Expat Living: A Home Unexpected

COMMUNITY

A Home Unexpected

By Ashley Johnson

July 17, 2015. It was warm, even for so early in the morning, and dark outside. I can still remember the harsh, almost clinical lights of the airport as dawn and my departing flight to Incheon crept closer. My mother and father hugged me close, said their tearful goodbyes, and watched me funnel through the nearly deserted San Diego Airport security. After hours in the air, I remember the older Korean man who saw me sleepily struggling to make sense of the airline bibimbap and kindly mixed it all for me with a quiet smile. We hadn’t even landed yet, but his kindness was comforting, and I thought, even as my nerves bounced along on the tarmac as we descended, “Well, this whole thing is gonna be okay.”

You know, I really thought I’d be back home in a year.

I think most of us naively thought the same, too. “It’ll just be a year,” we think, “Two tops,” and then it’s back home, of course – back to everything that’s familiar to us – when we step on the plane, before we fly off into the unknown. But what no one ever prepares for, or can ever prepare for, is how deeply, irrevocably, and fundamentally Gwangju will change you. Can you still remember it? Was it that long ago for you? Do you remember your plane touching down, the confusion and the thrill of nervous excitement as you managed to get a bus ticket to Gwangju somehow, the bone-deep exhaustion of being brought to a tiny room, your tiny one-room apartment that immediately felt like a safe haven after your travels? Those first days of meeting bright-eyed students, adjusting to life as a teacher, putting on that role in the morning or afternoon and tailoring yourself to fit it. Those first nights out downtown, flashing red neon signs and red crosses, the sharp soured punch of tequila and lemon drowned out and sweetly chased by the crooners lining up behind the open mic, the comforting camaraderie of new friends seeking connection just like you.

The ebb and flow of newcomers, the shifting dynamics – the instant best friendships and the little tribes that form, as if by magic, all on their own. Camping trips and late nights, soju and noraebang and hoeshik (karaokes and dinner parties), the surprise of catching another sunrise, trips to jeweled ocean islands, endless river crossings, and tunneling through the very hearts of mountains. You’re so

very new in the beginning, like someone wholly lost and grappling in the dark, but it’s the people of Gwangju, the spirit of this place, that manages to always illuminate your way forward.

And before you know it, a year seems far too short to be in such a place. Others agree. You can’t leave yet. Two years should be enough. You grow more and move in closer to the heartbeat of the city. You feel protective of this little Village of Light, the community here. Proud of the sacrifices the people of Gwangju made in the past. Proud to live in the cool shadow of Mudeung-san, to make art here, to sing, to give back, to really live, it feels, for the first time.

And then, somehow, you don’t really know when, maybe there was never a big “Aha” moment that signaled it for you, but at some point, Gwangju became more home to you than the home that came before it. The home you left feels so far off and quietly sitting on a forgotten shelf inside, a dusty relic to who you were and who you aren’t anymore. Gwangju is home now. Who are you without Gwangju?

Each year, a unique, distinct era, it seems. And those eras morph and evolve slowly over time, a constant trickling in and out of people who mean so much to you and don’t mean anything to you – at least not yet. Someone in passing one year, a mere acquaintance, a year later, the love of your life. Friends you’d die for one year, the next year hardly speaking. Walking for the first time past the places that will eventually hold deep significance for you, and then walking past them, walking through them, unknowingly for the very last time. An ever-changing landscape that feels rich and vibrant and full of life one moment, then cold and lonely and isolating the next, only to cycle back and renew itself all over again. But, always, Gwangju holds its own, throughout all upheavals, in its soft, encouraging glow. The backbone of the mountains the stability you need, and the river, the lifeblood, the nourishment needed to grow and expand. And always, that light is there to guide you.

Whether you stay and grow old here, or become new and leave here, what I’ve found to be true about Gwangju is that it’s not simply a bubble of reality from the home before or the home that comes after. It’s not an in-between limbo that exists solely as a layover between one life and the next. No one era outshines the others. Each year, each season, each change here changes you.

And when it’s time to go – you’ll know.

I don’t know exactly when it hit me, but it did all at once. The deep-knowing of it’s time to leave. That’s the way it is, isn’t it? But, even as I say goodbye to the town I loved so well, to the City of Light that brightened my own, I know that it’ll always be a home for me wherever I go, and that that light resides in me, and in all of us who settled here, even if only for a little while.

Gwangju is home. Your home. And it always will be a home in time where you really, truly, incandescently lived.

Photographs courtesy of Ashley Johnson.

The Author

Ashley Johnson has been an English teacher in Gwangju since 2015. She’s a California native and resident hippie in the tight-knit music and arts scene, always endeavoring to bring a little burst of sunshine wherever she goes. @wildheart_haven