A Night at the Jjimjilbang
By Chloe Sferra, a second year ETA in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do
Mud clogs my nose, seeps into my ears and piles up at the base of my eyes. The chunks of clay and water are thrown at me with no intention except to fly into my mouth and choke me. I can only clear it off long enough to take one more breath before it once again blinds me. I sit huddled in a ball, mud up to my shoulders, and accept this punishment. I’m circled by strangers who happily drown me. They scoop the mud up with their hands and kick it into the air with their feet so it comes down on me like rain. I close one eye, hoping to protect it, and keep the other open as a witness. I dig my fingernails into the clay on the ground, clawing at it, but there is nowhere I can dig to that will offer me an escape. I keep my head down for the sake of survival.
My friend next to me, also huddled in a ball, whispers something to herself. Was it a prayer to get us out of this pit?
When it finally comes to an end, I use my dirt-stained hands to regain my sight, wiping mud away with more mud. I leave the scene hand in hand with the strangers.
This is why we all came here. We came to play in the mud, rolling around like pigs, laughing and choking and whining in it until we rinse it off briefly, only for a moment, before jumping back into the mess.
“They say it’s good for you,” my friend says to me. “The mud of Boryeong has special minerals that help your skin.”
“Who is ‘they’?” I ask.
When my friend suggested attending the Boryeong Mud Festival less than 24 hours ago, I thought she knew something I didn’t. Maybe she has some omnipresent foresight because she swore it would be a great weekend. A weekend full of rest and relaxation, which is the kind we needed.
To the outside eye, the mud festival looks like a playground. It has slides and games, food and beer, spas and yoga rooms. When you are done splashing around in the mud you can run across the street and splash around in the ocean. Through clay, water and salt, you leave cleansed, softened and relaxed. That’s how it’s supposed to go.
When I leave the festival, there are still traces of dirt on me. My bright orange shirt has turned dull, and my white hat has discolored to a grayish brown. It stays under my fingernails, and my hair is stiff from it. There is something else too. I shift a little and can feel it. The dirt has found its way into my mind. It sits there like a lump in my chest. My blood feels clouded.
I first felt this different kind of mud when I returned to my placement in February, picking up right where I left off. But things started to change bit by bit, and I could feel the weight inside me grow. With each person I expected to see now gone, and each experience I thought would be the same now altered, the mass got bigger. These days it is so big that I can recognize it flowing through my veins, thicker than my blood. I hate this feeling. I hate that I don’t know how to get rid of it. I hate that I can’t even name it. All I know is that it feels eerily similar to how this mud feels on my skin. Dry, thick, suffocating. Like the mud, it hides in secret places around my body and won’t go away.
The dirt outside of me and the dirt inside of me. I want to be rid of them both.
“Let’s go to a jjimjilbang,” my friend says. “The cold water pool there is good for you.”
Does she, too, see all my muddiness?
There is only one jjimjilbang in this coastal Korean town. I wonder why the rest have disappeared.
The Korean public bathhouses, known as jjimjilbang, are places meant for healing, cleaning and relaxation. For just a few thousand won, around 10 U.S. dollars, one can have 12 hours of access to a range of experiences. A jjimjilbang relies on traditional Korean medicine techniques to allow each visitor to heal their body. Healing, yes, that is what I need. I follow my confident friend to this magical place.
She tells me all about the jjimjilbang during our long taxi ride. I listen closely, taking her words as gospel.
She rattles off what to expect: karaoke rooms, gaming computers, restaurants. She goes back and forth talking to me and the taxi driver. To me, she mentions the common room where we will sleep in matching pajamas next to more strangers. To the taxi driver, she talks about the other closed-down spas. To me, a description of the must-try sweet rice drink, sikhye. To the taxi driver she gossips about previous passengers he has met. By the sound of it all, maybe a jjimjilbang is exactly the answer I need. The cleanliness I desire must be there. Like a hero searching for hidden treasure at the end of a quest, I will surely find what I am looking for too.
When we arrive, she instructs me on the final expectations from the spa: the segregated bath houses complete with showers, hot tubs, cold pools, saunas and scrubbing stations. Store your items in your designated locker and strip down in the open locker room space before entering the bath house. Then, let the cleaning and healing begin.
Past midnight, the otherwise busy spa is quiet. Some people are already asleep in the common room and the bathhouse is still. We undress and tip toe cautiously from the locker rooms to the showers.
Tonight, in the female-only bath house area, there are just four other people. There is a young girl, maybe in her twenties, soaking in one of three hot tubs. Each hot tub is set to a different temperature. Behind the hot tubs is a dry sauna, a wet sauna and a vacant scrubbing station. It is closed for the night, but tomorrow women will pay a little bit of money and receive a full massage and salt scrub in return. Near a row of sinks, a mom holds the hand of her three-year-old daughter, leading her to a stool and a bucket for her bath. And a few spaces away from me is an older woman, in her late seventies. We all stay in this space naked, sagging with the weight of our bodies. My body, here for the first time, clearly foreign. Their bodies, understanding of this space that belongs to them. I look at them briefly, afraid to invade their privacy. They stare at me boldly.
I start washing myself. I use the shampoo and conditioner we bought for a few coins and the public soap bar offered for free. The water at the bottom of my feet turns brown from the mud, but with each rinse of my hair it slowly clears up.
My friend and I scrub our clothes next. We sit on two stools in front of a row of sinks and throw our shirts, pants, socks and underwear into two large white plastic bowls. With the same bar of soap, we let the water run through the fabric and furiously scrub. Although some brown water flows from the clothes, they still remain quite dirty. I can’t seem to scrub all the mud out. As much as I push and pull the shirt through the soap and water, the dirt is too embedded.
Then her hand waves in front of us. We look up to see the older woman in her seventies motion for us to watch her. She sits on her own stool, with her own white plastic bowl in front of her. Inside her bucket are just a few undergarments. We sit attentively to watch. Without thinking twice about her motions, she shows us what we should be doing. Her plastic bowl sits under a sink faucet. She switches the water on, turning the handle to the coldest temperature. The water flows fast onto the clothes. Then, she brings over a second shower head attached to the sink next to her and places it into her bucket on top of the clothes. She turns this shower head to the hottest temperature and lets the water burst through. A whirlpool forms in her bucket, aggressive and powerful. The hot and cold water fight each other through the fabric. Then she adds to the fight with her soap. She flicks her head up to signal that we should be starting this process with our own buckets. We fumble around to obey her orders.
Continuing to say nothing, our grandmother supervises our work. When she is satisfied with our technique, she sets her own clothes aside and enters the cold pool. It’s time for her to exercise. She kicks her feet back for a few minutes while we attend to the dirt.
The dirt. The dirt that clogs my pores. The dirt that I can’t seem to get rid of no matter how hard I try. The dirt that is not from the special mud that is good for you. But that other dirt. The dirt that lies so deep and whose stain seems everlasting.
I dig my elbows into the soap, scrubbing. If I scrub hard and fast enough, surely the dirt will go away. I push the handles of the sinks to make even more water come out.
This dirt I’ve been scrubbing for so long now yet it still won’t leave me. It stains the good things, dulling them of their brightness and color. The happiness is muddied by it. The clear pictures are foggy. And where did this dirt come from? It won’t tell me. It only hides inside me, escaping the bold view of others.
Scrub. More pressure. More power. Faster. Harder. Again.
Scrub. More pressure. More power. Faster. Harder. Again.
Scrub. More pressure. More po-
A hand is on my shoulder. It’s done, she says only with her smile, don’t work so hard.
Without words, we follow her to the locker room. We pass the 20-year-old girl leaving the hot tub and entering the sauna room. She sweats from the heat. The mom holds a bucket of fresh water over her daughter and slowly dumps it over the 3-year-old’s back. We walk behind our grandmother holding our plastic buckets like ducks in a row, all missing their feathers.
A large, squared, wooden platform sits in the middle of the locker room. Grandmother grabs several towels from a stack, so we grab several towels too. She holds up a single finger. Lay the towel flat on the platform. She holds up two fingers. Place one piece of clothing on the towel. Three fingers, place another towel over it. Four fingers, put it on the floor.
Her five fingers come with her first words.
“밟아.”
Balba. Stomp. She repeats it.
“밟아.”
Balba. Stomp. She points to my feet and says it again.
“밟아.”
Balba. Stomp. Again. And again. And again.
Stomp. Stomp. Stomp.
I repeat it in my head as my feet pick up speed. Faster. Harder. More pressure. More power. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Squeeze until it all seeps out. If I stomp hard enough, maybe the traces left by the dirt will finally fade away. Maybe the vibrant colors will return once the stains are all pushed out. Maybe everything will go back to how it was before the dirt clung to me.
I move on to the next piece of clothing, stomping and stamping. The air is cold against my wet skin, standing with every bit of body jiggling in front of my grandmother. She nods her approval after each movement of my feet. Without any words, I can hear her tell me that it’s okay. I can stomp it all out. So I continue until there’s nothing else this method can do.
We use hangers scattered around the locker room to let the clothes air dry. The rest of the cleansing is left to time. We all change into our matching jjimjilbang pajamas provided to us by the front desk. Once dressed, our grandma looks much younger. Her body is hidden by the red and gray cotton. We thank her. Grandma nods and quietly leaves.
My friend and I lay out on the tan mats in the common room. They are only as thick as several towels stacked together, yet it’s enough to shield us from the stiff floor. Our pillows are just two blocks of a sponge-like material, and we have forgone blankets. We prepare to sleep like this for the night. They say sleeping on the floor is good for you.
In the morning the clothes are dry, but to my disappointment, the effects of the mud are visible. The brightness and shine didn’t return, the colors are still dull. The clothes feel heavier from the mud, and there is still a faint smell that lingers on the fabric. Is there no way to get rid of the dirt completely?
I don’t just want it gone, I want the evidence of it gone too. I want to go back to how I was before it came to me.
“They still look muddy,” I say to my friend.
“You think so? Does it matter?” she replies. “If you never saw the original color, you would never know.”
Does it matter? The dirt is less than what it was before. It will surely return, but I can stomp it out again and again every time it comes back. That’s right, this dirt can’t win against me. And whatever stain that is left behind will become a reminder of each victorious step I took.
I look at my clothes in the mirror. They’re different, but I think I can live with that.
When we leave, the 3-year-old and her mom are still sleeping. The 20-year-old walks into the shower room for a morning scrub. Grandma is nowhere to be found.
We walk toward the bus station, leaving Boryeong behind. Purple flowers guide us over a bridge. Just below is the river of clay that hides the secret healing minerals. Even though I can still feel bits of the mud on me, I don’t rush to shake it off. Instead, I take a clear breath of air and embrace it.
“You know, in retrospect, that wasn’t too bad, right?” I say. My friend agrees with me.
The mud and the jjimjilbang. Did the healing really work? Were they right all along?
We walk slowly along the path, walking toward whatever is next. I touch the flowers along the way and delicately pick out the remaining chunks of mud from under my fingernails, revealing a newer, softer skin.
[Featured photo by Julia Wargo]