clubbin' in korea

After several hours of drinking very large beers at Miller Time (which is, as it name implies, totally devoted to Miller beer. Don’t ask me why. I definitely could not tell you. But there are the requisite happy, party-going white people posing in posters all over the walls in all sorts of strange scenarios, drinking Miller and acting really excited about it) and participating in at least three birthday celebrations (which involve the lights being dimmed, the same happy, happy birthday song coming on the stereo at a deafening volume, the words to which escape me now, but since it’s sung in English, you can bet they are ridiculous, the celebrators putting on various wigs – platinum, green, pink, etc – sparklers going off everywhere and strobe lights galore. If yer lucky and you’ve made friends with the birthday girl or boy, you’ll get a piece of cake delivered to your table. And if yer really lucky, you’ll get to see one of the birthday boys dance on top of a table as if he has just suddenly taken up the art of stripping), we headed to the club.

The guys we were with gave us all sorts of pointers on what to do when we got there –stay close, just walk right in like you belong there, and maybe we’ll avoid the cover charge. And so we did. We walked right in, past the dozens of doormen and waiters dressed like hotel bellboys in red uniforms. We jumped on the dance floor at the front of the first floor (there were three floors in this place), and started shakin’ it with all the Koreans. Me and three white boys. Yes, there were many staring eyes. Though the music was definitely high bpm, bad techno remixes of Korean pop songs, the folks on the dance floor seemed rather reserved. It was an odd sight, really. Hard to explain. The stage, where I thought there was a DJ but soon realized that we were actually watching a “performance” of some kind that involved an mc in a blazer and jeans with a low-buttoned shirt, looked like the death star. I kid you not. There were more moving walls covered in lights and stage parts that descended from the ceiling as though the commander of the ship, vader himself, could just drop in to say hi at any moment. This descending stage brought us mc blazer, a five-man cover band dressed in suave black suits that played hot hits from [what did they play], and some guy who did nothing but scream into the microphone with death metal expertise wearing an acid wash jean jacket and jeans. The jacket was unbuttoned to reveal his ever so manly chest (please note that Korean men have NO hair on their bodies, much like our very own roboto), and his jeans were thrashed leaving not a whole lot to the imagination. For most of the time, he did his bumping and grinding on the stage that came down from the heavens, tossing his fabulous Korean hair and blurting strings of guttural words into the mic. But as his “act” wore on (which was completely choreographed, I’m sure, and involved super bad pre-recorded techno music) we realized that what this guy really wanted to be doing was taking all his clothes off for us folks in the audience. He jumped in front the moving stage in a pretty fabulous leap and just went to town. The girls I was dancing near, staring in awe at this ridiculousness of my experience, were all looking very confused and amused at this joker.



The club itself, as I said, was three floors. The bottom floor was the only one we saw, but you could see the balconies of the other two above you. It was an enormous room. Probably twice the size of the Fillmore with one more level. The ceiling was completely covered in lights and had a full starlight experience glittering in it as well. There were planets and shooting stars and moons. It was unreal. There were a few hundred tables taking up 90% of the floor space. Red velvet booths and big tables, side by side. Like something out of a 1930’s big band club – or what I imagine that to look like. The menu was insane, of course. The cheapest “package” on the menu was ₩35,000 (about $35) and got you 5 small bottles of beer and a fruit platter. (Clubs and bars in Korea are mostly based on these packages you can buy. To get a bottle of liquor – whiskey is the most common – you have to pay like ₩125,000. With it you get a huge spread of food and snacks, but it’s insane to spend $125 on a bottle of Jack Daniels. They try to milk you for all you’ve got. The whole experience caters to really wealthy Korean dudes who liketo pick up the ladies. That’s what most of these places are – pick-up joints. But unlike the standard American sleaze bar where yucky guys just try their luck at throwing some lines out on the ladies and wowing them with their fabulous hair and pant fashion, actual money is thrown around in these places to get the girl you’ve got your eye on to come to your table. Apparently, as far as I understand it, you can pay a bartender or host/waiter to go snatch the girl you’re eying and bring her to your table. If you like her, she can stay. If you don’t, you throw her back in the pond. If she doesn’t like you, that’s sort of too bad, I think. I’m not really clear of how it all works, but I plan to find out.)

As a side note, but related to the club experience, the sex industry in Gwangju seems to be off the hook. There are hundreds of places here called “business bars” where dudes can go to pick up ladies in the manner described above, but there is obviously way more going on in the way of sex in these places. There are flyers for these places littering the streets á la vegas. A few months ago, they passed a law that mandated that the ladies on the flyers wear clothing. There are children around, after all. We wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea. Riiiiiiiight. It’s pretty hard to know much of anything about sex work in this city. It’s pervasive but no one talks about it, apparently. It’s one of my goals here – to understand how it works and why it’s so prevalent and underground. Obviously, the culture has a lot to do with it, but I only get to see a very small sliver of that. So, I’m hoping to understand things a little more deeply. I met a woman here who has become a good friend who was adopted from Gwnagju. She and I have talked a bit about the adoption policies here and what it’s like to be a single mom or be pregnant out of wedlock in a Confucian-based cultural system. [I write all of this, of course, with next to no real understanding of this system, so please take that into account.] Within this system, the father holds the highest position in a family and the most important goal is to propagate the family bloodline. So adoption of a child from another family is against the Confucian way. On top of this, if you do not know the name of the father of your child, your kid cannot be a citizen of the country. What happens to this kid, I don’t know. I’m not clear on how this works. And being pregnant without a husband is a disgrace. So, as a result, thousands of children end up in orphanages. On top of all of this is the historical subservience of women within the culture with few rights to decision-making. All of these things are connected. The sex industry, the Confucian system, women’s historical/cultural/social place in this system, childbearing and adoption, birth control, and on and on and on. I’m excited to try to understand more about it. Not sure where to look for answers yet.

Anyhoo, the club was silly and super fun. We were the crazy Me-guks (Americans) in the room, and it was a blast.