::A Geek in Korea::

I am not an abnormally large person. I am a normally proportioned person of slightly above average height (184.5 cm). I don’t have three arms, or a hunch back. However, the bell curve in Korea has me sitting slightly out of the three sigma range of acceptable sizes when shopping for clothing. I can’t walk into some stores downtown without being chased out. “MEDIUM SIZES ONLY!” as if I’m Yao Ming. I’ve never needed to shop at the Big and Tall store to find something that fit me in the United States. Damn it, I’m not tall, everyone here is too damn short!

Today we were shopping and I ended up picking “what they had in my size” instead of any first choice off the shelf. If I was shopping in the United States, I would have had no problems getting anything in my size, but I was forced to walk from store to store asking “What’s the largest size you have? Nothing larger? Can you check in back?” like i was a carnival freak.

Anyway, the issue of the moment is trying to find comfortable summer pants for work is something of a fiasco. I am a half size too big to fit in the largest pants sold in most Korean stores in Asian sizes. I’m also 5 centimeters too large to fit into “X-L” shirts as well. If I don’t need to stretch, and I don’t have a full lunch, I can squeeze into things, but ultimately for comfort I’d like just a slightly looser fit. I can’t pull a “Fat guy in a little coat” or anything, but it’s not like I feel completely free in smaller shirts. I’m just slightly too large for the bell curve. Over time, I might eventually get a Mr. Burns hump as I continually hunch over in my clothing.

I’m not alone. One of my students was asking how tall I was. He said that his brother was shorter, but had much larger shoes than I. He said his brother has shoes four sizes larger than mine, and had to order all of his clothes via the Internet, or custom made from Seoul. All that work just to find something to wear. That young boy’s brother fell farther out of the bell curve than I did and now had to wait days by the mailbox just for clothing to arrive.

I’m too lazy to shop for clothes online just to get something to fit. I’d rather scrounge around in the “freaks and left over sizes” bin of the department store hoping to find something in my size than actively hunt down clothes for me to care about online. It’s close enough, and it motivates me to exercise to see if I can lose those last few pounds to make my small Asian sizes fit better. I’m glad it’s an option if I ever need to, but it’s still a nightmare for me to consider. At least when I walk out of the department store I can say, “I did the best with what they had.”

I’m sure this is much more traumatizing if you care about fashion at all. For a fashionable expat in Korea of my dimensions, ordering online must be the only way to survive.