Shoestring Soul Searching #4: Korea

For those who don’t know, I was born in Korea but moved to the States with my family when I was six. After my sister and I went to college, my parents moved back to Korea. Ever since, it’s been a confusing existence stuck in the middle. I built a life for myself in the US, but my extended family remains in Korea. I try to visit every year, but can never do so for longer than a week.

It’s a place I associate with my earliest memories, but couldn’t tell you what a single one of those childhood friends is up to nowadays. It’s a place I readily fit into with the face I have, but internally leaves me feeling awkward, out of place, and voyeuristic, like I somehow snuck into this country with a Korean mask and now I get to observe people on their evening commute without them catching on that I don’t belong here.

Korea triggers a lot of thoughts, needless to say!

Here’s where I’m from, please like it

It was this tangle of thoughts Tiff and I stepped into when we decided I would show her Korea. Honestly, it was tough work and I was stressed for much of it. Not because she was being demanding or unreasonable. Quite the opposite. I was the one trying to take us to five different activities per day, racking up 25,000 steps, and getting upset whenever the weather wouldn’t comply. I think she would have been fine seeing one thing and chilling at home with delivery chicken.

What I realized is sharing a place that’s meaningful to you isn’t really for the other person’s sake. It’s for your own. Because you want another person to look at where you’ve brought them and say, “Wow, this place is [beautiful / gritty / real / whatever adjective you want them to think] and I can see how it played a big role in your life, which is important.” Don’t we all want someone else to witness us? To have us be the central story of their lives?

Petty perhaps, but we’re only human and need validation about who we are and where we come from. Which is why I’m happy to be dating someone who doesn’t think twice when you bring her to the Korean folk museum and the exhibit tells her to dance, dance like the kimchi juice runs hot in your veins.

All I wanted was spinach and instead I got this identity crisis

Part of the goal of being in Korea is to reconnect with it, on my own terms as an adult. Not through relying on my parents, which is what I usually do when I’m here. Because sorry to say, but one day our parents will be gone and then what points of connection would I have left?

I have been succeeding in this goal beyond expectations. I know this not because of what I accomplished, but because of all the obstacles I ran into. On my own in Korea, it turned out…

• I could barely navigate

• I didn’t know how to turn on the hot water in the apartment

• I didn’t know where the spinach was in the supermarket

These may not be what you had in mind when I mentioned points of connection. But I’d argue they’re the foundational blocks. How do I reconnect with a place when I’m fiber-deficient because I couldn’t find vegetables?

Having lived around the world and prided myself on my ability to adapt, it was tragically funny to be stumbling around the produce section in my birth country. It made me feel six years old again, helpless and wanting to call Mom to ask where the spinach would be. Or better yet, could she bring me some spinach? And all the while feeling self-conscious whether the store clerks were wondering why this grown-ass man was making his fifth lap around the leafy greens like he’s figuring out the market economy for the first time.

Maybe some of this resonates with the other third-culture kids out there. There’s a culture handed down by your family, and you’re not comfortable with it. Interacting with it often leaves you confused and embarrassed. There are two truisms here:

1. You will never fully escape who you are. You can try as much as you want, but your place of birth, or the food you ate growing up, or the way your face is perceived by the world, these are immutable.

2. Given #1, you have two options. Discomfort (by embracing the culture) or disconnection (by rejecting the culture).

As an independent adult of my own free will, I choose discomfort. Wish me luck.

Next steps

What happens now? I stay in Korea for a while, and Tiff heads back to the US for a wedding. We’ll have separate adventures until we link back up in early July. I’ll have more stories from Korea soon.

Wasn’t this newsletter supposed to be about my job search? I’ll get back to that in the next one, I promise.

Your friend,

Bryan