I live in a foreign country where me as a white female I am assumed to be an English teacher which is all fine and dandy if my job was teaching English and my body wasn't my job. But my job is very dependent on my body and my body is very much a huge part of my job. It's my walking billboard for my business, Hulk's Boxing, a company that is in the fitness and health industry. And while I loved teaching English when I was a teacher, I no longer teach English, and I want my image to make that clear. I want it to make it clear that I work in a totally different industry and I want it to either raise eyebrows and make people question my job and have my body hint that I must be in the sports or fitness industry.
My image is very much an on-going thing I am always trying to revise and recreate.
Today I revised it even more.
God bless my hair stylist, let me put that out there right now. My head of hair is a first for many of the ideas I've asked her to try but she doesn't question my wants nor does she judge. She just does her best to give me what I want. A few weeks ago she joked about how I keep on going shorter and shorter with the one side of my asymmetrical pixie cut and she asked me if I just wanted her to shave it. Well, today that's what I asked her to do. I got her to shave half my head and put scratches in it.
I love it!!!
I would never have been allowed to do this when I was a professor at Dankook University or Suwon Science College and I really think that's what did it for me, because before I felt so restricted with what I could and couldn't do. And my restrictions weren't just with my image but with what I could do, like my boxing. They considered it a second job, a no-no according to E2 visa rules but it would have been a simple no problem if Dankook just gave me an easy consent. They refused to do so though and what should have been something so simple got so blown out of proportion. I'll never forget the day Dankook sent immigration banging on my apartment door, threatening to deport me if I had another professional fight again. But I did have another fight. I signed for one in Japan, a place outside of Korea where their rigid, tight rules couldn't control me. They watched as I dropped mad weight for that fight and then when they asked if I wanted to renew my contract I had the last laugh. I married Snickers the next month, quit work and lived off the royalties of my boxing for a full year. Travelled to four countries that year on no official paycheck.
No one tells me what to do anymore. I am my own boss and my own business. Snickers may be the owner of Hulk's but I am the manager; I call the shots. Today I told Snickers I was taking off part of the evening and thus making him watch the club, a task I usually do on Free Train Fridays. And if I want to shave my head and wear only a sports bra and leggings while working, well then that's what I am going to do. Today it was the shaved head that became a reality.
KBS had a bit of a freak out when they read my Facebook status update this morning upon reading I had changed my looks. Their weeks of filming is not yet done but because of the fact that they'll be making three episodes with it all, some parts that were filmed first may be used for the last episode. It's nothing a change in camera position or hoodie during training can't keep secret though.
KBS travelled to Hulk's today for an interview -- Snickers and I with their main writer and an assistant. The interview lasted a little over 2 hours. They repeated a lot of the questions asked in an earlier interview but they also touched on more sensitive questions like whether or not I wanted to make a more comfortable, closer relationship with Mama Kim, Snickers' mom. I thought about that particular question, tried to come up with a tv-worthy answer but then I blurted out a simple "no". It's not that I do or don't like her, to tell you the truth, it's just that I really don't have a connection with her. She has her past that I don't agree with and though I know you can't change your past I also know I just can't connect with her because of it.
One of the questions that I really thought so broad but quite an interesting question was "what is it about Korea that you just don't understand?" I had to ask them if they could be more specific, like do they mean what is it about Korean culture, Korean families, the work environment, or whatnot. They said it was really up to me with how I wanted to interpret that question.
What is it about Korea that I just don't understand?!
I think what I just don't understand is the old school cookie-cutter life that is so pushed here. I remember the first week of marriage, being asked about when Snickers and I are going to start a family and whether or not I'm already pregnant. I have a family, Snickers is my family, and now my family consists of Pyen Chi, Balboa, and Pacquiao. Since when was a family with a two-legged offspring considered the only form of a family?! I'll never forget April Fool's Day 2014, when K-Gere told Mama Kim, as a joke of course, that I was pregnant. That woman cried and cried at the reality that I wasn't and when I approached one of Snickers' sisters about it she said "I know, but my family has expectations...." Instantly she lost me in that conversation as soon as she said the word "expectations". "You need to learn the English phrase 'cookie-cutter', I told her, "and stop being one!"
Of course the younger generation in Korea is changing this and the Koreans I met when I first landed over 10 years ago are quite different than the ones walking around now but given the fact that Korea assigns so much power and control to age here, seniority rules the country. "But they've got a female president, doesn't that say anything to them?!" I find myself blurting this rhetorical question out way too many times for my liking, to tell you the truth.
Korea is changing but apparently not with the ideals of my particular generation and from the older generations. I've been married five years and for five years every single week I've been asked either why don't I have a baby yet or when am I going to have a baby? The "when are you going to have a baby" question I can tolerate but it's they "why don't you..." that bothers me to the core.
I told the KBS writer today that I think if there weren't so much pressure on women to have babies than for starters I think many women wouldn't have kids but I also think more women would pursue their own personal and career-related goals. Kids are a huge reason why many Korean couples that would otherwise divorce stay together and though while I am not a fan of divorce I am more so not a fan of staying in an unhealthy or unhappy relation. That's not healthy for anyone involved. Having a baby in Korea keeps wanting-to-divorce couples together and causes other families to force their out-of-wedlock kids to get married. Both situations kind of screw up the whole notion of what it means to be a family, at least in my perspective. So if I want to call my husband and our four-legged friends my family than I think that is more ok because we all love each other and actually want to be together.
I have a family and I have three babies, four if you count my immature husband, so I'd really appreciate it if cookie-cutter people would stop asking me about when or why I don't have a family. I have a family. Friggin' open your eyes, get your head out of the stone-age and accept that. I simple hate the fact that people expect me to be like every other Korean wife here, so average, so predictable, as if me not having a baby makes me any less of a woman a wife or I'm going against what is natural, what nature intended for me. Sorry but my validation as a women doesn't come from being able to reproduce. My validation as a women comes from my own expectations, standards and ideals.
I was not cut using the same cookie cutter. I shaped ME and Korea will just have to put that on their chopsticks and chew on that because I'm not going to stop shaping me.
I've got half a shaved head now, perhaps that will tell them I don't follow the flow.
I don't follow the flow and I don't teach English.
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