“Han, my favourite Korean word, has many implied and specific meanings, but generally speaking, it's a mixture of endurance, yearning, sorrow, regret, bitterness, spite, hatred, and a grim determination to bide your time until revenge can at last be enacted.” This was Anthony Bourdain in Korea, in a story told backwards, Memento-like, from end to beginning.
Not every idea turns out as planned, just as not every well-laid plan goes astray. Every so often, there’s something to be said for going in cold, for not planning at all, especially when coming off a ground-breaking season of Parts Unknown that won several Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award — broadcasting’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, established by the (US) National Association of Broadcasters in 1940 to recognize the best in broadcasting news, entertainment, documentaries, children’s programming, education, interactive programming, and public service.
Public service? Yes, that’s Bourdain.
The Peabody is judged by a select committee of academics and broadcasting historians modelled after the Nobel Prize Committee. It is the Nobel, Academy Award, and Pulitzer Prize all rolled into one, and it goes without saying that it is not given away like candy.
Ambition doesn’t always go before a fall, but it helps.
That must have been what was on Anthony Bourdain and Korea sidekick and segment co-producer Nari Kye’s minds when they broke ground on the opening episode for Parts Unknown’s 5th season, which made its debut on CNN on April 26th, 2015, nearly 10 years ago.
The idea was inspired by — paid homage to, motivated by, stolen from, take your pick — Oppenheimer filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir psychological thriller Memento, made in the year 2000. Memento tells its story in reverse chronological order about a man with short-term memory loss who tracks down his wife’s killer. A story told from end to beginning, in other words. “I” before “E” except after “C,” except when it isn’t.
What if, Bourdain posited, he returned to Korea for another go-round?
Bourdain visited Korea some 10 years earlier for No Reservations, TV cameras in tow, accompanied by Korean-American filmmaker Nari Kye, by then a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and one of the first hires by Parts Unknown production company Zero Point Zero.
Kye, a self-styled “fun-raiser” on a mission to get everyone to fall in love with Korean culture, accompanied Bourdain again, a little older this time, more travelled and less open to suggestion. Kye herself is still active on social media, thanks to Instagram (where she posts as @narzattack) and in YouTube videos like the get-to-know-you introduction video posted by the Council of Korean Americans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzCFFxp224c).
What if, this time, they started at the end, with Bourdain blotto from a week of carousing in his happy place, and ended at the beginning, with Bourdain in the contemplative and reflective mood we’ve all come to know and respect?
Bourdain was smart enough to realize that not every viewer might get jiggy about his telling his story backwards.
In a Q&A after the show aired, Bourdain confessed that he wanted to open the show with the end credits, but CNN wasn’t too keen on the idea, guessing — again, probably with good reason — that fans would think they missed the show and turn to something else to watch.
Even now, years later, Parts Unknown’s Korea gets, um, decidedly mixed notices on chat forums like Reddit, in which one reader chalks it up to Bourdain’s being burned out from one too many frequent flyer miles and someone else remarks, again not without reason, that it’s no fun seeing Bourdain hopped up on hooch, veering from one hallucinatory vision to another, only to end up playing violent video games that don’t look so much like good clean fun as, well, creepy.
So … is Korea worth seeing again, or even a first time, after all these years?
The short answer is yes, and for a simple reason: It’s still Bourdain.
The caustic wit is still there, and so is that life-affirming humanity and insight into the human condition — at least, when he’s sober enough to tell the difference between han, the Korean concept of resentment and feeling the need for revenge, best served cold — or hot, Bourdain doesn’t mind — and jeong, the Korean cultural tradition of loyalty and feeling a strong emotional connection to people and places.
The hour improves as it goes along — well, sure, the story is being told backwards! — and even for those not in on the joke, it always helps when the show-ending summation — the part of the process Bourdain arguably liked the least and wasn’t afraid to say so — sums up the show and does it with the grace, style, and raw emotion we’ve come to accept.
“The past, the present, the future,” Bourdain says toward the program’s end or, rather, make that beginning, “in Korea, they all bleed together. If you’re there for the whole ride, one explains the other. Drop in the middle; it makes no sense at all.”
Not to mention the food.
Korea, Nari Kye will be quick to tell you, is known for unique — some might say eccentric — cuisine, unmistakably Asian but quite unlike anything else in Southeast Asia — or northern Asia, for that matter.
Bourdain noshed on spicy rice cakes and japchae (glass noodles served alongside veggies and beef) at the Gwang Jang Market in Seoul; still-wriggling sea worms, soju, and a bubbling pot of meh oon tang (spicy seafood stew) at the Garak Market at 298 Garak-Dong, Songpa-gu; and, with Nari Kye, Korean fried chicken and beer at Ggu Da Dak on Dhowa-dong, Mapo-gu (yes, these are all real places, and the food is real too).
Yes, much of the program is borderline incoherent — no pun intended regarding borders and conflating the North Korea border and DMZ with fast food and noodles.
That said, there’s much to recommend it, including a seriously weird sequence toward the end — or is it the beginning? — of Bourdain sampling DIY what-the-hell-is-this, surrounded by what looks to outside eyes like a cross between a makeshift TV studio and an underground military bunker.
Bourdain is determined not to allow the ever-present threat of Emperor Flat-Top across the way harsh his buzz, however. Or his wit.
Bourdain on silkworm soup, for example:
“Eating bugs? That is so last network.”
Don’t get him started on the past.
“Last time I was here, I was working for some other channel. The Bacon Channel? The Competitive-Eating Channel? What was that old show called? It was so long ago.”
For some of us, though, not that long ago at all. Some things don’t change. Not really. Korea was cool then, and it’s kind of cool now.
Korea is just cool, period. The southern part, anyway.
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