A bar on Hooker Hill

Illustration/Uday Mohite

When our social world is a media world, travel becomes a hall of mirror images. We seek images of a place and reproduce those images in a loop. Seoul, where I just was, currently exemplifies this Mohini status, given that South Korea, as Euny Hong writes in The Birth of Korean Cool, "has been setting up the mechanism of pop culture domination since the birth of the world wide web". Seoul's surfaces are smooth, its androgynous fashion and cosmetics muted and cuted, designed for blending in at scale, not standing out. Eating hangover soup (without hangover), convenience store kimbap, saying kamsahmnida, all heighten the feeling of K-drama cosplay. To be clear, I'm not complaining, boss. To encounter the ordinary, you need only take the wrong bus (in my case every bus I took) and end up lost. The thrill of arrival into a dreamscape soon turns to restlessness for that other romance, of the unexpected encounter.

Itaewon's hills - Home Hill, Hooker Hill, Halal Hill - signpost the neighbourhood's diversity (It has Seoul's only mosque) and make it an LBGT and expat friendly hub of clubs and stores. A friend takes me to a divey bar called The Grand Ole Opry, up Hooker Hill. Themed as an American Western saloon, with an aficionado's playlist of country music, it is festooned with international currency notes signed by patrons from around the world. The owner, 84-year-old Kim Sam Sook, better known as Mama Kim - also how she introduced herself - mixes the very strong cocktails. She tells us she started the bar in 1975 - real estate was cheap before the gentrification - making it the oldest bar still standing in the neighbourhood.

Curious, I searched for more online. One article described Mama Kim as feisty, a hater of Korean men, married four times. But this was merely another form of image-creation of gritty authenticity - and inaccurate. An affectionate video portrait by Jamie Wilkins, tells a different story. Mama Kim grew up poor in the Korean war - "one egg was big party!" - with a hapless mother, and so, worked several jobs till she opened the bar. Korean customers did not pay, so she banned them. Years later, she fell in love with a regular American customer and the middle-aged lovers married. "He made me very happy" she says over old video images of joy and fun. Now he is no more and she talks to his photograph each night after work, before bed. It's one of those great loves.

The name Itaewon is said to come from its abundant pear trees. Another version says it contains words alluding to babies born from rapes during Japanese invasions, or brothels, when, in the 20th century, the Korean government designated "comfort areas' for US soldiers from the nearby base. Struggling artists flocked to the area too. Eventually the city's music scene, now a big export, grew from these edges. The military camp moved, embassies entered. Expats replaced soldiers. The area represented diversity. The hit song Itaewon Freedom celebrated its ‘open' culture. Some say the phrase Itaewon Freedom also refers to legal exemptions for US soldiers who raped or assaulted Korean citizens.

In cities and in people, painful pasts nestle inside shiny futures, resilience nestles inside hardship, military inside capital, stories inside histories, experiences inside images, love inside injustice, in spite of, even because of it. Sometimes, they all walk into a bar together.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com