“You can't make a life out of not getting slapped in the face”

A Historiography of Solidarity, Survival, and Explosive Humor: The Life of a 70-Year-Old Transgender Woman in South Korea

At 70, Saekja—one of South Korea’s first-generation transgender women—takes the stage with fearless openness. At 14, she left school and home, surviving on the streets and in small inns, earning money through sex work with foreign gays. In 1981, she began working at South Korea’s first transgender bar.

Still active in nightlife, she transforms her life into performance with the unapologetic force of a strip act, even taking tips from the audience. Her stories chart a lifetime of survival: an illegal gender-affirming surgery in her 30s, public stigmatization during the 1980s AIDS panic, years as a celebrated queen in Japan, and her return to South Korea in her late 40s.

Against South Korea’s current backlash on student rights and its willful neglect in refusing to enact an anti-discrimination law, Saekja—who struggles to memorize lines at her age— recites Student Rights Ordinance itself, aligning with queer youth. She also speaks of transgender women still risking their lives in sex work, extending solidarity to senior queers. This solo performance turns self-objectification into a language of solidarity, becoming a living testimony of memory, courage, and collective resistance.

On stage, the director serves as her live prompter, echoing the gosu of Korean pansori. Their intergenerational duet—actor and director, seventy and forty—creates an unforgettable rhythm of honesty, humor, and defiance.