The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea

2 The Eight Women

2 2 2 THE EIGHT WOMEN This chapter introduces the eight women who figure in this book, as well as the paths that led me to them. Reflection on these paths begins this book’s consideration of South Korean class maps. My stories toward these women are dispersed over space and time, critical coordinates for thinking about class. At the close of this chapter, I discuss these women in a shared social field in order to begin my foray into the complexity of class location and identities for women of this generation. People Trails and Research Tales That the stories of how I met the women in this book are my stories is, for purposes here, incidental, for I o¬er them to reveal the spaces, structures, and subjectivity of class—the complexity that I began to assert in chapter 1. As the reader will have already gathered, this is not ethnography with a geographical or institutional center, as I do not locate it in a neighborhood, city ward, organization, or village. The fieldwork culminating in this book was strewn across Seoul, and long forgotten are the bus numbers, subway stations , apartment numbers, and the like guiding me to these women. But the feel of the di¬erent nodes of Seoul and its vast transportation network lingers: the skeleton of a city, the traces of oh-so-much talking, intractable summer heat, and bone-chilling winters. The fact that in recent years the end points of all the subway lines have changed, that whole new lines have been added to the system, makes anachronisms of me and the daily travel culminating in this book. A widely understood but less often written about truth of ethnography is that anthropologists meet many more people than those who make their 33 way into their books. The editing happens at so many points, which is entirely reflective, I think, of social life generally. We begin a conversation with somebody that never takes o¬, we strike up a relationship that goes nowhere, the serendipity of timing ends a relationship that seemed to have been going somewhere, and so on. We feature one person in our writing and, in so doing, another person fades into the background, a matter of personal a~nity. I personally like all the women in this book, but I must confess I did not have an a~nity for every woman I spoke with—hence not all found their way here. In this book, then—as in my personal life—I edited along the path of talk and friendship. A piece of paper with a phone number disappears, a correspondence is forgotten, and so on. Also, of course, in research we turn to the cases, the details, and the talk that conform to points and proclivities of the writing self of the moment. This is not meant to be cynical, for the points and proclivities have not been mustered whole cloth from some other social reality. As this project took shape, I told myself I wanted to talk with a range of women, classwise, not fully understanding then how vexed the matter was. If these tales convince the reader of that—the vexed question of class—they will have done their work. By Way of the Countryside The Laundress and Hye-min’s Grandmother I begin with one of the people trails that figured in this research: a trail beginning with a North Chôlla Province village from my mid- to late-1980s fieldwork, and particularly with one of the men who had been active in the tenant farmers’ movement that had then captured my interest. I turn to him because it was through his younger brother, Mr. Kang, that I came to meet both the Laundress and Hye-min’s Grandmother. The forty-something farmer in question was known in the village for his demure diligence. Rare among farming men, he was a teetotaler. The local common-sense about his active participation in the grassroots farmers’ movement in the late 1980s was that it was mostly a matter of his wife’s resolve—that hers was the stronger will of the household. While he was the sort who blushed if any attention wafted his way and who hardly spoke a public word, his wife was brazen, abrupt, prone to say too much, and at times a bit irascible. Like most of the people in that village, they were petty farmers with modest tenant landholdings. Both husband and wife...