Jjimjilbang - Going To The Public Bath House

On one of my first dates with my Korean boyfriend I was informed that we would be attending and then spending the night at a jjimjilbang. A jjimjilbang can be a very large or very small public bath house where many Koreans will go after a soju-filled night out to scrub away the nights shadow and grime and after washing can pay a small fee and spend the night in a marae style sleeping room.

I was completely aghast and terrified at the prospect. Bath house culture does not exist in my home country New Zealand and bathing and personal cleanliness is a matter kept strictly within the home. The body is not something that us New Zealanders readily show pony around in the public domain and the thought of walking completely naked through throngs of ajumma (married women with hands strong enough to break your fingers) teenagers and children made me feel nervous to the point of fainting. Was I going to be the only foreigner among several hundred Korean women? Would everyone point, stare and laugh at my bum and boobs? Would I end up huddled in the corner of the steam room waiting for the lights to go out so I could slink away like a shame faced alley cat into the darkened night? I didn’t know what to do.

New Zealand is a British colony and along with the Queens English, meat pies and pound cake, we inherited the joyous English sense of shame. Something which we lovingly passed on to Maori people who up until our arrival had been quite fine, thank you, wandering around in what God gave them. Thanks to the English and their propriety and ‘sensibility’ many of us New Zealanders have grown up with the idea that the body is not something to show off, that it is a highly sexual object that should be kept heavily shrouded in many layers of clothing and of which you should always feel a slight sense of disgust and embarrassment. Going to the spa with my boyfriend (who I was shocked to realise I would have to part with for several hours) would be my first experience of being naked in front of more than one person at a time. It was like my old dreams of suddenly appearing stark naked at school in front of Friday assembly were actually coming true.

After arriving and figuring out which locker to put my shoes in and which locker to get undressed in front of (there seemed to be a million different lockers for a million different things) I made my way into the main spa room fully clothed in the pajamas provided by the (nude) receptionist. I showered with the speed of a sparrow rolling in dust and like lightening leaped into a yellow coloured pool of mud. I carefully placed the pajamas beside the pool for the time that I would need to get out. I noted I was the only person in the entire spa room who had their pajamas with them let alone had them sitting beside the pool. After a few angst ridden minutes of faux relaxation had passed I decided to change pools and realised with terror that my pajamas were gone. Some overly busy ajumma had taken them and I would have to walk around like everyone else – NUDE. My nightmare had officially come to fruition.

Pajama-less, I was forced to walk totally naked to my next destination. As I walked across the seemingly massive expanse of the spa to my next pool I noticed that, yes, a few people were looking at me, but out of the several hundred women in the spa, barely anyone was interested in me at all. I began to feel a rush of freedom and liberation. I noticed that no one cared that I was naked because they were all naked too. And it began to dawn on me that here in Korea the sense of ones own body is different than it is in New Zealand (or at least, different than it is for me personally). No one seemed to feel embarrassed about their body, everyone seemed totally relaxed and there was a real feeling of sisterhood and community between the bathing women. People scrubbed one another, chatted as they showered or just bobbed up and down in hot pools with their eyes closed like blissed out Octopus. I realised that being a nudist was not such a weird lifestyle choice after all.

I walked to the showers where I copied other women and scrubbed myself with a harsh material mitten until I was as red and raw as a beet. Suddenly, with horror, I noticed I was being stared at by a nude ajumma somewhere in her 40’s. As she began to walk toward me I clattered my feet like the hooves of a terrified deer unable to decide which way to escape the oncoming headlights. Was she going to say something horrible about my body? Was she going to tell me to get out?! ‘Nice to meet you ‘ she said and embraced me in a full body hug (the first completely nude hug I have ever had with a woman), and then began to sway both of our bodies back and forward so that we were now dancing together under the warm water of the shower. She began to sing the 1985 Michael Jackson / Lionel Richie classic, We Are The World, as she puppeteered my arms up and down in frantic orchestral movements and moved my hips back and forth with her own. She clearly did not have a problem with a foreigner being in her spa.

How had she known this was one of my favourite songs of all time? I shall never know. I felt accepted

Finding my flow with this bath house thing, I transfered between the hot sauna room and the cold pool and at a certain point felt a cool rushing inside my body and up my chest. It was truly the most healthy and relaxing of feelings. I was later to learn that this is a physical reaction to bathing that many Koreans attend spas to achieve, the sense of internal ‘cool,’ the sense of total body cleanliness and health, and a sense of intense relaxation.

We slept that night in the communal jjimjilbang room. I woke twice, once to find a complete stranger asleep and with his arms across the face of my sleeping boyfriend. The second time I awoke was to find a drunk ajumma hitting my feet with a wooden block because she had decided that she wanted to sleep where I was sleeping. Luckily she was pulled away by her drunk laughing friends. I stayed awake for a while after this looking and marveling at how closely total strangers were sleeping with one another, arms and legs thrown across their sleeping neighbours, everyone was so completely at ease with one another. I loved it, I felt so relaxed and happy.

We left the jjimjilbang the next morning very early and watched the sun rise over Gwangan bridge. Vibrant pinks and blues flooded the harbor as the sun pushed the night away and I floated along drinking my hot coffee from a can, cruising on a cloud of having my ideas of the world and myself shifted and opened out. Asah.