Coming Clean In Korea

A few years before the 24th Summer Olympics were held in Seoul, I spent a couple of months traveling around Korea while waiting for the Japanese consulate in Seoul to process my visa. There was some sort of mix up, and they ended up taking their time.

"How long will it be?" I asked the secretary anxiously.

She shrugged. "Could be a week. Or it could be over a month."

My heart sank. I didn't have much money and I didn't speak Korean. While I waited for my visa, I had a lot of time to kill, and not much else. In my possession were a youth hostel card, my Japanese-English dictionary, and a backpack full of dirty laundry. It was a very hot summer and I'd had to travel from Northern Japan down to the South, where I took the ferry from Shimonoseki to Pusan. I'd been trying in vain to find a Laundromat ever since arriving in Pusan.

At the youth hostel in Seoul I was told that no washing machine was available. Fortunately, a girl from Hong Kong gave me her Korean-English phrase book and I learned how to ask for the Laundromat in Korean. But the phrase books can never tell you how to understand or respond to any of the several hundred answers you might get, so after a while I gave up and began using Japanese instead. Most Koreans over the age of fifty knew Japanese to some degree, thanks to Japan's occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945, so why shouldn't I use the one language I had in common, right? Actually, I'll tell you why not. Although the history and politics between Japan and Korea are complicated, most Koreans who learned Japanese under Japanese rule do not enjoy using the language, however fluently they might speak it. In fact, they bitterly resent it.

After a while, though, I worked out a way. If I approached people in a humble way and made my language suitably contrite and respectful (something that is very easy to do given the various politeness levels in Japanese), they responded very well. In fact, not only did I find my way to the post office, pharmacy, an international book shop and a bakery, I also had some fascinating conversations with a variety of elderly Koreans. "I never imagined I would be speaking Japanese with a young lady from America," one tall, genteel man remarked, shaking his head in wonder.

But I did not find the Laundromat, and all my queries were met with polite shrugs.

"Just give up and wash your clothes by hand," said a fellow American I'd met along the way. "That's what I've been doing."

But that was what I'd been doing too, and I was tired of it. In fact, I began to see the Laundromat as a kind of Holy Grail. There just had to be one, and I was determined to find it.

During my second week in Korea, someone mentioned that one of the larger hotels in the town where I was staying took in laundry for a modest sum. I bundled up my disgusting laundry and took it to the hotel in the morning. I asked the lady at the desk if I could use the machines on my own, but she didn't seem to understand me, so I handed them my whopping bag of filthy clothes after agreeing on a very reasonable price. They told me I could collect my laundry any time after five that evening.

I had a wonderful day, traveling around the town, knowing that somewhere my laundry was happily churning about in a washing machine, finally getting clean. My friends and I treated ourselves to a lavish breakfast at another western style hotel (my company in Japan having sent me financial reinforcements) and we spent the day touring the town. Just after lunch, we happened to pass over a bridge that spanned a rushing river. Looking down, we saw a group of women, washing clothes. It was an incredibly picturesque scene: this group of middle-aged women, brown from the sun and remarkably fit and healthy, laughing as they worked. Slapping the bigger items on the large, flat rocks, one woman made a comment that sent one of her companions into hysterics. Another woman seemed to be in charge of the smaller items; squeezing streams of water out of each piece, she would then dip it back into the water several more times, then repeat the process. I watched in admiration: the family's clothes were getting very clean indeed.

Then one of my traveling companions nudged me. "Hey, isn't that the dress you were wearing yesterday?"

I laughed.

"No, seriously," she said, craning her neck for a better view. "The beige one with the black checks on it. And, whoa! -- those are your blue shorts! Take a look."

I did -- and instantly stopped laughing. The ladies were washing my stuff all right -- every single bit of it. My disgusting, filthy laundry was in the river, polluting the water. They were actually handling it. I blanched, remembering the state of it. Suddenly their earlier laughter didn't seem quite so cheery.

When I went to the hotel to collect my clothes that evening, everything was neatly folded and ironed to within an inch of its life. There was no doubt about it: my clothes had never been so clean.

But after that I washed everything by hand.