Give Me Korean Cosmetics! ( How a Korean businesswoman lost her pride—and found herself—in Nepal)

Give Me Korean Cosmetics!

The travel guide business never made it past the chalkboard. No matter how many times I punched the numbers into my calculator, the math simply refused to yield a profit. Perhaps the version of me standing here today would have skipped the calculations entirely, flown straight to Korea, and knocked on the doors of major agencies until a path cleared. But back then, I was different. I only poured my energy into things that offered a calculated, predictable return. I never played the crane claw machines at arcades, nor did I gamble; they contained too many variables. What mattered to me was a strict, immutable equation: How much of my labor and time must I invest to secure a guaranteed result? I despised the unknown.

In fact, the only reason I had gathered the courage to uproot my life and come to Nepal was my absolute certainty about the market. But with each passing day, the cold realization settled in: my certainty had been a hallucination. I desperately needed something—anything—that would give me a concrete answer.

When I first left Korea, I was convinced a publishing house would sign a contract with me any day. I envisioned my book hitting the shelves, copies flying off into the world, and royalties steadily dropping into my bank account like clockwork. I believed that by deploying modern, sophisticated Korean marketing strategies, sales would ignite and my inventory would vanish overnight. Yet, not a single one of these projections materialized in the real world.

On the long bus ride back to Pokhara, I sank into a heavy silence, relentlessly dissecting my missteps. I weighed my options on a fragile scale: Should I keep grit-toothedly enduring this purgatory, or should I swallow my pride, put on a thick face, and slink back to Korea as a failure? I didn't know which path was worse. Both options felt impossible to bear.

If someone back home had only sent a message saying, "Please, just come back," the choice would have been infinitely easier. But no one said that. Instead, they cheered, "You’ll make it happen, no matter what." Even my nine-year-old son, possessing a maturity far beyond his years, never once whined, "Mom, come home early." He would briefly rattle off his wishlist of toys, tell me about playing with his friends, and quickly hang up the phone.

But looking back, their absolute faith in me wasn't baseless. In the small, tightly bound world I inhabited in Korea, I had always succeeded. After graduating from a commercial high school, I worked full-time while putting myself through a night college, even earning academic scholarships along the way. When I walked away from a decade-long career in corporate accounting to pursue culinary arts, I won the grand prize in a prestigious national cooking competition hosted by the U.S. Meat Export Federation, landing myself in the news. Later, when I transitioned into home-education sales so I could raise my child, I routinely broke company records as the top-performing specialist, which earned me a spotlight profile in a major women’s newspaper.

In every universe I had ever occupied, whenever I dared to challenge something, I conquered it. I possessed an unshakeable, hard-earned confidence. It had literally never occurred to me that my calculated efforts could fail. Even my very first completed manuscript had instantly caught the discerning eye of a chief editor at a prestigious publishing house known for churning out bestsellers. I can still vividly recall our meeting—the young assistant guiding me into the conference room with a warm smile:

"Please wait here, Writer-nim. The chief editor will be with you shortly. May I offer you a cup of tea, Writer-nim?"

Writer-nim. Author. Of all the titles and syllables that had ever slipped past someone's lips to define me, had there ever been an expression so profoundly elegant? The editor had leaned in, telling me my emotional descriptions were remarkably delicate, and that with a little polishing, we would birth a beautiful book.

So, what on earth went wrong? Since the moment my feet touched Nepalese soil, not a single thing I poured my sweat into had borne fruit.

Which card was easier to play? To stubbornly fabricate a forced drop of hope in this barren land, or to return home and look my family in the eye as a defeated woman? I sat on that bumpy bus, endlessly recalculating the cost of my pride.

The morning after my return to Pokhara, Jyoti burst through the door with a sliver of salvation. She had managed to secure a temporary kiosk space for one week inside a bustling department store in the city center. The owner agreed to let us set up a makeshift counter right next to a high-end cosmetics booth to liquidate our stock. It was the golden opportunity I had prayed for to clear my inventory.

In exchange for twenty percent of our sales revenue, I decided I would manage the booth myself. A department store meant a strict, fixed-price policy. Because the prices would be clearly displayed on labels, there would be no exhausting haggling, no room for linguistic misunderstandings. My strategy was precise: I would dress in the sharp, tailored attire of a polished Korean career woman, adopt an aura of elite professionalism, and use minimal, structured phrases to cultivate absolute trust. Meanwhile, Tara and Jyoti would continue their door-to-door sales. We needed to attack from all angles; every single bottle counted.

Before setting out, I sat Jeevan down and asked him how to say "Please buy Korean cosmetics" in Nepali.

"Korean cosmetics kinnus," he instructed.

It was simple enough. I rolled the syllables over my tongue, committing them to memory over and over again. Korean cosmetics kinnus. Korean cosmetics kinnus.

That afternoon, I meticulously wrote out prices on small white sticker labels and affixed them to each product. After all, a department store was a world of fixed transactions. The next morning, we loaded the inventory onto the back of Jeevan’s motorcycle, rode over to the store, and arranged the bottles elegantly across the display counter.

I was to be both the face of the brand and its premier saleswoman. The entire reason I had chosen skincare as my trading commodity was rooted in my previous travels through Nepal. Back then, local women had constantly swarmed me, exclaiming how beautiful I was. They would aggressively ask what I ate, what products I used, and if using Korean skincare would make them look exactly like me. No matter where I went in those days, I could never escape the intense, admiring stares of the locals. Granted, compared to other women in Korea, I didn't possess a remarkably striking face or flawlessly porcelain skin. But when immersed among the locals, I undeniably stood out. Perhaps it was because my facial features shared a subtle, familiar resemblance to theirs, making me approachable yet exotic.

Determined to leverage this, I styled myself to perfection—hair immaculate, makeup flawless—and stood proudly behind my counter. Sure enough, shoppers browsing the aisles kept their eyes glued to me, and even the professional saleswoman at the neighboring luxury booth paused to tell me how beautiful I looked.

The stage was perfectly set. It was time to open my mouth and draw the crowd.

Grounded in my sharp suit, I drew in a deep breath, summoned every ounce of corporate authority from my past, and projected my voice clearly across the floor:

"Korean cosmetics dinus!"

The passing shoppers stopped, glanced at me, and began to chuckle softly as they walked on. I simply smiled back, assuming my foreign charm was breaking the ice. A few curious onlookers approached the counter, picked up the bottles, but the moment they looked down at my neat price tags, they gently set them back down and glided away.

By the closing hours, I had not sold a single bottle. Not one. I had spent the entire day on my feet, beautifully made up, projecting my voice until my throat was raw, urging the crowd to take my products—yet my cash box remained entirely empty.

As if the universe was playing a cruel joke on my vanity, Tara and Jyoti both returned that evening having achieved over 1,000 rupees each in door-to-door sales. In a single afternoon, they had successfully recovered a third of their monthly salaries, while the "expert" corporate manager had brought home zero.

Defeated and bewildered, I returned to the lodge and called Jeevan. I confessed my utter failure, my voice laced with sheer disbelief. To quicken the liquidation, I had even marked the prices significantly lower than what we charged the local beauty salons.

"I stood there all day shouting, 'Korean cosmetics, Korean cosmetics!'" I exclaimed, my words tumbling out in a frantic, scrambled mix of English and broken Nepali. "I dropped the prices to the floor! Why didn't a single person buy anything? It makes absolutely no sense!"

Jeevan listened quietly as I paced the room, hyperventilating into the receiver. After a long pause, he asked bluntly, "What exactly did you say?"

"What do you mean, what did I say?" I snapped.

"The Nepali phrase for 'Buy Korean cosmetics.' How did you say it to the crowd?"

"Exactly how you taught me," I replied defensively. "I stood there and proudly said, 'Korean cosmetics dinus!'"

Silence hung over the line for a fraction of a second. And then, Jeevan—a boy who rarely ever smiled, let alone laughed—burst into an explosive, uncontrollable fit of laughter. I could hear him literally collapsing onto his bed over the phone, howling.

I stood frozen, holding the plastic receiver, staring blankly at the wall. "What? Why are you laughing like that?"

Between heavy, tearful gasps for air, Jeevan choked out, "When did I ever tell you to say Korean cosmetics dinus? I told you to say Korean cosmetics kinnus!"

"Okay... so what does Korean cosmetics dinus mean?"

"It means," Jeevan gasped, his voice mimicking the dramatic, extended hand of a street beggar, "'Please give me Korean cosmetics! Donate them to me!'"

He kept howling, completely unable to contain himself.

I slumped onto the edge of the bed, the phone still pressed to my ear, engulfed by a sudden, breathtaking wave of irony.

There I had been. A proudly tailored, South Korean businesswoman, standing in the middle of a department store behind a pristine mountain of skincare, spending her entire day beautifully, aggressively begging the impoverished locals of Pokhara to give her free makeup.

How deeply covetous I must have looked to the passing crowd. How staggeringly, beautifully foolish.