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
When What Tethers Me Is Gone
By Natalie Kim, a first year ETA in Gongju, Chungcheongnam-do “너의 외할머니가 살아 계셨다면 아마도 너희들이 한국말 잘 할 수 있도록 너희들 한테 한국말 가르치셨을거야.” If your wei-halmeoni were still alive, she would have made sure that her grandchildren spoke Korean. When my mother’s aunt said this, I could feel a pang of emotions. These words unraveled what I already knew but felt painful to admit—that with each generation, my family was getting farther from our Korean culture and roots. As a child, I could only grasp Korea through fleeting instances—traditions of warm tteokguk and bowing to our elders for New Year’s and eating my halmeoni’s seaweed soup for every birthday. It was through my halmeoni’s cooking and her stories that I gained a tangible connection with Korea—her cold naengmyeon in the summers, the sweet spice of gochujang she added to every meal, and the pungent smell of her well-stocked kimchi fridge. Sometimes, while she cooked, she shared bits of her life before moving to America. She spoke of the farm she grew up on, the dishes she learned from her mother, and the origin of her name. I tried to catch these memories to keep them safe, but I knew that even these connections were transitory and already beginning to fade. I began to wonder who would tell my children, “aigoo, yeppuda!” or if they would grow up knowing their favorite Korean foods and associating them with home. I know they won’t see their grandma squatting over a large blue plastic bowl to make kimchi while they eat goldfish, and their grandpa won’t smack them a little too hard on the back in the way that all ajeossi do to show affection. Maybe they won’t even call my parents wei-halmeoni and wei-harabeoji, and maybe they won’t go through a phase of rejecting their Koreanness—hating the smell of H-Mart and the shape of their almond eyes. I wondered what ties to Korea I would pass on. So, at the age of 22, I sought to build my own by moving there. I am a child of Korean immigrants who both moved to America at a young age—my dad before he learned to write his own name in Hangul and my mom before she knew her multiplication tables. This meant that Korean wasn’t spoken in our home, and to me, we were just typical Americans. I took a distorted pride in being so assimilated that I only spoke English, falsely thinking that this would somehow absolve me from being a perpetual foreigner. I didn’t think of myself as different from my white peers, but the words and actions of others told a different story. I was sometimes called “the Chinese girl” at school, asked if I could speak English in the grocery store, and yelled at on the street, “wasabi, wasabi. It means get the f*** out of the way.” As I experienced people’s perceptions and grew older, I realized that everything behind the hyphen in Korean-American was invisible to them. It didn’t matter that I didn’t feel different and that I had only known one country. I grew to understand that a large part of my identity was what the world reflected back to me, and the world was constantly telling me that I was something other than American. I was not expecting an idealized “homecoming” when I moved to Korea. I knew that it would be challenging not knowing the language and that people would still not know how to categorize me. Why does she look Korean, but the sounds coming from her mouth are too sharp and awkward? For an American, she knows how to use chopsticks so well and eat spicy food! I encountered confusion wherever I went, and this constant feeling of displacement left me with a deep sense of loneliness. Before moving to Korea, I didn’t realize that there could be such a physicality to loneliness. It felt like a weighty presence that I carried with me, even when I was surrounded by the new friends I was making and the experiences I was collecting. But in a way, I welcomed it. I had never felt close to my grandparents or really understood my family’s immigration—the language and cultural barriers sometimes felt like an insurmountable chasm. But living in Korea, I was able to understand a small fraction of the emotions and experiences that my family went through to settle in a foreign country. I picture my halmeoni’s face with anger simmering behind her fallen eyes as a woman told her that she smelled like garlic. I picture my uncle, who was raised in America, going back to Korea to be called “foreign pork” by classmates who were too young to understand that their xenophobic words were an insidious gift from the years of conquest and colonization of Korea. I also picture the way that my grandparents’ tongues must have felt heavy with the unfamiliar sounds of a language that wasn’t theirs as they tried to navigate a new terrain. However, just as I began to feel closer to my family, I was reminded of the fragility of it all. One night in June, my phone screen lit up with a call, and in a distant voice my dad told me that my halmeoni was in the hospital. She had fallen down the stairs and had a series of strokes that took away part of who she was. She would forget where she was and what year she was living in, and when she spoke, it didn’t seem like she was all there. I asked my dad how he was processing everything, and he replied that “this person isn’t really her anymore.” That night I cried. I walked in the dark by the river because I couldn’t stand to be alone, and my apartment felt suffocating. I was thousands of miles from the people and places that I called home, and now all I wanted was to be back. This homesickness caught in my
Please Forgive Me
By Teddy Ajluni, a first year ETA in Gwangyang, Jeollanam-do When I first arrived, it was too early to think about leaving. Everything was so new and exciting. You were all so welcoming to me. I was almost surprised at how few problems there were, especially for elementary schoolers like you. Sure, you could get a little chatty here and there, but you still showed a passion for learning—much more than I did at your age—and it gave me the passion to keep teaching. There were few times when I felt bored with my work, and those moments were so few thanks to your energy. I can only hope you felt the same during class, though I know that’s impossible. Having sat in your seat once, I know there were times when you must have been bored. Either way, you were patient with me, just as I was with you. It was all too exciting, too good to be true. Now I’m looking at the prospect right in the face: I have to leave. It’s a little strange thinking about it. I still have some time before I must go, but I know how quickly that will pass. I remember the days when such a span of time would feel like half of my life. I guess it really was half of my life back then. While I’ve known you for almost 10 percent of your life, you’ve only been there for a tiny fraction of mine. The odd part about it is, I know deep inside that it will feel like the other way around. Yes, you’ve only been there for a fraction of my life, but this episode will live with me forever. Meanwhile, while I’ve been there for so much of yours, I will slowly fade away. It might hurt for you at first, but I know what is likely to happen after that. It happened to me too. The portion of your life that I was with you will shrink smaller and smaller until it is almost nothing. I will become nothing but a memory—fuzzy and intangible—slowly morphing here and there in the recesses of your mind until you only recall half of my face or the sound of my name. You might even forget me altogether, and I would not blame you at all. Whether or not you forget me, I have to thank you for something. It’s not the behavior or the positive attitude I mentioned before, though I appreciate all those things. In fact, you might not even remember it, but it was when you answered a question of mine and returned something I didn’t even know I needed. You see, thinking about leaving made me ask why I came here in the first place. What was I seeking? What did I hope to find? There are answers to those questions, but now I know they’re not the right questions to ask. The real question to ask was this: what was I running from? Someone told me once that everyone’s running from something. I wasn’t sure what to think about it at first, but now I know that they’re right. I was running, and I still am. But you answered that question for me. And it wasn’t until you showed me what I was running towards that I found out what I was running from. I still remember the day you helped me discover why I was running. I had to go grocery shopping and I didn’t want to spend too long getting to the bus stop after work. Then a couple of you spotted me. “Do you play PoGo?” Pokémon Go. You said it in Korean, but some of you know as well as I do that the language of the Pokémon Trainer is universal. Despite my lack of language skills, I knew what you meant. I took out my phone and laughed. Of course I played. That game came out when I was in high school. And now, as all my friends seemed to outgrow it, they left me behind, stuck in my augmented reality. As time went on though, even I began to play it less. But it was still there on my phone, right where I left it. So I told you yes, I do play it. I opened the app and showed you. You were all amazed, even though some of you were a higher level than I was and knew much more about the game. It was funny to watch. Of course, I had a lot of the old Pokémon. Maybe that’s why you were so amazed. But you had a lot of the new ones, ones that I’m sad to admit I didn’t even know existed. “Raid,” one of you said, pointing at the virtual map. I looked. There it was. A five-star Raid Boss. Dialga. I hadn’t gotten it yet. Neither had any of you. “Come with us?” one of you asked me. Hearing such a question with such sincerity almost made me laugh. Or did it almost make me cry? I don’t know, but I smiled either way. No one had asked me to play for so long. Without even knowing it, I realized that it was the offer that I’d been waiting to hear for so many years. And now, it was being extended. “Yes!” Almost as if my subconscious were answering for me, I didn’t hesitate. “Let’s go!” You echoed me in excitement. So, we ran together. We ran towards Dialga. And that’s when I knew what I was running towards. Dialga, #483 in the National Pokédex. It’s a Steel/Dragon-type Legendary from Sinnoh. You can catch one, but only one, at Spear Pillar in Pokémon Diamond and Platinum. If you want to get it in Pearl, then you have to trade. In Pokémon Go, it doesn’t work like that. You can catch a lot, as long as you beat them in a Raid Battle first. But most of you already know