“In the middle of the journey of our life

I came to myself within a dark wood

where the straight way was lost.“

-Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy

As a foreigner in Korea, you’re often asked, “Where are you from?” to which I often freeze, not knowing how to answer. 

A more fitting question for nomads like me would be: “Where were you before Korea?”

To that I could share: my wanderings have been a bit circuitous, many the result of searching for something, self-medicating with travel, and in that process, jinxing myself and speaking into existence the places I end up living in.

Like during my semester abroad in Bangkok. While on a trip to Laos with fellow exchange students, we had crossed the land border between Nong Khai, Thailand and Vientiane. Feeling intimidated by the remoteness and the isolating geography, I casually spoke aloud, “I’m not sure I could ever live in Laos.” 

A year later, the Fulbright program rejected my application to teach in Thailand. I felt crushed. My time in Thailand felt like an answered prayer. After years of seeing the world through shades of gray in the wake of my father’s passing, I finally saw color in Thailand. 

Days after the news of my rejection, I received a call from the Fulbright program. They needed teaching assistants for Laos and had pulled my application from the Thailand batch. They offered me a spot. 

Spoiler alert: you never turn down a Fulbright.

My jinxing continued when I lived in Laos, another stunning country where I saw color. To quell my mom’s fears over my misadventures (e.g., a bus crash and a couple motorbike accidents), I’d repeatedly stress over Skype calls, “It’s not like I’m living in a warzone like Afghanistan.”

Cue dramatic music for foreshadowing.

Years after Laos, I had moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky and reconnected with a friend whom I had first met, coincidentally, in Laos. She too was a restless nomad and eventually left to teach English to women in the Afghan military in Kabul.

Upon hearing her news, I took inventory of my life. I was doing the good and noble thing of actively involving myself in the community. I had survived a grueling season of layoffs at my university, was in my second year of co-leading a women’s community dialogue group, and had just co-led a faculty seminar to Cuba. I even had one semester left before finishing my master’s degree. 

In spite of that, I felt hollow. My life brimmed with engagements and responsibilities, yet I didn’t feel whole. A great ache inside me kept yearning for something more.

Desperate for a new setting, I swayed off my initial career trajectory and joined ranks at a base in downtown Kabul. My role was to teach women who worked at a military hospital. Although the ache inside me didn’t dissipate, I was distracted by my new life abroad.

After the Kabul program ended, I roamed Southeast Asia, ticking off remaining bucket list places like Brunei or Ho Chi Minh City, and occasionally hopscotching to London to visit my then boyfriend.

Traversing the globe on my own eventually became lonely and disorienting. I needed purpose and an income. Frantically, I tossed out job applications. When a university in Incheon, Korea offered me a position, it felt like the Universe was tying up loose ends again. 

Four years prior, while visiting my best friend Kate in Seoul, I didn’t connect with the city’s cold, steel architecture, the fleets of black, white, and grey cars, and the repetition of chain cafes and beauty stores. The fourteen-hour work days, the rigid hierarchies, and the social rules of conformity, all doused with a lethal emphasis on perfectionism, made Korea seem unbearable. 

Before leaving for the airport, I confessed to Kate, “I’m not sure I could be happy in Korea.” 

And then the Universe cackled: “Challenge accepted.”

I ended up accepting the position in Incheon, and I’ve lived here for two and a half years. Like Dante though, I feel like I’ve woken up in a dark wood, but my wood resembles Songdo: a quirky mix between The Truman Show meets The Good Place Season 1 meets… Chernobyl.

Now, for families, Songdo is perfectly lovely. It boasts manicured parks, an excellent school district, and… a giant Costco.

Yet for us single, adventurous nomads, that’s not so much the case.

I’m quite certain then that with the COVID-19 pandemic halting international travel, the Universe doubled its bet on whether I can be happy here, especially since my usual sources for happiness -adventure, travel and men- have been limited or inaccessible.

How then can a single gal like me who self-medicates with travel and men make peace not only with her surroundings, but more importantly, herself?

This is why I’ve come here to write. With few places to turn, I’m learning how to make peace with where I live and travel instead to a place that many, including myself, fear the most: inward.

Since my journey inward has proven to be the most interesting, perilous, and transformative, I’ve come to share some tales of my life as a single expat in Korea.

Like Dante’s opening lines: 

It is a hard thing to speak of, 
how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, 
so that thinking of it recreates the fear. 
It is scarcely less bitter than death: 
but, in order to tell of the good that I found there,
I must tell of the other things I saw there.

With this space, I’ve come to tell you about the good I’ve found here in Korea.

I’ve come to share with you, dear readers, more of my circuitous wanderings.

Song for post: Nomads by Highs