Summer in Seoul

This summer was the first time I stepped foot in my birth country without my parents. I wasn’t there alone; my boyfriend sat beside me, sleeping through most of the nine-hour flight. We hadn’t seen each other in just over a year. All the people I’m closest to are scattered across the world, which is part and parcel of being an international student. My boyfriend, who I’ll call Sam, goes to college in China, and the time difference between us is a literal twelve hours off, thirteen after Daylight Savings kicks in. When my day is just getting started, his is winding down. Sometimes finding the right time to have a conversation feels like I’m a dog chasing its own tail.

When we arrived, Sam got held up in Immigrations while I coasted in through an automated fingerprint scan. As I waited for him—and it took nearly an hour—I considered the passport in my hand. It was the first time that it had a meaningful impact on me, apart from my family, not just via apocryphal paperwork and vague notions of patriotic identity. It had let me skip a line.

On the taxi ride to our hotel (Incheon International Airport is on an island, about an hour’s drive away from Seoul), the taxi driver remarked to me, “you speak Korean like a foreigner”. I had said a sum total of like ten words, so it couldn’t have just been my pronunciation—I know for sure that I don’t have much of an accent, and that the biggest giveaway is that all my sentences tend to die prematurely, tapering off into mumbling. What he must have meant was that I didn’t seem Korean, which is true. Every time I land in Korea—and this sounds so silly and superficial but it’s the truth—I’m struck by how pale everyone is, and how everyone dresses in more or less the same general style, excepting the more artistic and avant-garde creatives of Hongdae and the like. I’m very obviously not cut from the same cloth, but hundreds of thousands of words have been poured into gyopo-centred solipsism, and I’m going to try not to contribute to it here. The taxi driver asked me where Sam was from. “Morocco”, I replied, dazed and tired out of my mind. “Morocco! Morocco is a great country!” I glanced over at Sam, cocking my head—though I knew he didn’t understand. “Oh, is it really?” Morocco had made international news last year after being the first African nation to advance to the semi-finals of the World Cup, so I suppose there are a lot of eyes on it lately, at least where football is concerned. And Koreans love their football.

I met my grandparents the day after I arrived. They live at the northernmost district of Seoul, a place called 동봉구 (Dobong-gu), where I spent the first five or so years of my life, and about ten of my summers after that. It is situated next to a ridge of mountains so green that they look blue, and it is a world apart from the bustling nucleus of Seoul. During the winter, the mountains shed their green coat and don caps of snow. I only have a single memory of those white-capped mountains, because I’m only ever in Korea during the summer. We stayed in 명동 (Myeongdong), which is Seoul’s beating heart. The last time I had been in Myeongdong, more than four years ago, it had been an atrophied shell of itself due to the bleak and lean Covid years, but at some point after I left, it had undergone a miraculous defibrillation, a total resurrection.

In Myeongdong, there seems to be more Japanese tourists than anyone else. Sure, there are plenty of people from all around the world; as we walked through the narrow streets and squeezed past crowds in cramped pop-up stores, we would hear smatterings of French, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, and of course the ubiquitous English. But at least seven out of ten times, if you saw an Asian tourist, it was almost certain that they were Japanese. This happened in Busan, too, where there somehow seemed to be more Japanese tourists than in Seoul. Statistically, I’d never been in a situation like this before. It was to the point where when I ever stumbled over a word in Korean, or didn’t catch what the cashier or hotel clerk or waiter had asked me the first time, they would lean in and then repeat their request in imploring Japanese: Pa-supo-to, kudasai.

Somehow I’m almost never assumed to be Korean while I’m walking around in Korea, and once upon a time that would’ve been a source of a lot of angst. At this point in my life, though, it’s just a mild inconvenience at best and genuinely humiliating at worst (though it rarely gets that bad). My mom constantly gets mistaken as a citizen of whatever country she happens to be travelling in at the moment: in Russia, people on the street would ask her for directions (in Russian!), assuming she had Kazakh or Uzbek ancestry. The same thing happened to her in Japan. These are all amusing anecdotes, but being instantly clocked as a not-quite citizen while walking around in my natal city left me feeling like I was failing a test I wasn’t even aware I was enrolled in. I envisioned myself walking around with a name tag on my chest: “Hi, I’m Imya, and I swear to god I’m Korean”.

Sam talked to me a lot about landing in China for the first time, and then later on about his trips to Shanghai. Little things, like food delivery, the metro and the trains, WeChat (he’s the only reason I have a WeChat account), and how basically everything, from GPS to banking, is mediated through it. How he had to memorize his and his family members’ passport numbers, how he still has them in his brain to this day. How hard it is to find cold beverages. At one point on the flight to Incheon, we watched the informational video provided by the airline on what to do when landing in China for the first time. To me it was an impossibly distant nation governed by a set of rules like no other, not as infiltrated by what was in my mind, a nebulous but powerful “Western world”. Even what might feel like petty examples, like the existence of Douyin and Baidu, were walled off from the prying eyes of the English-speaking internet by an impenetrable fortress: the Chinese language. Where he lives, he says he’s constantly stared at for being visibly foreign; sometimes strangers will even take pictures of him without asking, which only strengthens the idea of China in my head as a sort of hermit kingdom, a world unto itself.