봄여름가을겨울- Still Life

A Reflection on life and the passage of time as my family transitions to life outside of the United States. *title from the 2nd generation k-pop band BigBang*

Today is my fourth day officially living outside of the US for an extended period of time. I’m not talking a vacation or even a two month sabbatical, either. I mean, we’ve sold or donated all of our stuff (furniture, clothes, car, electronics, EVERYTHING) and have left the United States without a plane ticket or date in mind to return.

My family boarding our 17 hour flight from Boston to Seoul

Currently, my family is in Seoul, South Korea. We will be here for the next 2ish months before we head to Vietnam, Thailand (for the holidays), and then make our way back to South Korea just in time for Cherry Blossom season in the Spring of 2025.

After the first two days here, I could feel certain stressors starting to leave my body. I’m sure that sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s true. Being able to put some distance between myself and the political cycle back home has already done wonders for my mental health and my ability to focus on anything that wasn’t wrapped up in the national elections happening in November of this year. The food that we’ve eaten tastes better. Seriously, it just tastes better. I bit into a grape the other day and the way the skin popped in my mouth and allowed for the flavorful juice to seep through felt very different than grapes I’d grown accustomed to eating at home. There is a different freshness to the produce here. And there damn sure is less sugar in everyday foods and treats like sodas, cereals, and ketchup.

Dinner at a cute restaurant down the street from our apartment

The food isn’t the only thing I’ve started to notice has changed in our daily lives either. Everyday, we find ourselves walking no less than two miles. This isn’t intentional, but the culture here is such that, every part of the city is walkable and the expectation is that you walk it or take public transit (which requires you to walk ALOT and the stairs coming out of the Korean subway system aint no joke!). The first few days have been hard and I’ve felt it on my body - the aches are aching - but I can feel myself starting to adjust to this new normal of daily activity.

Just a few stairs to climb out of the subway system

There’s also a sense of safety that we don’t often get to expereince in the States and other parts of the Western world due to the lack of access of firearms here. I don’t carry the unspoken weight and resignation of the idea that “someone might start shooting at this grocery store” or “my kids have to do active shooter drills at school”. Those anxieties around guns and mass shootings simply do not exist here. The freedom to just walk around outside and not have a constant fear of someone opening fire is something that feels so out of reach and unimaginable in the States - and we don’t even fully realize how it is slowly demolishing our mental health and contributing to our social decline.

Through this change, there are some adjustments we are navigating that feel challenging. For myself, my husband, and my two kids, our entire lives have been relegated to nine suticases and four backpacks. The apartment we are renting is a small 2 bedroom/1bathroom place with no living area and a kitchen so tiny that the stove only has two eyes and no oven, and a fridge that my 9 year old stands taller than and none of the rooms have closets. But none of that seems to matter. We are figuring out the best ways to make this space work for us, until we move on. We’ve sought out something that feels significantly different than back home in the US; that isn’t just culturally, politically, and socially. That includes understanding the ways that ‘things’ have weighed us down and contributed to our overall unhappiness as people. Less space means less stuff. Less stuff means more intentionality with spending. Our relationship to stuff and things and space has been so corrupted. The adjustment to understand neccessity in a more clear way is something I am already thankful to have and for my family to expereince.

Overall, the best part about this entire thing is everyone leaves us alone. There are no expectations of us - positive or negative.

We get to live our lives, as we want, without the weight of being Black in America. And while I know there is racism and discrimination that exists in all corners of the world, there’s nothing that screams Americana quite like the anti-Black sentiment and policy that the US has perfected.

Having space away from that is something that I hope all folk who identify as Black and live in America get to have over an extended period of time at some point in life.

We’ll see where this journey takes us as a family and what other continents we find ourselves on (I know that Europe is not on the list, as we are in need of significant time away from White majorities). As for now we’ll homeschool our kids, allow them to learn k-pop dancing twice a week, wander and explore the sights of South Korea, eat amazing food, make new friends, learn a new language and ways of daily life, and allow our nervous systmes to re-regulate while finding time and space to heal ourselves and our senses of self. In other words, we’ll contine to seek liberation.