Chamberpot

It’s been a while since I blogged. Life… what can I say? And unfortunately, some stories I write in my blog sit a little heavy within me and I sometimes avoid writing. Love and hate relationship, remember? But today, I wanted to write a funny and maybe crass story of my childhood. If you don’t like a bit of bathroom humor, please stop reading now.

So when I was young, despite living in a two-story house with a flushing toilet upstairs (which really was constantly broken), our whole family mostly lived downstairs during the winter. I mean, heating was expensive and, well, families usually slept together in those days. My parents would sleep in another room on the first floor, but grandma, me and my sister would sleep in the slightly bigger room. 

Downstairs rooms did not have a flushing toilet, nor even an attached toilet. Basically, we had 뒷간 (meaning back house, but really means an outhouse with a hole in the ground). So if you wanted to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you’d have to put on some extra clothes, shoes, take a little flashlight and go to this separate structure/room you’d call bathroom. Then you wash your hands as you come back, since the sink is near your room and nowhere near the outhouse.

As a child, I was terrified of falling into the said bathroom, as it was really a giant hole you squat on top of. Especially in the dark, it was even more terrifying since there were many stories of ghosts hanging about in the outhouses. And if you add freezing (-15 C) weather to that, you really didn’t want to go to the bathroom at night. Unfortunately, I always had a tiny bladder.

One evening, my dad was sleeping with us. This is rare since he was a very light sleeper and hated sleeping with others. We were all terrified of waking him up since he got really irritable and angry. Let’s say my bladder was not listening to my fears. It decided that it needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I didn’t know what to do. If I were to try to go outside, which I didn’t want to, I’d wake up my dad who’d get angry, etc.

So my grandmother came to the rescue… Because the bathroom situation was impossible, she always had this thing called Yo-gang (essentially a chamberpot, but it’s shaped like a round pot made of stainless steel). She said I should use Yo-gang quietly since that would be less likely to wake up dad. Since I was also terrified of going outside in the cold and dark, I was quite happy with her solution.

Dad wouldn’t wake up and I wouldn’t have to go outside.

Let me just say I hadn’t considered one problem…
The sound of pee hitting the stainless steel container.

You can probably guess the ending to the story. My dad jumped up from the loud noise, got angry anyway. Then, he got angrier because grandma had me use the chamberpot which, well, modern people wouldn’t use. 

There’s really no moral to the story except to tell you what honestly happened. The Korea of my childhood was not like the Korea of now. Even living in the middle of the capital city of Seoul, our two story modern house still had an outhouse. We had constant shut off of water so had to install a pump system. Our electricity went out rather often. There was really no hot water to speak of. And well, there was that one chamberpot.