BATHHOUSE
I used to think doing things for the story was disingenuous, but now I think, what else is there? Identities, whole lives, regrets and aspirations – they’re all stories. And the power of storytelling can be so immense it freaks me out, like recently I was telling Georgia about Ella, my friend from high school who did mirror affirmations every morning, and how back then I found it nuts, and Georgia said, “How’s she doing now?” and I cracked up cos Ella’s the most solid and bright of us all. So, I’ve just started doing mirror affirmations. What you tell yourself can end up becoming your reality. We repeat narratives, try to convince others of their validity. We also subscribe to the same narratives as certain groups, because part of being human is the constant battle between the two piercing desires: to be an individual, and to be a part of something.
I went to the bathhouse three times to write this story. It was below ground, in a quiet, mountainous neighborhood. I paid 7500 won to a man behind a tiny, sliding window – confession booth style – and then walked through a curtain into the changing room. I undressed, slipped the locker key string around my wrist, and slid open the misty glass door. Through the heat and steam I saw people sitting around the tubs, like animals gathered at a watering hole. I was really nervous the first time, but hesitation can mark you as an outsider, so I walked confidently to the showering station, put my soap and towel in a plastic bucket, sat on a low plastic stool, and started washing myself. I made a show of doing it thoroughly, to signal respect and understanding, but it was pretty awkward scrubbing my crack while sitting down, and I wasn’t sure if standing up and doing it was appropriate.
My boyfriend had googled bathhouse etiquette before leaving the Airbnb. I’d laughed but secretly found the information helpful. He read that if you’re not going to wash your hair, you have to tie it up. I’d assumed these things would come back to me naturally, as if it were a birthright, but being in the bathhouse reminded me of when I took him up to the Buddhist temple and suddenly realised I’d forgotten how to pray, that I’d always relied on my mother’s guidance for matters like these. There are things only experience can teach, things I hadn’t learnt enough to have the right to teach.
What I do know is that it’s all about scrubbing. You have to clean your body of grime before joining others in the tub. It’s a secret code, orchestrated through the wordless communication of actions that show a recognition of traditions and social protocols. Through these actions you show that you belong, that you’re willing to uphold certain ideologies. Code-switching is fooling the other party of your knowledge and rights, and I’m pretty good at it, but I must’ve stared around the room a second too long, because a halmoni in a hot tub slapped the water next to her and said, “이리와.”1
I crossed the stone floor and lowered myself into the shallow tub. We were top and tailing, and it made me think of home, of sitting on a wharf at low tide in summer, when the water’s perfectly clear. How the stingrays dart across the sand, unaware of how magnified they appear to the eyes above. I smiled at the halmoni. She eyed me for a long time, and then turned to pull the handle of an industrial ball valve – the kind of mechanism you’d expect to see on a trough on a dairy farm. Hot water rushed in. She pushed and pulled with her hands, mixing the water, and then looked beyond me, to the corner where the scrubbing ajumma was working on someone. She shouted, “다음에 이 아가씨 해요!”2 And then she slid one leg and then another over the low tiled wall, into the next tub, and started doing push-ups, chin craned above the water.
The next day I zoomed my therapist. She asked me if I was having a nice time in Seoul, and I said, “I’m having so much fun”, but then I started crying. It was so on-brand it was embarrassing. I said, “I look Korean, and I am, but there are things I don’t know, and my boyfriend says I look extra muscly here, and my cousins say I have an accent, and I dunno…” My therapist smiled and nodded – she’s Korean living in Aotearoa too. She told me she had a similar experience when she visited after uni. She said, “You’re grieving for your land. For what could’ve been.”
I usually hate it when people say ‘your land’ or ‘your culture’ to me – I guess it’s hardwired that those comments are loaded with aggression – but when Koreans say it, I feel seen. My therapist asked me where the anger comes from. I told her about the time an elderly Korean man yelled at me for drinking in public. He was like, “You think cos you’re hanging out with a white man you’re allowed to act like them? Like you can do whatever you want?”, and it really shocked and confused me.
She told me that when she visited, she cried through her entire holiday, but then she decided to say goodbye to her old self because you can’t reverse time. She told me I might have to say goodbye to my old self too, and I thought, can you do that? Just erase a part of your story? But it sounded good, so I put pen to paper and asked for specific instructions. She said, “You need to embrace your multiple identities” and I asked how, and she said, “You have to love yourself” and I was like okay but how, and she said, “You have to forgive yourself.” I was beginning to tap out of the conversation when she said, “Maybe you can write about it.” I’d never been more bored of this journey.
I looked past the laptop screen, out the window to the big persimmon tree. The orange fruits were sitting like naval boats in formation. A pair of birds flitted around but I didn’t know what kind. They had white bodies and long, light blue tails, like the skirts of hanbok.
A few weeks later we were out drinking, and I told my cousin’s Korean American friend that I cried a lot that first week. She seemed surprised, asked me why. My cousin sighed and said, “She’s just a bit like that.” We laughed and drank more wine cos it’ true.
I felt this at the bathhouse too, when I got scrubbed. The scrubbing ajumma called me up, ushered me onto a table covered in a pink plastic sheet. It reminded me of the time I got a GrabOne deal to get my pussy waxed in someone’s garage. She had put me on a similar table, and I’d stared at the big black rubbish bag of wax strips and pubic hairs, seen my own go into the pile. There had been a similar silence, and I had felt a similar sort of sadness then, too, like a stray dog whining to be patted.
The ajumma folded a hot towel over my eyes. She threw buckets of hot water on me, soaped me up, and then put the scrubbing mitts on. After a minute she guided my hand to my stomach and rubbed it around. “얼만큼 있는지 느껴져?”3 The dead skin was rolled up into spongey, thin chunks. I hadn’t been scrubbed like that since I was a kid, and I suddenly felt like crying. This stranger was moving my limbs around, getting into the creases, seeing every part of my body, and there was no passing comment on weight or skin or tattoos or scars, just caretaking. Her movements were soft but decisive – there was a fluidity. As someone who constantly feels like a robot glitching, I envy and admire those who are like water.
My second and third trips to the bathhouse were more relaxed. I still appeared to stick out, but people were kind and helpful, and I was less sensitive about it. I stopped feeling like I had something to prove. The steam room had a back wall of crystals – rose quartz, amethyst and jade encrusted into white plaster. I sat in there for a long time, the hot vapour pricking my nose, listening to the high-pitched hiss of the twisted steel pipes. Logs of charcoal and pine, and slabs of marble lay in a pile in the corner, adding some goodness to the air, which I couldn’t see but wanted to believe in.
It reminded me of the first time I joined Les Mills, how for months I couldn’t step into the sauna. I loved pool saunas but couldn’t wrap my head around this new flow of activities. Did you exercise, shower, and then go into the sauna? And then shower again? Did you wear togs? Just a towel? I had to discreetly watch and learn, consider things in steps and memorise them.
Being more relaxed at the bathhouse, I was able to observe more. I’d thought the walls were old brick painted white, but one day I sat in the cold pool, staring at the glistening lumpy surface. It was so beautiful I was overcome with a desire to touch it, but when I shot out my hand, the wall was just some spongey material glued on. Faux brick. It made me laugh. The large stone frog at the entrance had a cute jade tongue poking out. The shower hoses looked like giant coin-operated phones. The condensation on the ceiling blobbed like tiny bean bags. Things became commonplace; I was able to be more generous.
It was my first time going to Korea for fun, for a holiday of my choosing, not for sad, family-related reasons. It was also my first time taking someone – planning, navigating, translating. And it was such a nourishing experience that I became weirdly patriotic. My boyfriend made fun of me, but by the second week he said he wanted to buy the new Samsung.
It made me think of love and loyalty, and how sometimes it’s more of an idea, something we act out – a ritual. Family’s a great example. With anyone else, if you don’t like them, you leave them. But with family, if you don’t like them you say, “but I love them.” The elders in our family have beef – that’s a known fact – and us kids have been told different stories, binding us in loyalty to our own storyteller. But part of growing up is being able to hold conflicting information in your hands and making peace with ambiguity. So one night, when I was nearing blind on soju, my cousin put me on the phone to our big aunt, and a few days later I found myself on a five-hour bus ride to a remote coastal town to stay with her. It was the first time I’d hung out with her like that, and I had an unexpectedly nice time, which went against my prior beliefs, and my loyalty to my mum. Those conflicting feelings wore me out. Was I so pathetic that I was willing to undergo massive cognitive dissonance to form a relationship with an aunt who’d been a minor character until now? Or did we deserve to get to know each other, as aunt and niece, as adults? Had I been upset about things that didn’t have anything to do with me? I felt even more confused when she told me she loved me. I thought, how can that be true when she barely knows me? But when she said it, I felt tears well up, and that wasn’t nothing.
One of my favourite activities on our trip was the visits to the museums. We learnt about Hangul, the Korean alphabet, and it reinforced my belief in the power of communication. Language informs the way a person sees the world, and if you speak more than one language maybe it’s akin to having synaesthesia or something. Back in the day, the Korean language was written in Hanja, old Chinese characters. But the written symbols didn’t match the sounds, and it was difficult to learn, so it was only the royals and intellectuals who could read and write. In 1443 King Sejong created Hangul for the proletariat, for the people. It’s a brilliantly coded system that’s designed to be easy to learn, and intuitive. He wanted everyone to be able to communicate, to learn. But long story short, the ones who liked having the power wanted to keep the plebs out, so it wasn’t until 1894 that Hangul became the official script of Korea. But 16 years later Japan invaded and colonised, tried to wipe out the national identity, stamp out the language. There were groups of Koreans who worked in stealth mode to continue researching, teaching, and preserving the Korean language. They knew that to keep a language alive was to keep a culture alive – and of course, the colonisers knew that too. I think Koreans and Māori have a lot in common aye.
I had three more therapy sessions in Korea. We talked about shame – how it’s sticky and heavy. I told her how shit I feel for having tried to be white for so much of my life, that my priorities had been fucked. She said, “Maybe you were just trying to survive”, which seemed too kind. She said, “You don’t have to be a master, you can just be on the journey.” Platitudes make me cry. We talked about the unfathomable consequences seemingly random decisions can have, and how they can be felt for generations. I told her I worry I’m always making the wrong decisions, and she said, “Maybe if you stuck to one decision and saw it through, it would become the right decision.”
On our second to last night, I woke to a mosquito buzzing in my ear. I jumped up, waking my boyfriend. The whine of the mozzie was gone, but now I could hear wings beating against my right eardrum. Panicked, I yelled at him to please do something. He lay me on my side and poured water into the ear, but the noises only got louder. After a few goes with the water bottle he seemed unconvinced. Maybe something had been in there, but surely it couldn’t still be moving around. I began doubting myself too – it did sound like being underwater, it was probably just the water residue sloshing around. I went back to sleep, but a few hours later I woke to more frantic thumping. Now I was certain. It made me feel so gross, but I tried to stay calm. Google said to suffocate it with oil first. It said to leave the oil in the ear for ten minutes, to kill any potential larvae. I walked to the 24-hour corner store and returned with a bottle of baby oil. I don’t know why, but I stripped naked before lying on the bed , and my boyfriend shone his phone light and poured baby oil down my ear canal. I screwed my eyes shut. The oil pooled and spilled down my neck. The wings beat faster, faster, and then slowed down and stopped. For a split second there was nothing. And then I heard two high-pitched cries, like something carried on the wind, and then silence.
I was like “Ewwww”, but it wasn’t over. My boyfriend emptied his Clear Eyes and filled it with water, spent a good fifteen minutes trying to flush the thing out. But nothing slid out, so we waited until the doctors opened. The doctor examined my ear, said there was nothing there. He asked me if I had felt pain – I hadn’t. He asked me if I’d seen anything – I hadn’t. He concluded it must’ve been some flappy earwax banging against my eardrum. This felt so insulting , but it was a relief to know there was no carcass in me, so I thanked him profusely and left. Outside, the sun was yellow on the pavement. The orb spider webs shone. My boyfriend and I looked at each other and laughed. It had been nothing! It was all fine. But I said, “But I heard it die”, and he smiled and nodded. We held hands. It was a warm day. The birds were singing.
BIOGRAPHY
Joanna Cho / 조은선 is the author of People Person, published by Te Herenga Waka Press, which was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. She was born in Korea, moved to Tāmaki Makaurau at the age of two, and currently lives between Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Tūrangi. She studied for a BA, a graduate diploma in publishing, and a master's in creative writing.