Through Mud and Myth

By Johanna Alexander, a second year ETA in Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do

The importance of history, they say, is that if we know the mistakes of those who came before us, we can avoid repeating them in the future. I’ll grant them this: it’s good advice if you’re like the people in those histories. The kind of person who could fall prey to petty schemes and deceitful promises.

“Guys, come on now! He’s spreading false prophecies! I’m trying to protect you—clearly,” Poseidon said as he sent two giant serpents to strangle poor Laocoon, who had just warned the Trojans that the horse was a trick. 

“Thanks,” they all replied. What fools. Thanking the god for enabling their impending doom.

Me? I’m nothing like them.

“Thanks,” I said to the woman at the ticket booth. To her left and right sat two more employees, each with the same slicked black hair and pressed, collared uniforms. The three fates making an appearance this early on in my weekend adventure wasn’t surprising; the destiny of a legend was something anybody would want a part in. I pretended not to recognize them, but my blood was boiling in anticipation. What prophecy of greatness did they have in store for me this time?

“The mud is great for your skin,” they said. All three women seemed to speak with one voice. Their eyes glinted through the plexiglass partition, but looked past me as I nodded and left with my friend. My friend, who desperately needed the weekend of rest and relaxation that this festival promised. My friend, who, when I presented the idea to her just yesterday, seemed hesitant that we could succeed on such short notice.

“Last time we didn’t make a plan, it turned out fine right?”

“Please, look who you’re talking to. It will be great!”

We entered the festival, a huge stadium bordered by a fence with only one gate. At the beach behind us, hundreds of oblivious visitors were swimming and laughing in the ocean as their cellphones, shoes and wallets were slowly being washed away by the creeping shoreline. 

We soon found the mud arena and took turns pouring a thick concoction of earth and sea water on each other’s heads. This is what we came here for; I could feel my skin being nourished and rejuvenated. Not a moment after we had returned the ladle to its home in the barrel, we were grabbed by hands belonging to faces we could not see and thrown into a ring of strangers calf-deep in a diluted bath of the healing mud we had just indulged in. A man at the front of the ring blew a whistle, and all hell broke loose. Strange, I thought as my companion and I huddled together for protection. I came to relax like a king, but I’m made to fight like a Spartan? The other revelers at this bacchanal, with faces made anonymous and inhuman by the gray sloppy clay that covered us all, violently slung mud into our eyes, mouth, ears and somehow even in places where the sun rarely shines—though I supposed the mud was good for me in those places too, like they say.

In the few moments I could spare to think during the assault, I began to wonder why—why would this turn of events be happening to me of all people? I had done nothing wrong. I had made no mistakes. I never do! And that’s when it hit me—the thought, along with a well aimed chunk of mud. I must be too perfect. They say every hero has a fatal flaw, and mine was that I had none! I was climbing too close to divinity myself and the gods were threatened. This was their punishment. 

A group of men launched a surprise attack and a shower of mud exploded across my face. Did they know what they were doing? Did they know that this assault was not of their own free will, but simply the hand of my heavenly atonement? Yes, I was having a miserable time. But a hero of my strength, stamina, beauty, cunning and renown (just to name a few) would never be felled by a little teasing from jealous gods who were too cowardly to face me themselves. I lifted my gaze and whispered through the mud in my mouth. “I’ll come out on top. Just you watch.” Crouching shoulder to shoulder with my friend, who was struggling to keep one eye open as witness to our judgment, I decided that I would take their preordained punishment with a smile. My body would be healed and I would feel relaxed—if only to spite them.

As the festival dragged on, my voice grew hoarse with shouts of “Yay! I love mud! I can’t believe how awesome this festival is!” We tried to leave, but we couldn’t seem to make it to the exit gate, always getting mixed up and turned around in the hoards of muddy strangers who smiled and cheered as if this weren’t the first circle of hell itself. I had a thought then, that maybe they were not the executioners as I had previously believed, but the damned themselves, overcompensating just like us with a plastered-on smile and repeating hoorah. I wondered what the sorry lot had done to get here, for they could not have been the envy of the gods as we were. 

In the end—after hours of wrestling our way through ring after ring of muddy hell—we made it out alive. But it seemed our punishment was not yet complete. No, that would have been too quick, too dull for our celestial audience. The sun set as we hailed a taxi, trying to cover up our damp and dirty skin—unacceptable for sitting in someone else’s car—with our damper and dirtier clothes.

“Can you take us to the Saerom 24-hour Jjimjilbang?” Sweating and bathing at a sauna is great for your health, they say. We hoped it would offer us some real rest and relaxation after surmounting our previous trials.

“You’ve got no place to sleep tonight, huh,” our charioteer said. He was right. Everything was filled up. The gods continued to laugh. “Many jjimjilbang had to close these last few years. This is the last one open in Boryeong.” 

See, I thought to myself. This is why they’re after us; who else could have chosen the singular plausible option out of the handfuls of saunas that popped up on the Naver search page? Who else but us? It’s hard being this good.

As we rode through the night, our driver told tales of passengers past: far away visitors, locals, an incident which involved the police and a three hundred thousand won fare. I could tell he loved his stories and he loved that we, his listeners and passengers, had nowhere to escape to. My body began to itch as the mud dried and tightened my skin. I felt the walls of the car begin to close in around me.

“You know, just the other day I gave a ride to some other foreigners. Where were they from again? Turkey? No… Iran? Hmm.”

“Sir, the light is green.”

“Egypt? No no that’s not quite it… Persia? Yeah Persia!” 

“Sir, Persia does not exist anymore.”

“Yeah so these three guys from Persia, of all places, get into my car.”

There were no streetlights on the road where he dropped us off. We descended into a dark building, barely recognizable as a sauna, one flight under the earth. Another great feat to add to my list of heroic achievements: entering (and surely exiting) the underworld with my soul intact. A lone man stood behind a dimly lit counter and asked for 10,000 Korean won to cross the Korean River Styx into the women’s baths. This wasn’t exactly the picture of relaxation and comfort I’d imagined in my triumph at finding this sauna on the map. No matter. I reached out to receive the soft, silken robes I would later adorn my aching shoulders with, and instead received a heap of rust-colored cotton rags with fraying hems and a sagging neckline. Or so they would seem to the mundane eye. I saw them for what they were. Jjimjilbang pajamas—the robes of a king fallen from grace but hoping to be reborn again in greatness, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of a Korean wood-burning sauna.

Finery in hand, we entered the bathing room, ready to free ourselves from our muddy curse. We stripped naked and rushed to the showers, completely exposed to the few other women taking a midnight soak. Their eyes occasionally darted to us, but they were unaware of the trials we had just endured. Eventually the water that ran off our bodies turned clear, but our clothes—our damned, useless clothes that offered no protection from the mud—remained soiled. Of course if I had known the Boryeong mud festival was going to be a revival of Olympic Pankration hand-to-hand, I would have brought my armor. But I suppose it was better that way, for it gave the other mud-slingers a fighting chance against my otherwise indomitable strength.

Again we found ourselves crouched on the ground, shoulder to shoulder, one hand directing the spray of water, the other fussing with our polluted garments. Again we began to feel a holy punishment settle upon our hunched shoulders; no matter how hard we scrubbed and wrung and wrestled the fabric, the mud remained. Forced forever to push the boulder up the hill just for it to roll back down inches before the crest.

From my peripheral I saw a wrinkled hand waving for my attention, thin skin draped loosely over swollen and bent joints. It was a grandma, just as naked as us, and she was smiling, but silent. 

This could go one of two ways, I thought. Either she has recognized us for what we are and is here to assist us on our journey back to glory, or she is a harpy sent to whip us back into submission.

I glanced at my friend, who hastily avoided my gaze. No matter! I was confident that in either case we would come out on top. 

We followed the grandma to her wash station. I was still waiting for her bare feet to grow claws and turn into talons. They did indeed morph as we stood there watching her assemble a makeshift washing machine for some of her own clothes, but where a birdlike talon would have been, I saw instead a hoof. I gasped. Chiron, is that you? It must be! Our very own Chiron, mentor to Achilles, best of the Greeks, and now mentor to me, best of the rest of them. I watched her every move with renewed interest, my companion and I copying them at our own stations. More comfortable and efficient now, our clothes began to look once again as they had that morning. 

After 20 minutes, we declared our work done. Grandma Chiron curled her hand at us once again and we followed her out of the baths and into the locker room. Lesson number two: drying. Taking my dripping shirt from my hand, she rolled it in a towel, threw it on the floor, and gave it a stomp. We began a sort of celebration then; three naked women dancing around this almost empty, windowless, midnight chamber, feet pushing into the laundry, the floor, and rebounding our bodies back into the air. Our stomps echoed like beating drums off the walls, and I began to get lost in a wave of ecstasy. Have we finally proved to the gods that we simply cannot be bested? 

With our clothes hung to dry and our once bare bodies now covered by our unassuming, but not uncomfortable jjimjilbang pajamas, we headed to the communal room and faced our final challenge: a good night’s rest. Other guests in the same pajamas were already lying on thin mats around the room, which was still awash in a harsh white light. There were no beds, no blankets, no pillows save for a very rectangular foam block. We could blend in like this; we looked as they looked, we were doing as they did. I wondered if anyone knew that among them were two kings in disguise. 

The tiles were hard against my spine, but they say sleeping on the floor is good for your back. I clasped my hands together and closed my eyes, as one might do in prayer before sleep. But I did not ask the gods for forgiveness, nor did I apologize for my supposed wrongs, nor did I thank them for that with which I was supposedly blessed. Instead I simply wished them good night and sweet dreams.

We did not sleep well. In the morning, our backs and hips ached and our clothes were still damp and musty with the smell of earth when we changed into them. Our noses were tickled by dried mud, fingernails lined black with the reminder of our run of the gauntlet. 

“You know, in retrospect, that wasn’t too bad, right?” my friend said to me as we trekked back to the bus terminal. 

“Yeah,” I agreed. “And honestly, I’m feeling kind of rested, relaxed and refreshed!” I wasn’t any of those things…

“Must be the mud and the jjimjilbang. You know what they say.”

The importance of history, they say, is that if we know the mistakes of those who came before us, we can avoid repeating them in the future.

“Where should we go next weekend?”

[Featured photo by Gaia Gonzales]