MERVEILLES2 STACK004

Text :

But the seventh wonder of Korea, more wonderful still than the art of the ginseng gardeners, is the work
of the builders.

It takes fifty years to complete a ginseng plant (five thousand, says the Hsi yu chi) but only five days to
complete a street-five weeks to build a house-five months to transform a neighborhood. Korea grows
like a plant in a movie. It's a phenomenon that surpasses architecture and politics to enter biology.
You can travel without fear across the countryside: if the car is just a little slow, the road will catch up.
Don't reverse too fast after moving ahead: there may be a house behind you. Never retrace by night a path
you followed one week earlier by day. And above all, never rely on landmarks. They get moved.
When there aren't any cranes, they invent them- in sections. When there aren't any trucks, out come the
wheelbarrows, the hods, the boats, the cupped hands, the Marne taxis.
Little Korean inventions like the pedal pump or the string shovel serve to multiply the effort (with a bit of
training you can leave the work to the girls.)
All that in a grand flourish of trophies, red flags, embroidered slogans stretched between two poles, with the International or the Little Red Berries in the loudspeakers, if not the marching song of the People's Army,
which -to a rather bouncy rhythm--is none other than O Tannenbaum...
At nightfall, on the Taedong river bridge, one hears the students' songs fading away as the boat brings them
back to the University after a day on the worksites but the dusk is quicker: it hides them, and their song
disappears some time after they do, like the memory of the dead.

All night long, the aurora borealis of welding torches, spotlights on the cranes, reflections of the moon and
the headlights on the great glassy façades of new buildings- and the coarse chants of the haulers, the porters,
mounting in waves amid the half-sleep of an imaginary Africa shot through with electric flashes.