Plastic Koreans Ltd.

Korea is the first place I've lived where I feel unusually fat. My curves, which in the UK are considered pretty normal, go unappreciated here, where curvy Koreans are talked about in the staffroom in whispers. I walk into clothes shops and try to anticipate the shopkeeper's sharp intake of breath with a pleading "Foreign size?"

None of my colleagues are overweight - not a single woman out of 30-odd Korean teachers - and many are so tiny I can encircle their upper arms with my thumb and middle finger. It's a reflection of the attitudes of and towards women in Korean society. Apparently, 50% of women have some kind of serious eating disorder, and 78% of women in their 20s and 30s have had plastic surgery - although this includes the relatively minor double eyelid surgery. It's so popular, plastic surgeons operate out of malls in small outlying suburbs of Seoul.

After I found out about the double eyelid procedure (which gives the eye a fold in it), I started looking more closely at all the women I met - and I'm pretty certain that 78% is a fair figure! It's kind of understandable though, once you discover that job application forms include a space for photos (face and full body) and a section where you give details about your weight, blood type and personal home situation.

Now, don't get me wrong. It's not like large Koreans are ostracised from society (I mean, come on, it's not like they're disabled! Now there's a situation I'd hate to be in). You even see them on TV sometimes! Of course, both of them are comedians, but hey - the only disabled person I've ever seen on TV was in an advert for basic human rights.

The desire to be thin and beautiful reaches its withered bulimic tentacles right down into middle school, where my 13 year old female students count calories and carry around pocket mirrors to check their faces during class. Teachers reinforce this, calling up boys to demonstrate "Handsome. More Handsome. Most Handsome." and allowing kids to choose "Sexy Boys" and "Small Faced Girls" as team names. A class I have to teach over this summer pokes fun at people with freckles, buck teeth and moles, and teachers congratulate students on being beautiful. A teacher's comment on a class sheet (usually full of notes on behavioural issues and clinic visits) once read "Pretty girls!" I couldn't resist writing beneath it "Thanks for this helpful piece of information" before returning it to their homeroom teacher. Giving children a sense of self esteem is, of course, important. Basing that self esteem on external beauty (itself based on a damaging perception of what is beautiful) is child abuse.

It's questionable whether Westerners are any better - we're just not as good at reaching the ideal - but on the whole, I think I prefer people pretending they like my sizeable thighs, as opposed to pointing and laughing.

I'll end with a comment from a colleague I luckily found more amusing than offensive. Talking of the differences between Korean and western women, she stepped back and, critically looking me up and down, said "it's because you have such a small face, Emily, that your body looks so big."

Gee. Thanks.

My muddy birthday

Taking a short break before the summer program began at E.V. this week, 15 of us travelled down to the west coast of Korea, Harry The Newbie in tow (what a pleasure, by the way, to have family just down the hallway!) A one-hour bus ride to Seoul and then a 3 hour train ride found us unpacking our bags in a little pension, or minbak, called the Garden Minbak - and it lived up to its name with a profusion of flowers and plants piling up against the walls and in the patio. Harry, Cait and I were sharing a room - a room just big enough for our three mats to be rolled out without actually sleeping on top of each other :) Oh the joys of budget travel! I'd forgotten to warn Harry of the traditional Korean sleeping platform - the floor - and he was looking rather dubious about it all... he didn't have long to think about it though, as the moment we were settled in, our friends arrived from their rooms upstairs and we were off out to investigate the town. It was after 11pm, but you'd never have known it by the number of stores and restaurants still open! And this being a popular seaside area, the restaurants were largely seafood barbecue restaurants, open on one side to the street where they displayed their live wares in gently cooled tanks.

Some of you are aware that I tried to eat snow crabs recently, and failed dismally at the sight of their little claws waving at me and crying "Help! Don't eat me!"... telepathically, obviously; food doesn't talk. But it had the same effect. Anyway, I was still unsure about this freshest of fresh food, and if I had any doubts, the aquarium type displays of octopi, squid, and fascinating fish were enough to put me off trying it again in Boryeong. More on that later...

Onwards we went, walking along the beach (lined with neon signs in true Hermit Kingdom fashion), drinking some kind of alcoholic Liquifruit, watching Harry impress all the girls with his Zimbo bottle-opening skills (not the eye-socket one, though. He's saving that for another time) until we washed up at the main square, open at one end to the beach and an enormous stage. In the centre an even enormouser bouncy-castle-slide loomed over the streets. This being Korea, while the stores and restaurants were open and doing brisk business, the festival was closed for the night, so we wandered about, wondering at the thick gloopy mud that still covered the streets from the day's festivities. Eventually we wound up sitting outside a bottle store, chatting to the multicultural soup that passed us, until the beers ran short and our exhaustion kicked in at 4am.

The next day, after a hearty breakfast of pot noodles, we set off once more for the 20 minute walk to the stage, fighting the gales that were whipping the sea into a dark grey frenzy, and found a few hundred foreigners getting down and dirty with a few brave Koreans (one was our lovely co-teacher, Mina.)

















Boryeong's famous for its healthy mud, a grey, glutinous substance pumped out from the local rice paddies. That mud resulted in a few drunken foreigners descending on the quiet seaside town to wallow in the mud in 1998. Now it's grown to a 9-day festival famous around Asia. Of course, any festival where backpackers and the US military gather to drink and get laid is going to end up pretty dirty, and it's not the clean sort of dirty that we were aiming for. Our friends who came last weekend returned with horror stories of drunken Westerners ripping clothes off women and such things... but apart from a few (weak) lines from US soldiers ("I'm from Mexico. It's more awesome than Zimbabwe 'cause we got guns and jalapenos." "Take me now." Yeah.) the festival seemed pretty cool with a really friendly atmosphere. The main square was awash with mud, and slides and pools had been set up. A "cage" held people while Korean volunteers flung buckets of mud at them, and a looooong queue had formed to climb a bouncy castle and slide down the other side into a pool. One blow-up pool was the scene of a game sure to end in tears - 30 people stand around the edge, and a woman shouts out a number through a megaphone, at which the participants fling themselves at that number of people and try to bring them down... Harry says that in practice, nobody could hear the announcer so it was really just a free-for-all. It was great just giving in and getting really truly all-out filthy!



The gale-force wind with a high chill factor, however, eventually pushed us in the direction of the "Restaurant for Foreigners" where we sat under trees at plastic tables with plates loaded with burgers, chips and pasta. As we bit into our various meals an enormous camera arrived, two reporters and an interpreter in tow. They wanted us to appreciate the food on camera for KBS. Looking down at our very standard festival fare, the bemused expressions were clear. Harry tried his best, although I think his "hunger is the best gravy" line was a little cruel. We were all asked to bite into our food with relish - not hard for me, this being my first real meal all day. Finally, probably because they were fed up with us not playing along well enough, they made us raise our burgers, flash the peace sign, and chant in unison "BORYEONG MUD FESTIVAL IS NUMBER ONE!" Fun times. Luckily they left then, probably to torture some other blonde tourist for some usable lines. I say lucky, because just then I asked Harry to pass me the cigarettes from the mud-encrusted plastic bag we'd been carting around all day, and the reporter had moved it to the end of our line of three tables. As he leant towards it he started to topple and our cries were useless as he grabbed the table nearest him and went crashing down, the tables mere dominoes, earning him the Most Impressive Fall title for the weekend... Poor lad.

By now we were pretty tired and dirty - the "showers" being a large pool where you stood under squirting fountains, knee deep in water washed off the previous showerers. At one end of the festival stood the Boryeong Mud Information Centre, containing a jimjilbang - a Korean spa-slash-public-bath. Lots of people at EV go often to these, a very Korean way of relaxing and getting clean at the same time, but you have to get completely naked, which put me off - I have far too many insecurities to go parading them in front of strangers! But I asked a guide and he said there were so many foreigners that it was ok to wear my bikini inside, so I joined my friends, paid my W3000 (£1.50) and said goodbye to Harry as he went off to the men's section (we'd long since lost the other boys.) Depositing our shoes and bags in a locker at the entrance we went into the lobby of the women's baths - filled with naked bodies of all sizes and conditions, foreign and Korean, young and old. Insecurities started to fade and when Cait and Christa stripped right off, Wallis and I decided that although the bottoms were remaining firmly on our bottoms, the tops of our bikinis could come off. I'm very proud of this moment. The spa area was quite small compared to other jimjilbangs, apparently, but managed to squeeze in lovely hot showers, a fragrant sauna, a salt-water bath, a hot bath, a cold bath, a kids' bath, a mud bath, and buckets of mud you could paint yourself with. It was gorgeous and once I learnt not to accidentally lower my eyes from face level (surprisingly hard!) I started to enjoy it all! We spent nearly two hours just wallowing and chatting. After picking Harry up we decided to head home rather than wasting the feeling of not having mud in our hair and ears. Walking past the main area a guy commented to his friend "Whenever I see a girl like that I just want to run up and give her a big muddy hug" and it took all my forbearance to say "try it, and see how you live without your - ". I'm getting good at this zen thing.

Down the road we ran into our friends and decided to go to one of the seafood restaurants for dinner. These places are literally every second building in Boryeong so it was hard to choose, but we finally picked one and were ushered to a long table along one wall.


The fires under our table were lit and grills placed over the top, and the woman owner brought out a bowl sky-high with various shellfish - clams, oysters, mussels, conches, and a few none of us recognised. Then she expertly picked up a couple of oysters with her tongs and scissors, clipped them open and placed them on the grill, along with a conch or two. Which is when my appetite completely and utterly disappeared: the creature drew back inside the shell as it felt the heat. I turned to my stock favourite - the Korean pancake. The others tried a few, to their credit, but eventually the tubes and tentacles and suckers got to them too.

Thankfully, the lady, hearing our pleas, removed the rest from our table and brought us lots of mussels and clams instead which we laid out in their shells with garlic and chillis, then once they were steeped in spice, put them straight on the iron and grilled to perfection.

Later that night, as monsoon rain caught up with us and drenched the streets, we ventured out to a restaurant close to our minbak and generally disturbed the peace, tucking into huge bowls of steaming noodles and bottles of soju. At about 1am Mina and another friend disappeared for a bit, and came back bearing a cake that shouldn't have been allowed out on its own like that - piled high with cream and berries and filled with chocolate ice cream; Happy Birthday was sung loudly and with gusto and then Andrea demanded I mix my sweet cake with bitter soju before the others (you can see how keen Kyle was, having appeared beside me in these photos from the other end of the table...) could tuck in.


Once the birthday shots were done, everybody grabbed a spoon but it took exactly 0.9 seconds before Kyle smeared somebody with cream and then it was all over - the food fight was on. Cait and I still managed to spoon plenty into our mouths while fending off cream-filled fists though!

When the patience of our neighbours had worn thin, we paid up and left the restaurant - not far though, we walked across the road and down the steps to the beach, where in true Korean style there was a little shelter with a table (and lots of watertubes being stored), so we dumped our stuff there out of the rain while everybody went for a swim (not me - too nervous from South African seas to brave currents at midnight!)

The next day it was up at 9 to catch our train home. The train was amazing - very wide, and each seat had loads of legroom, but I'm not talking about that: I'm talking about the restaurant car, which was half restaurant/kiosk with seats, and half entertainment centre. One side was curtained off into small rooms - a massage chair room and a noraebang (karaoke room), in case you had the urge to sing with your friends on your way to your destination - while the other side had internet-enabled computers and video games! Of course, it filled up very quickly, but for the first part of our journey, what a pleasure to have such timewasters! Don't know why British Rail hasn't picked up on it yet!

There was one more surprise waiting for me when I got home. Leigh had been to Jeju this weekend with Jacquelyne, booking her tickets in a moment of desperation to get out of EV then realising it was my birthday. Cait and I arrived back just after her, and they both turned up in my room with a pile of presents! Topped off with Shabu Shabu that night, what a birthday weekend it's been..... :)

The Art of Korean-ness

On Saturday afternoon last week, Wallis and I took the subway to Gyeongbukgang. We were there to meet up with the Seoul Volunteer Group, a brand-new organisation that enables non-Koreans to volunteer in and around the city. Not quite sure what to expect from our first time, we walked up tree-lined streets to the top of a hill overlooking the palaces of Seoul, to a community centre packed with children swimming and doing fitness skipping classes (no, really). Tucked into one corner was the Gwanghwamun Art Hall, and outside was a group of about 20 foreigners and English-speaking Koreans. Sadly, because of the rain, the disabled children we were there to accompany to the performance were unable to come, and the 5 adults attending would have their own nurses. Surplus to requirements, we were told just to enjoy the performance. So we did just that.

As the lights went down, a single drumbeat rang out from the back of the auditorium, then it was joined by another, and a third, until the rhythm was a complicated heartbeat of sound, and the performers came dancing down the aisles carrying traditional Korean drums. Samul-noli is a traditional artform in Korea, and we were lucky enough to be watching the master, Kim Duk Soo, who brought it back to the limelight in the 1970s. The first part was Harmony of Drums. Three men stood in the semi-darkness, their backs to us, holding sticks at their sides, facing three massive drums suspended from the ceiling. The middle one began with a single, solid beat that reverberated through my heart, so deep was it. Then the other two joined in, and built up to a frenzy of thumping beat, the drummers literally throwing themselves at the drums, and leaping to reach the high edges. Just as I was getting lost in the sound they stopped and the light moved to the five performers sitting at the front of the stage, holding the janggu drum between their feet. A higher flatter sound started, built up to a crescendo with a think stick held in the right hand, and a thicker drumstick in the left which is twirled almost too fast to see, to draw sound from both sides. Finally four women twirled in to the drums - more gong-like - hanging at the sides of the stage, where their performance can't be called mere drumming, but was a mix of dance, song, music and drums, bringing the janggu and buk drums back into the rhythm and ending too fast to tap a hand to! It was amazing - I'm definitely going to try to see a Korean drum performance again!

Another section I loved was the Pansori - storytelling. The storyteller is accompanied by a drummer who encourages her with mmm's and aah's, while she uses a fan to emphasise her story, which is told with song, movement, and poetry-type speech. The story we were told was about a blind man who sells his daughter into prostitution on a ship because a priest tells him if he donates 300 bags of rice to the temple he'll see again - the dutiful daughter tries to raise the money for him, but he still can't see. After throwing herself into the ocean from the ship, she's rescued by the sea king who makes her a queen, and she invites all the blind men in the country to a banquet. The distraught, bereaved father, on realising the queen is his daughter and she's forgiven him, opens his eyes and can see. Then all over the country, while "they were talking, eating, singing, they were farming, working, doing a dump" (hallelujah), blind men opened their eyes to see... A fascinating tale of Korean attitudes to dutiful children in a nutshell.


Afterwards, Wallis and I posed with some of the masked dancers and the other volunteers for a group photo.
















We were taken for dinner afterwards to get to know our fellow volunteers and organisers, and I was seated next to a Polish woman who has been in Korea for 5 years, working for a charity that tries to help North Korean refugees assimilate into South Korean society. I'd already read about the problems the refugees face here so it was fascinating talking to her. Far from sympathising with the problems they've faced in escaping such a tyrannical government, South Koreans see Northerners as being the lowest of the low - even placing them below foreigners on the scale of "people we want to know". It's very sad. On another note, the woman told me that children arriving now, compared to those who escaped 5 years ago, know much more about South Korea and the West from secret radio broadcasts (from Japan and S. Korea) and are better placed to adapt to the sudden change to a capitalist free-for-all - which is kind of a shame, because they aren't even given a chance - they all get dumped in schools especially for them, and never get to meet S. Koreans their own age! Strange when you think that both North and South are part of a racial and linguistic group in a class of its own, and were essentially one nation until just 50 years ago. My students now see N. Korea as a completely different country. So much for the standard line which any questioning draws out from any S. Korean - "All Koreans want reunification"...

I leave you with a pic of the nearby Gyeongbuk Palace at dusk, Mt Bukhan rising in the background. Can't wait to climb it!