When I first went to South Korea to teach English a few years ago, apart from the fact that I couldn’t have shown you where the country was on a map, I didn’t know what to expect from the people. But I did know what everyone else in the world knows: they appeared to be effortlessly slim.
After a few months in the country, though, I found out it’s not so effortless. In fact, staying thin in South Korea is something of a national fixation. Koreans you have just met feel as much at ease commenting on your weight as on your age, marital status or how much money you earn. And I found their preconception of the size of visiting Westerners disturbing. When shopping for a jacket at Dongdaemun night market in central Seoul, famous for clothing and accessories, the shopkeepers offered: “You size extra largie?” so many times, I eventually became despondent. I am a size small here in South Africa. But in South Korea, apparently, I’m a big man.
A woman friend, who was originally from Canada but had lived in Seoul for three years, told me it wasn’t uncommon for Western women to be summarily shown the door when asking to try clothing on. On one occasion, she was chased from a shop with the words: “We no have your size!”
Shopping is big in Korea. All of the popular American and European high-street fashion labels — Levi’s, H&M, Abercrombie and Finch, Zara — are stocked in enormous and crowded multilevel shopping malls and districts. Many of the kindergarten students I taught sported designer labels such as Burberry and Armani Exchange and, of course, so did their parents. Children as young as four had the kind of brand consciousness that Paris Hilton would be proud of. Once, when I pointed out the Burberry check pattern in the lining of a student’s coat, saying to the class, “Christine is wearing her Burberry coat today,” they all started shouting with excitement: “I have that at my house!” or “I have the skirt!” and “I have a T-shirt!”
Brand consciousness seemed to spill over into body consciousness. My kindergarten students made comments about anyone’s weight — teachers, parents and fellow students. They would attach a word meaning “piggy” to someone who was deemed larger, so it would be “Dwegee-teacher” or “Her mom is a dwegee.” More than once, when standing unaware with my stomach protruding, I would feel a little hand give an affectionate pat with the smiling question: “Baby?”
I suppose one could put at least some of this blame on South Korea’s well-developed pop culture. K-Pop music is well supported and exported on tours to Japan and China. Girl and boy bands with names like 2NE1, Big Bang and Super Junior M display synchronised choreography, occasionally bizarre fashion and a sort of amplified perfection of features. Local celebrities are held in high esteem and are trotted out to advertise anything from polyester pants to spray-on hair.
Plastic surgery seems to be as common as it is in Los Angeles. Some of my Korean colleagues — usually young, unmarried women — told me they had had surgery. Most often, it was double-eyelid surgery, in which a fold is added to the top eyelid to make their eyes bigger, or more Western, or a nose job that was usually done to refine and narrow it down. I heard numerous times of parents giving their daughters money for surgery as a gift on their 21st birthday or for their wedding.
My flatmate in Korea, who grew up in Holland but whose parents were Korean, told me about going to the “fat doctor”. On his first consultation, which cost 25 000 won or R160, the fat doctor examined him and worked out his body-fat index. Then they sat together at his table and the doctor wrote: “Obesity is an addiction to carbs” on a little yellow memo, which was to be stuck on the fridge door. He also got a prescription that cost 40 000 won, or R260, and consisted of an appetite suppressant, a metabolism-booster and some kind of herbal laxative. At an additional charge each week, he had injections in problem areas. He told me that after these the fat had “melted off” in a few weeks.
I thought about going the fat doctor after I was told by someone I was seeing: “I think you are a bit fat. You should stop eating American food and maybe walk in the park sometimes.” Not coincidentally, this was on our last date. Besides, I remembered that I would be coming back to South Africa soon.
In a country that has one of the highest percentages of obese people in the world, I figured that people would be more likely to think that someone my size should have an extra piece of pizza as opposed to weight-loss treatment.
Eamon Allan is a freelance journalist now based in Barcelona