Market In Seoul

In ruined Seoul last week, TIME Correspondent Tom Lambert found life reasserting itself:

IN the shadow of South Mountain in the eastern section of Seoul, between dusty, windswept Bell Street and the foul creek known as Clean Stream, lies the East Gate Market. Here, in prewar days, was the busiest, most bustling collection of shops in the city. Here a man could buy the rice and vegetables for his family, a housewife could buy a silk jacket.

War came, and the shops crumpled and burned. Shopkeepers buried or carried away their goods. The East Gate Market became an empty wilderness of rubble, galvanized iron and silence. Seoul fell to the Communists, was retaken, fell again, once more was retaken.

A Handful of Beads. Today the East Gate Market is coming to life again. Most shopkeepers have no shops, only boxes and crates or an old army cot on which to display their wares. Some lay their little collections on the ground, brushing away the dust which sifts off Bell Street. They have not much to sell: a handful of amber beads, half a dozen mismated, tinted water tumblers, a tall, slender, gaily painted chalk doll. Some have rice, flour, corn, and cotton cloth. They get the food in devious ways. One said that he had his rice from a Department of Justice employee, another said his came from a South Korean soldier.

The shopkeepers sit hunched on their heels, willing to haggle, but apparently unconcerned about customers. The crowds drift past, slowly, pausing to talk and exclaim and now & then to ask a price. Their money, peeled with deliberation from well-thumbed rolls, or dredged from purses hauled from women's skirt bands, goes mostly to the shopkeepers behind the great shallow straw baskets of grain.

Only those with money get food. The shopkeepers show stony-faced callousness for the blind beggar boy, the orphan girl haltingly thrusting an empty G.I. ration can toward the grain baskets.

The Mournful Wind. All around are the ruins of a once great city: gutted buildings, jagged walls without ceilings, acres of desolation through which the mildest wind blows a mournful plaint. Through the ruins to the East Gate Market come those who try to sell their few belongings to buy food. So, one day this week, came a stooped old man with dull eyes and a wispy beard, dressed in a soiled grey robe and a bedraggled Panama hat. Under his arm he carried a thick, paper-covered Bible, in Korean characters. He asked 3,000 won (50-c- at Army exchange rates) for the Bible. "I have had that Bible for ten years. I don't want to sell it," he said, "but I must sell. I am hungry."

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