A City of S(e)oul
July 25, 2016
I was going to write poetry, but I can really only do that when I’m sad, and right now, maybe for the first time in a long time, I’m happy.
So instead I will write about this city.
Never before has a place so exhausted and exhilarated me. On some level, I think Seoul has made me a morning person—me!—because I’m getting up every day before eight and going on runs (although they’re not outside, which makes me sad because running outdoors can be, if done right, one of the great joys in life), coming back to teach myself some Italian and read a book or two, then going out to explore a bit. And all of that by eleven.
Of course, I miss the people of home. Here they are so different. They all look like me, for one thing. Often when I see someone who appears out of place—blonde haired, or dark skinned, or staring confusedly at a subway map—I am tempted to address them in English, as if demanding to separate myself from the masses, to show them that I come from their world, not this one. That’s ironic, because at home it is always the opposite struggle, to prove to everyone around me that I fit into their light-skinned, round-eyed, long-lashed American world just as well as they do. And yet I don’t fit in here, not quite. I’m tanner, from too many hours spent under the North Carolina sun, and my clothes are too revealing—a detail over which my dad has never argued with me, until we arrived here. “Can’t you put on a cardigan?” he asked the first morning when I emerged in a tank top. A couple days later, while I leaned against the counter and ate an apple, he approached with a strange look on his face and, only half-jokingly, tugged at the bottom of my jean shorts in a vain attempt to get them to cover more leg.
I have been reacting both consciously and unconsciously to what I feel is an unnecessary amount of attention paid to my physical appearance, afraid my dad’s comments preempt more immediate and unshaking judgments from the outside world about my character, drawn solely from my outfit. When I mentioned to my friends, a month ago, that my mom had forbidden me from bringing certain clothes on the trip because “people in Korea just don’t wear shorts that short,” they were skeptical of my explanation that it was because outward appearance is of the utmost importance here. “Yeah, like it’s not in America?” one friend pointed out, and I rolled my eyes and agreed. “Sure, but it’s different there. Like, plastic surgery is a graduation present.”
I can best describe it as pure objectification, one that lacks the sexual or racial or other similarly degrading overtones that it might carry in America. It is simply about having the best stuff—the most popular or most expensive or most celebrity-endorsed stuff—so that others will perceive you as put-together, as one of them, as perfect. For example—in late 2014, a new rage emerged: a snack called the Honey Butter Chip. The Korean craze for the Honey Butter Chip rivaled the American intensity for the Wii in the mid-2000s; people stood in lines, paid exorbitant sums, fought, even developed a chip-hunting smartphone app in their frenzy to obtain the snack. My dad’s friend, a week ago, brought a bag to our hotel and urged us to try the chips. While interesting—with a heavy and sweet flavor unusual combined with potato—I couldn’t exactly decide whether or not I liked them, and ended up consuming half a bag trying to make up my mind (I guess that answers the question, though). The point is—the Honey Butter Chip was nothing extraordinary. It tasted, word for word, like its name. But people went insane over that stuff. It wasn’t about the food; it was about the hype. The brand name. The reputation.
(By the way, the Next Big Thing here is banana. Banana shaved ice. Banana chocolate whoopie pies. Banana everything. Seriously, Korea. Please adopt a better flavor palette.)
However, I digress extensively from the purpose of this entire post, which is to describe Seoul. (Although maybe you now just think that my fellow homelanders are all snack-deprived, crazy-eyed maniacs in designer clothing shrieking in Korean as they hit each other with Fendi bags in a tooth-and-nail attempt to acquire the last bottle of banana milk from the grocery store. I shit you not. Banana milk.) That image aside, this city exudes so much life. It’s overwhelming, really—ten million people crammed into a square mileage about a fifth the size of Rhode Island—I have honestly never seen this many people in one place, streaming up and down the escalators of huge department stores, crowding the subways, filling the rooms and corners and narrow alleys with their chatter. It is the first time I’ve visited since I got my license, and I know now that I could never drive in a city like this; I have a newfound respect for the stereotype against which I’ve always vehemently argued: Asians are truly terrible drivers.
Nevertheless, I discover this untapped reservoir of energy in me whenever I step outside. We spent an entire day with our cousins about a week ago, just my sister and I with the two of them as our guides, and at every turn there was something new. A delicious Italian restaurant, tucked away on a street through which cars could barely squeeze without touching buildings on both sides, that made better pizza than most American joints. A movie theater on the eleventh floor of a massive shopping mall that only served popcorn with caramel or chocolate or garlic or cheese or two of those toppings at once, none of that normal buttered junk. A Zaha Hadid structure too beautiful to be called a building, curving and dipping between the skyscrapers, covered in a silver-plated exterior like a graceful UFO. A gem like that, in Seoul!
When our cousins came to pick us up that morning, we bypassed the subway and walked twenty minutes to our destination, and I couldn’t keep still, laughing or skipping up the sidewalk, drawing no small number of sideways glances in the meantime. I’ve always been a fast walker, but there was a part of me yearning to just run, to ditch my less energetic companions so I could explore this boundless city, so that I could adventure until I understood just what it was about the place that could make me feel so damn alive.
My parents like to joke that my aptitude with the Korean language is frozen at five years old, the age at which I started speaking English in earnest. In old home videos, I chatter in Korean with an ease and fluidity; the same tongue now trips me up every time I open my mouth. I want so desperately to regain that something intangible that I lost thirteen years ago; now, my second-best language is Spanish, and I hesitate to call myself fluent in Korean—although I can understand almost all of it and speak the basics, my reading and writing abilities are beyond limited. It makes me afraid to be alone in the city, in case I have to ask for help and can’t do it.
Yet everywhere we go, I am squinting at awnings or restaurant signs, trying to decipher them in the time it takes to walk or drive past. It is frustrating how the English translations—so graciously tacked up everywhere for ignorant foreigners like me—are instantly clear. I wish Korean were so easily decipherable. On televisions, the symbols flash past in advertisements too quickly to translate; some unmoving block in my mind prevents the words from falling into place as effortlessly as they would in English. Every time I think I have read a phrase quickly enough to be satisfied, I mess something up.
But Seoul continues to draw me in. I want to learn the subway system and speedwalk through the stations and understand the back roads and memorize the maps; I want to try the vanilla lattes (inexplicably, better) at every corner café and hail taxis and eat delicious Korean barbeque for each meal. When we are returning to our hotel in the evenings, people are just beginning to step outside. I remember, vividly, a night nearly five years ago when we went downtown and couldn’t even walk, the sidewalks were so crowded. Lights and noise and the brilliance of a city wide awake, and my mom told me to grab her hand tight as she dragged me through a throng of people whom, even at thirteen, I was mostly taller than. The warmth of the bodies pressed around me made me wish for more freedom—to be allowed to traverse the corners and undersides and depths of Seoul until I glowed.
I once wrote a letter to the country of Spain, and especially to Madrid, the first place where an entirely new culture and language and lifestyle unfurled before my very eyes, just waiting to be taken in and loved. And I loved that city, how its cobblestones and winding roads and heartbeats came alive at my fingertips, how it pulsed with thousands of souls, millennia of history, a great treasure I only barely uncovered in my time there. Seoul is different for me. Underneath its glitz and glamour, it is rawer and grittier than anything I have experienced, its authenticity yearning to surface beneath its polished exterior. The best restaurants here can barely sit twenty, and the food surpasses in quality that of any renowned establishment I know. It is in the markets and the streets that energy and life spring forth, exhaling through the mouths of vendors the demand to be heard.
Seoul thrives. I want to know every inch of it. The customs, the people, the places—they teeter on the verge of familiarity, almost making sense in my mind. Almost welcoming me in.
It is a challenge I will face, head-on. Open yourself to me, I want to say. I am ready to begin.
Header image courtesy of Linux Foundation
