Living
in South Korea as a Young Woman (2):
Three
Women Living Together
By
Gyeon-gwa-ryu
Published:
April 18, 2016
Translated
by Marilyn Hook
Editor’s note: To begin a new feminist discourse in
2016, Ilda is running a series on “Living as a Young Woman in South Korea.” The
series receives support from the Korea Foundation for Women’s “Funding for
Gender-Equal Society.”
Three women living together,
between fantasy and reality
I’ve
been living with my younger sister for 7 years now. Both emotionally and
financially, living together is better for us than living alone, but when our
landlord suddenly raised the rent, we found that the two of us wouldn’t be able
to cover it anymore. So, starting this year, we’ve had one more roommate. The
timing of her need for a room and the increase in our rent matched up
perfectly. That’s how we three women began living together.
There
are many advantages to there being three of us, despite having to share just
two bedrooms. Instead of saying, “If I’m not back within 10 minutes, call the
police” as we head out alone to the convenience store at night, we can go in a
pair, and both our financial burdens and our housework load are smaller for
being shared among three. And because the new roommate is also my girlfriend,
my love life has also benefitted in ways such as saving money on dating.
 |
| My, my sister’s, and my girlfriend’s teacups ⓒ Gyeon-gwa-ryu |
But
not everyone sees our living together this way. Some people, instead of
respecting a situation that the three of us are satisfied with, see the
situation as something imperfect, like a chipped dish.
Not
long after we began living together, my girlfriend went to get a haircut at a
salon that I recommended. They asked her who had recommended them, and she told
them that we had started living together. The owner of the salon where my
sister and I were faithful customers said, “Why would women live with each other,
instead of with men? I guess men don’t just grow on trees, though. Sad, isn’t
it.”
My
girlfriend said that our choice was reasonable when you consider Seoul’s
skyrocketing housing prices and our commute times, and that we get along well
and are happy. But in the end she was forced to smile politely at the salon
owner’s pity.
Even
I would probably have smiled politely at that moment. I like to think that not
paying attention to such attempts to get a laugh is easy, but it’s hard not to
be polite. I just silently shout, “It doesn’t matter that you look at me with
dissatisfaction, because it’s my life and the most important thing is that I’m
satisfied with it! Your disapproval has no effect on my life!”
This
unspoken feeling contributes only to my personal, psychological victory. While
we hold back the counterattack of “That’s a form of sexism,” the jokes about
women living without men pile up and become dangerous; they constrict the
efforts of women who try to live together and do something. When the wall of
that kind of truth grows higher, it’s easy to start to doubt even your own
feelings.
A world that treats an
unmarried woman like an “incomplete being”
My
friend L once confessed similar worries to me. L is an elementary school
teacher who turned 30 [in Korean age]
this year. A few of her coworkers of the same age are married, but L is not
interested in marriage yet and isn’t dating anyone she would consider marrying.
Those around L are much more interested in her marital status than she herself
is. When she told an older teacher that she had joined a reading group with
some other teachers she knew, the older teacher responded, “Are there men in
that group?”
“One.
The others are all women,” said L.
“Why
are you doing it? What’s the point if it’s all women?”
The
older teacher’s point was that L wouldn’t meet a man to marry by joining a
group of women. Even though L had emphasized that it was a reading group, the
older teacher dismissed it as a waste of time. L politely agreed that she
should try to find a group with more men and then changed the subject. After
finishing this story and seeing my disbelief and anger, L grumbled in sympathy,
but then she continued, with a worried expression, “Am I weird?”
I
had to tell her more strongly than ever that she isn’t weird, it’s people like
the older teacher who are weird. But really, I wonder how reassuring my words
were. How lonely and depressing it is that, even if each of us finds her own
psychological victory, we must make our living in a world in which we must face
people like that older teacher
 |
| A beer commercial. The media portrays men’s drinking parties as places of deep friendship. |
Of
course, this world claims that women can enjoy everything equally with men.
Sure, we’ve made progress. But we are not recognized as equals. While men’s
drinking parties are seen as places of real friendship, women’s are met with
questions like, “What do a group of women even do together?” In a place where
the life of multiple women living together is treated as an unnecessary or
incomplete thing, it is even more difficult for individual women to live as
they want.
What do you think we want? To live well, of course!
“But
I can understand getting married, too.”
These
are my sister’s words. During Lunar New Year vacation this year, she met up
with some friends. Unlike my sister, who has lived in Seoul since college, they
all live in our hometown. One friend said she was getting married soon, and the
others each started to tell about their own plans for marriage and children. My
sister was more surprised to hear that people her age were actively dreaming of
marriage and children than that one of them was getting married. She asked
whether they weren’t afraid of losing their jobs or their health because of
marriage and childbirth; her friends replied that on the contrary they expected
such things, but were willing to bear them.
When
I wondered naively whether it was a regional difference, my sister shook her
head. She said she got the impression that, for people who don’t have another
good reason to move out of their parents’ house, marriage is the choice you
make to be able to live your own life. It wouldn’t be any different for a Seoul
woman in the same situation.
My
sister told me what one of her friends said.
“I
didn’t want to get married either. But my parents, my coworkers, they don’t
treat me like an adult. I think they see me as just a kid. These days they ask
me whether I’m going to get married and when I’m going to get married so much
that I’m tired and I think I’d better just hurry up and do it.”
 |
| A scene from Kamome Diner (directed by Naoko Ogigami, 2006), a movie which deals with women’s independence |
In
this world, we are made to think of marriage as the only status that allows a
woman respect as an individual and protection, and to my sister’s friend, it is
nearly the only path to independence. Just like I chose cohabitation, the
friend is choosing marriage in order to live. Because it is that kind of
choice, I think that marriage, cohabitation, and reading groups can be talked
about as variations on the same theme. The amount of social resources that each
women is given is already small, and even that is only given to certain groups
within a limited range. In this kind of situation, I think that the purposes of
the people who choose marriage, cohabitation, and reading groups are similar,
even though these things seem different from each other.
If
I had to make a guess, I’d say it was in order to live well. In order to be
happy. Because of that, through jokes that are supposed to be funny, through
perspectives that see life choices as unaffected by social pressures, through a
system that doesn’t recognize a certain form of living, happiness is being
frustrated. In this situation, as women going through the same thing as other
women, we should stop holding back and speak up. Tell people to look at what
we’re doing.
When
you respond like this to the question of what the point of a group of women is,
we as people who speak up next to each other become a resource for women and a
reflection of each’s life. By putting our heads together and talking, our
“personal difficulties” are rightly labeled as sexism. In order to become
happy, we might even ask the questions that this world doesn’t. Like, “What
interesting things are you all doing together?”
Let’s imagine new ways to live
as a woman
These
days I spend time with friends who feel the same way I do. We became friends by
telling the stories of our lives in turn, as if we were running a relay race.
These included experiences of discrimination and violence. I think we’ve had
hard times, both in our personal lives and in our public lives.
 |
| Don’t they say that happiness is sharing, even if it’s half a bean? A hanrabong I shared with my roommates. ⓒ Gyeon-gwa-ryu |
The
fact that we talk about our wounds does not mean that what we’ve been through
goes away, or that the world we live in automatically gets better. But we know
that we are not strange people, or less grown up. We know that before we break
down alone, we can meet up with someone and talk.
We
know that if we can’t meet right away, we can text each other. In our group
text chat rooms, there’s a friend who shares lines from a book she read that
day or articles she wants me to see, one who wants to talk about the ups and
downs of a difficult day and be comforted, one who just woke up and wants to
tell about a dream she had, friends who zealously pester me to do something
together, and one who writes long messages. I know that each person’s style is
different but each is telling her story.
As
the feeling that we know each other grows, the wall formed by the view groups
of women are ridiculous begins to crumble from inside me. In this group, which
is difficult to explain simply, I feel that I am coming to understand feminism
personally, whereas before it seemed to get more confusing the more people
tried to explain it.
Right
now, all sorts of ideas are pouring into one of the chat rooms about meeting up
to mourn our past hurts and beginning to get over those we’ve sent away, and I
already feel more carefree, and look forward to the meeting. Now we are like
people who have run side-by-side for a long time. I hope that someone other
than me can wait for a long time. The salon owner and mother of two who tells
me that I have to live with a man and then a short while later says don’t get
married, the teacher L works with who considers a group made only of women to
be meaningless, my sister’s friend who wants to be recognized as an adult—I
try to imagine that they can all expect and experience different circumstances
than they have been.
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