Seoul, South Korea

April 14-19, 2024

My first impression of South Korea, as the plane descended through the clouds to land at Seoul Incheon Airport, was one of brown haze and an orderly conformity to clusters of high rise buildings. It had been a discombobulating travel day, leaving Wenatchee at sunrise with a long layover in Seattle, and now landing after a 12 hour flight in a +16 hour time zone.

Seoul is a city of contradictions. Ancient and avant-garde. Spiritual and materialistic. Formal and polite. Hurried and impersonal. Fastidiously clean and clinically efficient. Personal space is not a thing, and consumerism is everywhere. It’s vibrant, it’s exciting, it’s orderly, it’s flummoxing, and I love it.

I picked Korea off a random bucket list of places to visit in Asia. It’s my first experience of Asia that isn’t Taiwan or China. I don’t speak the language, and I’m unfamiliar with Korean history. It was at once familiar, and also foreign.

The War Memorial in Seoul was one of our first stops. The mute granite walls engraved with names of the lost are a somber reminder of events that are sometimes easier to forget. The exhibition has a noticeable Western bent on its telling of the Korean War, but was nonetheless illuminating. For me, the most illustrative exhibit was one that juxtaposed Korean history with American history: the former began a couple hundred years BC, the latter shows up more than halfway through the exhibit with Columbus in 1492, and then nearly the very end with the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It seems that Korea has been constantly embattled for its self-identity since pre-historic times. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know, and how woefully myopic my well-rounded and otherwise stellar education was when it comes to non-Western history.

We criss-crossed the city (which is huge!) sampling all the tourist spots and mimicking what the cool Korean kids are doing. At the Starfield Library, the thing to do apparently is not to read books (most of which are shelved too high to reach anyway), but to be photographed pretending to read books. Cafe culture is on point in Korea, serving up really good tiramisu and lattes that also happen to be photogenic works of art. Speaking of photogenic, self-serve photo studios are everywhere, so we gave it a go in one in Itaewon. Perhaps we’re better at eating than we are at photography. The food! I’ll blog more about food later. Suffice it to say that our days started in the hotel gym (because: Won), followed by as many meals we could fit in while still ordering enough for 4+ people, interspersed with sightseeing until we could eat again, capped with cocktail hour to fortify ourselves against the jet lag.

This trip turned out to have some profound personal significance as well. Much as my visit to Taiwan last year brought forth feelings of nostalgia and belonging, Won’s visit to the land of his birthplace was likewise deeply felt. It’s a sense of strange familiarity: the flavors and foods and customs that unearth long buried childhood memories. Until this trip, I had never heard my husband speak much Korean, beyond a few phrases to order food at Korean restaurants. Suddenly, he was conversing with fluency, in an accent that sounded authentic to my ear, and apparently also to old ladies who said his language skills were surprisingly good for a gyopo (a term for the Korean diaspora, those with Korean heritage who live outside Korea). The term, by the way, is both descriptive and judgmental. Because alongside this feeling of belonging is a coexistent sense of disconnection: on the outside we may look alike, but in thought and habit and so much else, we are different. Won was able to meet with members of his extended family, some for the first time. This was very special. Maybe like Seoul itself, we are also full of contradictions, profound and resilient in our own way.

May 5, 2024