husband, dad, son. american, korean. seoul, ann arbor, san francisco. dev, colleague, em. christian…ish

Tag: nostalgia

  • streets

    my elementary school on the left

    There’s something surreal about walking through the streets you grew up on. No matter how many years have passed, if you close your eyes for just a second and let your mind drift, time folds in on itself. Suddenly, you’re back in the days when your biggest priority was chasing after friends. Often for not a particularly good reason, that also definitely wasn’t pre-approved by Mom.

    In 2023, I returned to Seoul for the first time in about 12 or 13 years. A number of very challenging family health issues had kept me from visiting, I had even stopped contact with all my childhood friends during those years. But the moment I stepped off the plane into that heavy, humid air, it felt like I’d never left. Whenever I had free time, I’d just walk—aimlessly—turning my head constantly to take in every side street, every restaurant, every pastry shop that caught my eye.

    Friends would recommend visiting that beautiful park or lake in the city, but we have tons of that in California. What I wanted was chaos. The busiest, craziest, tightest areas possible jam packed with impatient cars and frowning people in a hurry to get to places while frowning. And it was glorious glorious. The symphony of traffic, winds, sounds, walking, air, cicada sounds were identical to decades ago. Again, it was like I never left.

    At night it was even more vivd. The darkness shrouding the streets contrasting with the bright lights inviting you in, car taillights moving away along with the lively pedestrians coming and going… yep exactly the same. It was like some comfort blanket where I felt like I could walk on forever. Probably the streets being safe at night helps too, but thats another, can of worms type topic.

    I do however, confess the fact that I’m on vacation(well, I still check Slack and Outlook out of habit) contributes to this, and if I stay longer I’ll probably notice the stuff I’m glad I left behind. But til then its an interesting and refreshing, though a bit melancholy experience I get to go through whenever I visit.

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  • cost

    Sometimes after meetings or syncs I go down to get lunch with colleagues. Often times folks I don’t know very well, given our need to interact with a large variety of engineering teams. And that leads to, well, a lot of small talk. Between professionals the topics are your typical where do you live, weather, vacation plans etc.

    But there’s one topic that tends to draw out more genuine conversation: relocating to the Bay Area for work. It comes up often because almost everyone at the table, whether immigrant or American, moved here from somewhere else. America alone is a huge country.

    Then the tones shifts and we’re usually thinking the same thing, reminiscing about the lives, friends, and relatives we left behind, especially our parents. All agree it’s only years and years after that you notice the high price you paid. We sort of laugh and say how envious of our friends back where we grew up, how they stay connected and are still close to their families(though curiously they largely seem to meet up among themselves only when we visit).

    Thus, pretty much everyone here is rebuilding their friends and support groups. Or as often is the case, we aren’t. And it’s so easy to let time slip by while not making that investment, not knowing it gets ever so harder to build new relationships and become isolated.

    But the silver lining is that it’s actually not that hard to develop relatively deep friendships. It just requires consistent meeting for whatever reason, for around 18 months. You don’t have to do anything fancy or expensive at all, each others presence is good enough. Obviously even faster if the group has common interests or has the characteristics of a support group no matter how big or mundane.

    In the end, talking about this does help at work. We get to connect with our colleagues a bit better, which is critical when inevitable tricky situations at work arise.

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