The Gye, the No-Name Hair Salon, the Coup d’État, and the Small Dreamers

Abstract

The Gye, the No-Name Hair Salon, the Coup d’État, and the Small Dreamers Jung Hae Chae (bio) I. THE WOMEN End of month. Here we are, together with the ladies of the First Home Ownership Gye, gathered at the no-name hair salon next to my grandmother’s house, and again you could tell who the hoarders, the cheaters, the coup d’état-ers were by watching them drop fiery spit-bombs at the organizer, an older lady who’d lost her husband in the war and hadn’t enough management sense to foresee the runaway who’d skipped town with an early payout—yet another gye to go bust that month. Always, the show went down at the neighborhood hair salon, which sat under the old gingko with its limbs hanging over the mud-swept streets like the twisted fingernails of a soothsayer, in that iodine-soaked one-room den with fly traps hanging overhead where I’d spent all my lazy afternoons, watching the ladies pretty up to a better version of themselves—a halcyon dream in this nation of amnesiacs. They’d welcomed me, the almost-mute five-year-old who always came wrinkled and clutched to her grandmother, into their lair. It was here at last they sat their weary selves down, loosened their hair from buns for their hours-long ajumma perms. It was here they sometimes cussed, sometimes cried—having left behind their wretched lives for the afternoon—about their drunken-crazed-butcher-knife-wielding husbands who’d dragged them by their hair through the playground just weeks before. It was here they dreamed their small postwar dreams. Outside, the soon-to-ignite military coup smoldered in the streets of Seoul. In 1970s South Korea, the era in which I grew up, just about every woman I knew and my mother knew and my grandmother knew belonged to a gye, a crude, early form of a savings club. A one- or two-year term, with a sky-high “interest rate.” Get in, get out, get house, get rich. Fast. Korean people are fast. Everyone, well, not everyone, but everyone watching and listening and feeling knew in the lowest substation of their gut that change was coming. And not a household-variety change but a mantle-shattering, sea-bottom-quaking kind of change. Like a tsunami descending on a beach resort for fat, rich tourists, except in the opposite direction. It was the tsunami of an opportunity for the poor, the disenfranchised, the oppressed, the formerly colonized who lost nothing during the war because they’d started with nothing, the outermost fringe class of this war-torn, village-turned-nation, [End Page 135] this protoplasm of a society that South Korea was back then. You didn’t need to be the Yangban class—the patrician, the formerly powerful, the inbred class that had kept their privilege strictly gated for millennia—to get in on the real estate boom. No one could come in and confiscate your house while you slept, as they had under the old colonial rule. Real estate had become real again. Hello, property rights, nice to see you again. I don’t know who was the first woman to invent this get-rich-quick scheme dressed up as savings and loans, but it was always and only women who ran the local gyes. In the shadows of a colonial past, reeling from the wreckage of a war that had splintered their land and souls in half, it was the women who were the most eager to mend, rebuild, or crowd-source their people. It was the women who would save their households and their husbands, chronically unemployed and drunk, and free the people from poverty and the violence that came from poverty, assuage their shame/sorrow/self-reproach—the trifecta of the dispossessed people—and their once broad-chested idealism and whatever other ills that had made them go mad or turn up as perverts in playgrounds. It was the women who would pay for their children’s college tuition, put the down payment on the thousand-dollar apartment that would go on to become a million-dollar property in...