The Goshitel Diaries: Part 1
3.5 square meters. Five floors up. Above a brothel. This is where the story starts.
In the bustling city of Seoul, at the edge of the nocturnal playground that is Itaewon, up an alleyway, and behind a nightclub is a 3.5 sq m apartment in a dingy five floor walk-up that I once called home. The bottom floor was rented out as a not-so-covert brothel, advertised as a Karaoke bar. This was typical for the back streets of Itaewon.
Behind the trendy bars, there are a few streets fondly called “Homo Hill” and “Hooker Hill” – two of the most popular reasons to visit the neighborhood. Gay bars and dance clubs that are a few steps away from girls on display in glass windows and red-lit doorways. There was a lot of overlap between Hooker and Homo Hill. From the glitzy main road to the hidden backstreets, and everything in between, it was a neon kaleidoscope of revelry and dereliction.
I was a resident carny of this midnight circus a few years ago. On the fifth floor, above the fleshy karaoke bar and behind the dance club was my dingy little room. The accommodations were in a “goshitel”. In my case, a 4 by 8 ft room for those down on their luck. The price was all-inclusive, roughly $200 USD a month. I chose to pay an extra $50 for a window you could barely fit your face in.
Typical side streets in the neighborhood.
A goshitel was my last and only option for accommodations as a broke student. The one I lived in was one of the cheapest, grimiest in the city - filled with asylum-seekers, prostitutes, the derelict - and me! The visitors to Itaewon came for fun, but the residents of the district were largely foreigners of various ilk. That’s what it was known for. Once a ramshackle ghetto for North Korean refugees after the war, it has become a place for Seoul’s misfits and bon vivants. The hip, expensive restaurants and bars lining the main streets were where the expats and expat-lovers frequented. Dive bars and Irish pubs catered to the English teachers and military guys from the nearby army base. The preferred hangouts of day-laborers from Africa and South Asia were small shops that sprinkled the less glamourous back alleys.
Every inch of Itaewon is known for its debauchery. Music, alcohol, and sex flow freely there. The main purpose of a night out in Itaewon was always picking up someone for the night and getting absolutely smashed. Be you a US military man pent up with energy or a Korean office worker ready to play hard after an 80 hour work week, Itaewon beckons.
A string of bad luck launched me into Itaewon’s gravitational pull. I reached the brink of financial oblivion while studying for a master’s degree at one of Korea’s most prestigious universities. My savings dwindled, my scholarship and backup funding had evaporated after the first year. I managed to scrounge up enough money to cover tuition by working as a teacher, maid, and bartender. When I wasn’t in class, I worked most days from 10 am to 1 am, and tried to hit the books during down time at the dimly lit whisky bar that I worked at.
All my money went to my final semester’s tuition. Down to the last cent. For months I lived off of convenience store snacks, leftovers at the bar, or free meals I would flirt with the male patrons into buying for me. There were days I had nothing but coffee and fun-sized Korean off-brand ‘Orion Nacho Salsa Sauce’ Dorito chips.
Before the depths of broke-ass-bitch-ness that forced me into the goshitel, I was living with a male German exchange student in a run-down, soon to be demolished slum in Ahyeon-dong, which later went on to be a filming location in Parasite. You know the parts where they’re in a depressing slum? Yeah, there. The place seemed to have been slapped together during the post-war years and the only people I saw who still remained after the eviction notices had been posted on every corner were over 80.
The neighborhood must’ve held sentimental value, but it was hanging by a thread. Junk from people moving out was piled uncollected everywhere on the streets. I didn’t know why furniture, old photos, and what seemed like people’s keepsakes were dumped and left out on the pavement. I later heard that the area was part of a redevelopment plan and all the tenants were under forced eviction orders.
Family photos mixed with the trash thrown out on the streets
My apartment was falling apart. The wind blew through cracks in my bedroom walls and the bathroom filled with two inches of black water every time we ran the washing machine. Towards the end of my stay there, the shower completely stopped working and the landlady refused to fix it. I would shower at a friend’s place.
My time at this place was cut short when the landlady inexplicably shared the address on craigslist in an ad for “free stuff” to pick up. An American man answered the ad and let himself in while I was out (showering at my neighbor’s house). When I came home, it looked like a tornado had gone through the place. I quickly checked and found all my valuables – including my passport – were gone.
I spent the night at a police station and filed charges against the burglar. After trashing my place and stealing half my stuff, my landlord texted him to bring it back. According to him, he came to our apartment on her invitation and thought that we were spies who had fled the country. My roommate with dual citizenship had two passports – the burglar assumed only international spies had two passports.
Police put tape over the front door of the apartment after the burglary.
His wife came to the station to beg me not to press charges. “He’s just really stupid… I think I’m going to divorce him, honestly,” she explained. I didn’t press charges, and later on he wrote me and my roommate an apology. The landlady (who, according to the police at the station, was a scammer and my apartment was in an abandoned building that she didn’t own) refused to return my deposit back out of spite. The next day, I gathered my belongings and went to a classmate’s place to crash. For the next few weeks, I was sleeping on someone’s floor, taking my final exams and working nights at a whisky bar across the street.
Eventually, I decided that I didn’t want to mooch off of the kindness of my friends any longer and found a spot in a six-bed coed dorm room in a hostel. For three months, I earned my keep as a maid. I would wake up with my dorm mates and we would start doing chores from 9 am. Doing laundry, cleaning rooms, preparing food for the communal kitchen. We’d usually finish around 1pm. Once I realized I was being paid roughly $17 for 5 hours of work so I could share a room with five 20-somethings who were in Seoul to party (making studying and getting sleep a bit of an issue), I saw a listing on craigslist for dirt cheap accommodation in Itaewon and moved into the goshitel.
…
The goshitel took up two floors in the building. The first floor was for men, the second for us ladies. On my floor, there were two rooms for showering and a shared bathroom – two stalls, one a squatter and one a western style toilet. Both were disgusting, covered with urine and smelling to high heavens of shit and menstrual blood. The showers had lipstick kiss marks on the walls and cockroaches in the drains.
There were about 15 rooms on each floor. I quickly learned that some of my neighbors were workers on Hooker Hill, others were asylum-seekers (I distinctly remember a woman from Yemen) and others were just mentally ill oddballs. The girl who lived in the room to the left of me was by far the most intensely remarkable of the bunch. She was a mix of all of them – a prostitute, a foreigner with nothing to return to, and mentally unstable.
She introduced herself to me on my first night in the goshitel while I was on the way to the toilets.
“Hi, what’s your name?” she said to me in her birdlike voice. About 5'2", brown hair, maybe early 20s, staring at me in the hallway blocking my way to the shared bathroom.
“I’m Alicia. What’s yours?”
“Oh, me? I’m no one.” Come to think of it, she never told me her name.
“Oh, okay. Where are you from?” I was too groggy and in need of a piss to try and digest that response.
“You know North Africa? Morocco -Tunisia - Libya. I’m from there”
“Yes, I know those countries. So you’re from Morocco…?”
“I’m Tunisian. Let’s be friends. I’m so lonely and I have no friends here,” she spoke like a whiny child trying to get you to buy candy for them.
“Oh… um, well,” her tone made me wary. I slowly slid past her in the direction of the toilet, “I’m sure I’ll see you around. Bye!”
The interaction was odd, but I made nothing of it. I didn’t see her for the rest of the week and some of my other neighbors were more distracting. Like the morbidly obese Korean prostitute who I saw sitting ass on pavement in front of a motel frequented by foreign day-laborers calling out to them for a “fuck”. Or the extremely skinny, and silent wild haired woman of about 60 who stared intensely at me whenever we shared the kitchen space together.
After a few days of coming home to a house of spooky, unfriendly strangers I thought if I just kept my head down, went to classes and two part time jobs (bartending and tutoring), I’d barely be home at all to have to interact with any of them.
BANG BANG BANG BANG.
Saturday; 7 am; I woke up to rapid-fire pounding at my door. My room, so small that my head was at the door and my feet were touching the other wall meant I couldn’t ignore it. BANG BANG BANG BANG. Still half asleep in bed, I reached over and opened the door to the Tunisian girl.
“Hello! My friend! I am so happy to see you!” smelling of alcohol, she flopped down to her knees. She now crossed over the doorway into my room and was eye level with me. “I want to be your friend! You’re so pretty, and I really like you.”
“Oh,” confused, bemused and curious as to what else she was going to say, I couldn’t help but respond, “what are you doing up so early?”
“I went to a party!”
“Oh, cool. Did you meet anyone?”
“No! Nobody likes me!” she said with pouty lips.
“Oh, well that sucks.” I half heartedly suggested.
“Sex?! No,no,no,no! No sex!” She paused for a moment and made her eyes wide, “but I did have sex with an Arab man!” Well, that took a turn. I wasn’t sure what in the world she’d want me to reply to that.
She had sex with an Arab man. I thought she probably wanted me to ask her for details so she could reveal some deeper aspect to the story but, to say “I had sex with a (blank) man” was not a very inviting opener for conversation with a complete stranger.
“Ok…was it…good?” Was it ‘good’. I had no excuse for my clumsy words, it was 7 am and this girl was throwing me conversational curveballs.
“Yes, but now I think I have baby in my stomach. And I have a Korean husband. I don’t know what to do.” Another curveball.
“Um, I don’t know. Do you want to go to a doctor?”
“Yes, can you come with me? I have a pain in my stomach! Ow, ow! It hurts!” she touched the area right above her crotch. “Here, it hurts here. Touch it!”
“Oh. No, I’m ok.”
“No, touch it!” she took my hand and placed it on her womb for a moment. Then she pulled my hand lower. I maneuvered my hand quickly out of that predicament.
“Um. It’s kind of early. Let’s talk later about this when we’re both not sleepy.”
“No, no! I’m not sleepy at all.” At that moment, the woman from Yemen came out into the hall and spoke to her in another language. I'm assuming Arabic. They had a back and forth for a minute which ended in the Yemeni woman seeming to shruggingly give up and going back to her room.
“What did she say to you?” I asked.
“Oh, she said that I must be cold and I should go inside. I don’t know why. Anyways, will you help me? Because I have Korean husband and I don’t know what I should do! Mommy! Mommy! What should I do?” Now I’m mommy?, I thought. Tread very, very carefully with this one.
“I guess fall down some stairs?” Oops, steps not so carefully trodden just there. I was losing my patience. “I don’t know,” I quickly recovered. “Maybe you can talk to the Arab man and get him to help you?”
“Oh habibti, I don’t know….” she said as she lowered her head in worry. She then went on to explain in further detail how much her stomach hurt, how she had no friends, and how her Korean “husband” was going to be very angry about the situation and wanted me to figure out a solution for her. I half listened and half tried to figure out how I could make her leave and let me go back to sleep.
“Do you have WhatsApp?” This always works to get people to go away. Usually, it's for the guys in bars who won’t leave me alone. Ask them for their WhatsApp, exchange information, send an emoji to satisfy them and then block their asses once they’re out of my hair.
“Oh yes! I do! Let’s be friends!” We cheerfully exchanged contact information. “And I can introduce you to the Arab man! He has lots of money! We can go party!”
“Oh my gosh, yes! That sounds so much fun. Let’s talk about it later, OK?” I said with a grin.
“OK! See you soon Habibi!” and she moved her knees out of my doorway and I closed the door in her face.
I thought that would be the worst of my interactions with her.
But, alas. I shared a wall with that Tunisian girl. A very thin wall. For the next few months, often after 3 am on weekdays, I overheard her conversations with her family in Tunisia, to her co-worker and fellow goshitel resident Jenny (“JENNY! Where the FUCK is my money!” is a memorable line she screamed into our halls) and a man only referred to as “oppa*”. Oppa, I assumed was the “husband” or possibly, her pimp. What husband would put his wife in this shit-hole?
A typical conversation with her Oppa would go like this:
“Oppa! Oppa please” she’d whimper from the other side of my Japanese shoji-screen of a wall.
“Oppa. Oppaaa. Oppa! Give me money. Please, Oppa! I need money or I have to go home to my country!” She’d usually deploy a couple more Oppa-infested pleas and then the conversation would abruptly end.
I don’t know if this method worked for her. It must have been enough so that she didn’t go back to Tunisia but not enough for her to get out of our roach-infested goshitel.
Some days she would come home in the wee hours of the morning, blast her music and sob. I’m a fan of a good cry. An occasional guttural sob-fest just to get it all out. But when my ears are accosted at 4 am on a Monday, when I have class with a very prickly Professor Kim at 9 am, I have very little sympathy for the crier.
The end of the final semester of my program was coming up. Professor Kim, my part-time jobs, my shabby living situation, and the Tunisian girl were pushing me to the brink of a mental breakdown. Usually, I’m the kind of person who, if someone accidentally gets some spittle on my face, will pretend not to notice and slyly brush it away when the other person isn’t looking so I don’t embarrass them. I do not like conflict and I hesitate to make people feel uncomfortable. This part of myself was being smothered to death by the Tunisian girl. Suffocated with her pillow filled with Oppa squeals in place of feathers.
Then I broke.
To Be Continued in Part 2
*Oppa - Literally means ‘older brother’ in Korean. Used with older men that you vibe with. Can be made cutesy. PSY became everyone’s oppa ever since he declared “Oppa Gangnam Style”.