I was lean­ing against the entrance to the Shin­chon sub­way sta­tion watch­ing peo­ple turn the cor­ner into the Semaeul Shi­jang, the out­door mar­ket where I bought rice each week and where my friend Mr. Kim had bar­gained one of the ven­dors down from the price she was going to charge me for a blan­ket because I was migook saram, an Amer­i­can, to what she would nor­mally charge a Korean. I’d just fin­ished lunch, a bowl of kim­chi chi­gae, and I had no place to be, so I just stood there, enjoy­ing the sun, smil­ing at the peo­ple who could not help but stare at my very con­spic­u­ous west­ern pres­ence and laugh­ing with the chil­dren who, when they passed by, also couldn’t help them­selves. “Migook saram! Migook saram!” they would yell out and point, as if I were some rare ani­mal they’d sighted, or as if a char­ac­ter from one of their favorite sto­ry­books had come to life. One group of kids, about four or five of them – maybe they were sib­lings – stopped right in front of me, but when they called out to their mother, who was a cou­ple of steps ahead of them, and also to every­one else who was pass­ing by, and to as far beyond our imme­di­ate vicin­ity as their voices would reach, that I was an Amer­i­can, I gave in to a mis­chie­vous­ness I’d been con­tem­plat­ing for some time and, instead of nod­ding and smil­ing, looked from side to side, gave them an excited, quizzi­cal look and asked, “Odio?” Where? If only I’d had my cam­era with me. The look of sur­prise that froze their faces when they heard me speak Korean is some­thing I  wish I’d been able to capture.

A few min­utes after they left, laugh­ing and wav­ing and call­ing out anyige­seyo, good­bye, an old woman wear­ing tra­di­tional Korean cloth­ing passed by. She had a cig­a­rette in her mouth, glasses on her nose and her hair was pulled back into a tight bun. She walked with her hands clasped behind her; and her back was bent, as if she were car­ry­ing some­thing heavy; and, as if she were lost in deep con­tem­pla­tion, she took slow, delib­er­ate steps, clearly not in a rush and clearly assum­ing that peo­ple would make way for her. She got about four of those steps past where I was stand­ing and stopped. She lifted her head and I could see that she was mut­ter­ing some­thing to her­self. Then she turned around, her mouth still mov­ing, and walked straight towards where I was stand­ing. She stopped in front of me, looked me up and down, mut­ter­ing what I thought at first was gib­ber­ish, since it sounded like nei­ther Korean nor Eng­lish, but after fif­teen sec­onds or so, I began to make out words like “tall,” “hand­some,” “strong” and then “American.”

She moved a lit­tle closer and put her hand on my bare fore­arm, a ges­ture to which I had become accus­tomed from rid­ing the sub­way. Kore­ans often have less body hair than white peo­ple and so the hair on my arms and on my chest, which was vis­i­ble if I was wear­ing an open-necked shirt, was a con­stant source of fas­ci­na­tion. Wher­ever I went on the train, older Korean women – who, because they live in a cul­ture where age is ven­er­ated, can do pretty much what they want – would sit next to me and stroke the hair on my arms, smil­ing and chat­ting ami­ably with me as they did so. This woman, how­ever, when she was fin­ished with my fore­arm ran her hand up to my bicep and gave a quick squeeze; then she laid her other hand flat against my stom­ach and moved it down quickly to cup and pat my crotch through my jeans, smil­ing and nod­ding her head as if she were eval­u­at­ing me and was pleased at what she was finding.

This all hap­pened so quickly that I had no time to react, and since she was stand­ing directly in front me, there was no way for me to get away from her with­out push­ing her, and she was so small and so frag­ile look­ing, and I did not want to make a scene, so I con­tin­ued to stand there; and then she was look­ing up at me, still smil­ing, and her eyes were bright, with­out pre­tense, though they held also an imp­ish mis­chie­vous­ness, and she asked me in a slightly accented Eng­lish, “Are you Amer­i­can?” Sur­prised that I was able to under­stand her, I hes­i­tated for half a sec­ond before answer­ing, and she put her hand on my arm and asked again, “Are you an American?”

“Yes,” I said, and she tight­ened her grip on my arm just a lit­tle bit. “Why you here alone? Come with me. Room-café around the cor­ner; I will pay for you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a very thick wad of bills.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I am wait­ing for a friend.”

“But it’s no good you out here alone,” she insisted, giv­ing another gen­tle tug on my arm. “Really, I will pay,” and she again showed me the money in her hand.

Room-cafes were just what they sounded like: cafes with pri­vate rooms where men went to be “enter­tained” in ways not so dif­fer­ent from the way Mr. Park and I had been enter­tained in Miari. I knew which room-café the old woman was talk­ing about since I’d walked past it many times on my way in and out of the mar­ket, though I’d never gone in. It was called Sing-Sing. Once, when I was com­ing home very late at night, after the café had closed, the women who worked there were sit­ting out­side, smok­ing and chat­ting – some of them were eat­ing kim bop–when one of them, a tall woman in a tight neon green dress, with nail pol­ish and eye­liner to match, called out to me, “Hey! You like what you see?” Her com­pan­ions laughed. I smiled and kept walking.

The old woman held up her wad of money one more time. “No,” I answered again. “Maybe next time” – the polite thing to say – “I really need to be here to meet my friend.”

She let go of my arm, but she didn’t walk away. “Are you a sol­dier?” She sounded just like the woman who’d chased me on Chong-no.

“No, I’m a teacher.”

“A teacher!” The woman’s face lit up as she put her money back in her pocket. “Teach me some Eng­lish while you wait your friend?” She took my hand and started to walk towards the mar­ket. The change in her man­ner and her tone – she was polite and def­er­en­tial, in stark con­trast to the almost demand­ing tone she took in her insis­tence that I let her take me to the room-café – also reminded me of the woman who’d chased me on Chong-no, and my curios­ity got the bet­ter of me, so I let her lead me where she wanted to go. She stopped to point at the dif­fer­ent fruits on a stand that we passed – apples, grapes, pears, oranges – and asked me the words for them in Eng­lish; then we stood in front of a cart on which the mer­chant had very care­fully arranged alarm clocks, blowdry­ers, hair curlers, elec­tric shavers and other small home appli­ances. After that, it was a cloth­ing stall, where she asked me the words for pants, shirt, belt and under­wear. Finally, she picked up a pack­age of women’s socks. “Will you buy these for me?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, tak­ing them from her. I hadn’t for­got­ten about the money in her pocket, but I’d started to like her, and I wanted to do some­thing nice for her. I also felt sud­denly a lit­tle bit like one of those young men in the fairy tales who meets and is tested by the old hag, who is really a witch or sor­cer­ess in dis­guise, who, depend­ing on the story, either rewards the young man’s kind­ness or pun­ishes his cru­elty. So I paid the 1,200 or so won that the socks cost and handed them over to the woman. She turned the pack­age over and over as if she no longer rec­og­nized what it was, and I real­ized that she had expected me to say no. “Do you smoke?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good! Do you drink?”

“Some­times, but not very much.”

“Good! Come sit here with me.” She pointed to an empty space on the steps in front of a closed store. ” You know, I lived in Amer­ica. Once. In Cal­i­for­nia. Dur­ing the war. Sol­diers call me mamasan.” She didn’t say which war, but I guessed it was the Korean war, and I knew from the lit­tle bit of hang­ing out I’d done in Itae­won, the part of Seoul where the Amer­i­can army was sta­tioned, that if the sol­diers had called her mamasan, it meant she’d been a madame.

We talked a lit­tle while longer. She asked me about my life back in the United States, about where I lived and worked in Seoul, about the kinds of Korean foods I liked. She told me she had a daugh­ter with whom she lived and she asked if I would like to have din­ner with them that night. By now, I was com­pletely dis­armed, and I thought it would be a very inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence, and so I said yes. She stood up imme­di­ately and started lead­ing me away from the mar­ket. I had a brief moment of anx­i­ety when I real­ized I had no idea where she was tak­ing me, but I set that aside and walked qui­etly beside her for about five min­utes or so, until she looked at me out of the cor­ner of her eye and smiled slyly. “Maybe next time, you and I enjoy in bed together,” she said.

I walked in silence for a few more steps as I tried to decide whether or not she was jok­ing with me and how to respond if she was; but then I real­ized it didn’t mat­ter. I no longer felt safe going with her to a part of Seoul with which I was unfa­mil­iar and so I decided to “remem­ber” a call I was expect­ing that night from my mother in Amer­ica. I needed to be home to get the call, I explained, because my mother and I had some impor­tant busi­ness to dis­cuss. The old woman looked dis­ap­pointed. She took out the socks I’d bought for her, removed the card­board back­ing from the pack­age and wrote down her phone num­ber. “When you want, you call me. We have din­ner. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. We told each other good­bye and I started walk­ing back in the direc­tion from which we’d come. I turned once to look at her again, but the street had become sud­denly crowded and I couldn’t see her. I looked at the piece of card­board. She’d writ­ten “din­ner” and then a phone num­ber, and then “Love, Mamasan.”

I didn’t want to go back to my apart­ment right away, so I walked instead to the Lotte World depart­ment store. I knew some of the peo­ple who’d worked on the indoor amuse­ment park and roller coaster that every­one was talk­ing about, and I’d been mean­ing to check it out for some time. Since I hate roller coast­ers, though, I did not ride it. Instead I wan­dered around the store a bit, until I found on one of the top floors a large foun­tain around which peo­ple were sit­ting. I bought myself a straw­berry ice cream and took a seat at the water’s edge, eat­ing slowly and think­ing about the old woman whose phone num­ber I had in my pocket.

I was star­ing off into space, not look­ing at any­thing or any­one in par­tic­u­lar, but a woman sit­ting with her daugh­ter on her lap on the other side of the foun­tain must have thought I was look­ing at them because she nod­ded her head and smiled. I nod­ded and smiled back, just to be polite, and the woman’s daugh­ter left her lap almost imme­di­ately and started walk­ing towards me. When she reached the spot where I was sit­ting, she climbed with­out a word into my lap and sat there gaz­ing silently at my face for about ten or fif­teen sec­onds. Then, still with­out speak­ing, she reached behind me for the water in the foun­tain, trust­ing the arm I raised to keep her from falling. When she sat back down, she opened one of my hands, palm up, and held her fin­ger­tips above it, let­ting the drops she’d gath­ered drip onto my skin. When the last drops had fallen, she climbed down to return to her mother, never once glanc­ing back in my direc­tion. The mother stood up, took her daughter’s hand, smiled at me, nod­ding one more time, and then led the girl into the ele­va­tor, which car­ried them down into the rest of their day.

My day took me next to din­ner in the restau­rant where I first prac­ticed read­ing hangul, the Korean alpha­bet, by order­ing each time I ate there a dif­fer­ent item from the menu that was posted on the wall. Two of my col­leagues, Tom and Gavin, were already eat­ing when I walked in. They invited me to join them, which I did, and we decided that we’d meet later that night at the Gilbert Stand­bar, which was also in the Semaeul Shi­jang, a few doors down from the room-café the old woman had offered to take me to. I arrived at the Gilbert about fif­teen min­utes late, but my friends were not there, and so I sat by myself at Ms. Park’s sta­tion – she insisted on Ms. and not Miss – ordered a beer and some fruit and set­tled in to wait. My friends never showed up, but that night at the Gilbert turned out to be, in some ways, a fit­ting end­ing to a day in which an old woman grabbed my crotch in pub­lic and a lit­tle girl who was a com­plete stranger sat in my lap and dripped water on my palm.

A stand­bar is what we would call today, here in the US, a karaōke bar, though since this was in the late 1980s, before dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy made karaōke juke­boxes pos­si­ble, the music to which patrons paid to sing along was live, pro­vided some­times by an entire band and some­times by a sin­gle key­board or piano player. As far as I know, the term stand­bar – I don’t think it’s much in use any­more; a google search turned up prac­ti­cally noth­ing – comes from the fact that there are bar sta­tions, or “stands,” arranged around the room at which sit the host­esses whose job it is to enter­tain the cus­tomers, who are almost always men. This enter­tain­ment includes pour­ing drinks, serv­ing food, going up on stage to sing when their cus­tomers do and danc­ing blues, slow danc­ing. The women are also often avail­able for sex – though, as it was explained to me by my Korean friend, if the sug­ges­tion for sex comes from the woman, you don’t have to pay for it.

The one or two stand­bars to which my Korean friends had taken me reminded me of a cross between the more extreme excesses of the disco era and the stereo­typ­i­cally sleazy Asian “girly bars” that are so famil­iar from the early James Bond movies. The Gilbert, how­ever, was more of a neigh­bor­hood place. There were no disco balls or flash­ing lights; the host­esses dressed very casu­ally – jeans and a but­ton down shirt, for exam­ple – as opposed to the tighter, glitzier often more reveal­ing out­fits the host­esses wore in other stand­bars; and there was, in gen­eral, a much more laid back atmos­phere. In fact, my col­leagues and I learned after we’d been going there for a while that it was the place where the men and women who worked at other sex trade estab­lish­ments came to relax.

This dif­fer­ence, of course, was one of degree not kind. The same things that went on at other stand­bars went on at the Gilbert, only more qui­etly and dis­cretely; and, most impor­tantly to me and my friends, no one made a spec­ta­cle out of us because we were west­ern­ers. The host­esses were not con­stantly ask­ing us for (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) “pri­vate Eng­lish lessons;” the other patrons were not con­stantly com­ing up to us to buy us drinks or prac­tice their Eng­lish. We were able, in general, just to hang out, drink a few beers and sing a few songs, just like reg­u­lar customers.

Ms. Park was the host­ess at whose sta­tion we always sat, and, over time, she and I became friendly. My Korean was bet­ter than that of my col­leagues, and so I could make very sim­ple con­ver­sa­tion, about the weather, for exam­ple, or food; about our jobs – she was very funny when describ­ing the men who’d sat at her sta­tion whom she didn’t like– and a lit­tle bit about my life in the US. She told me very lit­tle about her­self, though we did talk about books; she liked to read and she was fas­ci­nated by the fact that I was a poet. She intro­duced me once to a man who did not come to the Gilbert reg­u­larly, but whom she seemed to know pretty well, telling me he too was a poet. He gave me a copy of one of his books, though I lost it a long time ago, and I can­not now remem­ber his name.

Over time, I began to real­ize that when­ever Ms. Park danced blues with me – just because I would have been per­fectly happy not to dance with her did not exempt her from doing her job – she stayed in my arms a few beats longer than the end of the song, which is what hap­pened on this night, but then, she stayed there even longer, gaz­ing at me and grin­ning a sat­is­fac­tion she offered to share when she asked if she could come to my apart­ment after work. I wanted her in that moment as well, and so I said yes. I gave her my address and phone num­ber and we went back to her station. Waiting for us, how­ever, was a thin, bald­ing man in a crum­pled gray busi­ness suit and thick-framed nerdy glasses. As soon as Ms. Park sat down, he com­manded her to fill my glass, not from the bot­tle of inex­pen­sive beer that I’d ordered, but from the bot­tle of Chivas that he had in his hand. This kind of behav­ior was out of char­ac­ter for the Gilbert, as was the fact that he did not ask Ms. Park drink with us, and I was imme­di­ately uncom­fort­able. I looked at Ms. Park, but her face was frozen in her best customer-service smile, betray­ing noth­ing of what she might be feeling.

The thin man toasted me as if she weren’t there, waited till my class was empty and then pointed at Ms. Park with a fin­ger that was unusu­ally thick, given how skinny the man was. “Do you like her?” he asked, not deign­ing even to glance in her direction. Because I knew where the con­ver­sa­tion was headed, I did not answer him and told Ms. Park that I wanted more kol­bengi. She got up and went into the kitchen, and I tried as hard as I could, while she was gone, to let the thin man know I was not inter­ested in talk­ing to him by focus­ing my atten­tion on the very drunk, immac­u­lately groomed silver-haired man try­ing to sing John Denver’s “Coun­try Road” with­out falling over onto the host­ess who was stand­ing under his shoul­der to prop him up.

The man with the Chivas bot­tle did not take the hint, how­ever, and he fell silent as well, sit­ting with closed eyes until Ms. Park returned with my food. Once she was sit­ting down again, he leaned over and said qui­etly in my ear, “Isn’t she pretty? Don’t you like her?” When I still didn’t answer and kept my eyes focused on the silver-haired man, who was now stum­bling back to his seat, my unin­vited and unwel­come com­pan­ion put his hand on my arm and said more loudly, “She has beau­ti­ful labia.”

Still I said noth­ing; still I would not look at him.

“Don’t you under­stand?” He was not quite shout­ing as he pulled from his pocket a wad of bills almost as thick as the one the old woman had pulled out of her pocket ear­lier in the day. “Korea is a par­adise for men! Here!” He waved the money in my face. “You can have her if you want.”

I real­ized at this point that I had to say some­thing, but I also under­stood that what­ever I said had to be cal­cu­lated not to esca­late the sit­u­a­tion, and so instead of say­ing what I wanted to say – some ver­sion of “Stop talk­ing about her like that and get the fuck away from me!” – I said instead some­thing that would get him to leave me alone, while allow­ing him to save face, “Maybe next time. Tonight, I am very tired and I just want to drink by myself.”

My words had the desired result. He looked at me, looked for the first time at Ms. Park, gave a snort of dis­gust and walked back towards his table just as his friends were com­ing over to pull him away.

For the rest of that night, Ms. Park refused to meet my gaze, but each time I went to the Gilbert after that, and in all the time before I left Seoul, she con­tin­ued to dance with me the same as always; even as I watched her belly swell gen­tly and then flat­ten out again over the course of three or so months, she danced with me a lit­tle closer and a lit­tle longer than the other men; and some­times I saw flashes of the smile she gave me when she asked if she could come to my apart­ment, but she never brought that pos­si­bil­ity up again, and nei­ther did I. And we talked just as we always had, though she was more reveal­ing about her­self than she had been before, telling me often about the man who’d promised to marry her. All he needed, she said, was enough money to buy a place for them to live, and she said he’d told her that he didn’t care if his mother dis­owned him. She was the woman he wanted.

I have no idea if this man really existed, though I hope he did, and I hope he kept his promise and that Ms. Park was able to stop work­ing at the Gilbert and be, sim­ply, hap­pily, his wife. I hope she has chil­dren and that they have brought her great plea­sure. I hope all this, but I know the odds are against it being true, that she is more likely to have had a very dif­fi­cult life; and so right now, as I remem­ber Ms. Park, what I choose to remem­ber is how deeply she smiled when she asked if we could be together, not because of any­thing hav­ing to do with the sex that didn’t hap­pen, but because I could see in that smile that the thought of being with me made her happy and it’s more painful than I want to feel right now to remem­ber her any other way.

I’d been in Korea for two weeks when I decided it was time to ven­ture on my own into Seoul’s urban land­scape. One of my col­leagues had taken me the pre­vi­ous week­end to Chong-no for some noo­dles, a visit to Pagoda Park, where the Korean Inde­pen­dence Move­ment got its start in 1919, and then a browse in the Kyobo Book­store, which was then and is still Korea’s largest book-selling estab­lish­ment. Since I already knew how to get there by sub­way, I decided that would be a good place to start explor­ing. So there I was, walk­ing down the crowded main street, try­ing hard to enjoy the Sat­ur­day after­noon sun while keep­ing my eyes locked straight ahead so I could ignore the stares my West­ern face attracted, and I almost tripped over the man in front of me when, right in front of the Pagoda Park entrance, a woman called out “Hello! Hello!” to me in Eng­lish. She looked about my age, twenty-six or so, but the creases that appeared around her eyes and at the cor­ners of her mouth when she smiled as I stopped to acknowl­edge her made her seem much older. Her long black hair was disheveled, and I could see her hands were cal­lused. Wear­ing a thin pur­ple dress that hugged the curves of her body and leather san­dals with no socks, she was def­i­nitely out of place among the men in busi­ness suits and the women better-dressed than she was, but I was so relieved to have found some­one who spoke Eng­lish that, to me, it was every­one else who looked as if they didn’t belong.

“Hi!” I said. “Were you talk­ing to me?”

“I love you,” she answered. “I love you.” She took the first two fin­gers of her right hand and pushed them slowly in and out of her mouth. I turned and walked quickly away.

Run­ning to keep up with me, the woman appeared at my side. “Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m just walking.”

“Just walk­ing?”

“Yes.”

Upon hear­ing this, she wrapped her arm around my waist, laid my arm con­fi­dently along the con­tour of her hip, looked up at me with a smile I can only describe as angelic, and said, “You, me, fuck-fuck, all night, real cheap!”

I smiled back – what else could I do? – took her arm from my waist, said, “No, thank you,” and set off more quickly in the same direction.

“No t’ankyoo!” Her voice was high-pitched and mock­ingly flir­ta­tious as caught up with me, put her arm back where she thought it belonged, and offered again to fuck me all night, any way I wanted, for “real cheap.” When I again said no, she started nudg­ing me with her hip towards the side of a nearby office build­ing, mim­ic­k­ing me all the while, “No-o! Please go awa-ay!” I pushed back just hard enough to make her let go of me and turned down the first side street I came to, almost falling over an old man sit­ting on the pave­ment, his stock of nail clip­pers and other assorted knick­knacks spread out neatly on the pave­ment in front of him. She was still behind me, how­ever, so I turned left and made two quick rights, des­per­ately hop­ing I was walk­ing in a cir­cle that would lead me back to the main street. I don’t know how many dif­fer­ent streets I took try­ing to lose her, but each time I looked over my shoul­der, she was behind me, half run­ning, half walk­ing, and still promis­ing me the night of my dreams.

Finally, I’d had enough. I stopped as if to catch my breath and she jumped at the oppor­tu­nity. She wound her arm yet one more time around my waist and started to recite frac­tured ver­sions of the titles of pop songs that were old twenty some odd years ago when this all took place. “Every­body need some­body. Are you lonely this night? I fall in love with you, mend your bro­ken heart! Help you make it through the night!” With each new line, she tried to embrace me with her other arm, which I kept push­ing away, until I grab­ber her wrist and pulled her into a small alley between the two near­est build­ings. At first, her face lit up with tri­umph and antic­i­pa­tion, but then, as she felt the tight­ness of my grip – enough so she would know I was seri­ous, but not enough to hurt her – her eyes and mouth began to widen with fear. Tow­er­ing over her, I pushed the words out through clenched teeth, “Go away! Just leave me alone!” Then I started back in the direc­tion from which we’d come.

“Are you a sol­dier?” The voice behind me was self-effacingly polite. I stopped walk­ing. “No, I’m a teacher,” I said, and it was as if my answer trig­gered a switch in her brain, for her behav­ior changed instantly. With­out look­ing at me, she asked if I wanted to stop in a cof­fee shop for some­thing to eat. She offered to show me around Seoul, to help me learn Korean. She said some­thing about where she lived, or maybe she was ask­ing about where I lived, I wasn’t sure. All I could think was that she was not some­one I should trust, so I started walk­ing again, ignor­ing the new found polite­ness with which she con­tin­ued to fol­low me, until she slowed down, touched me on the lower back in a gen­tle, almost wist­ful farewell, and headed off in the oppo­site direction.

Mirac­u­lously, I was able to find the Chong-no sub­way sta­tion within a few min­utes. All through the ride back to my apart­ment, how­ever, that last, sex­less touch haunted me, mak­ing me won­der what I’d been run­ning from. I’d been assum­ing, of course, that the woman was a pros­ti­tute – cer­tainly she was will­ing to pros­ti­tute her­self – but it was also pos­si­ble that she’d been hun­gry and poor and des­per­ate, that she’d seen in me an oppor­tu­nity to put a decent meal in her stom­ach and did, was will­ing to do, what she thought was nec­es­sary to make that hap­pen. I wasn’t second-guessing my deci­sion not to go with her – I did not know Korean at all yet, and I cer­tainly did not know the cul­ture well enough to know what I would have been let­ting myself in for had I stopped to spend time with her, sex­u­ally or oth­er­wise – but I was won­der­ing what I’d been scared of, because the truth is that I’d run the way I did, in part any­way, because I was scared.

Not for my phys­i­cal safety, though I rec­og­nize there were any num­ber of ways she (and accom­plices, if she’d had them) could have been plan­ning to ambush or intim­i­date me into giv­ing her my money. Rather, I was fright­ened by the explicit and pub­lic and inescapably naked way in which she’d propo­si­tioned me. I didn’t want peo­ple to know I was the kind of per­son whom pros­ti­tutes approached like that, but what I learned on Chong-no, what I felt vis­cer­ally for the first time in my life, is that – what­ever else may be true about who I am – my body marks me as pre­cisely that kind of per­son. More to the point, my body is not some­thing I can run away from. I ran, in other words, not only because I didn’t want what the woman on Chong-no was try­ing to sell, but also because I didn’t want to face hav­ing to reject her, because the fact that I could reject her meant the priv­i­lege of hav­ing her was already mine.

Still, it would do jus­tice nei­ther to my expe­ri­ence nor to what the real­ity of that woman’s life prob­a­bly was, to stop here. For while it was, and most prob­a­bly still is, true that to be a man in Korea is to have access to the vast “play­ground” of the Korean sex indus­try, the indige­nous ver­sion of the play­ground exists almost entirely behind the doors of the estab­lish­ments where Korean sex-workers earn their liv­ing and is gov­erned by rules of deco­rum that ren­der the spec­ta­cle of a woman chas­ing a poten­tial cus­tomer down a crowded avenue in the mid­dle of a week­end after­noon all but unthink­able. In con­trast, accord­ing to fig­ures com­piled by the Embassy of the Repub­lic of Korea, dur­ing the time I was in Seoul, 18,000 South Korean women were reg­is­tered as “club women” for United States mil­i­tary bases. Spend just a few min­utes in an area where these women work – when I was there, Itae­won, where the 8^th Army was sta­tioned, would have been the best exam­ple – and you’ll see that the way they do busi­ness has more in com­mon with the stereo­typ­i­cal 42^nd Street street­walker than the typ­i­cal woman who works in a Korean-oriented sex estab­lish­ment. What I ran from when I ran from the woman on Chong-no, in other words, was only the priv­i­lege of being a man, but also what it meant to her that I was mi-gook saram, an Amer­i­can, and the way she propo­si­tioned and chased me needs there­fore to be seen as reflect­ing her expec­ta­tions of me and my cul­ture at least as much as it might reflect the val­ues of hers.

The tra­di­tion of the kisaeng, or cour­te­san, within which the Korean sex trade is most prop­erly under­stood, at least in his­tor­i­cal terms, has its roots in a way of life very dif­fer­ent from the one that gave rise to the street­walker. The tra­di­tional yang­ban, or Korean gen­tle­man, gov­erned his polyg­a­mous house­hold accord­ing to Con­fu­cian rules of deco­rum that deter­mined every­thing from the way he spoke and ate his meals to when, how often, and even how, he had sex. The kisaeng house pro­vided men with a refuge from this and the other pres­sures and respon­si­bil­i­ties of being the man of the house. Trained not only as host­esses, but also in lit­er­a­ture and the arts – Korea’s most famous woman poet, for exam­ple, Hwang Jin-hi, was a kisaeng how lived in the fif­teenth or six­teenth cen­tury – the kisaeng offered a stress-free evening of female com­pan­ion­ship and cama­raderie that would have been impos­si­ble within the strictly hier­ar­chi­cal rela­tion­ship a man had to main­tain between him­self and his wives. With­out explic­itly exclud­ing sex­ual favors from their ser­vices, in other words, the kisaeng were not engaged pri­mar­ily in sell­ing their bod­ies, a dif­fer­ence from west­ern pros­ti­tutes that it is impor­tant to keep in mind.

Much in Korean soci­ety, of course, has changed since the time of Hwang Jin-hi, and the very quick thumb­nail sketch of the kisaeng I have just given you nec­es­sar­ily sim­pli­fies the his­tory and the nature of what is in fact a com­plex Korean social insti­tu­tion.¹ Nonethe­less, the cul­tural frame­work within which the Korean sex trade exists – or at least existed when I was there – still resem­bles that of the orig­i­nal kisaeng houses. Con­tem­po­rary Korean men go to room salons, stand bars, song-in dis­cos–they may be called by dif­fer­ent names now, but I imag­ine they still exist – and all the other places where women are avail­able at least as much to be enter­tained as to have sex. To social­ize with Korean men – this, too, I imag­ine has not changed much since I was there – is even­tu­ally to find one­self in such a place. A story or three about that expe­ri­ence com­ing in parts 3 and 4.

1. Songs of the Kisaeng, a book of trans­la­tions of kisaeng poetry, offers a more fully fleshed-out but still acces­si­ble intro­duc­tion to the kisaeng, along with some insight into what the life of a kisaeng was like, at least as they depicted it in their art. [↩]