Not your average “auntie”
A brief photo-essay about the middle-aged women ever present in Korean marketplaces: The venerable Ajummas.
“Ajumma” is the Korean word for middle-aged woman. In some contexts, it is roughly equivalent to the word Auntie, but no matter how much you may love your father’s sister, the translation doesn’t seem to do any justice to the women who dwell in Korea’s bustling marketplaces.
The ones that seem to command the most reverence are the ones who work at Jagalchi, the largest seafood marketplace in South Korea. The place is now a bustling marketplace hosted in a modern glass building, but there was a time when it was just a pebble-covered beach that became a critical refugee hub in Busan, the provisional capital during the war and the most significant city that never fell to the North. During the times of the Korean war, while all the men were in the battlefield, the beach became a dense cluster of shacks and makeshift stalls where women gathered to sell whatever the sea provided.
Mind you, these were women who had to step in as primary providers instead of the men who were fighting or wounded by the war, so they were operating in survival mode to feed their families in a chaotic war economy. They had no other choice but to develop thick skin and a commanding presence. In Korea, they are often described as having Kkeut-gi (indomitable spirit). They don’t have time for your nonsense but they are not "angry", they are "hardened". Don’t be surprised if they throw in some extra shrimp for the same price after a brutally aggressive haggle or some well deserved scolding for your inability to quickly decide between the Mackerel or the Sea Bream.
Historians tend to suggest that these women are key protagonists of South Korea’s rapid economic rise, the so-called ¨Miracle on the Han River¨. While the business school case studies tend to talk about massive shipyards and car factories, there is a lot to say about how these women provided the social floor that made South Korea the technology powerhouse that it is today. They pooled their meager daily profits to fund informal lending circles (Gye), providing the microfinance to put each other’s children through school, raising the engineers and technical professionals who built modern Korea.
They fed the working class on the cheap by maintaining a high-volume low-margin seafood trade that supplied a stable source of protein. Even after the war was over, they seemed to stick to their stalls to remind everyone that no matter how the world would change, there was someone standing by a bucket of fish who wouldn’t let the city go hungry. Observed through the most romantic of lenses, these women are the living bridge between a Korea that lived on gravel and pebbles and the one that lives in skyscrapers.
For all their reputation of fierceness, some of them are incredibly friendly, like the kind of auntie that we would all like to have. In fact, only one of them outright refused the advances of my camera (albeit very angrily) but all the others seemed happy to lend an easy smile or a friendly gesture. One of them even had the tender audacity to give me the Korean finger heart, and I wasn’t there to buy any of her fish.
So, tourists beware: if you ever find yourself in the Korean version of a bazaar, you should know that these middle-aged women are not your average 'auntie.' The ones in Seoul tend to be masters of street food (Cho Yonsoon cooks an insane recipe of noodles featured on Netflix); some can delight you with the meanest mung bean pancakes Korea has to offer. But the ones in Busan are perhaps the most venerable of them all. If you are lucky, like me, they may steal your heart with maternal smiles and friendly gestures. But do not forget that these are the undeclared feminists who came before feminism was chic. These are the women who carried the economy of their nation when it needed it most. This is the fierce generation of women who won the war in their own way. Show some respect.
You can find the full photo-set of the Ajummas here.