Uiseong, Korea
An introduction to Korea’s most famous garlic town
My first weekend in Uiseong I sat down and did soju shots with an apple farmer, a cow rancher, and an electrician.
If it sounds like the beginning of a joke, you’re close. That moment – such a perfect introduction to life in small-town Korea – marks the beginning of a series of moments that have inspired me to write a profile of my new home.
“Vibrant and hopeful Uiseong,” the town’s motto, is home to 14,000 people. That’s 6,000 households, a third of which are family farms. The town’s nestled in an agricultural valley with the Namdaechun river running through it, and the Gubong-san mountains to the West. It’s about an hour northeast of Daegu and half an hour south of Andong, the two nearest major cities.
The Garlic
The first thing you can’t help but notice when you come to Uiseong is the garlic. It’s everywhere. It’s hanging to dry in big storehouses next to the farms and in town. It’s picked apart and sorted by old Korean women near the market, where it’s also stacked and bundled for shipment in oversized garages.
And it shows up in more unexpected places, too. I’ve seen garlic hanging from apartment windows. The public lampposts have ceramic garlic decorations. There’s a bus stop with a garlic-shaped overhang. A Facebook page for local events even has a cute garlic cartoon character as its profile picture.
So what’s so special about the garlic here?
Sheer quantity, for one. Uiseong produces a lot of garlic and is home to “the nation’s largest garlic market.”
It’s home to a special strain of garlic, too: Uiseong black garlic. Garlic farmers here have perfected a 45-day fermentation process that changes normally-white garlic cloves into a dark black color. The trademarked result, Uiseong black garlic, is the town’s pride and joy. It’s eaten by locals and exported to 20 countries overseas.
Uiseong black garlic has a unique sweet-and-sour taste. “It’s sour but has a strong sweet taste, and it’s easy to enjoy,” one Uiseong resident told a reporter in a special TV segment on the local delicacy.
Garlic is as good as gold here. For Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok), the principal at my school gave me a special Uiseong garlic gift set that included distilled garlic oil and black garlic salt. I remember a teacher saw it in my office and raised her eyebrows. “That’s really expensive,” she said in passing. Garlic gold.
The People
I often joke that there’s no one in Uiseong between the ages of 18 and 65. It’s a joke, but it’s almost too real. In town, I see students running off to the PC rooms or cram schools (hagwons), and I see much older Koreans who look like they were born before the Korean War. Nothing in between.
The older Koreans are active as ever. They walk the streets and hike the mountains. Some lean on canes or strollers to walk. Others roll through town on power scooters, ATVs, and tractors. Most of the walkers have a severe stoop, a product of decades working the fields.
I started chatting with one woman, pictured left, who rides the public buses to get from town to town. We were making small talk, the bus pulled up. The woman walked over – fell face forward into the bus – and proceeded to pull herself up the steps. The fall wasn’t a mistake. She physically cannot walk up the steps, so she’s found a way to crawl into buses.
The next week, the same older woman showed up at my school, walked into my class, and started yelling something in Korean. I had no idea what to do. Thankfully, another teacher came and escorted her out. I found out later that she’d been walking into all the classrooms trying to sell pumpkins.
At the bus stop one day, in my classroom another: In Uiseong, I see the same people around every day, and they show up everywhere.
Chatting with the older Koreans can be a mixed bag. One day I’ll have an amazing conversation with two of them outside a 7/11. Another day a haraboji (elderly man) with four teeth will sit next to me on the bus and lecture me in his incomprehensible Gyeongbuk province dialect.
The other weekend, for example, I started chatting with five old harabojis at a lookout point atop Uiseong’s Gubong-san mountain range. One of them, who said he was 80 years old, mimed a drinking motion with his hands, and the next thing I knew he had pulled out a bottle of soju from his fanny pack and we were drinking.
Two big cups of soju later and the two of us had killed the bottle. It was 3pm on a Saturday.
And it wasn’t even over for him. He ran into the woods to do what I thought was use the bathroom, only to reemerge a second later – with another bottle of soju he had stashed in a bush. I told him I had to go.
The Town
There’s one main street running through Uiseong. When I want to get dinner with my friends Matt and Kevin, two other Americans teaching here, that’s where we meet. (“Let’s just meet on main street.”)
The storefronts on the main street either look like they’re from the ‘80s, or they’ll be new corporate franchises. Convenience store chains, like GS25, and telecom retailers somehow make their way into every corner of Korea; Uiseong’s no exception.
The most prominent buildings in town are churches and love motels. I keep coming back to the juxtaposition of those buildings – one, a haven for the virtuous; the other, a haven for vice – because it says so much about the hypocrisy of rural Korea.
There are 40 churches in Uiseong, according to Naver Maps. That’s a lot of churches for such a small town. The more troubling thing to me is not that there are a lot of churches, but that alongside the churches there are the brothels.
There are 40 churches in Uiseong – and 10 brothels. (I’ve seen more, but only 10 are listed online on Naver.)
The brothels are called dabangs (“coffee shop”) or hyugesils (“resting place”). I’ve never been in one, but from what I’ve gathered young girls serve you coffee (as a front) and perform sexual services. Most of the girls, allegedly, are from Southeast Asia. The actual services happen off-site, either in love motels or in the patron’s apartment. (There are 13 love motels in Uiseong.)
Drivers take the “coffee-delivery” girls to patron’s apartments by car, usually in a small Kia Morning. Whenever I see a small Kia with tinted windows and a young girl in the passenger seat, I know I’m seeing the local sex industry in operation.
One other peculiar thing I’ve noticed, that may be related, is the abundance of barbershops in Uiseong. There are 37 barbershops in town. It always puzzled me why there were so many because whenever I walked by one, people seemed to actually be getting their hair cut. It turns out, though, that barbershops are another common front for sex work in Korea.
Prostitution is technically illegal in Korea, but the industry is alive and well in the countryside.
“Ah, the idyllic small garlic town.”
That’s what a friend of mine said about my being placed in Uiseong. And brothels aside, his comment really does ring true.
Life’s simple here. The air’s cleaner. People friendlier. I started running when I got here and love running out on the farm roads, through the rice and garlic fields and apple orchards. It really is idyllic in so many ways.
There are peculiarities of life in Uiseong that I’ll admit are bizarre, like the halmeoni (elderly woman) who tried selling pumpkins in my class – or even straight up illegal, like the dabangs and hyugesils.
Any time I start to get too weirded out, I remind myself that I came here to experience those peculiarities. To experience life in the Korean countryside. Before this year, I’d been to Korea once before, two years ago, when I studied abroad in Seoul. But I’d never made it outside Korea’s capital city.
I wrote in my Fulbright application that I wanted to live and work in the Idahos of Korea.
And if that means I’m swapping stories over soju with an apple farmer, a cow rancher, and an electrician, I think I’m doing it right.
