My apartment building and the one next to it are filled with young women who are employed by Busan’s underworld. Dozens of girls spend the night be ferried to Room Salons, business clubs, whiskey bars and other dubious locations to entertain Korean businessmen. This often involves just drinking and having conversation with businessmen, but often, if the price is right, shadier deals are done between the young women and male clients. Throughout the day, there is a fleet of black sedans parked behind my apartment building. Each one usually has a solitary driver, young, thuggish looking man. They taxi the women around during the daytime, helping them buy groceries and whisking them off to daytime rendezvous.
During the evening and night, the area around my apartment is buzzing with activity. Girls get into sedans and are driven off, arriving back sometimes quickly, when they hop out of one car and into another. This activity goes on all night. Every night. If you are awake early in the morning, between the hours of 6am-8am, you can usually see and hear these girls stumble back home.
Aside from the hostesses, there are other dark characters lurking about. Often you can see groups of hulking Korean guys milling about in the neighborhood, perfectly fitting the description of the stereotypical “Gangpeh.” Today in my local Starbucks was a table full of such men. They had “dangerous” written all over them. What was interesting was that at a second table, sat a lone lackey. He sat apart from them but closely watched them. At one point when their water cups were empty, he ran over refilled them and sat back down at his “Lackey Table.” I once even saw a group of about 20 scary looking, black suit-clad goons bowing to what looked like a kingpin as police sat in the distance writing down license plate numbers. Ive read that luckily, “Gangpeh” avoid foreigners for fear of drawing attention to themselves…good!
Needless to say, I live in an interesting neighborhood.
