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Recently my wife and I went to the nearby E-Mart to do some shopping, get out of the house, engage in the soothing Retail Ritual. The Retail Ritual calms me, these days, if it’s in one of these huge ultramodern, brightly lit stores. Odd, for an old hippiepunk like me, who has little good to say about our marketing-driven civilization, and often.

That said, I don’t care shopping for anything other than food, so I guess I can still fly my freak flag proudly. And although stores like Walmart and Costco are a scourge on the landscape back in North America, sucking the life out of smalltown centres, feeding low-wage, no-security, permanent part-time slavery, homogenizing the already desperately whitebread-and-mayonnaise landscape even further …that’s not so much the case here. The box stores sit in the middle of already existing major shopping areas, beside subway stops, and have the opposite effect, if anything, revitalizing cruddy areas and triggering some urban renewal. These stores also tend to employ women under better conditions and for better wages than they might otherwise receive in this sexist nightmare of a nation. But more on that later.

So the wife and I were trundling around with our cart, happily sampling and grazing and knocking small children down (well, I was the one knocking them down, and the wife was the one scolding me – she pretends to tolerate my aversion to the little buggers, but I don’t think she really does), when one of those spine-chillingly weird Korea moments happened, that nobody much seems to notice or comment on, a situation which sometimes leads me to theorize that I’m living an extended hallucination in a Matrixy goo-filled pod somewhere, fed digital imagery to pacify me by some higher machine intelligence which is extracting my life energy to run pachinko machines in Osaka or something.

Some facts first that will help explain, I hope, my flash of The Weird.

In Korea, like Japan, walking into a shop or restaurant will usually result in a hail of welcomes and other ritualized greetings from the employees. I hate these, but I must admit they make me feel all shiny and special too. I am a good consumer, and I really am welcome here, and I should buy something to celebrate that, I say to myself, before I realize their cunning ploy and adopt the anti-salesperson scowl that is my customary demeanor while in-store.

In Korea, it’s (and excuse the romanization, but I’m going for clarity of pronunciation more than the current textbook romanization) ‘uh-suh-ohseyo,’ which more or less translates to ‘welcome, and please buy lots of our overpriced crap!’ On departure, particularly if you have in fact purchased some crap, it’s (phonetically, more or less) ‘kahmsahmnida‘ or ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, both of which mean ‘thank you, and spend again’. Well, OK, just ‘thank you’.

The other necessary fact to know is that upmarket department store chains like Hyundai or Lotte and also these more middle-class retails outlets like E-Mart and Walmart and Carrefour (foreign business, which are floundering and leaving Korea, more on which, later) all employ way, way too many people. Behind a typical watch-counter at Lotte, for example, you might see 6 to 8 men (always men, behind the watch counter, for some reason) loitering about, trying desperately to look busy, beseeching you with their eyes to please come and look at a watch or two, just for a freaking minute you rich bastard, come on …and then swarming up like Keystone-Kops-as-filmed-by-David-Lynch when someone does.

It’s good, in some ways, that so many are employed when they might otherwise not be, but you can be sure that the only way such a situation can be justified is by paying extremely low wages. The idea behind these clusters of clerks is that such heavy concentrations of service-people enhance the feeling — that wealthier Koreans, including the growing middle class, seem to just love — of being catered to by hordes of low-born types or a reasonable facsimile, grovelling before the shopper’s imperial whims. See also : Dynasty, Chosun.

Walking around the aisles of the supermarket sections of these stores is a hazard course of (usually) miniskirt-clad (invariably) young female product demonstrators, who want to give you a sample of coffee, or help you choose that perfect shampoo, and (usually) older (invariably) females in the fresh-food areas, cooking up some pork or slicing up some veggies, and inviting you to chow down, using the (invariably) plastic green toothpicks.

(What’s the female equivalent of ‘avuncular’? Damned if I know, but that’s what these fresh-food ladies are. Ajummacular, perhaps.)

The younger ones, the ones that staff the toiletries and dry-good aisles, are always goooood-lookin’, though, and pretty obviously hired on that basis, and apparently instructed to bend over, but demurely, whenever possible. Which makes astonishingly little sense, even ignoring the sex-discriminatory aspects, as the vast majority of shoppers are middle-aged women, who are unlikely to be seduced by the milky thighs of these miniskirted productistas.

Anyway. Any given row in the supermarket sections of these chains will house anywhere from a minimum to two to a maximum of six women, some of whom are apparently hired just to stand there and smile at people.

So back to the trundling and the shopping and the running-over of children. As we were rolling down the ramyeon aisle, the sixth or seventh repetition of the ecstatically faux-happy, 50’s-style E-Mart Song was coming to an orgasmic close, and there was a slight crackle over the PA, and a voice.

A female voice, one that was absolutely perfect in its unctuous, saccharine, mind-colonizing tone, oozing into your ears, grabbing whatever handholds it could find and whispering, irresistably : everything’s going to be all right, there there, just lay your weary head on my soft, perfumed, padded bosom….

Anyway, this voice sweetly but firmly intoned ‘uh-suh-ohseyo’ (’welcome’). And every single woman employee in the place turned from whatever they were doing, as one, faced in the same direction, towards whatever Mecca-equivalent was operative, and repeated ‘uh-suh-ohseyo’ while bowing deeply, to nobody in particular. The voice paused a few seconds, then said ‘kohmuhpsoomnida‘, and once again, every single woman, matching the weirdly unnatural, woman-as-service-automaton voice, chanted ‘kohmuhpsoomnida.

This repeated perhaps four or five times, and you could hear the chorus of voices throughout the store. Nobody else even batted an eyelid, but I was just transfixed, with chills literally running up my spine. The Weird.

I know what the rationale behind it was, and understand that many Koreans really think that sort of stuff is spiffy, and are drawn to shop somewhere that shows that kind of rigorous employee-indoctrination methodology, but it was still deeply, excitingly Weird.

Of course, I forgot about it 5 minutes later, while buying beer, which was, after all, my secret mission for the day.

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One of these, one you’ll notice immediately if you spend any time watching one of the many evening variety shows on Korean TV (all of the major networks stream on the net live or on demand, by the way, if you’re curious and have the bandwidth : the big three : MBC, KBS, SBS. Even without being able to read Korean, you should be able to find the streams pretty easily…) is what I’ve called the ‘schoolgirl howl’.

This is a sound I cannot for the life of me reproduce. I’ve tried. It is reminiscent of the kind of pre-orgasmic squeals that teenyboppers on those black-and-white newsreels in the early 60’s would emit when faced with the Beatles, or Elvis, and I suppose, in a deliberately more chaste fashion, that’s what it’s modelled on. It sounds a bit like a very high-pitched ‘ooo-WOOOO-OOoo!’, done chorally. The thing is, though, that it’s delivered with clockwork regularity every 10 or 15 seconds, when anyone does or says anything even remotely interesting. And even when they don’t — a chef is brought into the studio to prepare some normal, everyday food, and the guests on stage crowd around the table to sample his creation. One of them dips his spoon, tastes: the schoolgirl howl.

“Oh my goodness I am uncontrollably excited in a non-sexual fashion by the fact that that dog just jumped through a hoop!” is the message. It’s ritualistic, of course. It’s contrived in the same way that the applause light and audience wranglers elicit carefully-timed reactions from the bleachers on David Letterman. But the artificiality of controlled, note-perfect choral ululation, a simulation of wild abandon, raised at the most banal of actions in the studio, is enough to raise hackles if you pay attention to it, perhaps because it’s so unfamiliar to the western viewer.

To add an extra layer of weirdness, theschoolgirl howl is also omnipresent on prerecorded segments. It would seem that Korea has invented, parallel to the sitcom laughtrack machines in the West, a Schoolgirl Howl Machine. I imagine the engineer in the booth, bored look on his face, cigarette dangling from his lip, pushing the lever for another howl, and twiddling a knob for that extra bit of oomph because the current howl-ee is a member of the latest boy-band, wondering how he got there.

I rarely even notice it these days.

[originally published January 2002]

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