Dude, Don't Hold My Hand In A Bar

            So today I woke up around noon since I had been out a little late the night before.  No there weren’t any shenanigans but I will tell you about what happened when I went out to a dance club called Bubble Bar.  I was with a couple of guys, one of who is the guy I met on the Mudseung Mt. night hike and the other I met at a foreigner dinner.  We met up and had some beers but all the bars were closing early and these two were feeling the desire to get some ladies digits so we went to Bubble Bar. I don’t like the place but I can wingman when I need to.

            We get there hang out and James sees some people he knows so he goes over and starts talking to them.  Well I wait a minute then head over to see if he needs some cover.  He’s doing just fine but something different happened while I’m standing there.  A Korean guy tried to grab my hand and talk to me.  Now I don’t think I’ve talked about the difference between Korean masculinity and Western masculinity but it’s a huge cultural difference.  Obviously Korean men are much smaller than Westerners and they have zero, I repeat, zero facial hair.  And if they do it’s because they have a Japanese ancestor. 

            However the cultural differences between us are that they have no personal bubble space they will hold hands or walk arm in arm together.  It’s definitely different and I’ve experienced this firsthand because my 70yr old landlord will grab my hand to show me something or take me to his office to pay a bill.  It definitely weirds me out when he does that but I don't want to be Westerner who insults his cultural version of the backslap.  I’ve also seen Korean businessmen walking down the street stumbling drunk off Soju arm in arm together.  Now, I lived in DC for six months and hung out around Dupont Circle where there’s a large gay and lesbian population.  So I’m familiar with seeing same-sex couples together or being approached by gay men.  It didn’t bother me if they would come up to me to hit on me as I would politely say thank you for the compliment but that I was straight and they would leave me be.

The ironic thing is that here Koreans culturally believe that no gay people are in Korea.  Yes there definitely are but because of how Koreans interact, and my Western interpretation of a certain type of interaction being “gay” or not, I can’t tell if a Korean man is gay or not. I’m not the only one who has commented on this phenomenon as most of the Westerners I’ve talked to agree that it’s difficult to understand Korean masculinity.

So now that you know Korean men will hold hands with one another or what not back to my story.  I’m standing there next to James watching the weird Korean music video when someone tries to grab my hand. I think it’s a girl and push it away.  Quickly it comes back, I look and can’t tell if it’s a girl's or guy's hand so I follow the arm and I see that it’s a Korean guy.  He tries to grab my hand again and I SWAT it away.  I don’t know why that bothered me so much but it did.  I was not in the mood to have anyone grab my hand and he wasn’t my 70 yr old landlord, so I wasn’t letting it be.  That was my cultural line of, “You can do what you want but I am not trying that out bud”, it’s as simple as that.  Well James and Jonathan thought that the whole thing was funny as hell but I bet that Korean will think twice before trying to grab a Western guy’s hand in a bar again.