I’ve been looking for something to do for the past months – besides writing every ten days to post on here, going on a stupid walk for my stupid mental health, and singing in the shower. Something to bring rhythm and structure to my days and, if luck has it, money on my bank account. Something that feels right and aligned, in which I can be nothing but confident because this is what I am meant to do.
People keep telling me it’s just a phase, and it is. The tarot readers on my Instagram account, my parents, my friends, and any person I end up talking “job search” with. And just because I feel mildly discouraged on days where everything seems to objectively be going wrong doesn’t mean that I am not aware of the temporary nature of my situation. I’ve been through this before – and I recently found that I am nothing but annoyingly resilient and painfully resourceful (on top of being a gifted yapper in classes I don’t attend anymore). It is truly a waste: all of this unshakable, paradoxical confidence in someone with a remarkably low self-esteem and the tendency to sabotage and rationalise her own relentless idealism.
But, as I said, I’ve been through this before; one gets lost more than once in their twenties and throughout life, I suppose. The question of who one is, who one wants to be, and what one’s future will look like is painfully old and almost boring. But alas, I’ve been pondering life’s most basic questions for years by now and still feel no closer to a definitive answer. Identities shift and dissolve like sand under one’s weight, and you can rebuild that castle at will. Realise the foundations were still malleable, or that you built it just a tad too close to the ocean – that you can be careful not to crush this ultimately weak architectural miracle, but the crash of a wave just might. Here’s your definitive answer, I guess: it just drowned.
The first wave that washed over all of me came five years ago right when the pandemic hit everyone at the same time and inevitably disrupted one’s routine in unprecedented albeit unequal ways. I was twenty and bored, university was cancelled until further notice, and I was back home. My life was on hold, but it was still a good one – it was slow, repetitive, but safer than most people’s. I had a roof over my head, three meals a day, and a garden. The weather was easy, and there was a long list of books I hadn’t yet read that were waiting for me, as well as a collection of new paint pots and a ukulele. Carpe fucking diem.
Then a guy faked coughing when I got on a train and spat as he left.
The thing is, I have been Eurasian my whole life – and that this conditions how certain people treat me, you’ll be surprised to learn, was no new information to my twenty-year-old self. I learnt I was mixed-race when another kindergartener drew me with a yellow crayon because my mom was born in Seoul fifty years ago. That being said, that stupid and ultimately meaningless gesture, enacted by an even stupider man I can only assume, had the merit of its timing, ideal for introspection and cultural curiosity. I had been Eurasian my whole life, but I hadn’t been so confronted with my own mortality and this amount of prolonged free time, aware of my unlimited internet access, and graced with this renewed sense of righteous anger yet. I could brush it off and forget about the whole thing altogether like I usually would, for I hadn’t been hurt and was conditioned to not make a big deal out of this kind of things, but I didn’t want to.
It bugged me the whole way home – and it bugs me, still.
I came home and I decided to pick up Korean on duolingo. It was a wish I’d always hold out on. Too little time, too little discipline, very few resources when you’re ten. But I had time, now, and a renewed sense that this was something I was meant to do for the time being. The end of the school year was nearing, I was about to graduate and I didn’t know what the future had in store for me, but it didn’t matter much because it felt more uncertain than ever. I had a plan. I would learn the basics of Korean and, then, I would pack my bag and I would go to Seoul for a while – learn about my heritage and how my life could have been different (or non-existent) had the universe wished it.
I did not go to Seoul before long. The school year ended, and I graduated, and rumours had it that everything would be back to normal (whatever this was supposed to mean) soon enough – which meant that I needed to find, and quickly, a viable life plan that my parents could approve, and that over was the era of BTS music videos, South Korean filmmaking, and Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Ji-young, Born 1982. My Korean was still bad, my cold sense of determination waned, and I enrolled in a master’s degree because I was scared my life would end if I took a gap year I ended up taking twelve months later. My dream was on hold, and one of the hardest years of my life began; half of me was homesick, but I had fundamentally no idea of what home was.
Why was I so set on going to a country I knew nothing about because life felt difficult, when I had no idea of what I’d find after that twelve-hour flight? Why do I want to go back now, when the first thought that crossed my mind when I finally landed in Incheon was that I wasn’t meant to stay longer than a few months and that this wasn’t where I was meant to be? There still isn’t any answer to these questions – and how I feel about this place. I don’t know why every time I am experiencing hardship I want to go to South Korea, but I do. It’s a private wish, what feels like a soul tie to a country I still only know a tiny fraction of, a cocoon I can retreat to whenever I need to rest. My own personal North Star pulling me in and telling me who I am, or who half of me is, at least.
I’ve been looking for something to do for the past months – besides writing every ten days to post on here, going on a stupid walk for my stupid mental health, and singing in the shower, and I don’t know why I want to go back to South Korea, but I do.
I really do.
andstillwedream 