[KS] Kisaeng

[J.Scott Burgeson]

--- Pete Morriss <pete.morriss at nuigalway.ie> wrote:
Does anybody know of anything - fiction, non-fiction,
film, or whatever - that might give an insight into
the lives of kisaeng?


I interviewed the last surviving classically trained
gisaeng in Seoul, Kim Ja-ya in 1998, and she passed
away about a year later. The full text of this
interview is available in my book "Korea Bug"
(Eunhaeng Namu, 2005). To my knowledge, such an
in-depth, transcribed interview does not exist even in
Korean-language sources, as any local media stories on
her mostly contained just brief quotes or paraphrases
by journalists, rather than full and actual
transcriptions of any conversations they had with
her... I also interviewed a contemporary "gisaeng" in
my magazine Bug Vol. 1 in 1997, but they cannot be
considered gisaeng in any true sense of the word,
although to the untutored eye, the hanboks they wear
may signify some level of "authenticity"... A room
salon hostess would in fact be a closer modern
equivalent to the classical gisaeng...
   --Scott Bug 
  


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