When SNSD welcomed me to Korea

SNSD: The more, the merrier

When I came to Korea in October of 2010, I hardly knew anybody here. My Korean friends were either doing their military service or studying/working in the US. I had a few cousins who were around my age, but we hadn’t seen each other in nearly ten years. And my brother was still in college.

With an immediate future that looked lonely and uncertain, I was desperate to find something that would connect me to my new home. Before, I had never been too keen on Korean pop culture as I saw no real need to be. Back in high school, I remember a lot of the Asian kids were into Boa and Hikaru Utada, and a lot of the white kids were into AC/DC and Led Zeppelin. I thought both groups were painfully ethnic in their musical tastes.

But since I was going to be in Korea for a while, I decided to check out what all this Korean pop stuff was.

And within about a week after arriving, I found myself in love with SNSD, or Girls’ Generation (in English). Though they’re megastars in Asia, they’re not as well-known in the rest of the world, so I’ll quickly explain. They’re a female pop group, and they’re probably the most famous K-pop stars of the last five years. 

They’re the kind of group that I’d consider myself too cool to listen to if they were American, but since I was in Korea, I got into them under the excuse of “cultural research” and other similarly self-serving BS. Hey, I was friendless and they were really pretty and personable and some of their (early) songs were cute and catchy, okay?

I downloaded albums and listened to them almost exclusively. I went online and found variety shows that they had been on and watched all of them. My favourite was “Hello Baby”, in which the girls from SNSD were tasked with taking care of a toddler (I assume that some kind of childcare professional was supervising behind the cameras).  

Yoona: Yeah, there's kind of a reason why
everybody picks her

I had trouble deciding which member was my fave. Predictably, my first love was Yoona, but everybody picks her. Then I liked Tiffany, then Yuri, then back to Yoona, then Taeyeon… Needless to say, it was quite entertaining.

I hardly listen to them anymore, especially since their last few songs have just been ugh. But I’ll always fondly remember my first few months in Seoul when I didn’t know Sinchon from Sincheon, or Gyeongbokgoong from Cheongyecheon. At least I had those nine beautiful SNSD girls to keep me company and ease my transition.

Mission Statement

When you are the child of immigrants, your ancestral homeland usually looms large in the background, sometimes unwelcomingly so. I was born in Vancouver, but my parents never bought into the whole assimilation thing: they never voted, they never took much pride in Canada Day, and they never got into hockey.

I spent 18 great years in Vancouver, but it never quite
felt like home to me, and I haven't been back in 5 years.

Growing up, I came to resent Korea as the place that my parents kept trying to drag me back to, in a figurative sense. By pushing their childhood and their homeland on me, they made me feel like an alien in my own country. The worst thing was that while they constantly reminded me that I was Korean first and foremost, they never made it seem like it was that good of a thing. Rather, my impression was that being Korean was some kind of burden that I would have to overcome, like a club foot or something.

Geez, how appealing.

Then they started to literally drag me back when they permanently moved to Korea a few years ago. From then on, I spent most of my college winter and summer breaks there. I hated being removed from my friends and from what I perceived to be my real home, but what was truly annoying was the feeling I got from my parents that they expected me to feel right at home because I was, of course, supposed to be defined mainly by my ethnicity and race. As a minority in Canada, I’d spent most of my life trying to prove the exact opposite!

But after graduating from university and needing some time to mull over my future, my only viable option was to go "home" to Seoul, with my student visa expiring and all. This time, however, I tried to approach the whole thing differently. I was sick of always feeling like a foreigner, whether it was in Canada or in the US or in Korea. This time, I’d commit to living in Korea as much as possible. I may not have a place where I belong, but perhaps that could also mean that I could fit in anywhere easier than most people.

It was October of 2010 when I arrived in Korea as a fresh graduate of Brown, and it’s been a truly wonderful almost-two years since. I will return to the US at the end of August, and when I walk the streets or ride the bus these days, I feel a little pang of sadness as my time here in Seoul as an early 20-something post-grad nears its end. So as a way to chase away those blues, I decided to create this blog to commemorate what has been one of the most satisfying periods in my life and give it the proper send-off that it deserves.

This won't really be a travel blog, and this definitely won't be some vaguely offensive, cutesy-puke "OMG, they do/watch/believe/eat THIS in Korea!!!" kind of thing; instead, I’ll try to write about the thoughts and experiences that I've had because of my past two years spent in Korea. It may result in some seemingly random posts, but hopefully, they’ll all tie themselves together somehow. Thanks for reading!

Cheonggyecheon in the summer night