WBEZ | Korean

King me: my inaugural visit to the Korean spa

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 08:39:00 -0500

No big deal. It’s 9:45 on a Tuesday night and I’m just laying, completely naked, on a massage table in a line of other massage tables also covered by other completely nude women, none of whom I know.

Still more nude women are enjoying the sauna and hot tubs nearby and some others are sitting on white plastic stools, showering. A Korean woman who I estimate to be about 55 or 60 years old, wearing a black bra and panties, is scrubbing my body vigorously with what feels like a brillo pad. She’s scrubbing behind my ears, she’s scrubbing my breasts, she’s scrubbing my belly and she’s got my butt, too.

I often hear a loud cupped slap as one of the nude women down the line from me gets popped with the hand of the underpantsed woman working her. Occasionally I am doused with a few buckets of hot water to wash away the threads of dead skin that have been exfoliated.

I’m covered with a towel but not in any sort of modest way: my breasts will be covered while my crotch lays bare, or just one thigh will be covered. The scrubbing feels raw and hurts but then the second the woman moves onto the next part of my body, I miss the scrubbing, in a strange way. The woman’s name, I can see from the sign hung near the table, is Linda. Linda is also the name of my old boss so it’s funny to imagine her doing this job. I think she’d be strangely good at it.

By the end of the event, after Linda had flipped me around like a seal and slathered me with baby oil and given me a satisfyingly intense shampoo and conditioner, I felt utterly defeated. But in a good way!

This was my first experience at King Spa, the mega Korean spa over in Niles, Illinois. I still can’t quite wrap my brain around it, because the spa reminds me of Las Vegas, except I’ve never been to Las Vegas. It’s also like a shopping mall, but one where you can walk around barefoot and sleep overnight. But I haven’t actually been to one of those, either. It was also a lot like the baths I’d been to in Hungary, only instead of feeling like I was in the 19th century, I felt like I was in the 22nd century. In a Korean version of Las Vegas. Do you get where I’m coming from?

At King Spa, where my friend Erica was my guide, we checked in and were given keys on wristbands that would serve as our de facto credit cards the entire experience. (It's sort of like the card you’re given at FoodLife: you ring everything up on it and then pay when you’re done.) We removed our shoes in the anteroom and then got naked in the ladies’, where little colorful things are for sale that I couldn’t adequately identify but some seemed to be massagers and some seemed to be little adorable slippers and hair ties.

It took me little while to get used to the full-on nudity. I’m not super shy, but I am not so used to walking around nude in front of a lot of strange women that it comes to me naturally. My bod is not as red-hot as it once, believe it or not, was so I was a smidge self-conscious. But once I got over that, we had fun trying out the various lovely hot tubs and sauna.

I was tempted to try the sitz bath, just for fun, as it has many “healing properties” that benefit new moms like me but the process really just looked like someone ties a garbage bag around you from the neck down and lights incense near your crotch.

The phrase “anal intake” and the reassurance that it’s “mentioned in many ancient medical references” didn’t tempt me that much (Didn’t ancient medical references also encourage tempting the uterus to leave the part of the body that it’s bothering?)

One of my complaints about ladies’ day spas is that you are starved as you are pampered: the most you can ever expect to eat is a tiny cup of trail mix and you suspect that that mix is merely a test to see whether you have any willpower or are a big fat hog who doesn’t deserve to get a massage. At King Spa, you actually get to eat. There’s a restaurant with a wonderful array of Korean food, juices, ice cream, you name it. I went for the Bibimbap which included a big bowl of meat, veggies and egg with rice, kimchi, pickled radishes and other yummy stuff on the side. Erica got some shrimp dumplings.

After we ate, Erica showed me around some of the various saunas. I am not a big sauna person: sitting still in a very hot room doesn’t do it for me, so I failed to truly take into appreciation all you can get from the gold sauna or the salt sauna or the amethyst sauna (“They all have different healing properties,” Erica explained. I gave her a suspicious look and she shrugged.)

They’re basically like different theme rooms in a cheesy Wisconsin Dells hotel but in this case they’re all incredibly hot and you lay on the floor in your standard-issue shorts and top (women get pink, men gray, kids yellow, and theirs are the cutest.)

One room is a gold pyramid, one looks like a magical cave, one looks like a regular cave, one is super hot, another super cold. There’s something strangely exciting to me about the construct of a tiny house inside a larger, actual building, so even while I didn’t particularly adore the sauna, just the prospect of all these little rooms to go and try was enjoyable.

The part that’s most interesting, that I’m trying to wrap my brain around, are the parts of the spa that seemingly have nothing to do with a spa. There’s a meditation room, yes, but there’s also a movie theater with a bunch of La-Z-Boy recliners in it, plus another room with a bunch of similar chairs in it with some flatscreen TVs where you can spend the night.

Did I mention it costs $25 to get into King Spa and that it’s open 24 hours? Something doesn’t quite add up to me about the fact that there is basically a hotel that you can stay at for $25 a night as long as you agree to wear their clothes and sleep in a cushy chair and then go sit naked in a hot tub for as long as you please.

I was relaxed by the time we decided to leave, thanks to the yummy food, the hot bath and Linda's pummeling, but not all my questions were answered.

I think I’m going to have to go back a few more times to figure this all out. Maybe by then I will have gotten up the nerve to allow the wormwood steam sitz hip bath to let its water vapor “reach inside the vagina” and to try out a one-person jacuzzi that looks onto the main lounge of the spa. I just hope Linda is there to scrub me down again. I miss her already.

Chicago, Cook County must offer ballots in a new language, but which one?

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:00:00 -0600

Election officials in Cook County and the city of Chicago are rushing to comply with the latest elections-related mandate from the U.S. Department of Justice: to provide bilingual assistance to Asian Indians in time for the 2012 election.

“We need to get moving and get this process rolling,” said Kelly Bateman, Assistant Executive Director of the Chicago Board of Elections. “The election’s March 20, so you go back a good six weeks before the election, if not more,” added Bateman, referring to the Republican primary voting date in Illinois.

Bateman and her counterparts at the Cook County Clerk’s office have just a few weeks to translate all written materials and publicity pieces for the election. They also need to find bilingual poll workers and interpreters for election day to assist Indian immigrants who are registered voters. This assistance is currently available to Spanish-speaking and Chinese-speaking minorities, which qualify under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act.

The federal formula to determine which language groups get bilingual assistance depends on the number of voting age citizens with limited English proficiency, and the portion with less than a fifth-grade education. Until this year, the U.S. Census Bureau considered the data every ten years. Going forward, the determinations will be made every five years, based on data from the American Community Survey.

Bateman says her office is well-versed in providing this assistance, but accommodating Indian Americans may present some different challenges. “There could be 50-plus different types of languages or dialects in the Asian Indian language,” said Bateman. “So we need to narrow it down to one language that is recognizable and understandable by the community.”

The three most common languages spoken for Indians in Cook County are Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati, but there are dozens more, including Tamil, Punjabi, and Telugu, to name a few. And they’re not all united by a common written script, as with Chinese. So Bateman and officials with the election office in Cook County are getting knee-deep into the data to learn which precincts Indian Americans live in and which languages they speak.

Bateman says even though the written materials will only be translated into one language, poll workers and interpreters can help with others.

Bateman’s office and the Cook County Clerk’s office were surprised that Indian-Americans were the next group to qualify for language assistance. Based on numbers from the 2000 population survey, they expected Korean to be the next language.

“People can see that influx of Korean-Americans. If you go to Glenview and Northbrook, and also the Niles area, a lot of Korean businesses are booming in that area,” said Sik Sohn, Executive Director of the Korean American Resource and Cultural Center. “So that’s why I think that we expected that the Korean language would be added.”

Sohn is happy for his Indian-American counterparts, but he’s disappointed that Korean-Americans did not qualify for bilingual voting assistance. Sohn wants to see the latest data, and says based on that, he might appeal.

South Asian organizers say language access will overcome an important barrier that many Indian immigrants face when voting. But Chirayu Patel said there’s a bigger obstacle. “I think there was a lack of connection in terms of my voting, how does that affect the issues that I’m facing?”

Patel registered South Asian voters on Chicago’s far North Side for the 2006 midterm elections. He said many of them cared more about politics in India than what was happening in their congressional district.

“I think the biggest thing that we did was make that connection in terms of why voting, even if it’s at the local level, why that matters in terms of addressing the issues that you have,” Patel said.

Patel says it’s great that the feds are giving Indian-Americans a better chance to voice their opinions at the polls. The question is, will they use it?

Something You Should Eat: Shrimp banh mi from Del Seoul

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:00:00 -0600

Everyone has been talking about the Korean-style tacos served up at Del Seoul in Lincoln Park. I do happen to love the well-marinated kalbi that's finely chopped, buried beneath a mound of Napa cabbage and Asian greens dressed with gojujang (Korean red chili paste) and topped with sesame seeds; not as much of a fan of the store-bought tortillas, but you can't win them all. One thing I wasn't expecting to like was the hearty shrimp banh mi. This Vietnamese-style sandwich is typically the province of well-regarded bakery/cafes such as Nhu Lan in Lincoln Square or Ba Le in Uptown. But for some reason, the combo of grease-free fried shrimp with the spicy mayo makes this sandwich really sing.