I was standing in the doorway of one of the classrooms in the school at which I made a living teaching English to Korean children. Through it I could see a female colleague of mine sat at her desk, powdering her nose and checking her eyeliner. A young Korean lady touching up her make-up is not a particularly unusual sight, it has to be said; it seems few of them would ever dare to venture beyond the doorway of their homes without their faces caked in 'beauty' products. However, in this case I was a little confused. M-Ran, my work-mate, was about to teach a class of poorly behaved kindergarten kids, before moving onto her timetable of equally misbehaved elementary schoolers. I wondered just who she was aiming to impress with her pristine appearance. So, I asked if she thought her pupils would be impressed by her impeccable foundation.
She was not amused at my little enquiry, and mumbled something in a mixture of English and Korean, which sort of sounded like she was saying something along the lines of wanting to look nice regardless of where she was, or who she was with. I wandered away chuckling, but soon began musing on how much time Korean women devoted to their appearance, or dare I say it her vanity, was almost a microcosm of the country itself.
In the 21st century, Korea is in many areas heavily developed and looks impressively modern. Seoul is the classic example of this: bright and new, almost in both appearance and outlook. However once away from the capital and the other major cities, things change. While even in small towns and villages there are still plenty of big, slinky new cars and enough neon to drown out half of Nevada, the covering is not as thick and the country's blemishes and imperfections are plain to see.
My adopted hometown of Taean was little more than a fishing and farming village in the country's northwest. Despite being out on the coast, nearly 2 hours from any city, there were plenty of signs from modern Korea: my office was air-conditioned, there were several western-styled bars, and the facilities in my school were exponentially better than at the school I had attended back in England some 10 years earlier. However, as comfortable as the modernity made my life, it was what poked up from beneath the painted visage of the community that fascinated me.
The side of Taean that gripped me was neither sanitised nor developed, rather it was the side where I could walk through the market and find fish being sold from a bucket in the gutter and pigs heads from plates on the floor. It was the side where just a mile from town I could find old women hunched over, tending to their rice fields, just as they had done for generations. It never failed to coax a smile across face when a brand new SUV skipped around an antiquated, three-wheeled tractor carrying a bundle of cabbages driven by an old man with a face so wrinkled his features would disappear into the creases of skin.
The way I saw it, it is as always the blemishes, the realities of a place that make it interesting. In Korea I found them particularly interesting when they were in such obvious contrast with the new coverings that are being created.
For the record when I eventually saw Mi-Ran without make-up in something of her natural state, I was shocked how pretty she was. I don't know if there is a metaphor there, maybe she stands as a symbol of Korea's deeper beauty, or maybe she is just an example of the modernity being a mask that covers a truer reality, make of it, and of Korea, what you will.