Seventy-five years ago this June, troops from Soviet-controlled North Korea entered the territory of the US-controlled South across the 38th parallel—a border that had been arbitrarily drawn by American, Soviet, and Korean officials. Solomon’s solution. This sparked the Korean War (remember?), where the princes of capitalism and communism sent their subjects to fight on their behalf. Many Koreans—because, not so long ago, there was no distinction between Northerners and Southerners—found themselves fighting against each other simply by chance of where they were on June 25th, 1950. Over the next three years, an estimated four million people died. The war “ended” in a stalemate that was meant to be temporary. Instead, 36,000 American troops[1] remain stationed in Seoul to this day, ready to reinforce against the North.

Which is how, to skip ahead a bit, I ended up tripping on acid and dancing to gothic techno in a dank basement club in Itaewon—the neighborhood in Seoul that, until 2018, was the playground for those American soldiers.

 

The Forgotten Mirror

 

The Yongsan Garrison held the Japanese Imperial Army during their occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Koreans expected liberation by the United States, but instead, American troops simply replaced the Japanese as their new occupiers. The Americans, trusting their efficient former rivals more than the Koreans—whom they saw as uncivilized and unfit to govern themselves—even recruited members of the Japanese army to stay on in Korea. America, high on its postwar victory, was more than eager to keep flexing its long arms across the globe. From 1945 to 2018, Yongsan Garrison contained hundreds of thousands of Americans pouring into Seoul, bringing with them visions of a Western-controlled global peace and the great gifts of capitalism: freedom (of a kind) and pleasure (of many kinds).

The Korean War’s nickname, the Forgotten War, like most nicknames, is as humiliating as it is accurate. Before my trip to Seoul, I met up with a friend whose father had been stationed in Korea. We were at an infamous bar in Brooklyn, one I’d been to dozens of times before. I was telling him how strange it is that we have so little cultural acknowledgment of the Korean War, despite the current obsession with Korean culture, not to mention our ongoing military presence there. He said, “You’ve noticed the Korean War memorial statue just outside, right?”

Reader, I had not.

Part of this collective blindness may come from the historical overlap between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. There’s more content about Vietnam than any American could healthily consume in a lifetime. Not so much for Korea. The most prominent piece of American media set in Korea during the war is M*A*S*H, a show that, despite its setting, was actually a thinly veiled account of the Vietnam War,[2] which would have been too controversial to air at the time.

Until recently, the American imagination of Korea has been fixated north of the 38th parallel. Growing up in the 1990s, I watched Kim Jong-Il caricatured on South Park, Dennis Rodman’s flamboyant visit to Pyongyang playing out on the news, and North Korean refugees—always young, pretty women—giving interviews on daytime television. Conservative American women, like the ones who raised me, are bizarrely obsessed with trafficking. My guess is that discourse on sex trafficking allows them to think about sex without the heavy shame of their own desires. But beyond that, there’s also a lingering obsession with the mystique of North Korea—its exotic secrecy. A cloud hovers over the 38th parallel, obscuring our view and piquing our morbid curiosity.

Since the early aughts, attention has shifted south to South Korea’s shiny, export-ready self-portraits, their Gangnam Style and NewJeans. But this isn’t just cultural exchange. The Korean government has invested billions in promoting Hallyu—the colloquial term for Korea’s global cultural wave—in the United States as a way to boost its international image and economic influence, and perhaps as a way to get even with Japan’s cultural chokehold on us. Yet the portrayal of Korea being exported is carefully curated, offering a version that’s far removed from the complexities of its history and its entanglement with American imperialism.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism, along with agencies like KOCCA, has poured billions into the global promotion of K-pop, Korean dramas, and films. BTS, one of the most famous K-pop groups in the world, has received state support through funding for overseas promotions and performances. Even the Academy Award-winning Parasite, while not directly funded by the state, benefited from a state-sponsored film ecosystem that nurtures filmmakers and promotes Korean cinema globally. Despite its supposed critique of capitalism, Parasite was eagerly embraced by American elites. See: Barack Obama’s adding it to his list of favorite films that year. Jonah Weiner asked the director Bong Joon-Ho why Korean pop culture resonates so deeply with Americans. “Bong ventured that since America had exerted such strong influence over contemporary life in South Korea…’maybe you guys are using Korean culture as a mirror of something in yours.’”[3] 

Like any intellectually-inclined American tourist, I felt compelled to discover the “real” Korea. During my light Googling, I couldn’t find much in the way of resources. What little I found was written by expats living in Seoul, mostly young Americans there to teach English.

So, I started where I know best: Resident Advisor, a website that lists parties across the world with DJs and semi-sanctioned raves. I didn’t recognize any of the DJs on the listings; they seemed to be all local, which was fine by me. I was curious what the scene in Seoul would be like, and how it would differ from New York. Most of the listings pointed me to a little pocket of Yongsan on the border of the Yongsan Garrison called Itaewon, the “international neighborhood.”

 

America Town

 

I had been invited by the Korean consulate to speak at the Seoul International Book Fair about promoting Korean literature abroad. By day, I’m a book publicist. Early in my career, I worked with the Korean American poet Don Mee Choi on Hardly War, and later, I was the publicist for the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, whose work Choi translates.

The Korean government flew me out on an exorbitantly expensive direct flight on Korean Air. Flipping through the in-flight magazine Morning Calm, I read that “we are standing on the verge of the ‘K-era,’” citing Squid Game, Parasite, BTS, The Vegetarian, and Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 as proof that “there’s something special about Korean pop culture.”

The book fair was held in a sleek convention center-mall hybrid with glossy white walls and towering ceilings. Hundreds of attendees milled about, flipping through books and pamphlets in long rows of booths. It looked like every other literary fair I’d been to in the U.S. and beyond.

My panel, “How Did Korean Literature Steal the Global Spotlight?” was one of the fair’s opening acts. I was joined by Kristen Vida Alfaro from Tilted Axis (UK) and Tracy Hurren from Drawn & Quarterly (Canada). We spoke on a stage near the entrance, competing with the loud cumbia music blaring from the Colombian booth–they were that year’s guest of honor. Everyone clapped politely. The Korean moderator made a dig about my presentation running too long. I had over-prepared, wanting to justify the thousands of dollars they’d spent to bring me there.

Before the event, the organizers had sent me a questionnaire to help prep for the Q&A. The questions were unanswerable riddles, for example: “Which part of Korean literature is superior, marketability or workability?” and “How does the success of BTS and Squid Game affect Korean literature abroad?” It was clear that they wanted me to celebrate the glory of Korean culture, and that the only acceptable answers credited the Korean government’s cultural strategy as the driving force behind every success. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable, for one, attempting to define “Korean literature.” An understanding of the Korean language seemed like a basic requirement… I dodged, saying that the books I worked on succeeded simply because the writing was good. 

After the book fair, I slung on my bag, laced up my cushiony black sneakers, and looked up directions to Itaewon using Naver Maps, South Korea’s version of Google Maps (as part of its ongoing security protocol in the civil war with the North, the country doesn’t allow foreign companies to store its geographical data). 

At the train station, I fumbled pathetically with the ticket machine, poking at promising-looking buttons to no avail, my eyes tearing up with frustration. Finally, a few kind Koreans took pity on me and helped me get a ticket. 

The Seoul subway system is clean, quiet, and efficient, unlike New York’s busted version. New York’s subway, however, runs (at least in theory) 24 hours a day, a luxury I would come to miss toward the end of my night in Itaewon. The Korean subway cars are spacious, and priority seats are respectfully left for pregnant riders, the elderly, or people with disabilities. It’s a smooth, remarkably polite ride. Passengers mostly keep to themselves, scrolling on their phones or dozing off. Also in striking contrast to New York: everyone was, over two years after the first outbreaks of COVID, wearing a mask. 

Itaewon sits on the north side of Seoul, which is bisected horizontally by the Han River, a clever rhyme with the 38th parallel. It’s inside the larger area of Yongsan, a central district nestled between the river to the south and Namsan Mountain to the north. Its location places it at a literal and symbolic crossroads in the city—between north and south, foreign and local, old and new.

I exited the station and emerged onto the main drag. My sweaty reflection stared back at me from the window displays of Beaker, the infamously hip clothing store where thin, pale models in modest outfits mocked my wrinkled knees. Everyone flowing around me on the sidewalk wore billowy pants, each more pleated than the last. Gaggles of young girls walked arm in arm.

Ducking into the alleys, the veins of Itaewon, I meandered past photo booths stocked with wigs and props, jewelry stores, cafes with English names, and an American-style diner with a line out the door. It was like a vision of America imagined by someone who had only seen it in reruns, a mash-up of every home I’d had—in the West Coast, East Coast, and Midwest—all blended into a version I didn’t recognize.

Architecture professor Mark Gillem describes overseas military installations as “America towns,” designed as replicas of American suburbs that offer a “slice of the American dream”[4] to expatriates abroad. These spaces were familiar and comforting to Americans stationed overseas, while also offering the allure of something new and exciting.

Surrounding these little Americas were the gijichons—“camptowns” where American GIs and local Koreans collided, creating a culture that was both exclusive and exploitative, seductive to both sides. Goods like American cigarettes, liquor, perfume, and jewelry became accessible to Koreans, and even American pop music and the soundtracks to American films filled their homes. This influence was no accident. A predecessor to South Korea’s campaign to globalize its cultural exports, America’s soft power initiative aimed to cultivate an appetite abroad for its products and the capitalist lifestyle they signified, which, once adopted, would sustain their enterprise—using their sumptuous goods and the industry around them to entice and, in some ways, addict a struggling postwar economy. By 1969, 46,000 Korean workers were employed in these communities, and the Korean camptowns earned $70 million. U.S. troops contributed 25 percent to South Korea’s GNP. [5] 

I wanted a glass of wine to sip while I waited for the sun to go down. I’d read that going out alone in Seoul could be difficult—it’s customary to eat and drink in groups—and I found that to be frustratingly true. I went from bar to bar, asking in clumsy Korean if I could have just one glass of wine, and was politely turned away again and again. Finally, I found refuge at Dear Alice, a three-story, cream-colored building with a balcony from which I heard some Australians loudly laughing. A waitress came to my table, and I asked, please, could I have just one glass of wine, not the whole bottle? She smiled and said, in English, yes, of course, then asked if I wanted anything to eat. No thank you, just the wine, I said.

“You should eat something,” she replied.

She asked if I was American, and we started chatting. I told her it was my first time in Asia, and she responded with what I interpreted as satisfied amazement: “You came here before Japan?” She disappeared to the back and returned with the wine plus several packets of saltines. She told me she owned the bar, asked to add me on Instagram, and told me to message her if I needed anything.

Variations of this conversation repeated itself throughout my trip. Most Koreans seemed surprised when I said I hadn’t been to Japan yet. Did I detect a hint of pride in their reactions? A subtle glee that I had chosen Korea before Japan, their former imperial occupier and overlord? Or was it my own pride that I was the right kind of tourist, one who made the politically correct and charmingly unusual choice?

I’ve been lucky enough to travel widely, and like many Americans, do so while carrying a heavy bag of guilt. We’re aware of the damage our country, in its arrogance, malice, and greed, has inflicted on others. To travel the world as an American is to be both pariah and landlord, ambassador and supplicant. 

But everywhere I went in Korea, strangers seemed primed and ready to help me without agenda. A gray-haired waitress served me a plate of rice and meat, then proceeded to cut it into small pieces and gestured for me to eat, as if I were a baby prone to choking. They rarely spoke English, but mimed instructions and directions with remarkable patience. I did my best to learn basic phrases—gamsahabnida I would say, bowing at an angle I hoped might be appropriate. They always laughed, the sweet kind of laugh adults give when a child proudly says, “Look what I can do!” before awkwardly somersaulting.

I finished my glass of wine, pocketed the crackers, and headed to my first club of the night: Concrete Bar. I sipped a mojito in the sparsely filled room—it was still relatively early—decorated with plants and low purplish light, while the DJ spun disco records. I sat on a barstool under a window, watching a young Korean woman entertaining two white men on the street below. She was dressed as what I can only describe, with a slight wave of nausea, as a baby princess.

 

The Glittering Cage

 

An estimated 110,642 sex workers operated in Korea in the immediate postwar year of 1955, with 61,833 catering to American soldiers.[6] Many of them were formerly “comfort women” for the Japanese occupiers. They were often poor, from rural areas, forced into migrating by the devastation of war; displacement, death, and poverty created millions of widows and orphans. Between 1967 and 1976 alone, 6.7 million people left the countryside, and over 60 percent of the women who migrated to cities were between the ages of ten and twenty-nine.[7]

When the American Military Government (AMG) took over from the Japanese imperial army, they upheld the existing bureaucracy of sex work, including compulsory venereal disease examinations. “Club women,” the sex workers who served the bars around US bases, were obligated to carry a VD identification card, issued by the VD clinics operated by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare with the help of the AMG and Korean police.[8] 

Imagine, as Bruce Cumings implores us to do in “Silent but Deadly: Sexual Subordination in the U.S.-Korean Relationship”: “one could be raised on an Arkansas farm and at eighteen rule a roost just outside the military gates, where a Felliniesque collection of shantytowns, bars, whorehouses, and small tradesmen”[9] cater to your every taste. A cluster of brothels in Itaewon became known as “Hooker Hill.” Clubs such as the New York Club, Playboy, Cosmos, and the UN Club sprang up as tax-free establishments catering to foreigners, which did not admit most Korean men as customers, but they hired Korean girls to serve drinks, dance, and fraternize with GIs. It’s perhaps not accurate to call all of the Koreans who had sex for money in that area sex workers. Could a twelve-year-old Korean girl understand that what an American man does to her is work?

The film Manchurian Candidate (1962), arguably the most well-known piece of American media directly about the Korean War, opens in a dimly lit, claustrophobic brothel. The walls are lined with peeling wallpaper. A squad of young American soldiers lounge around, some slumped in worn-out chairs nursing drinks, while others flirt with Korean women who are perched on their laps or doing laundry, wearing smiles that look practiced, detached yet accommodating.

About a fifth of the sex workers in Itaewon lived with American soldiers as “girlfriends,” sometimes becoming legal spouses.[10] Compared to the daily grind of dealing with clients, pimps, and government regulation of unmarried sex work, this domestic arrangement often proved more secure and profitable. Due to the high number of GIs abandoning their wives, the US military introduced education classes on interracial marriage and tightened regulations. Still, marriage service agencies proliferated in camptowns, facilitating paperwork for around $200 per marriage. Korean military brides became the largest group of adult Korean immigrants to the US from 1945 to 1965, when immigration from most of Asia was otherwise blocked in the United States. 

I finished my drink at Concrete Bar and headed out to the long list of other clubs I wanted to check out that night. One of the amazing geographical details about Itaewon is how dense it is. You can walk from one end to the other in an hour, but in that stretch, there’s a whole universe of clubs, each with their own distinct vibe and aural aesthetic. 

Just off Itaewon’s main street lies a small alleyway nicknamed “Homo Hill,” a 360-foot stretch that serves as the only concentrated area for gay nightlife in all of Seoul. The bars there opened around 1980, roughly the same time that the AIDS crisis was devastating the U.S.[11] The names of the bars on Homo Hill are written in bold English on large, neon-lit billboards: SOHO, Eat Me, Black Diamond Trans Bar. 

There’s a reason Homo Hill found its home in Itaewon. Decades of state-sanctioned—and later unofficial—sex work had imbued the neighborhood with a perfumed air of permissiveness and sexual freedom. A sort of open secret in the heart of the city. This sense of liberation from Korea’s otherwise Confucian, patriarchal culture made it a natural haven for Seoul’s queer community.

In 2000, Hong Suk-Chun—a popular South Korean actor—became the first public figure to come out as gay. The backlash was brutal. Hong had risen to fame playing a character that was queer-coded, yet when he publicly acknowledged his queer identity, he was fired from his role as a children’s TV host. His parents, overcome with shame, went so far as to invite him to commit suicide with them. In 2002, defiantly, he opened a restaurant in Itaewon named Our Place. Over the next decade, he opened eight more in the neighborhood.

Hong Suk-Chun’s legacy is told in the K-drama Itaewon Class, where he plays himself. The show, hugely popular in both Korea and the US, where it was imported by Netflix, follows Saeroyi, an ex-convict who opens a bar-restaurant in Itaewon with a ragtag group of misfits: a transgender woman, a biracial Korean-African man, a brilliant but sociopathic dropout, and Saeroyi’s fellow ex-convicts. In episode nine, Saeroyi visits Hong Suk-Chun at one of his fabulous bars on Halloween (a holiday for which we pretend to be something we’re not, celebrated in Itaewon as a relic of the American military presence). Saeroyi declares Itaewon “a place where different cultures can mingle freely, free from restraints. Itaewon symbolizes freedom.” 

On Halloween night in 2022, 159 people died in a human stampede in Itaewon.[12] A city investigation revealed that emergency hotline calls warning of the impending danger were ignored, and that police and municipal officials had failed to make adequate preparations despite anticipating large crowds. A Seoul court sentenced three police officers to short prison terms for failing to implement crowd-control measures, and two others for destroying internal reports that flagged safety risks.[13] To date, no top-level officials have been held criminally accountable.

 

The Faustian Bargain

 

As I made my way past the gay bars, I watched people stumbling around, too drunk to stand upright. I’m not that much of a drinker, which puts me at odds with the rampant drinking culture of Korea. I saw a woman so intoxicated that she was stumbling in baffling angles, yet still somehow upright and dancing at the same time. I found a man slumped over in a doorway, shook him until he made a noise, bought two bottles of water at the closest convenience store, and tried to get him to drink one of them until he told me, I’m assuming, to get the fuck away from him. 

It was just before midnight. I’d heard that, in an effort to curb COVID outbreaks (blamed, of course, on Itaewon’s clubs), the city was shutting down all public transportation from midnight to 6 a.m. During a cab drivers’ strike, no less. I could take the last train out of Itaewon or stay and pray I’d catch a cab. It was the government’s way of saying: if you choose the pleasure of this place, you forfeit our protection. Four months before the Halloween crush, it was a sort of dress rehearsal of fatal abandonment.

The night was still young, and I hadn’t hit the frenetic high I usually chase on a night out. There were still a few clubs left on my list. I decided to risk it.

I’d brought with me what looked like a pinhead made out of hard candy. It was a tiny morsel of a hallucinogenic drug, a surprise (to say the least) gift from my former assistant on his last day. He said it was acid that he bought on the Silk Road. I don’t think it was actually acid; it’s hard to know what’s what sometimes. A lot of these drugs are cooked up in labs, advancing faster than anyone can classify them. Anyway, I took it.

I didn’t know then how fiercely illegal this was. Korea has a draconian attitude toward drugs. Possession of cannabis can land you in prison for five years, and even prescription amphetamines like Adderall are strictly prohibited. In 1957, the South Korean government passed the Narcotics Act, banning “Indian marijuana” along with poppies, opium, and cocaine–drugs that were frowned upon but popular among American troops in military bases.[14]

I followed directions on Naver Maps to a club called Pistil, an intimate little bar with a DJ booth in the corner. The crowd was loose, swaying under neon lights that were vibrating. Either of their own accord or from the drugs, I couldn’t tell. Garlands of deep house threaded the air. I could feel the strands of music pulling taut into a net that held everyone in the room. Time folded in on itself into an elegant hourglass, gathering us together for a few precious moments before spilling us back out again.

From Pistil, I walked to a club called Cakeshop, a big room where a thick mass of kids danced to deliciously manic drum and bass. The setup was unusual; I’d never seen six DJs behind the decks at once. They jostled and laughed, taking turns that seemed random, acting more like a collective than individual performers taking turns in the much more common B2B (back-to-back) style, in which two DJs share the same decks and mix into each other’s sets. Their energy was infectious. I bounced along with the crowd, watching a cartoon animation of a globe—smiling while on fire—spin on the wall.

You can listen to music at home and you can dance at home. Doing these things alone, especially at the same time, is infinitely pleasurable. And yet, we also choose to move and listen to music together. There is something alchemical about these combined elements: music plus bodies gathered in a room like a clock without hands. Choosing to be unproductive together in these spaces, to step out of the systems that keep us atomized and exhausted, feels radical in a world that worships work. On the dance floor, you can feel the possibility of stepping outside the structures that define the rest of your life. It’s a way of opting out, which is perhaps why so many governments feel it is dangerous.  

There’s a hypnotizing call in this kind of mathematical music that promises a universal experience. Even if we can’t speak the same language, we can understand each other through rhythm. That’s been the fantasy since the American rave scene of the 90s coined the motto PLUR: Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect. And now, as audio production software and music-sharing sites like SoundCloud and YouTube have become cheap and ubiquitous, and platforms like Resident Advisor exist, where you can find the same iteration of a rave anywhere in the world, we feel closer than ever to being able to dissolve national identity through music. 

Itaewon sells itself on this hollow utopian promise—the idea that because you can have a similar club experience in New York, Berlin, or Seoul, those fleeting moments of trans-national connection on the dance floor translate to meaningful connections beyond it. The owners of the club Faust, for example, advertise the fact that they brought in an audio engineer from Berlin, the global hotspot for techno clubs, to help redesign the space. “A lot of people from all over the world specialized in various fields gave their contribution to the creation of the new Faust,”[15] they said in an interview I watched on YouTube before I arrived. But unlike in Berlin—a city also once literally divided by the puppets of communism and capitalism, now teeming with transplants and tourists like me—everyone at Faust, from behind the decks to the dance floor, was a local. 

 

The Velvet Rope

 

Itaewon’s appeal hinges on its outsider status—a neighborhood shaped by U.S. military presence and foreign influence—making it attractive to young Koreans who see partying there as a kind of cultural rebellion. The result is a paradox: clubs like Faust strive to look and sound like their Western counterparts, while operating within and drawing from a hyperlocal scene. Michelle Lhooq, a journalist who covers the international rave scene with a focus on Southeast Asia, articulates this tension: “Instead of relying on DJs from America or Europe to fill a room, these crews tend to pull on homegrown talent and to collaborate with other sonically adventurous collectives from throughout Southeast Asia…The new generation of party kids sees these localized networks as a means of pushing against the cultural hangover of colonialism.”[16]

After decades of incremental relocation efforts, the U.S. and South Korea finally agreed in 2003 to consolidate the American troops across the country into two areas: some to Daegu in the south, and the majority to Pyeongtaek in central Korea. By 2018, all the troops from the Yongsan Garrison were moved to Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek. In the wake of their departure, the value of Yongsan real estate skyrocketed, and dance clubs catering to a young Korean clientele blossomed along the streets. 

It’s perfectly reasonable that the Korean government would want to dismantle the American mess in Itaewon, even aside from wanting to reclaim what is now highly valuable real estate. While the American military presence might have been a “welcome” economic boost and backstop against North Korea, the presence of the individual soldiers was not. 

In 1999, there were over 861 reported offenses against Korean civilians by American service members. The rape and murder of Kum E. Yoon, a Korean woman, by Kenneth Markle, an American soldier, led to widespread outrage and protests, and the formation of a Korean organization called “The National Campaign to Eliminate Crimes by U.S. Military in Korea.” The strangling of Lee Ki Sun, a 44-year-old Korean woman, by Eric Munnich, a 22-year-old soldier, allegedly over an argument about payment for sex, sparked protests outside military bases by Koreans demanding the removal of U.S. troops.

Robert Altman’s film M*A*S*H, the inspiration for the television show, follows the irreverent antics of surgeons at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea during the war. Altman’s thesis, if you will, was how even under extremely nasty, bloody circumstances, the rhythms and rituals of American life persist: the boys-will-be-boys sexual entitlement, drug use, homophobia, and “it’s all in good fun” racism. Two troops decide to improve morale and bring a little flavor of home to the base with a good ol’ football game. The troop we follow recruits Oliver Harmon, an African American neurosurgeon and former San Francisco 49ers player with the nickname “Spearhunter” (in reference to stereotypes about Africans). During the game, a white player taunts another black player with a slur, and Harmon coaches him to throw it back with a reference to the white player’s sister. Fights break out, as you can imagine. This was fictionalized but not fiction. Violence between white and black soldiers in the Korean campgrounds was common. Many white soldiers refused to go into establishments that also served their black peers. A special section of campground existed for black soldiers: the DMZ—the “Dark Man’s Zone.”[17] 

Many Koreans were happy to adopt American values of racial hierarchy, as long as they weren’t the last rung on the ladder. The Korea Times reported that in advance of the 2010 G20 summit in Seoul, the immigration office and police jointly launched a large-scale crackdown on Africans to apprehend those who had overstayed their visas or “were suspected of being involved in terrorist groups.”[18] Nigerians, the largest population of Africans residing in Itaewon (556 as of 2020[19]) claimed that landlords were more hesitant to rent to them, and asked for larger security deposits than for Americans and other foreigners. 

Itaewon’s brand of internationalism is similarly curtailed; racial prejudice enforced by a bouncer. In episode eight of Itaewon Class, the one black member of their friend group, Tony Kim, who has a Korean father and Guinean mother, isn’t permitted to enter a club in Itaewon because of his race; the club has an official rule that bans anyone from Africa, a loud echo of the segregation of the military base clubs. It’s particularly ironic given the dance music playing in the background, and throughout all the clubs of Itaewon: the 1970s disco hits, house tracks and techno beats which all originated in African diasporic communities. 

The official government website for Yongsan states: “Yongsan lagged behind the rest of the nation, in terms of modernization, for many years due to the foreign troops that were stationed in the area for over 100 years…Despite its setbacks, most Seoul residents will agree that Yongsan is the only land in Seoul that still guarantees profitability and offers hope.”[20] Their “about” section includes a tab just for statistics on the number of registered “foreigners” in the neighborhood. The number in Itaewon as of 2020? 4,034.[21] Compare that to the 30,000 American troops and their families that were relocated from Itaewon in 2018.[22] So much for the international neighborhood. 

 

Club Heterotopia

 

Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre both used the term heterotopia, but with different intentions. For the former, heterotopias were realized utopias that could simultaneously represent and reject reality. Lefebvre’s appropriately ambiguous definition is even less rosy and neat. He used “heterotopia” to signify entities which contain multitudes under a single roof, so to speak, without being subsumed into each other. Art historian Tom McDonough explains Lefebvre’s “heterotopia” as what “refuses to be integrated into the hierarchy, what remains disjointed, fragmented, uncontrollable, excluded, or dissociated.”[23] Itaewon, in order to be this heterotopic consortium, has to implement a structure in which select chaotic elements can co-exist. 

I descended dimly lit concrete stairs to a club called Volnost. The woman working the door, who looked like a sexy vampire with excessive top lip filler, scanned me with bored eyes, then put a sticker over my iPhone camera before opening the club door, letting out a cloud of dank fog. Time, as it does, evaporated. I danced to the booming alloyed bass, reverberating in the low-ceilinged room full of people with whom I could not speak, not ever making eye contact but letting our slick bodies slide against each other. It was hot as breath. Even the walls were sweating.

I stepped outside to smoke. A group of young Westerners approached me and asked me if it was fun inside. They looked, I’m sorry to admit, square, and I’m even more sorry to admit that I was ashamed that they approached me. I said that it was fun, but I didn’t think it would be their vibe. They walked down the stairs to the entrance and came up again before I could finish my cigarette.

It was raining. The drugs were starting to wear off but I was still swimming in a shimmering high as inescapable as a dream. I took a sip from my plastic water bottle, my wonderful friend. I thought about everyone who had contributed to the making of this plastic water bottle, the thousands of people all over the world working together for me to have this exact sublime experience of bringing the bottle to my lips to drink, to quench my thirst. Or no…or yes, kind of…but more working together for the bottle to be purchased.

It was 3:30 AM. I decided to call it. I walked to the main drag to try my luck at catching a cab. There were hundreds of people lined up in the rain, standing idly by, staring at their phones. You either had to try your luck at catching one of the few cabs on Korea’s only rideshare app, or you could stay at one of the 24-hour “spas” that had communal nap rooms and hope you didn’t get molested or robbed. I huddled under a bus awning with dozens of others. I gestured my extra water bottle, the one I had tucked away in my bag, to the man next to me. He looked to be in his mid-forties and was wearing hideous jeans. He laughed and shrugged as he took it. He showed it to the young woman on the other side of him, seemingly a stranger, and they laughed and spoke in Korean. She leaned over to me and asked in English, “Are you American?” She said he had managed to book a cab, which was on its way. Where was I staying? In Gangnam, I said. That’s not far from where he lives, she said. We’ll all get in the car, which will drop me off first, and then you, and then him, and he’ll pay for all of it. Would I like to come? I didn’t seem to have any other options, so I agreed, although out of everything in this dubious situation, I was most skeptical that the cab would ever arrive. But it did. She ushered me into the backseat, next to the strange gentleman, who promptly put his hand on my leg. No thank you, I said with a smile, and picked up his hand and put it back on his own. We repeated this choreography over and over as the woman in the front seat told me that she works in a hotel that hosts many foreigners, but she hasn’t seen that many lately. Business was slow, so she was able to leave work early and party in Itaewon. She also asked to follow me on Instagram, and an hour later, after she was dropped off and I put up a long defense of my naked thighs, to the annoyance or horror of the silent cab driver I’ll never know, she messaged me to ask if I was safe.

 

 

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[1]  U.S. Army, “Welcome to Camp Humphreys, South Korea,” Army.mil, last modified November 25, 2013, https://www.army.mil/article/117803/welcome_to_camp_humphreys_south_korea.

[2] Craig Mathieson, “M*A*S*H 50 Years On: The Anti-War Sitcom Was a Product of Its Time, Yet Its Themes Are Timeless,” The Conversation, September 16, 2022, https://theconversation.com/m-a-s-h-50-years-on-the-anti-war-sitcom-was-a-product-of-its-time-yet-its-themes-are-timeless-190422.

[3] Jonah Weiner, “Bong Joon Ho’s Next Movie Will Be Just as Unusual as You’d Expect,” New York Times Magazine, March 4, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/magazine/bong-joon-ho-mickey-17.html.

[4] Mark L. Gillem, America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xv.

[5] Lee Na Young, “The Construction of U.S. Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Trans/Formation and

Resistance” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2006), 125.

[6] Ibid, 111-2.

[7] Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development: Economic Change and Political Struggle in South Korea (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 171-2, 181.

[8] Katharine H. S. Moon, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.–Korea Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 80.

[9] Bruce Cumings, “Silent but Deadly: Sexual Subordination in the U.S.–Korean Relationship,” in Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia, ed. Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus (New York: New Press, 1992), 170.

[10] Lee Na Young, “The Construction of U.S. Camptown Prostitution in South Korea: Trans/Formation and

Resistance” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2006), 142.

[11] Riley, Mapping Queer Seoul, https://mappingqueerseoul.netlify.app/.

[12]  “Seoul Crowd Crush Police Sent to Jail for Deadly Failings in Itaewon Disaster,” The Guardian, October 1, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/01/south-korea-itaewon-disaster-seoul-crowd-crush-police-jailed.​

[13] Agence France-Presse, “Seoul Police Officers Sentenced for Deleting Halloween Crush Evidence,” The Guardian, February 14, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/14/seoul-police-officers-sentenced-for-deleting-halloween-crush-evidence.

[14] This was secretly the handiwork of Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Anslinger had a bizarre obsession with Billie Holiday, believed addiction was contagious, and thought addicts needed to be quarantined. He was also Joseph McCarthy’s morphine supplier and was reportedly high on morphine himself when he died in 1962.

[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpTdjv6vHM8

[16] Michelle Lhooq, “The Simmering Sadness and Radical Eclecticism of Singapore’s Rave Underground,” Nina Protocol, February 8, 2024, https://www.ninaprotocol.com/articles/the-simmering-sadness-and-radical-eclecticsm-of-singapores-rave-underground.

[17] Whitney Taejin Hwang, Borderland Intimacies: GIs, Koreans, and American Military Landscapes in Cold War Korea (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010), 60.​

[18] Lee Hyo-sik, “Are Africans Leaving Itaewon?” The Korea Times, September 9, 2010, https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/20100909/are-africans-leaving-itaewon.

[19] https://www.yongsan.go.kr/eng/main/contents.do?menuNo=700005

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Major General James Walton, interview by Jenna Gibson, “A Conversation on USFK’s Move from Yongsan to Camp Humphreys,” The Peninsula (Korea Economic Institute of America), January 18, 2017, https://keia.org/the-peninsula/a-conversation-on-usfks-move-from-yongsan-to-camp-humphreys/.

[23] Tom McDonough, “Invisible Cities: Henri Lefebvre’s The Explosion,” Artforum, May 2008, https://www.artforum.com/features/invisible-cities-henri-lefebvres-the-explosion-188139/.