Ah, the bi-weekly hunt for a blog topic. Yesterday I was inspired to write “Printculture: The Korean Drama,” but casting was a problem. Would I cast by age? By status? By personality? All problematic since I only know the rest of the gang virtually. Who would commit suicide at the end? It was a house of cards.

So I went to my fall-back: The New York Times. I’ve been hanging onto the link to “Getting Territorial Out in the Hall” for just such a moment of blogger-shutdown disease. The article describes the battles fought by New Yorkers over the hallways of their apartment buildings — those tricky, not-quite-private and not-quite-public spaces. I haven’t witnessed any similar scenes of hosting parties, stealing boxes, hiding strollers, or fighting over decorations in our hall here, but as a suburban girl living in the city for the first time in my life, I could certainly sympathize with the irrational anger and claustrophobia that comes with extended periods of time in small, crowded spaces.

Hallways, as the article states, are places where the terms of the social contract are less than clear. But beyond that they are buffer zones, places of decompression, transit territories between public and private. Long years in suburbia have trained me to use that time spent walking over a lawn or riding in a car to slowly switch between my private and public self; but in the city, especially as one as crowded as Seoul (over ten million people, in an area smaller than New York City) any public/private distinction is amorphous at best. My apartment neighbors can smell what I cook, know how often I yell at my kids, and can feel the vibration of my front door slamming shut. Similarly, without having met the folks upstairs, I could tell you what TV programs they like, what time their kids go to bed, and how often they fight.

As I have come to frequent the public baths like the Seoul natives, even bathing is no longer a private process. For me, the public bath is place to relax and get away from shouts of, “Mommy, he’s pouring maple syrup all over your passport!” But for others, the bath is a social place, for trading complaints about mother-in-laws, dieting tips, and information about the best local hakwons. At first, although I loved the luxury of sitting around in pools of hot water, I couldn’t move beyond the discomfort of being on display, and the anxiety of being unsure of etiquette norms. Growing to love the public bath required a trick of my consciousness — I mastered the art of existing in my own private world despite the public reality of naked strangers surrounding me. (This trick of consciousness is sometimes broken when I run into people I know.)

It seems to me that city people easily slide into that feeling of being in a private bubble while in a public space, especially in those transit or buffer areas such as hallways, elevators, or subway cars — places that city people occupy so often that they become as familiar as second homes. I regularly see people put on makeup on the bus (despite the bumps) and have personal conversations on subway cars, feeling a sense of privacy derived from perceived anonymity. One day, while taking a visitor around Seoul, I witnessed (with fascinated horror) a young couple squeeze each other’s blackheads during our 30-minute subway ride. In a place where lovers rarely kiss in public, this pimple-popping behavior seemed to require such a strong sense of detachment from the surrounding environment that, although disgusted and disturbed, I couldn’t stop watching; I had to keep checking that they were still, still doing it. I never realized I was such a voyeur.

Mirroring the amorphous public/private nature of these spaces is the expression of private emotions — particularly irrational anger — for which there may be no acceptable no public face. Take the case of the “dog poop girl,” a girl who didn’t clean up her dog’s mess in the Seoul subway, who was captured on an enraged bystander’s cellphone camera, and vilified by angry netizens. The disproportion of anger incited by this incident (death threats, calls for her to commit suicide, etc.) was incommensurate with her “crime” precisely because, I think, people reacted as if she had let her dog shit all over their own personal spaces (and because the sentiment had an anonymous public medium in which to run amok — the Internet). You don’t see that kind of personal level of anger over an oil spill in a purely public ocean. Letting a dog shit on the subway or leaving a stroller in the hall are akin, perhaps, to peeing in someone else’s cave, triggering private emotions in public space — a kind of road rage — for which there is no public face, only acting out.

The windows of one side of our apartment look out into the street; the windows on the other side look into the hall. In the summer, to get some more ventilation, people often leave their front doors open, which reminds me a little of living in a dorm. As you walk down the hall to your apartment you have to train yourself not to look at (at least not too obviously) the inside of others’ apartments. (I recently learned that my friend Emily, during her one-month stay here last summer, failed to notice this norm and violated it often and with nosy glee) As I move along my hallway (mostly clear of strollers and garbage) and through the streams of people on the sidewalk, I think again about the training of citizenry taking place at my son’s school and the emphases how to move one’s body, how to sit, and how to stand in line, in terms of the pressures exerted by living in a fishbowl.

Not a Korean drama, for sure. But just as the Korean dramas explore tension between status and capability, between following ritual and following desire in the turmoil of modern life, so too do hallway and subway dramas interrogate our modes of being in the changing boundaries between public and private being.