Anarchy By the Numbers

By Pico Iyer/Seoul

It is the least impersonal of cities. Understatement has no place here. Rather, this is a brawny, rough-and-tumble, rollicking place, animated by the earthy good humor of its Chaucerian folk. Hurly-burly impromptu is the way of Seoul. Round-faced women set up huge speakers on busy street corners, then sit beside them, crooning along to organ music as they entertain themselves. Hypervendors stack up rows of imitation Reeboks on the hoods of cars, using the backseats as storerooms for their goods. A man wanders out onto the sidewalk in his pajamas.

Surprising, perhaps, for the fast-growing modern center of a booming economy. But then Seoul might be best described as high-tech with a human face. Computerized machines give out bus information in the shopping center of Myongdong -- only to be obscured by a million people passing through the narrow streets in a carnival crush each day. Commuters march through the shiny, streamlined passageways of the city hall subway station at rush hour, serenaded by the psychedelic frenzy of the Doors singing Light My Fire. Even the demonstrations that have become the city's most celebrated feature abroad are stylized rites of disorder, public performances in which both sides take time off for lunch and stop fighting for the national anthem. A city like Tokyo is all spotless efficiency, a city like Calcutta all riotous confusion. Seoul, in a sense, is the meeting place of the two, the place where boisterousness collides with planning. Anarchy, you might say, by the numbers.

The first surprise upon landing in this endlessly rebuilt metropolis, 594 years old and as new as just now, is its distinctly human scale. Today roughly a quarter of the republic's 41 million people live in the city whose very name means capital, yet the feel of the place is oddly uncongested. Here is not just another high-rising Asian metropolis, like Hong Kong or Singapore or Taipei, but a compact and manageable place of little lanes and neighborhood stores, of tree-lined streets given a sense of space and rough lyricism by the granite hills that surround them. Nature is more in evidence here than Industry: to go from one downtown hotel to another, one drives around the side of Namsan (South Mountain).

Nor is Seoul, like London or Tokyo, one of those capitals that live behind veils and screens; the city wears its emotions on its streets. Everywhere one is grabbed by shoves and shouts and smells and smiles. Here is a city that does not stand -- or even sit -- on ceremony. The area around the stately old South Gate is a swarm of vendors. Ask a girl for Chanel, and she will produce an elegant package for $100. Protest the price, and she will instantly draw out another box: Shanel -- for less than $6.

Engagement, in fact, is the very essence of Seoul, a vigor and emotionalism that find expression in the fierceness of the city's rites. At the World Evangelical Crusade in the Yoido Plaza last month, half a million Christians gathered round, crying "Allelujah!," their bodies swaying, their faces suffused with joy, tears streaming from their tight-closed eyes. Yet even in their ecstasies, the devotees were model citizens of Seoul: almost no one stood up, lest he obscure another's view.

Seoul is, of course, a city perpetually on alert, many of whose citizens believe themselves at war. Antitank walls line the highway leading out of town to the DMZ, just 35 miles away, and air-raid drills bring the city to a halt on the 15th of each month. Soldiers are everywhere (museums even offer specially priced "soldier" tickets). Yet for all that, the city is much calmer than the choreographed, telegenic demonstrations suggest. For most of the area's residents, the convulsions of the "demo-crazy" students are as remote as South Bronx gangland warfare to a businessman in Manhattan; many, in fact, are concerned not that security will be too lax at the Olympics, but that it will be too inflexibly tight.

Seoul, in short, is a city of "verys," a place of extremes that demands and enforces toughness. In winter it is bitingly cold, with winds blowing down from Siberia; in summer, so hot that some choose to sleep in the streets. Simply negotiating the city is a task that is not for the faint of body. To cross busy roads, pedestrians must clamber up overpasses or, more frequently, descend into underground mazes that seethe with shops and exits. Thus a walk down three city blocks can become a ten-minute expedition that involves 92 steps down and 88 steps up, and leaves one feeling fit enough to enter the 10,000-meter run. Yet always there is an accommodating yin to balance the rigorous yang: Seoul's user-friendly subway is a miracle of swift efficiency.

That kind of surface -- like the banks of vending machines, the glossy coffee shops, the state-of-the-art museum tickets -- gives Seoul at times the look of a rough-and-ready version of Japan. But everything is hotter here; the summers are warmer, the people more hot-blooded, and the local food has a garlicky tang far removed from the cool elegance of sushi. Korean pride is no less full of flavor. One of the most elegant museums in the city, approached through solemn wooden gates, is devoted not to Buddhist statuary, or to modern painting, or even to Korean celadon, but simply to the country's spiciest national treasure: pickled vegetables, or kimchi.

Parts of Seoul, inevitably, feel like suburbs of America. The streets of Itaewon, not far from the Yongsan garrison, are decorated in the U.S. Army- surplus style common to base cities around the world: country-and-western bars called Bonanza and Tennessee, the Las Vegas disco, a spit-and-polish row of Pizza Hut, Pizza Inn and Shakey's. And where there are servicemen, of course, there are service-industry women: in certain hands, Seoul's rowdiness can turn to raunchiness. The body trade flourishes in the G.I. bars of Itaewon, and the city's ubiquitous barbershops have little to do with cutting hair. At Miari Texas (the name for the red-light district in the Miari area) rows upon rows of open-fronted stores, as many as 200 in all, are lined up along a busy main road. All of them are blindingly lighted and decorated in nouveau Vegas style -- frilly pink rooms smothered in mirrors, watercolors, fish tanks and color-coordinated teddy bears. In every one of them, arrayed like bridesmaids in their matching uniforms -- traditional hanbok, wedding gowns, or dresses with the Korean flag stitched into them -- sit ten to 20 young girls, plaintively gazing out into the street for potential customers. This again is Seoul: the ultimate in no-holds-barred convenience shopping.

Other parts of the city are lost in another era, a different world. On the busy thoroughfare of Chongno, kids in FUNKIN' JAMAICA ROOTS T shirts clog the doorways of Dunkin' Donuts and one of Colonel Sanders' outposts. But across the way in Pagoda Park is a scene as quiet as any Song dynasty scroll: call it "Sages Discussing Mortality." Far from the heat and noise, hundreds of old men sit on benches, dignified and serene in their white hats and wispy beards, talking over their walking sticks, fanning themselves in the shade, huddling over games of go. Some -- this being Korea -- are even sitting on the ground and singing a cappella to a rhythm they keep with their clapping hands.

Sometimes the eclecticism that results from all this is simply zany. Filipino minstrels serenade American diners with Jamaican calypso songs at a Mexican restaurant. The Hubba Hubba Photo Studio is just around the corner from the Christian Photo Studio, and both are pretty close to the Bolim Buddhist Department Store. Inside the Tongdaemun baseball stadium, the loudspeakers play Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez; outside, squatting women sell seventh-inning snacks of quails' eggs and dried squid.

Yet all the fury of recent developments seems not to have diminished but only to have added pungency to the city's clangorous mix of order and warmth. Go to the Lotte Department Store any morning 30 minutes before it opens, and you will see a perfect display of Korean ceremoniousness. Workers polish the spaces between shoes. The p.a. system broadcasts an English lesson, and the shopgirls start waving their arms in the unison of official Lotte calisthenics. Then the steel gates on the street draw slowly up -- to the martial strains of the Lotte theme song -- and the workers take up their positions, hands demurely folded in front, carriage solemn and erect. Four women in white hats and gloves and two men in dark suits bow six times, on cue. Finally, another anthem is played, the women bow to the customers, the doors are pulled open -- and half of Seoul crashes into the store, 29 people < squeezed inside a single elevator, crazily dashing toward $700 gray parrots. A subverted demonstration of efficiency, it is, in the end, as much a part of Seoul as the students' efficient demonstrations of subversiveness.