (side dishes) that for the sake of your waistline you'd be best not to finish everything you're given. In the North by contrast, millions of people are malnourished and the country is one bad harvest away from another famine.
There is no better place to ponder these things than the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), the narrow strip of land separating the two states. When I visited it last year, I didn't realise what it was. Like most of the foreigners who take the USO tour, I thought of a trip to the DMZ as an anecdote in waiting. "I've been to the last Cold War frontier..." etc. So I saw the world's tallest flagpole, went down a North Korean tunnel and had my picture taken with a very scary looking South Korean soldier in typical tourist fashion.
it was only later I realised that what, for me, was a place to have an interesting day out must be, a very sad place, especially for older Koreans. The DMZ is the symbol of the continuing partition of a country and thus the partition of families. I remember watching TV footage of family reunions in 2000 during the days of "Sunshine Policy". As these elderly relatives, who hadn't seen each other in fifty years, embraced, their crying sounded almost non-human in its intensity.
In their tears they showed that this isn't an island after all.