America

I lived in Korea for a decade, but in February of 2022 I finally came home.

Why I Moved Back to America

My homecoming was not something I took lightly. There were a lot of contributing factors to my decision.

I Am American

I knew so many good people in Korea, and most of the Koreans that I met were unbelievably generous and kind. After a while, however, I began to realize that most of the Koreans who genuinely loved me desired for me to become, in some way that was impossible, Korean.

I don’t think that this was necessarily a bad thing - I think because Koreans have a sense of nationalistic pride it is natural for Koreans to believe the best thing for another person is to eat Korean food, speak the Korean language, and participate in Korean culture. I think it’s out of sincere love for me that so many of my Korean friends didn’t want me to “settle” for being American but instead always urged me to become more and more Korean every day.

And, to be honest, it’s the right thing to do when you live in a country not your own. If you make no effort to assimilate to the culture that has welcomed you, quite frankly, that’s just rude. If I had lived for ten years in Korea and had made no effort to learn Korean or enjoy the food or respect the culture I think that would have been an egregious offense on my part.

But I began to realize that ultimately what my Korean friends wanted for me wasn’t possible. I am American; I am not Korean. I have certain values as an American that will never be compatible with Korean culture. I value individualism, while they value collectivism. I value independence and personal freedom, but in Korean culture it’s rude to do things your own way if people older or higher-ranking than you want to do things differently.

I grew up, as an American, in a culture that shut down children’s desires because “You can do whatever you want when you grow up.” My experience in America was that when you’re a child you are supposed to do what your parents and teachers tell you, but once you become an adult, you have earned the right to be your own person and do your own thing.

My experience in Korea, however, was that people give young children a pass on all kinds of things because once they reach a certain age they will be expected to defer to others and live a selfless life. Once you are old enough to sacrifice yourself for society, it is considered rude and selfish not to.

As a result I was getting the short end of the stick both times. I didn’t get to do what I wanted when I was growing up because only adults had that right. But now, as an adult, I lived in a culture where you got everything you wanted as a little child and now you lived your life for other people, not yourself. It felt like being shortchanged. When would I be done paying my dues and allowed to be a person on my own terms?

Patriotic Pride

I also started to grow jealous of how proud Koreans were allowed to be of their country and their culture. Like I said above, when Koreans wanted me to like their food more than Western food and prefer their customs more than Western ones, it always felt “benevolent” to me, because Koreans had such pride in their culture and country that they genuinely believed I would be better and happier if I were just like them.

And I can’t fault them for saying things like, “Korean is better than English,” “Our food is better than your food,” “Our culture is better for you,” etc. They’re Koreans, living in Korea! If anyone should have the right to be proud of their own country and their own culture, it should be the people of that culture while in their own country. The idea of expecting Koreans not to be proud of their country and not to want to speak their language or eat their food in their own country seemed totally absurd to me.

But I couldn’t help but feel like Americans face pressure every day in their own country to hate America, to act like all the world’s problems are America’s fault, to act like American culture is evil but other cultures are good, to act like it’s “wrong” or “bad” to be proud of your country or fly the Stars and Stripes - even in America.

It made me realize how absurd it is that so many people - even in America - think that it’s rude for Americans to be proud of their country or their culture.

It made me realize how absurd it is for so many people who come to America to disrespect our country, our laws, and our culture. There’s nothing wrong with bringing your own culture in with you, but there is something wrong with refusing to acknowledge that you are benefiting now from the country and the culture that you live in and refusing to respect it.

The idea that I shouldn’t fly the American flag in America because it might offend someone who doesn’t respect the nation they’re benefiting from is absurd to me, and I believe my having lived legally, lawfully, and respectfully as an immigrant in a foreign country for ten years gives me the right to say so.

My heart broke when I read the news and saw what was happening in America while I was overseas. I began to feel like it was more important than ever for me to go back to my own nation and be proud of my own country - while we still have a country left.

Covid

When Covid happened, it brought a lot of things to a head. I personally was very blessed during Covid, because, as an introvert, I was happy to work on projects in my apartment instead of socializing, and having more free time meant I actually spent less money because I finally had time to grow my own salads and bake my own bread.

But it became harder and harder to live in a country that wasn’t my own during a crisis.

Every single day we got spammed with emergency alerts telling us another person we had never met and probably would never see had tested positive for Covid. All the emergency alerts came in Korean and there was no way to copy the text into a translator. It grew tedious manually translating each one so eventually I stopped. It turns out Korean people were overwhelmed by the number of emergency alerts, too - so much so that when there was an earthquake and nobody saw the emergency alert message because it was drowning in a sea of unimportant Covid notifications, they made a new emergency text system so they could keep their Covid spam separate from actual emergencies.

I kept thinking, “What if war breaks out or there’s a real emergency and I don’t have time to translate all the instructions?” I studied Korean while I lived there but it’s not easy to learn a foreign language when you work all day in English and have other things to do outside of work. I think I studied diligently, but I only ever reached an intermediate conversational level, and government vocabulary is still beyond my grasp. I didn’t like to think about trying to make out garbled announcements in Korean while trying to reach evacuation points surrounded by signage that used words I hadn’t learned yet. At least if I were in America, I figured, I would understand what I was being told to do in the event of an emergency.

And then came the way suddenly everyone began to treat me like I was “dirty” because I was a foreigner. Before Covid, Korean people used to make fun of me because I was kind of germophobic. I didn’t want to share chopsticks or cups with people who had terrible chest infections, and I guess technically that’s rude in Korea. But once Covid hit I went from being so germophobic everyone made fun of me to being so dirty surely I was the reason random people in my city whom I’d never met were testing positive for Covid. I hadn’t changed - I still washed my hands more than most people I knew, I still used soap and warm water, I still made sure not to cough or sneeze in other people’s faces - but suddenly I was considered a vector always carrying diseases, and people treated me accordingly.

In fact, since I am an introvert, most of my hobbies involved doing things alone in my apartment, doing things alone on my bicycle, or doing things alone in a wide open space in the countryside somewhere because I don’t like being around people and I like the peace and quiet of feeling like I have some distance between myself and everybody else.

But when a non-Korean guy who worked down on the opposite side of the city doing work completely unrelated to mine tested positive for Covid, the city government handed down an executive order saying that all foreigners (non-Koreans) had to go the next day to a particular place for mandatory testing. Not Koreans - just non-Koreans. Even though I never would have met this guy or been around him otherwise. But now, by government mandate, I was forced to spend an hour and a half in close quarters with people who had actually been exposed to Covid (unlike me) just because the government assumed all non-Koreans must be sharing germs together. This ticked me off quite a bit, because I hate being sick - Covid or otherwise - and if I were going to come down with Covid, it would only be because the government put me in a position to catch it.

Then came all the pressure to get vaccinated. I never considered myself an anti-vaxxer, but I did think the Covid vaccine had not had a chance to be properly tested and I wanted to wait before doing something irreversible to my body when there was no telling what the consequences could turn out to be.

They had not made any laws requiring foreigners or anyone else to get vaccinated by force (yet), but the city’s executive order forcing me to be exposed to Covid had made me lose a lot of trust in the Korean government. You don’t make people catch a disease as part of your plan to prevent that disease unless you’re corrupt or incompetent, and I didn’t want to stick around to find out which it was going to turn out to be.

My boss kept insisting that the Korean government was never going to require people to get vaccinated, even though there was a lot of pressure to do so and people were coming to my school every day asking why the foreigner hadn’t been vaccinated yet. My boss had actually warned my co-workers and me a few years earlier not to get flu shots because you couldn’t always be sure the vaccines would be safe, so I think she was on my side about the hesitancy to take a vaccine that hadn’t finished being tested yet. But the pressure kept on mounting.

I told my boss that it was one thing if I disagreed with the laws of my own country and chose to break them, because to some extent I felt I had that right as a citizen, but I was not going to break Korean laws when I was a guest in their country. So I began making plans to leave and warned her that if the government made another executive order in the middle of the night like last time requiring all foreigners to get vaccinated, I would have to leave immediately, because I wasn’t going to break Korean laws. She understood and agreed with me, but kept insisting that the Korean government would never do something like that.

Then one day the government sent out a mass text saying that people weren’t allowed to cross the river or go to any other provinces without showing their papers proving they’d been vaccinated. I thought, “I love South Korea, but I’m not interested in living in North Korea.” And I began to worry how I would get out if I couldn’t leave the province or cross the river without papers. Obviously, this caused me a lot of stress, since usually I try to be a law-abiding citizen as much as possible.

Thankfully, the next day the government sent out another text message, apologizing for the last one, and saying it had been sent out by mistake, because they hadn’t meant to implement that law yet. (Yes, they actually said yet.)

I showed that to my boss and this time she believed me.

Homecoming

My boss hired a replacement for me, and I began the urgent and difficult trip of taking taxis and buses to get to the airport in Incheon, where I then had to wait in lines while people in hazmat suits shoved things up people’s noses and if you got the wrong result you would be locked in a government hotel for a month while you had to pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for it. No stress or anything, right?

Thankfully I passed the test, and I was allowed to board my plane for a long, 14-hour flight.

By the time I got home I had been awake for two full days straight, because time goes backwards when you’re coming back. (I spent all of Tuesday traveling, and then we flew through the time zones so that it became Tuesday all over again!)

I hadn’t seen my family in nine years and didn’t even have a working cell phone in America to call them after I got in. My parents were at the airport to pick me up and had no way of knowing where I’d be or when I’d be there since I no longer had phone service to contact them if my itinerary changed.

But, like a miracle, I happened to come out of the baggage claim area right into the place where they had come to look for me, right at the time that they were looking.

They brought me home, we talked a bit, and then I slept for fifteen hours straight.

So now I’m back, and I need to update all my bio information because I’m no longer in Korea. But I’ll get to that - lately I’ve been busy with more important things, which I’ll tell you about in the next post.