Uncharted home

I am always stumped when asked where I’m from. I know why they ask. Whether it’s because of the way I look, dress or speak, they know I’m not from their way.

I understand. If I saw me I’d be curious too. This strange being who looks so different but talks their talk and enjoys their food.

I just don’t know how to answer them because I’ve lost my way.

My birth place or ethnicity no longer define me. In my family’s constant push towards a better future, I’ve somehow gained many cultures and lost that strong connection to the one that started me on this journey.

Born in Japan to Korean parents living in the jungles of Borneo at the time, my birth place, ethnicity, passport, and where I live are all different.

There is no map marking my way back home. There is no GPS guide to make the way clear for me. Home is instead an uncharted future or the crumbs of my heart scattered over the world.

Aomori, Samarinda, Singapore, Hobart, Sydney, London.

I read my life by these places, like chapters in an unfinished book.

Yet always there is a thin connection to my parents’ homeland. A thread pulling back to the Korea inside the four walls of our family home, the Korea they took with them from country to country. A Korea they wanted to share with me.

My memory of Seoul is always cold. They say the city can get quite hot in summer, but I have little recollection of it.


My family and I made annual trips there during my school holidays when I was young.

We left summer in Australia and swapped it for the biting Korean winter.


For me, the city is always a place of subzero temperatures and warm apartments; of street vendors selling steaming soups, spicy rice cakes and baked sweet potatoes as the snow drifts down.


It is a big vibrant city bursting with people. A city that wakes up early and goes to sleep late. Neighbourhoods full of tall apartment buildings and fast, efficient metro trains.


It is the place where I have felt completely at one with its surroundings, and also the most alien at the same time. A strange mix of looking like everyone else, but feeling completely different.


Almost every year I'd go back to brush up on my Korean and to immerse myself in a culture different from the one I was used to back in Hobart.

It was a time to connect with my heritage; to understand and embrace my family history. I danced the traditional dances, studied the abacus and spent the rest of my time watching Korean dramas and reading comics.


The aim was to absorb the culture as much as possible before I came back to that city where I spent my youth; to learn as much as I could so I didn't forget my mother tongue or where our family started.


But then I grew up and moved away to a city on the mainland. I married outside my race and settled down in Sydney.


I've been out of that Korean culture for a while. Its values and norms that were so clearly articulated by my parents and elders in the past have now become hazy over the years.


I have forgotten a lot, and that inner map showing the way back to my ethnic heritage has become almost unreadable.

When I went back to Seoul with a family of my own, I realised just how much the country and its people had changed. The Korea I knew from my childhood had moved on, but it didn't take me along with it.


I was somehow stuck. One foot in an idea of a homeland that no longer existed. The other, in Australia, my then new adoptive country, slowly being transformed by it.


Seoul is a familiar and unfamiliar place for me now. I would like to get to know it again.

Not to map out my heritage, I've long since given up trying to work out where I’m from, but out of curiosity for a modern city with a centuries-old culture and its people.
 I'd like to get to know them on their terms, if I can.