“You’re right. In a world where doctors can cure cancer and do heart transplants, there isn’t a single pill to treat menstrual cramps.” Her sister pointed at her own stomach. “The world wants our uterus to be drug-free. Like sacred grounds in a virgin forest.”
Jiyoung hugged the bottle to her stomach and cackled despite the pain.
Kim Jiyoung was assigned to a girls’ high school about fifteen minutes’ bus ride from home. She took extra math classes at a famous cram school about thirty minutes away, and often hung out at a university area about an hour away by bus. Entering high school meant a sudden expansion of her geographical and social world, which taught her that it was a wide world out there filled with perverts. On the bus and underground, many suspicious hands grazed her bottom and breasts. Some crazy bastards rubbed themselves up against women’s thighs and backs. The girls were disgusted by older boys at cram school, church, and tutoring sessions pawing their shoulders, stroking their napes, and sneaking a peek at their breasts through button-down shirts and T-shirts with low-cut necklines, but the girls couldn’t let out a single horrified cry. All they could do was remove themselves from the scene.
School was no better. There were always male teachers who reached up and pinched the soft flesh of the underarm, patted students on the bottom, or ran their hands down the spine over the bra strap. Her tenth-grade homeroom teacher was a man in his fifties, who carried around a pointer that had a hand pointing just the index finger on the tip, which he used to poke girls in the breasts under the guise of drawing attention to missing nametags, or to lift girls’ skirts to “check their school uniforms.” When he left the stick on the podium by mistake one day after morning announcements, one classmate with heavy breasts, whose nametag the teacher often “checked,” marched to the front, threw the stick on the floor, and trampled on it over and over as she wailed. The girls near the front quickly picked up the broken pieces and got rid of them, and her best friend hugged and comforted her.
Jiyoung’s situation was better compared to that of other girls who had part-time jobs in addition to school and cram school. Employers harassed them for “being inappropriately dressed” or “not having the right attitude,” and held their wages ransom. Customers thought the right to harass young women came with their purchase. The girls stowed away repulsive, frightening experiences with males deep in their hearts without even realizing it.
One day, Jiyoung’s cram school got out late. By the time she was through with the regular classes and the special seminar, it was quite late. She was standing under the bus-stop sign yawning when a male student made eye contact with her and said hi. He looked familiar but she couldn’t place him, so she awkwardly nodded at the boy she assumed to be a classmate at the cram school. He sidled up to her bit by bit. Once the people waiting around them at the bus stop had all gone, she found him standing right next to her.
“Which bus are you taking?”
“Huh? Why?”
“I thought maybe you wanted me to escort you home?”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
“Um, no. I didn’t. You can go.”
She wanted to ask who he was and how he knew her, but she was afraid to continue talking with him. She avoided his gaze and fixed her eyes on the car headlights far in the distance. Her bus finally came. She looked away as if it wasn’t her bus, and hopped on at the last minute, but the male student managed to follow her on. Peeking at the reflection of the male student’s back in the bus window, Jiyoung was frightened out of her mind to think that he was peeking at her, too.
“Hey, are you okay? Are you sick? Here, sit.”
A tired-looking woman who appeared to be on her way home from work offered her seat to Jiyoung, who was pale and drenched in cold sweat. To get help from the woman, she held the tip of her finger and looked desperately at her. The woman didn’t understand.
“Do you need me to take you to a hospital?” the woman asked.
Jiyoung shook her head and lowered her hand so the male student couldn’t see; she made a fist and opened her pinky and thumb to gesture “phone.” The puzzled woman looked back and forth between her face and her hand, thought for a while, and then passed her a large mobile phone that she pulled out of her bag. Jiyoung hunched over the phone to hide it, and texted her father: IT’S JIYOUNG MEET ME AT BUS STOP PLEASE HURRY.
She looked desperately out of the window when the bus pulled up at her stop, but her father wasn’t there. The male student was standing one step behind her, and the bus door opened. She was afraid to get off, but couldn’t keep going to a strange neighborhood late at night. Please don’t follow me, please, please, she prayed to herself as she stepped off the bus onto the deserted street, and the male student got off as well. They were the only two around, and the broken streetlight made the bus stop even darker. Jiyoung froze where she stood. The male student approached her.
“You always sit in front of me,” he said under his breath. “You always fucking smile when you pass me handouts. Always flirting with your hi’s and goodbyes and now you treat me like a predator?”
She didn’t know who sat behind her, what face she made as she passed handouts to the person behind her, what she said when she passed by someone blocking her way in a narrow hall.
The bus suddenly stopped down the road and the woman from earlier got off. “Hey! Miss! You forgot your scarf!” she cried as she came running, waving a scarf that anyone could see at a glance a girl of Jiyoung’s age would never wear.
“Cunts,” the male student spat and stormed off. When the woman got to the bus stop, Jiyoung collapsed and burst into tears. Her father came running out of the alley. Jiyoung explained what had happened: he might be in her class but she had no memory of seeing him, and he must have deluded himself into thinking she was flirting with him. The woman, Jiyoung, and her father sat together on the bus-stop bench and waited for the next bus to arrive. Her father said he came empty-handed because he ran out in a hurry, that he was sorry he couldn’t at least give the woman the fare for a cab, and that he would absolutely offer her a reward for her kindness.
“Cabs are worse,” the woman shook her head. “She must have been scared out of her mind. Console her.”
But that night, Jiyoung got an earful from her father. “Why is your cram school so far away? Why do you talk to strangers? Why is your skirt so short?” Jiyoung grew up being told to be cautious, to dress conservatively, to be “ladylike.” That it’s your job to avoid dangerous places, times of day and people. It’s your fault for not noticing and not avoiding.
The mother called the woman and offered to compensate her, a small gift, or even to buy her a cup of coffee or a bag of tangerines, but the woman refused. Jiyoung felt she should thank her, and called her again. The woman said she was glad Jiyoung was fine, and suddenly declared, “It’s not your fault.” There were far too many crazy men in the world, she’d had her share of run-ins with these people, and the problem was with them, not with the women. Hearing this made Jiyoung cry. Trying to swallow her tears, she couldn’t say anything back.
“But you know what?” the woman added. “There’s far more great guys out there.”