Traveling Beans

Which home?

In response to the new guy, longing for home, and the big and little pictures...

What can I say in response to my fellow (brainiac) bloggers? I don't know where to begin. I'm right there with everyone that traveling and living away from "home" is painful and glorious at the same time --that when it's most overwhelming you just give someone a few minutes of your time and your mind is calmed by the connection you made with that person. However, with just four months left until I am back in the U.S., I feel the pressure to run around and experience as much as possible, to check off all the boxes on my goal list for Korea: teach something miraculous to my students, learn and cook Korean, find my father's family, investigate who my mother's family was in North Korea, decide whether I should identify as Korean-American or what? But then how does one achieve all those to-dos and leave room for inviting my students out to ice cream or taking time to talk to the next person who screams hello at me after hearing me speak English.

It seems as though my experience from the other bloggers is different. For the past 7 months I have lived on a block where the girls at the local Big Mart smile out of recognition and not just out of rehearsed politeness, in a city where it's impossible not to run into one of my students in any of its corners whether I'm jogging or having coffee with friends, in a country where the taxi drivers go out of their way to explain the beautiful topography of their town because my face is one of their own. But just as Bennet said, I could spend a lifetime --not just a year-- discovering all the plants growing through each crack in these mountains, and many more lifetimes trying to fully understand how those plants sustained Koreans through Japanese occupation and then famine and war just 50 years ago.

This is the moment where I take a deep breath and keep in mind Hilary's voice saying, just take it all in because whether we consciously process it now or not, it will remain with us and we will continue to unpack this for our lifetime to come. That thought of taking time to understand this year of living especially resounds with me because this year of being in Korea has placed so many pieces of my life into some kind of common-themed puzzle that can finally begin to be put together. Though a year could put so much into the light, it will certainly take longer to make sense of the history, identity, family, and home. I suppose I have just named both the painful and the glorious part of living a year in one place, which is pretty similar to living a year in many continents: there will always be so much to learn, see, and live and sometimes it hits you, sometimes it doesn't, othertimes its neither and life is working itself out.

I suppose you can see it as a supreme irony --leaving home to understand what is home and to want to be at home-- or you can see it as the pieces coming together in a time that follows different rules from the chronological one that we wake and sleep to. The latter is how I have to see it because I've never had a backyard (or have had too many backyards), and being in Korea where my students say I am one of them because I look like them and because I have the same blood, even the U.S. as my birth or cultural home is a stretch. I guess for me, I am always searching for home and sure, the more I travel the closer I seem to get to....being at peace that maybe there isn't one on this earth for me, or at least, there isn't a singular home for me. I rather just belong to the world, the universe, to God.

posted by jacquelina @ 12:00 AM