I Get The Pink Shirts

I get it, I do.

I was at Holy Family Hospital (성가병원) in Bucheon last week with my wife, getting a sonogram, and she was sent to have blood drawn.  The waiting room we wound up in was basically a caged chicken away from being the bus station in Damyang.  The people there looked like they’d been left on the deck of a boat overnight, the men red with years of drink and rough living, the women wizened old farm-grandmas.  It was a rough crowd.  It was straight-up old-school Korea, basically South-eastern Bucheon in a nutshell (excluding Beombak-dong).  There was a boy there being screamed at by a male phlebotomist.  ‘Give me your arm!  응?  What are you, a baby?! 응!?’  The boy flat out refused.  His mother came over.  She was from some other country, which I couldn’t tell until she spoke, because she had what the Koreans call a ‘square face’, very Korean. She spoke Korean strangely, to the point where I had to ask my wife if she was a foreigner or had a cleft palate.

‘응? 응? 엄마 떼려?  응?’ (‘Want mom to hit you?’)

And then she started wailing on him.  Most of the people there seemed pruriently interested.  Free show.

Then dad came.  I’ve heard all the stories about these international marriages where the husband beats the foreign wife, but there was no way that was the case here.  He looked scared to death of her, and she could totally take him.

The phlebotomist, the father and the mother went on for about thirty minutes trying to get this kid to give up his arm, and I had a thought.  ‘In America,’ I told Miyoung, ‘this would never happen.  Someone would grab the kid, his blood would be taken, and that would be it.  Because this is fear, and there’s no use reasoning with fear.  That’s the difference between there and here.  There, people will stop everything and spend a half hour trying to get a kid to express true remorse and apologize.  Here they’ll spend a half hour trying to get a kid to submit to authority.’

Then I looked around and noticed there was not a single pink shirt in sight.  this is a very rare occurrence in Korea, and warranted note.  I asked myself, where are the pinkies.  And then I realized.  The whole reason behind the pink shirts, the couple shirts, the effete and slightly feminine styles the boys of Korea like to wear is a rebellion against the aggressively gruff, dull rural roots that practically everyone comes from.

Many young guys who grew up in this world find that it’s just not them.  What recourse do they have but to declare loudly and pinkly to the world ‘I am not what my parents are.’  They’re showing people they’re young, they’re modern, they’re not dissolute drunken bums (and how would one know if not for their outfits?) and they’re urbane.  If my two choices of apparel are white pants, a pink shirt, and ‘wax’ in my hair or slippers, track pants, a motorcycle and a case of the soju rosies, then I have to say I would be right there with these preening young men foppin’ it up.

What would you do?

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~ by Joshing on June 18, 2008.