I don’t know if I’ll leave this post up for long, as it feels somehow weirdly personal, and I don’t have much time to properly dissect what I want to say, as I’m due out the door for work in twenty minutes or so, but….
This morning I woke up from a very strange dream. At first, I was with some kind of tour group in some nondescript pan-European city. We were visiting a mall, and inside the mall we came across a large glass window. Behind it sat four of the Halmonis. A tour guide explained who they were and afterwards, they displayed various traditional Korean paper crafts they had made, which were on sale. I approached the glass kind of hesitantly to speak to one of them, and another member of the tour group told me she thought they looked busy, and not to bother them.
In another flash, I was running through the streets as a gang of what appeared to be Italian men (which in hindsight probably represented my own mixed European heritage) were chasing me. As I rounded a corner in a dark alley, trying to escape, I saw a cheap and dirty sign posted to a decrepit door leading into what I somehow knew was a strip club, which read, “BLACK PUSSY ONLY.”
Where the fuck did all that come from then? Well, my guess is that it resulted from the conversation Busan and I had just before bed, which was about how, at this point, several of his coworkers entirely separately have told him that I look like a mannequin. The comment has resulted from his Kakao talk photo, in which my hair is covering my face partially, so you can’t really necessarily tell that I’m foreign. I asked him if that was a common remark to make in Korea that I just wasn’t aware of, and he said no — this was the first time he’d ever heard anyone say that. I asked him to describe in more detail what the comment meant, as I found it amusing the first three times around, but by the fourth time he reported someone completely different making the comment, it had started to really bother me.
He said that it means I have good “balance” — of proportion. Face to shoulders to chest to waist to hips to legs. We discussed it a little more and decided that what they are actually commenting on is something weird and unfamiliar about the shape and proportions of my body. Since they don’t know that I’m foreign, they don’t know quite what to make of the fact that I seem somehow odd or different, and this is how it’s coming out.
It’s clear that some part of my subconscious mind is grappling with the various versions of sexualization and commodification of our bodies as women, based on racial category. I studied this, intellectually, for a long time and in great depth at university, but it never hit home for me on a personal level until I came to Korea and realized what it’s like to have your body, and therefore your sexuality and sexualization as a female, placed in a different category from the majority.
I’m not going to lie — although I was (and still am) only just cutting my teeth in the realm of that strange and confusing version of being female, and although I cognitively realized that I had the benefit of facing this by choice and as a mentally developed adult, and not having to face it down in my home environment as I was coming of age (from the very time I had rational thought), it was still hard for me not to feel a little more dramatic about it than I possibly should have, given those facts. These days, as I learn more, given my new lens of perspective to view things through, I’m realizing more and more what it would be like to actually mentally, emotionally and physically develop within those circumstances.
I don’t know what any of this means, but I do know that that dream is going to stick with me for the rest of the day, and probably actually a lot longer than that.
