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
Series from the Hwasil, a Room of Flowers and Magic
By Julia Wargo, a second year ETA in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do I Darker, lighter, darker. These are the only words I hear for hours at a time, and I repeat them over and over again to myself. There’s something deeply meditative about that repetition, and about ink wash painting. Ink: solid midnight, ground out of a stick and applied to white hanji paper. Washing: the process of purification. Together, painting purifies me from beginning to end. When I arrive in the studio, I grind the inkstick until my arm is sore, and I am regretting adding too much water to the mixture. Concentrating on making the most concentrated black, one that doesn’t lighten if I leave it out to dry. Then, when the ink is ready, a pool of darkness waiting to be dipped into, my teacher picks up a brush and paints an example. There are no words in this place but those he repeats: darker here and lighter there. Understand? There are no definites, only a maybe. It is turned by necessity into a hesitant, “Yes.” I try to imitate the painting, and in the end when I am done and holding the brush under the faucet, seeing streaks in the water, that unsaid maybe echoes in my mind. II Sometimes I catch myself thinking about more uncertainties. About how 화 (hwa) can mean painting (畵) and sometimes fire (火) and sometimes flower (花). Hwasil literally translates to painting studio, but sometimes I think of this place as a flower studio. There are papers with flowers on them plastered on the walls and on the floor, where I have to step gingerly to avoid them. The only free space is the ceiling, and if flower paintings were to appear there too, I wouldn’t be overly surprised. On rare occasions, other paintings materialize. Sometimes there are neat rows of Chinese characters, or a tiger or dragon. But for the most part, I am learning more words for flowers than I ever knew before in English. The first four types of painting I’ve learned are orchids, bamboo, chrysanthemums and plum blossoms. After you’ve learned them once, you should repeat them over and over, perfecting and adding more strokes, more additions, improving. It’s a progression perfected over centuries, and sometimes I can feel those years echoing deeply when I am attempting to paint. Legacies I can’t live up to, that don’t quite belong to me, but that require respect. I am drawn to other subjects too. The lotus, stretching high out of the pond. The trumpet vine, orange and reaching low, overhanging a wall. Persimmons, plump and ripe. Goldfish in the pond, with slight ripples around them fashioned from the barest hint of ink and water. The sheer variety is overwhelming. To focus on the strength of boulders? Or the delicacy of a vase? When I leave the room, flowers are blooming in my mind and fish swimming through the air around me. The world comes alive and electric to the touch. I carry the painting and the fire and the flower inside me. III Nothing can convince me that this place isn’t some sort of liminal space where anything can happen. It’s a place where there are multitudes of blossoms and multitudes of stories. Many of them spring straight from my teacher’s mind, and his sense of humor sometimes differs from my own. One day, I am painting a bird, and my teacher gestures for me to hold out my hand. When I look inside my palm, there is a detached bird’s leg. With feathers still attached. A mild sense of horror surfaces, which I try to suppress. He’s looking for a reaction and the chance to laugh at my squeamishness. Instead, I just say, “cool,” and chuckle. Is it just a model for drawing a bird? Or something else? The possibilities are endless. The next week, it’s alcohol made from bee larvae on offer, his amused smile just daring me to try it. I can’t quite bring myself to, the murky brown color reminding me a bit too much of river water. Next, his humor lands on frogs as its object of interest. The first image he paints is of two frogs, dancing. It’s left to me to question why. The next image he draws is the same, but a snake appears. I expect danger, not what follows. The snake pours a cup of alcohol for the frogs. And the frogs happily drink themselves into a daze under the gaze of the full moon, painted in a shade between blue and purple and clear water. I ask: why? Why are there frogs, why is there a snake, why is there alcohol, and how did you conjure this from nothing, from a blank page? I don’t get an answer, just a grin and yet another story to live on in my mind. IV There are frequent breaks when my teacher vanishes for indeterminate periods of time to smoke, and the studio suddenly feels more like an average room. Four walls, a roof, air that is too hot in the summer and cold enough to see your own breath in the winter. Sometimes the breaks take five minutes, sometimes I suspect he’s wandered off for a meal or a walk or to the mountain to look for wild ginseng. I am left looking at my brush and paper. This time, when he comes back to the hwasil, he motions for me to follow. We’re on the third floor, and he goes up the stairs. What is beyond this room? What is left but rooftop? Does the magic extend beyond the boundaries of the door and windows? It’s past sunset, and my eyes don’t adjust immediately. I stumble a bit over uneven floorboards. He points at the sky, towards the mountain, and I see a flashing light. Amidst the disorientation, I feel my first burst of certainty in a long while. The magic in the hwasil was carried here to this rooftop and to me by the thread of my teacher’s path upstairs. To this place where there is only darkness punctuated by