PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Blind to Bared Souls

In the center of Los Angeles’ Koreatown, amid the babble of mysterious signs, there is a large and expensive hot-springs spa. Given the modesty of Korean culture, there is surprisingly little here. In the women’s room, bared bodies turn lobster red in the burning waters. Large bodies, slender ones, white and of color, wrinkled, young, supple, stiff, some carried well, others painfully--and yet there is a distance to this nakedness, as if there is no need for shyness because everyone else is invisible. Women look through one another, around one another; they make no move to clear a space on a ledge, to smile, to nod, to share this appearance of intimacy. Some sprawl in deck chairs, eyes closed, carelessly uncovered, to be jolted awake as a masseuse calls out a name.

Each masseuse has her own style: The older one, topless, breasts hanging, takes her customer by the arm and pulls her along; the younger ones, in bikinis, turn wordlessly, expecting to be followed. The massage room is off to the side through an arch. Little is heard in the darkened spa but the slap of hands, the shuffling of feet around the tables, the rough truth of flesh, of each woman isolated within her body.

To outsiders, coming here is “exotic,” as if this array of marble, the ritual of wash bowls beside the showers, of stone stools beneath an imitation rock roof, somehow puts visitors in touch with 2,000 years of history and the wisdom of the ancients. In the changing room, women call their services and agents and sigh about relaxation and refreshment, as if they had been on a long journey. What journey? They have tiptoed unseeing into Koreatown as if, in that small turbulent and dramatic country that spawned it, there had been nothing between Confucius and Hyundai.

They were not born here, those who work at the spa. Most have endured a truly terrible journey, grateful only to be employed and invisible so that their children might grow up to be confident and thoughtless. The curse of knowledge; the blessing of ignorance.

Suk Woon Ham is a masseur at the hot springs; he is a “star,” sought after by regulars. At 36, his face is completely unlined, wax-like, still. He is blind. He does not wear dark glasses, makes no attempt to cover the unseeing eyes, slashed by glass when he was 12.

People rarely ask questions; he, too, is invisible, there only to serve and to comfort. And so they don’t know about his village in the south, bombed by the Americans, flattened by warring armies. About the freezing winters, the fear and hunger. By the time he lost his sight, his father had died. His oldest brother, the family’s spiritual head, took him to an institution for the blind--and then left for America. The rest of the family followed. It was his duty to learn independence: “I was crying inside my mind but I never showed it outside.”

The institution trained him as masseur and he went to work in Seoul, tending visitors in hotel rooms, besieging his brother in Los Angeles with telephone calls, begging to be “allowed” to join him. Again and again, he promised never to complain, never to be a trouble, never to need help.

He was 26 when he came here, and he tries to forget those first years when no one would hire him because his blindness offended, his eyes disturbed. “Unfortunately, I am blind,” he says, “but I am not a blind man.”

He is married and has a daughter, fishes on the beach as once, as a boy, he fished from the sands of Yosu. He is enormously proud that his mother lives in his house, not in the house of his oldest brother. Honor has come to his life.

He is devoted to the hot springs spa. “Every morning I tell my wife--I love my work. My clients have interesting lives, but I have an interesting life, too.”

He knows the bodies, their tensions and stresses. He feels close to those he serves--wordlessly close as his fingers seek to understand another human being, to “know” that person’s story, to “see” that person’s life.

How rarely is the compliment returned.