Looks

I eat a lot of strange things here in Korea, as you might expect. Thanks to my grandmother and great-aunt, I probably eat more traditional Korean food than most. A couple weeks ago, they bought a load of young green chili peppers, and they are amazingly good -- small, thin-skinned, fresh, rarely spicy. We dip them into a thick soybean paste (miso to most of us) and have them as side dishes. I've taken to munching on them as a snack, late at night when I get home from taekwondo, along with slices of raw onion.

Yeah, I wouldn't kiss me either after one of my little snacks. But there's no one here in danger of trying to do so -- sad for me, but lucky for them, since they'd faint dead away from the smell.

I must admit, I haven't been eating very well for the last month and a half or so. I wake up late, go to work or to meet someone by 1 or 2 pm, go to taekwondo, and get home around 10 pm. I have "breakfast" (only in that it's the first meal of the day; then again, breakfast is pretty much the same as lunch) once before I go out and then sometimes dinner before taekwondo, but more often a small snack. And then depending on how hungry I am, I might snack on something late at night at home.

With the irregular eating and regular exercise, the predictable has occurred -- I've lost a couple pounds, and the pounds left tend to vote Muscle a little more than Fat these days. People at work and my old school mates have commented on it, and even I can see that my face looks thinner. My old department head said two weeks ago, "hk, when you first came to work here, you looked like a student, but now you're a lady!"

Koreans make comments on appearance that would horrify Americans. Or at least send them for a loop. One coworker, at the same office function, said to me, "Your skin looks really good! You used to have acne -- what happened?" It used to unnerve me, but -- like everything else -- I've gotten used to it.

My old classmate Etsuko divides up my time here into three periods. The first was the original long-haired, bespectacled hk that first arrived in Korea. The second was when I cut my hair short in the spring last year. And the third was in the summer, last year around this time, when I switched to contact lenses and got my first straight perm. I'd say that there was a version 3.5 between then and now, after I came back from the States in the fall loaded with several pounds of J1's excellent castoffs.

I guess this slimmer, "lady-like" me is the fourth hk in seoul. New and improved.

I look a little more like a Korean girl these days, which is probably why people have noticed the differences approvingly. It's not hard to do, replicating one of the look, since there's only so much diversity. It helps that all clothing stores sell virtually the same clothes, with a slight variation in price. I always felt like being well-dressed in the U.S. was out of reach; since I could never tell where the really sartorially smart people bought their clothes, I just muddled my way through stores buying what was on sale and seemed to fit reasonably. Here, it's so easy, even I can do it.

When I first got here, I thought that Korean style was a little weird, and I still do think so about certain combinations and frills and bows and such, but familiarity didn't breed contempt for me. I can't say I completely like everything worn here, but I can definitely find things I don't mind wearing. That I even search for, in fact, when I'm in one of those wonderful underground shopping areas. You know, where the bras are USD$1.80 and the shoes are $8.57.

I've even gotten used to men's styles. Pink polo shirts? Hey what's wrong with that on a man? Large pink heart dangling from the cell phone? So what? Permed hair? Yeah, it's kind of girly, but I don't think it makes the guy look less masculine. Well... okay, no, that might be going too far. (Especially the singers with the really permed out hair that looks fussier than a show poodle. Looking at them makes me understand why Asian men are fetishized in the gay community.) Point is, there's a different aesthetic for men here, and I've grown used to it.

'Course, that doesn't mean I want to date any of them.