Yujin
An account of my experience at the Korean spa, and how nakedness can heal.
Yujin looked old enough to be my grandmother. She had a hard face and short black-dyed-gray hair. Her wrinkled skin did not match the strength that I would soon find out her limbs surprisingly possessed.
I stood before her, completely naked, awkwardly holding the small towel that the front desk attendant handed to me at check-in. Yujin motioned for me to lay down on the table and unceremoniously poured hot water over my chest. Though Yujin’s eyes glossed over me the way one might review a to-do list, I couldn’t help but feel self-conscious about my nakedness. I wondered if this was what Eve felt like after she bit into the apple.
Yujin’s plump, wrinkled hands reminded me of overripe persimmons, with their soft flesh and delicate skin. But when she held my ankle to move my leg into a workable position to begin her service, her fingers were unnervingly strong, as if her bones were made of steel. The session began with 30 minutes of rigorous, abrasive, and thorough scrubbing. Per the Korean Scrub promise, mountains of dead skin were sloughed off my body. Every inch of my skin was scrubbed three times over. No skin was spared—the inside of my armpit, the crease between my inner thigh and my vagina, the backs of my ears, and the spaces in between my toes were all scrubbed with a strength that seemed impossible to come from a 5’1, pushing-geriatric Korean woman.
As I wiggled my fingers, I could feel little rolls of dead skin surrounding me on the table. Their malleable, sandy texture felt like sun-dried dough. I was astonished at the sheer amount that continued to come off my skin. Yujin was scrubbing away the outermost layer of my past and present, and rebirthing me as a new, pink-skinned person. The gray debris of my old self flowed gently down the drain as she poured another basin of warm water over my chest.
Right when the pain was starting to get unbearable (there was no dead skin left to scour and my new, pink skin was screaming in protest), Yujin paused and told me to lie back on my stomach again. She then poured warm coconut milk onto my back and shoulders. At this point, she had taken off her scrubbing mitts and was using her bare hands to massage me.
Two years ago, I met with a chiropractor for the first time who told me, in her broken English, that I had rocks on my shoulders. She told me she could not comprehend how a person of my stature (referring to my thin frame and overall impression of weakness), could hold so much stress in my so small shoulders. I wondered if Yujin thought the same. Yujin let out a sigh that I interpreted to mean “Jesus Christ, this girl has issues” as she worked on my traps and shoulder blades. Her knowing palms pressed on all the proper pressure points in an attempt to wear down the rocks that are my shoulders. My body has never known hard labor. It has never known war. And yet it has only ever known rocks for shoulders.
Yujin massaged my back with a precision indicating decades of experience. She was methodical, direct, and efficient. She took no shortcuts. I could hear her breathing become more labored as she worked her way from my toes to the top of my spine. She applied deep pressure that satisfied me in a painful way. Like a suffering just on the outbound of bearability that is synonymous with transformation. Usually, the masseuses I work with apply a feeble pressure, as if afraid I may break under their touch (likely they are just trying to avoid a lawsuit). But between me and Yujin, complete strangers aside from our shared Asian womanness, Yujin probably knew I needed it.
Yujin drove her elbow down hard into my shoulder. I clamped my lips shut to keep from yelling out. Tears welled in my eyes and I knew it wasn’t from the pain. Yujin had found the key to a space I didn’t realize I had locked away. The space that stored all my anxiety. All my shame and disappointment and anger, tucked away in the space between my left shoulder blade and spine, right behind my beating heart. A heart whose worst sufferings are just a lame ex-boyfriend and some betrayals from middle school I never quite got over, but a heart who suffers acutely nevertheless.
Yujin excavated my hiding spot. She wore down the fascia with her bare, steel-reinforced hands and uncovered what I didn’t know was there. I couldn’t help but cry. I guess this is what they mean when they say Western therapy doesn’t work on Eastern minds. Eastern trauma is held entirely in the body. Trauma that probably isn’t even mine, just whatever is leftover from my mother and my mother’s mother. Leftover from a war I never experienced and a pain I never shouldered.
The depth of nakedness I felt astonished me. It went beyond my material body and into the baring of my soul. Like all my baggage was out, and flowing gently down the drain. No shoe dropped. The world didn’t cave in. I felt naked but not vulnerable. I felt like nothing. I just was. In that moment, my body was no longer a vessel for my abundant emotionality but a mere object being performed upon. No longer a site of unwanted lust and hungry stares but a checkbox on Yujin’s to-do list. One of thousands of bodies she must have scrubbed in her years at the spa. And there was true liberation in this realization: that I was simultaneously important and meaningless, and that nothing here was of consequence—not even my pain. I was Eve before the apple, free to exist and yet untouched by the world.
She patted me on the leg to signal that the session was now over. Blearily eyed and legs stumbling like a newborn foal, I thanked her profusely as she ushered me out the door. My skin burned softly under my robe, and for once, the pain felt like proof of care.