This place called Sejong
“Where is this place…?”
These were the words that I can remember saying to myself. I was nervous. I knew it was in South Korea but where specifically I could not say. Phrases my recruiter told me meant to clarify instead engulfed my mind with anxiety as I latched onto what was left that seemed familiar. Familiar was comfortable. Familiar was something I had experience in.
It’s the Washington DC of South Korea!
There’s a lot of government officials here so it’s filled with people just wanting to raise a family!
They want the best for their kids and you are in a really big hagwon chain so it has great job security!
These were the words he wrote to me and here was how it played in my head.
There’s going to be a lot of ambitious and politically sensitive minded people here so it’s best to be sensitive about the things I talk about.
It’s geared to support families mainly so, as a single male in his early 30’s who enjoys sticking to a mundane schedule, it was within good fun.
I’m going to have to deal with helicopter parents that will involve themselves heavily in the education of their child. Bad news for a guy with only a Bachelors degree that has no experience at all teaching English.
I’ve lived in different parts of the world now for an extended period of time. I’ve spent half my lived life in one and the other half I am currently living in another. I know that this place will feel like home the more time I spend within its limits. “I just need to get past the first few months…”, I said to myself trying to steel my nerves for the oncoming bouts of depression and anxiety. I was always imagining how the worst situation could play itself out: if I run out of money, if I lost my passport, if the bus I was taking was a one way express to North Korea. My imagination ran wild with these sorts of things though not as funny as when my mom made the suggestion that if I go on my morning runs I would suddenly find myself running into North Korea. We both had a good laugh on that one. While she was indeed cautious, as I would imagine all moms would be, not to give in to such thoughtful predilections and I wasn’t, I was never fully sure if I would ever make that mistake.
Maybe I will run into North Korea.
Thankfully, once I got here in Sejong, I put her fears and my absurdities to rest when I rode a train and a bus to get to Sejong. Both of which took about 2 hours and 30 minutes to carry me, my duffle bag and my two heavy suitcases to my new home. Sejong first greeted me with a cold similar to the precipice of one warm season ending and another cold one just beginning. The end of Autumn in Sejong couldn’t have been more familiar to that of an evening winter in California. It gave my mind a sense of familiarity I could hold onto.
Amidst the bright neon signs warning pedestrians of their purpose, cartoonish grins of warm old men or women, and a variety of shapes meant to illustrate the kind of food being advertised, it was all foreign to me. Shapes gave more comfort than the words above or under seemed to say. Sejong is like that in many ways as all travelers can attest to: the unfamiliar, the foreign, the strange — all things serving as a litmus test to those who speak of wanting to travel and those who actually live it. Shapes in the form of letters forming words that cannot be read bred distance and curiosity. It meant learning something new and I was in no mood to do that so early on. Shapes coherently formed into what the shop existed for gave a sliver of comfort. Enough comfort to warrant a try out of me. It meant I knew in some capacity what it had. It therefore commanded me to lower my guard. Life here is filled with those moments and slowly I built up enough courage to partake and participate in my new home.
Sejong was just a place for me. I know its home to the people that live here. I live here too but it didn’t feel like home right away. Gone is the romance of first love and the subsequent predictable story that follows. Sejong is not that. Nor is it the unrequited experience of a traveler looking to settle here. Not for me anyway. Sejong took its time to grow on me as I do now with my living here. As I was on the road to familiarity so was the people I interacted with and got to know. I needed to communicate with them, however painfully inept I was at it, and they graced me with their best reply. They were on that same journey with me whether they liked it or not. I’m sure they liked the money I was willing to give them as I was equally grateful for the commodity I was buying. Ours started with a relationship built by economics and was as droll as the incentive for starting it. And yet, with each passing transaction of goods came the gift of the familiar: a smile, a polite bow, a phrase meant for expressing gratitude. Slowly, the communication evolved as they were getting used to me as I was to them. Routine was established and the normalcy it brought also gave me the breathing space to be more of myself. More of who I was before I came. More of home.
The more I know about my new place of residence it slowly becomes familiar. Slowly becoming what is normal for me. Slowly inching to familiar territory until it won’t. Until I move again away from this place and embark on another journey into the strange and unfamiliar. Only to look back at this experience and find the familiar once again. In which case, I never really left Sejong. For I take Sejong with me wherever I go.
