The Bathing Women2- Musician S

The Bathing Women – project by Magia

 If you observe a day in the life of a metropolitan woman, it will most likely end in a bathroom where she wraps up the day by having a bath(for the sake of convenience, shower and bath will be collectively referred to as ‘bath’).

 For particular women, bathing comes across as special. She stands naked in a confined space that is around 1 Pyeong[1] , and spends some alone time with her most private self. This is the only time of the day where she can ultimately be herself.

 As human beings, we’re all equal when performing the act of bathing. We undergo a similar process, with similar facial expressions, to wash off the threads of tension we carry around throughout the day.

 Magia finds metropolitan women who derive special meaning from bathing, and she photographs their bathing procedures. Through the action of bathing, some women have survived the city, while some are surviving, promising to themselves that they will survive the next day. <The Bathing Women> documents the traces of daily life on the body.

[1] Pyeong: Korean unit of area and floorspace. Approx. 3.3058㎡.

TW: Suicide, Self-harm

This project contains materials that may be harmful or traumatizing to some audiences. Viewer discretion is advised.

03. I’m in the right place, wrong time. - Musician S

When do you usually have a bath?

I work as a food delivery driver, so I leave home at 10 A.M. and come home around 9 or 10 P.M. I end up having a bath around 11 P.M. to midnight. I’m having some time off at the moment though, because I got into an accident recently.

Would you like to tell me about your main career?

I feel quite shy to introduce myself as a musician just yet, but I’ve been pursuing music as my career for my entire life. I’ve made 3 songs so far, one each of folk, pop and rock. I’m planning to release a single album of each. I want to create something new through YouTube that doesn’t exist in the indie music scene currently, so I’m trying bits and pieces of different stuff.

Is there a specific rationale behind getting in touch for this photoshoot session?

People often stare at me with suspicion when I go out and live a “normal world” life. I felt that it was unnecessary for me to have to go through a process where people are poking around and asking me something like ‘You are That(Transgender*), right? Or are you not?’. I’d rather want to open up widely. It is much better when people who don’t care whether I’m ‘That’ or not are sticking around, and the others just leaving.

*Transgender: People who have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from the sex that they were assigned at birth
(Ref: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender)

This might end up getting unwanted feedback.

There’s nothing to get that’s even worse than how it is now. My life’s always been like this. Once I get to a point where I think ‘Oh, this must be the hard bottom of it.’, there always was a lower bottom. It will ridiculously hit that lower bottom somehow no matter how much I struggled not to hit it. Like how I got into this recent accident from work. So I give up .(laugh)

How did you hit what kind of bottom?

My biggest woe in my mid-late 20s was ‘true love’. I was feeling like I was such an arrogant and bad person for not being able to accept someone I loved. I was firmly determined to take my own life because I couldn’t forgive myself for that, then I thought, since I’ve decided to end everything, I might as well give it a shot going with my true identity before it ends. It is essential to get a formal prescription to start hormonal treatment (in Korea). To get this prescription you have to see a psychiatrist, so I went to see one and naively told them everything above. Of course they didn’t prescribe anything for me. (laugh)

Then I ran out of money to see the psychiatrist, so I bought birth control tablets from the pharmacy. They contain estrogen, you know. I bought 2 trays of them and took 4 pills a day. I started to sweat a lot at random, like when I was simply eating. After a while I came to realize that I should have approached the psychiatrist somewhat differently. So I went back, and told them something like ‘I am excited for a happier future through the Gender Transition*.’, and that got me the prescription I needed.

After that I saved some money and got gender reassignment surgery (GRS), alongside the regular hormonal therapy. That was about 2 years ago, just before COVID hit.

*Gender Transition: the process of changing one's gender presentation or sex characteristics to accord with one's internal sense of gender identity – the idea of what it means to be a man or a woman, or to be non-binary or genderqueer. (Ref. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_transitioning)

It hasn’t been that long (since the GRS). What is life like after the transition?

It’s already late, too late.

What is (late)?

To get a job, especially to get a stable one.

I got rejected from most of the workplaces I applied for before the transition. If I got lucky and made it to the interview, then they’d ask for the health certificate, and once they see the certificate (that displays legal sex) they’d kick me out. They treated me very differently before and after they knew (that I am a transgender). This recurred constantly and I wasn’t able to build a solid career as a consequence. I could only work for a short period of time at restaurants or gas stations. Some places would keep me for a while because I was a diligent and hard worker. My longest period at work was at a Spanish restaurant that lasted for about 2 years.

I opened up a wine bar after the GRS. I put a lot of effort in it, painting the place and putting up the tiles myself, and opened it in December last year. Then hit the COVID-19. I thought to myself, I should put the music career back on track rather than try barely keeping this new business together, so here I am. I’m in quite a bit of debt in ways. (laugh)

Both your parents are pastors and you also majored in Theology. How did you open up about your current life (to the parents)?

Transition itself wasn’t a big of a deal for them. They always thought I was a child who’d disappear at any moment if something went slightly wrong, so they wanted to hold on to me no matter what. But they still call me a son.

Who are the people in your phone wallpaper?

This girl on the left is my best friend from kindergarten, and the one on the right is me. If I hadn’t moved away, I would have been able to keep the friendship from my childhood. I wonder if life would have been much better that way?

What was life like after that (moving away)?

Some kid back in elementary school told me “Who would marry a kid like you!”, and this added to the body dysphoria that I hadn’t acknowledged. I grew up as a teenager with very low self-esteem. My body dysphoria* is particularly more severe than other transgenders. It’s still such an agony to look into the mirror even though I have completed my transition. I feel like I’m a sewed up rag doll.

I’ve been actively coming out since high school, but it mostly returned in extreme and explicit hatreds. I don’t have many people around me anyway. I probably would never see friends from high school or university. They won’t accept me as a woman, nor will I try to find them and convince them.

*Body Dysphoria: obsessive idea that some aspect of one's own body part or appearance is severely flawed and therefore warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix it. (Ref. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_dysmorphic_disorder)

What if you chose not to go with the transition?

There are various orientations amongst transgenders. I’ve never doubted the fact that I’m not a man. I watched a cartoon when I was a child, a male baby got sucked up into space and came back out as a female. That was my first experience noticing ‘the concept of a man and a woman meaning that they have different sex’, and I always have acknowledged myself as a woman ever since. Never thought I was a man once. Of course there are people like me, as well as people who are in continuous questioning.

Lifestyle also varies a lot. Relatively rarely, there are transgenders who are doing very well within the current ‘normal’ social boundary. On the other hand there are struggling people right at the very bottom of the society. Because the world wouldn’t accept us as a ‘regular, permanent, full timer’. When I think of those who are in a very bad spot… I’m lost for words.

Whereabouts do you think you are?

I see myself as an ambiguous being and a misfit. But isn’t that what normal feels like in an insane world? It doesn’t matter I guess, if I was a good person then I should be able to have good relationships with other good people.

You have already come out on social media. What was the reaction like around you?

Well, some people were like ‘Cheer up!’, ‘You are a worthy person’ even, and some would be dismissive to avoid the “headaches”.

Everyone wants to avoid those headaches.

I don’t. I have to live in this society as a ‘transgender’. Neither male nor female, could be the third sex. In some way my survival up to date is a result of countless attempts and experiences of transgenders from the previous generations. The world is definitely getting better than before, by small bits. It has only been recent to be able to get hormonal therapy before too late, after you identify as a transgender.

Your existence is a legacy of those who stood up for these “headaches”.

The accumulated experiences of the people from the previous generation affects my own experience of today. On this timeline made by people of the past and now, I, now am marking a gentle dot on ‘this period’ as I am living. And that very dot will continue into a line in the next generation.

Once, a long time ago, I got introduced to some of the 1st generation transgender elderly women. They’ve been through Korean War and Japanese Occupation. We chatted together over some whiskey, and that felt very obscure. They accomplished their transition in such times, even though it was such times, enduring so much damage. They might have gone onto the operation table more as an experimental subject than getting a proper surgery. From that meet up, I witnessed the time I’ve been living overlapping with the times they’ve been living.

Who would even think there were Queers in the ravages of Korean War? I can’t even dare to imagine. Thus I think I am living a blessed life. Discrimination is still out there. But knowing what these women had gone through, it humbles me to be cautious expressing my own pains.

‘Expressing your own pain’ could be a way to represent other people’s voice and pain for them.

I’ve decided to acknowledge and accept my own pain for that reason. I am neither a victim nor an offender. I’m just a person stuck in the wrong timeline. There’s a saying that goes ‘I’m in the right place, wrong time’.

How do you envisage continuing living in that wrong timeline?

I decided to not think about anything. Future will always stab me in the back even though I prepare for hundreds and thousands of different possibilities. If I’m destined to get stabbed, I’d rather be stabbed without trying hard to avoid it.

Is there something you’d like to do (other than not think about anything)?

Love, just a simple heart-warming love. A love that I live in my world and they live theirs. I wonder their world and they wonder mine, then it slowly consolidates into one. I would really love to share the journey of learning each other’s world.

‘Love’ always seems to be a very important topic to you.

All I need is just one person to be on my side. So that I can see the world through that person. That will calm my complicated mind down a bit. One of the big reasons for me to want to end my life is that forever complicated mind. I already know how to execute it. But on the other hand, another more objective me will be watching myself from a distance at the same time. I don’t know why I’m like this. (laugh)

The quote on the white board is very striking. What does it mean by ‘Savage things, inferior lives’? 

I wrote it because I like people too much. I’m natural at empathizing with others, so I expect a lot and get disappointed a little too much from them at the same time. Bonding or parting ways with others is very difficult for me for that reason. The wounds after the end of a relationship have always been overwhelmingly deep as well. Then I would vent that pain out on myself even when it should actually be towards the other person in that relationship. Sometimes it would snowball so much and get out of my hands. That quote is some sort of a frantic effort of mine. An effort to keep myself at a safe emotional distance from others.

(*A while after the interview the quote has changed. Attached at the very end is a photo of the most recent quote the model provided.)

Those emotions must affect your depression.

If I don’t take a bath, it doubles. I practice one of the depression treatments that you go into a tub of hot water then cold in rotation. I always loved the feel of the water. If I were born in the primitive era, I might have lived right by the hot springs.

Do you have a dream bathroom? Like, if you were rich, you’d take the interior to a certain excessiveness?

I feel guilty towards humankind for enjoying any type of privilege. If I get one thing, that means the same will be taken away from some life out there on earth. You live taking or being taken away from. So I don’t really dream of glamour much. If I could have something, a basin and a bathtub would be everything I need.

The only way to liberate me from this endless pain.
Throughout 37 years, I’ve tried so hard, hundreds and thousands times more than other people, to live, to figure out the meaning of life, until I concluded to abandon my own.
In the end, there is no place for me to go back.
That’s enough.
You’ve been through a lot for 37 years, child.
I don’t know exactly for how long, it could be 38 or 39 years, but you’ve done well for all those times.
Rest in peace.
If there will be any fantastic coincidence, I am hopeful for that extra time to come.
But truly, you’ve done well.
You’ve lived a good life, more than anybody else.
You were a great, amazing, beautiful and lovely child^-^ I love you.

Translation-Dorothy Park