Two Worlds, One Childhood

Looking back, growing up around Seoul between 1993 and 2000 feels less like a clear timeline and more like disconnected scenes from a Wong Kar Wai film – not quite Chungking Express's dreamy melancholy, but certainly hazy, like a half-remembered dream.

Take 1998.

I was six.

Our neighbourhood sidewalk, dusty and sparkling in the summer rays, was alive with kids playing games and carefully melting sugar over tiny flames to make dalgona—that sweet, brittle Korean treat. I remember the sun-kissed breeze kicking up dust devils that danced around my Reeboks in the back alley. In that world, everyone looked like me, everyone sounded like me. It was impossible to imagine anything different; it was simply everything I knew.

That cocoon of familiarity shattered the day my mum gathered my older brother and me in our small living room, its floor comfortingly warm beneath us. Amidst my stuffed Pokémon, scattered preschool homework, and the ever-present TV remote, lay a new addition: a world map I didn’t recognize. We all sat around it as Mum posed a life-altering question to my brother. "It's up to us where we go," she said, her finger hovering between two vast continents. "Here," she pointed to the United States, "or here," shifting to Canada. "Remember," her voice serious, "this might be the most important choice of your life. Choose carefully."