It has been six months to the day since I arrived in Korea. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but at some point during those six months I crossed the threshold from visitor to resident.
Korean society is a dichotomy when it comes to foreigners. Korean parents want their children to learn English, so the public schools and after-school educational centers are filled with teachers who are native English speakers. Yet the culture overall is not accommodating of foreigners. No one at the immigration office speaks English; most foreigners I saw there had a Korean friend to help them navigate the byzantine bureaucracy. Opening a cellular account is more complicated than taking out a mortgage in the States. And what Koreans consider pizza is unrecognizable--a mass of dough and cheese with no tomato sauce and topped with corn and sweet potatoes.
I don't know whether I will ever consider Seoul "my city" in the way that I still do New York, even though it's been four years since I worked there and ten years since I called New York home. New York, for all its intensity, congestion, competition (for apartments, parking spots, subway seats, a patch of green on the Great Lawn), and steaming sewer grates, is still easy to romanticize. Battery Park City at night after the Wall Street traders have gone home, Times Square on an early Sunday morning, the George Washington Bridge, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and any dive bar with a great jukebox.
Seoul, on the other hand, lacks beauty, or at least conceals it. It's possible that I haven't been here long enough to know where to look, but look for it you must. For as ancient a culture as Korea is, there isn't much of a sense of history here. I'm sure that's because the modern city of Seoul was built after the Korean War, much of it decades after the War. The rush to modernize, however, has contributed to the lack of identity. Roaming the streets gives you the impression that this is a city that is searching for its identity, deciding what it wants to be--traditional but modern, welcoming but apprehensive, deeply proud but surprisingly insecure.
Korean society is a dichotomy when it comes to foreigners. Korean parents want their children to learn English, so the public schools and after-school educational centers are filled with teachers who are native English speakers. Yet the culture overall is not accommodating of foreigners. No one at the immigration office speaks English; most foreigners I saw there had a Korean friend to help them navigate the byzantine bureaucracy. Opening a cellular account is more complicated than taking out a mortgage in the States. And what Koreans consider pizza is unrecognizable--a mass of dough and cheese with no tomato sauce and topped with corn and sweet potatoes.
I don't know whether I will ever consider Seoul "my city" in the way that I still do New York, even though it's been four years since I worked there and ten years since I called New York home. New York, for all its intensity, congestion, competition (for apartments, parking spots, subway seats, a patch of green on the Great Lawn), and steaming sewer grates, is still easy to romanticize. Battery Park City at night after the Wall Street traders have gone home, Times Square on an early Sunday morning, the George Washington Bridge, St. Patrick's Cathedral, and any dive bar with a great jukebox.
Seoul, on the other hand, lacks beauty, or at least conceals it. It's possible that I haven't been here long enough to know where to look, but look for it you must. For as ancient a culture as Korea is, there isn't much of a sense of history here. I'm sure that's because the modern city of Seoul was built after the Korean War, much of it decades after the War. The rush to modernize, however, has contributed to the lack of identity. Roaming the streets gives you the impression that this is a city that is searching for its identity, deciding what it wants to be--traditional but modern, welcoming but apprehensive, deeply proud but surprisingly insecure.
But underneath the confusion and mask of modernity is beauty waiting to be unearthed. I hope you grow to love it as much as I have. And though I only lived there for 10 years, and has been almost 5 years since I left, it will always be one of the most beautiful and wrought cities to me!
ReplyDeleteSarang, what were some of your favorite spots?
ReplyDelete