“What do you do, Gan-ol?” When people ask me this, I say: “My first job is ‘unemployed person,’ and my second is ‘carpenter.’”

 

People usually laugh and ask what kind of person has a ‘first’ and ‘second’ job. And soon after, more seriously, “Carpenter? Did you say you’re a carpenter? Wow, that’s really cool.” To which I think, “Cool, my foot. You just think that because you haven’t tried it,” but smile and say some claptrap like, “Yeah, it is. I sell what I make and teach classes.” Though strictly speaking, that’s not quite claptrap, because it’s all true.

 

▲ The author ©Gan-ol

The image of a carpenter is made up of fantasies or envy about this skill that so-called ‘macho middle-aged men’ master, and romantic ideals about the person with these skills. But this work isn’t as hard and doesn’t require as much engineering skill as people commonly assume. At the same time, it is physically, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating.

 

Carpentry is used in a wide variety of ways, depending on what you’re making, why you’re making it, and how you’re making it. It stretches from the construction sites using middle-aged men for yarikkiri (hiring someone only to finish a certain amount of work by a certain time) to the DIY furniture-making of power bloggers and the handicraft pieces found in expensive houses in Gangnam. The pay and lifestyle differ greatly depending on what kind of carpentry you do.

 

Starting carpentry during a long period of depression and powerlessness

 

The workshop where I work is part of X Center, and I started there when I took a class that the workshop manager was teaching. As I kept hanging around and making furniture there as time went on, I built a nest for myself and learned that work.

 

When I first started doing carpentry “for real,” I was quite depressed [for other reasons]. I didn’t talk at all about personal things, I just did the work silently like most apprentices. I didn’t talk about my personal relationships or what I liked to do.

 

That year I was living a life that had gone wrong at some point, as I stopped taking care of myself, let my apartment become a mess of dirty laundry and trash, went to school in the same clothes that I had worn the day before, went to class after washing my hair in a bathroom on the 6th floor of an out-of-the-way building and drying it with a hand dryer, and lost my will to live in general,. I did think to myself, “This can’t continue,” but it seemed like there was nothing that I had the power to change. Having half given up, I didn’t belong at school, home, or anywhere, and I just drifted along.

 

▲ A pallet ©Gan-ol

When I started working at the workshop, it was me, the sparsely-goateed manager (a man of indeterminate age who had majored in design and then switched to carpentry), and a young female staff member (a 19-year-old who had graduated from an alternative high school and learned carpentry after managing a café). We three, of different ages and genders, became a team. As someone who was used to spending time in a group of people of the same age, gender, and political leanings at my quiet school, it was quite a change. The language and gestures they used and their philosophies and outlook on the world were very different, and I quietly—that is, mutely—learned between the two of them how to work.

 

First, I was given the low-level job of strapping together and transporting the materials for pallets (wooden or metal platforms for carrying large loads), and hunting around for unused pallets. Because my desperation for work came not from a need to earn money, meet people, or do something I enjoyed, but simply to pass the time, this manual labor was perfect for me. Time flew by when I was doing it.

 

Then as now, we always arrived at the same time and had a cup of coffee and a quiet chat together before starting work. At midday, we would go to a restaurant in Youngdeungpo, each have a bowl of noodle soup, and amble back to the workshop while enjoying the winter sunlight. When we got back, we would brew and drink some more coffee. At 4 p.m. we had a snack, and at 7, would say, “Carpenters simai (a Japanese word that has a much more cathartic rhythm than ‘finish up’) at 7!”

 

▲ Handling the technical part is just like riding a bicycle—once you’ve acquired the skill, you won’t lose it. ©Gan-ol

The steady step-by-step of the stages of work was a good foothold for helping me return to normal life, when I had been wandering around powerlessly with no sense of time. I dutifully went about learning the stages: collecting materials, design, planning, cutting the pieces, assembly, and finishing touches. Each stage was enjoyable in its own way, and I really enjoyed my first experience of trying my hardest to make something that wasn’t for me.

 

Handling the technical part is just like riding a bicycle—once you’ve acquired the skill, you won’t lose it. This is because ‘acquiring’ itself means that the skill becomes engraved in the body. Building up experiences and sense through my body taught me, as a person who had lived a monotonously visual life (with print media, computers, etc.), a new way of acquiring knowledge. I found that these things were not something possible only during childhood, but that they were both possible and worth continuing as I got older.

 

And I filled up my room with the furniture I made. Before then, I had not felt like “I control this space” or “I am engaged with this space,” but was gripped a feeling that I was chained to this studio apartment. But as I filled it up with things that I had made and learned how to arrange them, things got better bit by bit. Through making material changes and rearranging the flow of the room, I started to engage with my space.

 

Because it changed me from simply accepting things to actively making things, the carpentry work I took on gave me tangible results, a sense of accomplishment, and  recognition of my own existence, at a time when depression had long been beating down my pride and sense of competence. Once, after finishing a big order, we just up and went to Jeju Island. Said laughingly, “You have to go on a trip after finishing a big project, you know.” This is work in which tension and concentration are very distinct from rest and relaxation.

 

Macho men’s world... ‘Are you really a carpenter?’

 

Fantasies and a sense of romance about carpentry and manual labor! I must admit I had them before I officially started working at the workshop, when I was just starting to learn carpentry through the class.

 

▲ In the workshop ©Gan-ol

I majored in history at university, so I was always adrift in an ocean of talk, in the words of countless other humanities and social science students. What we had in common was a feeling of useless and guilt, the thought, “I can’t do anything.” We didn’t have any skills, uses, or talent, and all we knew how to do was write (poorly) and talk.

 

The few among us who could play the guitar or draw well, or were good with computers, were secretly envied. It would be a lie to say that some of that envy isn’t directed at carpentry, as well. But when I actually started doing it, and especially when I started dealing with machinery, I realized how foolish and impractical these romantic notions were.

 

As I got better at the work, middle-aged male carpenters have sometimes asked me, “So, Gan-ol, are you a carpenter?” There is something hidden in this question. Or in the question, “What will you do when you graduate?” I can’t answer them. I don’t have enough high-level skill, am too physically weak, and am just unqualified in too many ways to say, “I’m going to be a carpenter,” or, challengingly, “I assumed I would work in the workshop.” I have struggled with a sense of inferiority every time I am asked these mean-spirited questions.

 

More than learning how to make pretty furniture or systematically becoming familiar with carpentry techniques, the work here has a stronger ‘comprehensive’ quality. So you could call it both a kind of teamwork (more than a management-labor relationship) and a community that shares some (adventurous) aspects of life. I haven’t been just learning carpentry skills like production, assembly, and so on, and doing the work, I have been spending time with these people and learning how to work. 

 

Instead of working full time at carpentry, the middle-aged men take plenty of breaks to rest and have fun. They don’t spend every hour from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the same pose, but spend their time quite fluidly, taking a break when they get too hot or cold, having snacks, never missing a tea time, shouting “Simai!” and having a beer at 6 p.m., sometimes finishing work in the morning and going swimming at 2 p.m., or working only in the afternoon. And, remarkably, this helps them work really efficiently.

 

While other people are sitting in front of their computers doing paperwork, we enjoy a flexible way of spending time that accommodates the worker and work environment, by taking a break to ride bikes in the winter air by the Han River or eat ox-bone soup at the Yeongdeungpo ironware market. 

 

Exploration, and the Yeongdeungpo market

 

Sometimes we call simai and walk around Yeondeungpo looking for a good place to drink. Yeongdeungpo is full of distinctive features. Each part of the market sells something different—gloves, tents, bearings, springs, screws, iron goods, safety equipment, saws, staple guns, and so on. It is really fun to thread through those alleys on our bikes and find carpentry supplies to bring back.

 

▲ Things bought at Yeongdeungpo market ©Gan-ol

At first the middle-aged men running the shops would look at us suspiciously and remark to each other, “Some young women are here.” I often felt that they were being rude, as well, but after a while, they got to know our faces and now give us juice when we come and say, “What do you need today?” or joke, “You’re working on a holiday, doesn’t your boss give you days off?” I smile and reply cheekily, “He doesn’t! Maybe I should ask for better pay.”

 

The Yeondeungpo men taught me the names of a ton of tools. If I said, “When I want to buy this, what should I ask for?” they would say, “Ah, you can call that a saragiri (countersink drill bit), and you should say first whether you’re going to use it on metal or on wood...” Learning one by one the names, how to make an itemized invoice, units of measurements—it was really like a new world to me. Though I can’t really become one of these men, the interactions with them feel not so much like an impenetrable barrier as simply a different type of experience. 

 

At an “M”-brand store in Yeongdeungpo, there is a super-macho older man. He treats the small-framed workshop manager with disdain, and can barely bring himself to speak through his frown to any women who go there. Every time we get back from that store, the other workshop staff member practically flies into a rage while cursing him. This man doesn’t give us any credit for the skill we have acquired (our attitude is that we’re not beginners anymore, we know our stuff) after a year of frequenting Yeongdeungpo market, and that isn’t pleasant. 

 

It was definitely hard to conquer the macho middle-aged men of Yeondeungpo market with the way I look, but as time went by and they saw me come in on my bike wearing any old thing, covered in paint and with my hair a mess, they got used to me, and I to them. Of course, it isn’t just appearance that we have in common, but gestures and ways of speaking as well. The me who hangs out in Yeongdeungpo has a posture and clothing similar to that of the macho men, and imitates them in some ways, but she is also clearly different.

 

In the end, I haven’t become so much a regular carpenter as I have a carpentry teacher. I sometimes run a youth program using carpentry, support a carpentry class targeting youth from alternative schools, and run a job experience class. This doesn’t require only carpentry skills, it entails making carpentry into curriculum, teaching a class in a way that is appropriate to the students, and recording the results.

 

At first I would think, “Why don’t the middle-aged men at the workshop call me a carpenter, I’m as fit as they are,” and sulk, but as I spent time with tens of teenagers of all types every week, stood in front of them and told stories about carpentry, and saw their expressions change when two young female carpenters with safety gear gave them demonstrations, I began to understand what it meant to find the things that I could do, that I have to do, within the wide field of carpentry,

 

I can’t work with only romantic notions of making the furniture that I need, acquiring skills, and making something with my own hands. Similarly, this work isn’t something to be done only for oneself, but entails carrying and fulfilling the responsibility of influencing society or passing on something to the next generation. Instead of proving myself as skilled a carpenter as the older men, I have to understand moving forward by making good use of my documenting and observation skills.

 

▲ The author ©Gan-ol

Conflict, talking, creating long-term relationships

 

Of course, there can’t be no conflicts between the middle-aged male carpenters at the workshop and me. Putting aside the conflict between considering the carpenter that I want to become and the type of carpenter they push me to be (because it’s what I do well), we have especially different opinions about pay. No, it’s more correct to say that what we want to give (and receive) is different. 

 

I hold to the principle of ‘fixed time – fixed income,’ and so there can’t but be friction between me and these men, who are doing carpentry for the experience or for fun.

 

It is a conflict that we can’t completely resolve through talking about it, because our basic world views are different and our views on money are very different. I always get annoyed when they say “How about you use your imagination [to be satisfied with what you have],” and I go away to get my feelings out by using the cutting machine 1000 times. I finish the day well enough working on absorbing tasks, realize that I didn’t have to say what I said, and go home. I take my bike. Sometimes I’m hungry.

 

When I broke the cutting machine while trying to cut three pieces at once as I was muttering, “How long do I have to keep doing this?” and complaining to myself, or when I purposefully acted as if I didn’t want to look at the others and worked silently, thinking to myself, “Crazy person, what are you doing?” while I mixed 12 bags of cement, I was giving them the silent treatment. I only started really talking to them when I had had enough of silence.

 

If I had continued biting back my complaints, the relationship would have fallen apart. What made me finally decide to start talking to them was the realization, ‘Fine, I don’t care how this relationship ends, I’m not going to worry about it,’–and then as I continued working, that feeling subsided. That my way of thinking was so extreme now seems comical to me.

 

Are you embarrassed when you don’t speak because you’re worried about the effect of your words? The fact that we women don’t have the courage to thoroughly consider and then discuss problems that come up is more embarrassing, actually. Because, even considering our ignorance or our failure to consider our positions or circumstances, we should be able to talk about things.

 

Since then, I’ve worked on big projects with them, and learned to tell dirty jokes myself. I’m an unprecedented being in their world, what with my gender, sexual orientation, and age all being different.

 

How can I put this... in the end, I haven’t been able to get in a position of power there. But my adversary isn’t these macho older men, it’s not about acquiring better carpentry skills than them or knowing more than them (they all went to good schools). What matters in the end is whether I’ve taken the right risks and have lived well.

 

Taking the less-travelled path on a mountain, sleeping in the open, learning to swim, not being embarrassed when you ask for help or receive kindness, confidently accepting and expressing goodwill and anger, but being able to hold your ground and get angry when someone has made a mistake or crossed a line,...finding people who will try and share these experiences with you is actually quite difficult.

 

The world of carpentry and the people I’ve met in it have made me a cruder and more confident person, and I’m glad about it. [Translated by Marilyn Hook]

 

*Original article: http://ildaro.com/6827 Published: September 25, 2014

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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