But the life of a shaman is not an easy one. When she was younger, Min would perform kut for neighbors and clients, but when she encountered them in public afterward they would pretend not to know her, ignoring her as they walked by. “We take on their problems. Then they act like they don’t know us. That’s the thing I didn’t like the most. The most painful part.”
Throughout Korean history, shamans have been hunted in the name of social order by Confucians, in the name of modernity by Japanese imperialists, and, most recently, in the name of industrialization and anti-superstition under President Park Chung-Hee. Modernization and the erosion of folk culture is not unique to the Korean nation. What is unique, however, is the way in which folk customs were forcibly eradicated by presidential command in the late twentieth century.
The following summer, two friends from college, Jane and Amanda, moved to the city, and Jane and I decided to share an apartment. We found a place on West Tenth Street, still tiny but palatial compared to my studio. Midway between uptown and Brooklyn, our place became the obvious meeting spot for impromptu weeknight dinners and before going out on the weekends. We cooked elaborate feasts in the galley kitchen and held whimsical parties; parties where we only served cheap champagne, bourbon, and cupcakes; parties that in the summer meandered onto the fire escape and up to the roof of our building, technically off-limits but perfectly accessible. I began running, and that’s how I learned the zig-zagging streets of the West Village.
Still, I had the nagging sense that real life was happening elsewhere. I’ve always had serious wanderlust, and my life those first years in New York, which in retrospect seems pretty dreamy, felt sort of square and pedestrian to me at the time. My ex-boyfriend was working at an NGO in rural India; I had friends teaching English in Japan, ski-bumming around Colorado, and living in communes in the Bay Area. I had the typical complaints about the city: the bleak winters, the limited access to nature, and on top of it, everything was outrageously expensive. Sure, I’d always thought I’d end up in New York someday, but being here, working a regular nine-to-six job, at age 23—then 24, then 25—felt like a failure of either imagination or nerve.
“Sometimes you don’t know who you are until you put on a mask,” Chee writes. Each of these excursions into a kind of lived fiction allowed Chee to confront and accept something he had, at least in part, rejected about himself: his mixed heritage, his queerness.
What makes this airport bar unforgettable is, perhaps, the same reason your favorite en-route-to-somewhere-else haunt is so beloved. (Okay, admittedly, location is everything, and Nick's Tomatoe Pie is pretty much the only place to sit down and get a drink and something to eat in the concourse.) But that's exactly it. The beauty of any airport bar is not what's in it, at least not in terms of its food or microbrews or glitzy clientele. It's that it offers a chance to capitalize on this increasingly rare moment in modern life: You have time to kill, and nothing better to do while you wait — why not sit down for a spell, talk to some fellow travelers (surely they have interesting stories to share), and, if not, simply have a drink and a bite while you check your email?
The game begins once your clothes are off and you’re wearing nothing but a paper gown, your feet in the stirrups. The set designers have created an atmosphere of grim realism. The room is cold and harshly lit. A small pubic-hair tumbleweed lurks in a corner. The puzzles in this game rely on a basic understanding of biology, self-knowledge, and intuition, but with a twist: ultimately, the only way to escape this room is to defer to the older, male doctor who thinks he knows more about your vagina than you do.