The Woman Is Going Into The Bag
By Park Ju-yeon
Published Sep. 10, 2023
Translated by Anastasia Traynin
In 1928, Virginia Woolf said, “A woman must have money and a room of her
own if she is to write fiction,” meaning that a room of one’s own is needed to
fully express one’s thoughts in writing. The same is true today, nearly 100
years later. There are many things that require a room of one’s own. Yet having
one’s own room or house is hardly easy. It could even be more difficult than
ever before.
In this tough world, there are
many women getting by without a proper room to themselves, but their stories
often go untold. Women living in the streets. Homeless women. These images are
still unfamiliar to many, and it is only recently that the women’s stories have
started to come to light. The book The Woman Is Going Into The Bag is one example of this.
<Translator’s Note : The original Korean book title is intentionally written with no spaces, a play on “Dad is going into the bag,” a nonsense phrase used to remind people to use spaces when writing. The correct phrase is “Dad is going into the room,” which makes the correct book title “The woman is going into the room.” This becomes a dichotomy between “the bag” for homeless women and “the room” for housed women. Korean reference: https://m.blog.naver.com/kiyoon96/220292113514>
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| Seoul Station is a space where many homeless people stay. © Humanitas |
This book is also a follow-up to The Story of The Jjokbang Village Next to
Hilton Hotel, which was co-authored by activists from Homeless Action, Korean
People’s Solidarity Against Poverty, and teachers from the School for the
Homeless who aimed to share stories of the residents of the jjokbang
(flophouse) village facing eviction due to redevelopment. It is an extension of
the social movement to document “the life of the poor.”
The book tells the experiences of seven homeless women. One, Kim Jin-hee, wrote her own story, while the other six told theirs to members of the Homeless Action oral life history team. The women’s experiences are all different, and there is a refreshing diversity to the writers’ storytelling methods. The other interesting thing is that The Woman Is Going Into The Bag dares to break down the walls and tell stories beyond words and phrases such as “homeless woman,” “sleeping on the street,” “poor person,” “victim,” and “disadvantaged.”
Where are the homeless women?
Why have homeless women’s stories
hardly ever been told? Is it because there didn’t used to be any homeless
women? The answer is “no.” Homeless women have always existed, but the reason
they haven’t been seen is due to the inherent difficulty of being homeless. [As
This Woman Is Going Into The Bag explains,] “What is called homeless usually means sleeping outside, wet with
dew, but women sleeping on the streets are rare. As you can expect, this is
because of the danger.” So they wander between houses of acquaintances or go to
places that you have to pay to be in, like public saunas, Internet rooms, and
fast food restaurants.
Despite this reality, the “Homeless
Investigative Survey” carried out by the Ministry of Health and Welfare focuses
on streets, shelters, and jjokbang. Women staying in other places are not
counted in these statistics. Regardless, according to this survey, women account for 3,344
people out of the total homeless population of 14,404, amounting to one out of
five people. This is by no means a small number, and the actual number is
larger.
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| The Woman Is Going Into The Bag (by Kim Jin-hee, Park So-young, Oh Kyu-sang, Lee Jae-im, Choi Hyun-suk, Hong Su-kyung, Hong Hye-eun. Published by Humanitas). |
Another reason why homeless women have been invisible is that our
society hasn’t paid attention to them. Even during the IMF crisis, the focus
was on men who had lost their homes and jobs. Yet they weren’t the only ones
setting up tents in parks and living in the streets. When Lim Mi-hee came to
Seoul Station in February 1998 at the age of 23, “there were families with kids,
and more than 10 people around my age” in the park.
“Among the men, there were many
who had been let go from day labor and restaurant-type jobs that had provided
them housing. As for the women, there were many who had been kicked out or had
run away from home. There were also those who had left their marriages.”
This is how, although there have
always been homeless women, those who are both women and homeless have slipped
through the cracks of various systems and policies. It is because they don’t
live in the streets. At times, free meal services refuse to serve them, citing
the idea that “middle-aged ladies can make their own food.” Even women
depending on acquaintances for a place to stay due to the danger of the streets
are considered as “having a house” and so are disqualified from street homeless
support.
At the 2018 Homeless Memorial
Ceremony, Seo Ga-sook said, “(Going to get food) every day, I’m still the only
one. Homeless women cut their hair to look like men. We have to hide
ourselves.” That’s the reality of homeless women. They exist, but at the same
time they shouldn’t exist.
Homeless Women’s Invisible Labor
It’s not only their existence that
goes unnoticed. Because they are both homeless and women, their labor also gets
erased. “What homeless labor? If these people worked, they wouldn’t be
homeless.” Contrary to this type of prejudicial belief, homeless women also
perform labor. Lee Ga-hye, “the woman living in the bathroom,” lives in a
public park bathroom that she also cleans.
“The work I do here is wiping down
the bathroom and sweeping the whole park. Every day, I have to mop up the floor
several times. I do both the men’s and women’s bathrooms. When it rains,
there’s even more mopping to do. People step all over, so the water goes
everywhere. When it’s windy, the leaves blow here and there like waves.” (pg.
14-15)
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| A homeless woman’s bags set up neatly in the corner of a bathroom. Photo by Lee Jae-im. |
For Gahye, homeless people aren’t “hungry and homeless with nothing to do.” They are “people who live for and help others.” And the bathroom she stays in is “clean enough to lay down anywhere in.”
Kil Sun-ja, who lives in a
Yangdong jjokbang, has done endless care work. She cared for her ill
mother and husband. (She also refers to her second husband by the colloquial
terms “groom” and “my old man.”) When caring for her mother, she would “lay her
in bed, go to work at the church, come home to feed her and change her diaper,
and go back out to work in the evening” on repeat. When her second husband
passed away, the mortuary worker commented, “Ma’am, your husband is so clean.
I’ve been working here for decades, and this is the first time I’ve seen
something like this.” Sunja’s dream is “helping out at a home for the elderly
and at elderly people’s residences.” Actually, she bathed an elderly person in her neighborhood after he soiled himself. “I washed him three times,
and I also called emergency services.” When a person with dementia moved into
the neighborhood, she even “did the laundry and cooked for them for over a
month.”
In Gil Sun-ja’s case, she did care
work because she was a “daughter and a wife,” but also because it was work that
someone had to do and she liked doing it. But society never recognized it as
labor. It was taken for granted as the role of a woman affectionately taking
care of her family.
Still, homeless women perform
labor. As someone experiencing homelessness, Seo Ga-sook also began the work of
activism to help the homeless after seeing the Homeless Action activists and
thinking, “They are doing really good work.” Of course, “going to Homeless
Action, there would be someone demanding, ‘Hey, let me borrow some money.’” But
Seo Ga-sook was moved by seeing the Homeless Memorial Ceremony, and she became
a caretaker of other homeless people, checking in to see if they had eaten or
if they were sick.
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| Homeless Action activist Seo Ga-sook’s drawing. |
Living Within Relationships That Bounce Around
Homeless women being invisible in
our society is also connected with their suffering from mental illness. The
rate of mental illness among homeless women is 42.1%, significantly higher than
the 15.8% rate of men. Furthermore, at a rate of 53.4%, there are more homeless
women than men (22.9%) staying for more than 20 years in nursing homes for the
homeless. Homeless Action activist Lee Jae-im explains that “mental illness is
a reason for them becoming homeless, as well as a result of difficulties faced
while experiencing homelessness.”
Those under “care” at facilities
due to mental illness live a life where they “can hardly go out or stay out
overnight, where they all get the same haircuts once a month from a volunteer
stylist, and they are so cut off from relationships with others that they no
longer have anywhere to call and no need for a cellphone.” They are not given
the right to be free. Is this a just and appropriate treatment?
The writer Choi Hyunsuk listened
to and documented the story of Yeongju, who in addition to several illnesses was
diagnosed with anger management disorder and an intellectual disability. The
writer describes how she has an increasingly difficult time with Yeongju and
continues to mull over how to maintain relations with her. Yeongju is a “cool”
kind of woman who agreed to the interview on the condition that she would get
free cigarettes, and the writer envies her “freedom and survival skills.” Yet
she has also been put
in the “slammer” for all sorts of reasons. There is also the problem of her
“oppressing and bullying the weak - the developmentally disabled, the young,
those coming for the first time, those not fitting in well,” and her explosive bouts
of anger toward the writer. The relationship between these two seems to be a
cycle of rupture and repair.
Choi Hyunsuk’s part of the book finishes
with: “Now, in July 2023, the relationship between Yeongju and me keeps
wandering through a maze and bouncing around.” Living in this complicated and
messy society, doesn’t it stand to reason that people’s relationships couldn’t
help but to bounce around? But then why is one kind of bouncing around
permitted while another is not, facing division and exclusion?
The Woman Is Going Into The Bag contains homeless women’s untold lives and experiences, as well
as the stories of those who chose to listen to them. It gives us another chance
to learn the self-evident truth that we are all connected.
Original Article : https://ildaro.com/9719
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