Behind the toilet isn’t usually the best place to look for treasure. But at the Kimnyong Maze Park, a “symbolic hedge maze” located just outside the fishing village of Kimnyong on Jeju’s northeast coast, that’s where you’ll find it. It comes in the form of one Frederic H. Dustin, the seventy-eight-year-old founder and proprietor of the park, who planted the first sapling for the maze with his own hands, and who happens to be the foreigner who’s lived in Korea independently longer than any other — a kind of Ur-waygookin who predates the explosion of the ESL industry by at least a couple decades, and therefore has a lot of interesting stories to share from the time before it was common for white people to enjoy eating fermented cabbage in sour hot pepper-and-fish paste.
Dustin has been living in Korea since 1958, and on Jeju since 1971. He originally came to the country as a clarinetist for a US Army band during the Korean War, and obviously found something to like in the place; after finishing his service, he went home to Washington State to earn the first masters degree in Korean Language and Literature ever awarded in the US, then came back to Korea to stay. Along the way, he’s had a dizzying array of jobs, and played a unique role in shaping little pockets of South Korean industry and enterprise with his resourcefulness, business acumen and strong sense of community. His longest stint was as a professor at Cheju University, where he taught English and tourism for twenty-two years. Perhaps the most fortuitous of his gigs, however, was his stint at the Kanaan Poultry Corporation in the 1960s, importing chickens from the US to strengthen Korea’s poultry industry — a job for which he was awarded the rights to develop the plot of land where the maze park now stands.
“This was all wild grasslands,” Dustin tells me, waving his cigarette around in a flourish, during a lunchtime meeting at his office, a small trailer behind the park washrooms that has the comfy, lived-in feeling of an old rec room. “In 1971, you could sit in this very spot and see the ocean.”
These days, there’s a fair bit of foliage and development between Dustin’s office and the sea, but he still maintains a strong connection to it through his ownership of the Kimnyong sailing club, which gives local kids a shot at manning the jibs and spinnakers and other sailingy things I don’t pretend to understand. The club is only the tip of Dustin’s community-building projects; profits from the park are donated to local tourism and educational initiatives (according to this article on Korea.net, Dustin donates over eight percent of his earnings to charitable endeavours), and he’s constantly trying to find ways to create jobs for Kimnyong locals and make the village’s economy self-sustaining.
His deep, complicated relationship with Jeju is reflected in the maze itself. Designed by Dustin and professional maze maker Adrian Fisher, it is made from 2,232 Leyland Cypress tress, and its shape makes explicit reference to Jeju’s culture and geography. (You can view the maze on Google Earth.) The periphery is shaped like the island and aligned on the same east-west axis, and its inner, arabesque walls form five different symbols of Jeju spiritual traditions and historical flashpoints as they wind towards the centre, where those who find the exit get to run up a cedar-planked boardwalk and ring a silver bell. The park brochures claim only sixty-five per cent of people find the way out, and that for the few dim souls who get stuck in the maze there are rescue crews standing by to help. While I don’t doubt that it happens, it took me just fifteen minutes from start to finish, which I think could have been cut down even further if not for the considerable time I spent blindly running around, pretending my fiancée was a crazed, axe-wielding Jack Nicholson (which is way hotter than it sounds.)
What’s most remarkable about Fred Dustin’s story is realizing how much he’s seen Jeju, and all of Korea, change in the years he’s been here. In his thirty-seven years on the island, he’s watched as Jeju inhabitants’ traditional means of making a living — fishing and farming — have been whittled away by trade, environmental change and shifting lifestyles. Many people who come to Korea to teach have the luxury of disconnect; they don’t invest any time in learning about the country’s language, history or culture, because they don’t have to. It’s a get-in-and-get-out situation, wherein people can more or less ignore their surroundings or a year or two, reaping the benefits of the Korean thirst for English education while pretending the society around them is little more than a giant diorama, something to be peered at occasionally but just as often mocked or casually dismissed over a Happy Meal.
But Dustin is no Korean patriot — he openly admits to complaining a lot about the country. “When Korean people ask me why,” he tells me, “I say, ‘I can leave any time… can you?’” He’s obviously found something in Korea that gives him what he needs, and he’s fiercely dedicated to give something back in return. If it means ruffling a few feathers along the way, so be it. There’s a difference between simple whining, and complaining on someone’s behalf, done with the best intentions. “I think for anyone, especially a foreigner,” he told Korea.net, “being able to demonstrably feel a part of the whole is a most satisfying feeling.”
His efforts are currently focused strongly on his local village. “I think we could make Kimnyong a focal point for tourism on Jeju,” he says, “so people could actually make a living working in the village.” He calls it an “old man’s dream,” but behind his avuncular face and droopy hound dog ears, you can see the nimble, determined dance of a still-fierce contender, the wisdom of a man who knows more about Jeju’s traditional roots than many of the slick-dressed young Koreans who haunt its urban bar districts at night. Forcefully knocking the ashes off his umpteenth smoke, Dustin riffs on his grand vision for melding Jeju’s traditional rituals and routines with a commercial approach that would benefit the lives of islanders.
“Are these traditional forms of livelihood adaptable to modern methods of tourism?” he asks. “We have to be positive and say, yes — how? Like the hae sin jae [traditional ceremony], where they threw a babe into the snake cave. There’s gotta be a way to commercialize that!”
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