The first moment I realized something was wrong, a girl stood facing a wall in a packed club with lights and music going on around her, and she wasn't reacting. I kept looking over at her, waiting for her to clue back into what was going on around her, or react to the music, but she never did. Then I noticed her tapping on the walls and mumbling.
Our table had ordered a massive bottle of something off some sort of bottle service, I don't even remember what at this point. We had a bowl of ice and some mixers. Everyone stood dancing around the table, lost to the music and the atmosphere; some people stood on the amphitheater style rows behind us, also vibing. There was a pole on a main stage of sorts that I had accompanied someone from our group to dance on, me hyping them up from below. The bouncers were watching with bored eyes, and everyone seemed to be in their own little groups either vibing and drinking or wildly dancing in the center.
At first I thought someone she was with would notice, and pull her away from the wall or engage with her. I kept looking for other people she might know, or even the bouncers.
Only when a guy started grabbing at her hips and bare stomach, without her even physically reacting to a strange man's hands on her, did I start feeling like I needed to do something. At first I went to the bouncer and told him I thought she needed help. His shrug sparked a surprising level of anger in me. I thought, alright well if you're not going to do something, then I will.
I grabbed her hand and tried to see if she could understand me, but she kept staring off at the wall and mumbling. While I had her beside me, I recruited a couple from the group of hostel members, telling them I wanted to get her back to the hostel and she could stay in the spare bed in my room. I planned to watch over her and make sure she had water or get her medical attention if she needed it; originally I thought she could just sleep it off while supervised. I was tipsy but not fully drunk at that time. We were walking out of the club when I saw her phone and tried to get her to unlock it, but she was incoherent and face ID didn't work, so we started walking back towards the hostel.
She was leaning heavily on the guy from the couple, and me while we were walking, but it got to a point where we were practically carrying her. When we stopped a few blocks away from the clubs, I think she had fully passed out and couldn't stand up straight. She started vomiting on herself, but the contents weren't leaving her mouth forcefully, so I swept what I could out of it to make sure she didn't choke. I pulled my massive claw clip out of my own hair (unsanitary I know) and gathered up her hair into a half-up to pull it out of her face while she was vomiting.
I instructed the couple to call for help, 112 I think? I was tipsy so not fully thinking. We got someone, and I was babbling in English, but I understood chingu (friend), to which I could say aniyo which means no, and kept saying stranger. Someone who spoke English got on the phone, at which point I described the issue: I thought someone had drugged her. They dispatched a couple of officers, who stayed with her, asking me if I was a friend or not, but when I said no, they didn't let me go to the emergency room with her, so I just had to leave her with them.
We went to a convenience store and I got a hangover tonic and a bag of chips for the morning, which the couple paid for, a good deed considering the night we'd had. It was incredibly kind of them, especially considering I was disgusting from the vomit and kind of out of it with an adrenaline crash.
Caring would have looked like the bouncers stepping in before patrons had to. Patrons caring would have looked like someone closer to her taking care of her before she stumbled down the large steps to our table at the bottom level. She was behind our group, tapping the walls, but no one even looked at her. Caring would have looked like more people around her looking at her worriedly rather than her being invisible: anything beyond the complete passivity I saw around her. This was not normal behavior, why was I the only one who seemed to notice or worry or do anything?
Social psychology has held an answer to that question since 1968. John Darley and Bibb Latané put college students on an intercom, let each one overhear another student's seizure, and counted who left the room for help: 85% of the students who believed no one else could hear, and 31% of the students who believed four others were listening. Darley and Latané named the mechanism diffusion of responsibility: every added witness shrinks the share of the emergency that any one listener feels bound to carry. On their reading, a silent bystander may be answering the other bystanders more than ignoring the victim.
Footage from outside the lab treats crowds more kindly. Richard Philpot and colleagues reviewed surveillance footage of 219 public conflicts in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and South Africa; in nine of ten, at least one bystander stepped in, and the likelihood that someone would rose with the size of the crowd. Neither study observed a club, or a stranger who could not ask for help, so neither settles what one room did on one night.
I'd heard whispers about this research before that night, mentions in my Psychology 101 classes, but I don't remember ever facing it so clearly, and the realization contributed its own part to my anger. The rest I owed to knowing what I feared for her: the Burning Sun scandal had already shown what happens to a drugged woman in a Seoul club when the room looks away. The anger did the weighing: the fear of seeming stupid, or ignorant, or nosy, came out worth less than what might happen to her. Courage, that night, was just arithmetic between those two fears.
The hairclip itself was nothing wild: a large white claw clip from Target I'd bought on a whim while browsing to wait for an appointment. I had protected the white one for special occasions since it seemed the most polished out of the pack of three (the others resembling tortoiseshell and a pink one with rhinestones). I have since then bought many more claw clips, but two years later sometimes I think about how she will only know me from that white claw clip. I wonder if the clip belongs to a positive(ish) memory of waking up cared for in a hospital, or to a traumatic haze for her that she's forgotten long ago.