By Emily Jisoo Bowles
There’s an inherent sadomasochism to the Korean bathhouse: pushing your body to its limits by suffocating in the sauna heat then plunging in the ice bath, exfoliating your dead skin so hard it leaves you raw and red but smooth. “Scrub harder!” my mother would tell me, “Think of all the times you hated me and take it out on my back.” Despite all the anger I could muster into my arms, it was never quite enough for her.
My early experiences of going to the bathhouse in Korea with my mother were a mixture of pain, curiosity, and boredom. She would scrub my back, then frustrated with my own weak efforts, the soft parts of my body: the arms, the inner thighs, the tummy. I thought about all the white people who would never have to exfoliate in their life and wished I was them. Released from her iron grip when she was satisfied that I had shed enough grey noodles, I hopped from the hot bath to the cold pool until I could no longer stand the thick air of the dark cave, and waited impatiently outside for my mother to be done so we could finally go home.
The bathhouse is largely populated by ahjummas (women over 40). Bustling and loud, they talk shit about their husbands and complain about menopause. It’s as if the lack of clothes or makeup make them even more open and honest with nothing to hide, and their bellowing laughter fills the room, vibrating the stagnant water vapour around them. I try not to stare at the sagging tits (dim thoughts of my own ageing begin to take shape at the back of my brain) and inverted bums, black from lifetimes of sitting on hard surfaces as they splash around in the cold pool back to being steamed in the hot bath, or casually nap for an hour in the dry sauna to emerge like shrivelled lizards. I look at my own young angular body in the foggy mirror and feel a strange sense of dissociation from it.
In Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night (2016), David (Joe Seo) experiences a similar dissociation, almost like he’s an observer of worlds he can never really be part of. The Korean spa in LA Koreatown is simultaneously a community space for Korean-Americans to relax and scrub their family members’ backs as well as a cruising spot for gay immigrants. He stares at his reflection in a steamy mirror of the bathhouse where he covertly works to help his financially struggling family, exhausted with navigating expectations and his desire for men all in one claustrophobic space. Leaving his drunken dad (Cho Youn-ho) snoring in a massage chair upstairs, he follows a man into the sauna.
The camera reveals the tension between the public and private in subtle ways. It remains still in wide shots of the spa where naked men walk in and out of the frame baring it all. When the camera moves, it’s usually following David’s lingering gaze, closing up on the sweat beads on men’s skin. The more erotic a scene gets, the less of the body we see. When the men get caught, the all-too-brief eroticism evaporates to leave the underlying discomfort. The heaviness of the sauna air and the low hum of the ventilator amplify the oppressive. David becomes a furtive ally for the cruising men, putting up “Cleaning in Progress” signs in front of the sauna after a few suggestive glances wordlessly lead to one man entering after the other. But how much can the lookout, caught between two worlds, partake?
As long as bathhouses have existed, gay shit has been happening in them. What did you think was going to happen with a bunch of naked men in a hot room? Originally built for the public to maintain personal hygiene in times when it was difficult to bathe at home, the normative and the transgressive have coexisted in an uneasy state inside its sweaty walls for centuries. Some bathhouse owners attempted to clamp down on homosexual activity while many others were happy to overlook it in favour of profit (and bribes) from their gay patrons. The establishment of exclusively gay bathhouses in America in the 1950s allowed for safer cruising, despite being subject to police raids and crackdowns. Crucially, this meant that beyond anonymous sex, these bathhouses also became important community hubs for sharing information, even hosting voter registration and vaccinations.
Being undercover in a heteronormative place, especially an insular immigrant community like LA Koreatown, is psychologically taxing to say the least. Queer East is all about celebrating being both queer and Asian, but in many of the films screened at the festival, the characters are faced with an ultimatum: live a double life or be yourself at the cost of exile from your community. It seems notable that the man David cums with is also Korean. After the act, David’s attempt to kiss him is foiled by the manager peering into the sauna. No one is there to be a lookout for him. My stomach feels like a bottomless whirlpool watching him finally get what he wants be instantly taken away. In loss, in shame, he scrubs the abs he loves so much with a blue 때수건 (ddae soogun) exfoliating towel, notoriously the most abrasive colour of towel, until his skin is peeling, a wound. Instinctively I clutch my sides. I can’t help but wonder if this is the scrubbing my mother would be satisfied with.
Near the start of Spa Night, David is at the 찜질방 (jjimjilbang)* with his parents, sharing a bowl of 빙수 (bingsu) shaved ice. His mother laments her lack of a daughter and says he needs to get a girlfriend so that she’ll have someone to scrub her back. “What if she thinks it’s gross?” asks David, tentatively testing the waters. “What if I marry a white girl?” to which his mother, no longer smiling, replies “You should marry a Korean woman and have Korean kids. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
I asked my mother (much more directly) how she would feel if I liked girls. Her answer was along the lines of “You can’t help being like that, but I would be sad because you would live a very lonely life full of suffering.” To throw away your parents’ hopes of you living their idea of a good life seems like the ultimate act of betrayal. Why be queer, why go out of your way to be different, when nice is right there?
After the screening of Spa Night, we all huddle outside into the chilly April evening and pack ourselves into the small wooden saunas of Hackney Wick Community Baths. Unfortunately, the venue does not allow nudity, and everyone is wearing swimming costumes. The heat opens our pores (and more), and I find myself talking to strangers. We discuss the film, pretend-retching at the scene where David’s friend vomits and shoves it down the drain with his feet (not the vomit toes!). Someone complains about the lack of good food at Sweatbox, London’s most popular gay sauna. He proposes a five-storey jjimjilbang, complete with bingsu stations in its place. When the heat becomes unbearable, I step outside. The world seems a little less distant today.
* jjimjilbang is quite different to a regular bathhouse. Whilst the Korean bathhouse is completely gender-segregated and nude, the jjimjilbang has a communal mixed-gender and clothed area for recreational activities like eating, sleeping, and watching TV (sometimes even Karaoke!). There is a greater focus on relaxing in the jjimjilbang, whereas the main appeal of the bathhouse is its variety of hot baths, designed to tease out the dead skin to be scrubbed away.