I decided to treat Seoul as somewhere I was traveling. Ever since, the streets I walk in this city have felt different. Things I hadn't seen came into view, and I found myself stopping where I used to pass by. Then this summer, sitting on a mat at the edge of the sea, I understood something. There was one place I had never put on the list.
1.Jinsang
Jirang Village, Jinsang-myeon, Gwangyang, in South Jeolla Province.
My family never called it by the name of the village. We just said Jinsang. We go to Jinsang. We are in Jinsang. We come back from Jinsang.
It is where my mother was born and raised — the house where her own father and mother lived.
When summer came, we gathered at that house. There was the school holiday, and in August there was my grandfather's birthday. Two reasons landing in the same season meant our family's summer was always Jinsang. Every year, from when I was very small until my school years were behind me.
And this house holds time that runs ahead of my memory. When I was younger still, I lived there for a while — or so I am told. I have no memory of it. Which means I must have been very young.
So this is the first place I ever went, and the place I have gone to most often.
2.The House
My grandfather doted on me, they say. That, too, is something I was told.
What I hold myself is a single expression on his face. I learned what the word kind looks like from that face.
And candy. He would hide sweets and snacks somewhere and slip them into my hand when no one was looking. What he gave me, and where, I no longer remember. I was too young. What remains is not the taste but the hand.
My grandmother was food. In that house I ate soybean soup two ways. One was warm — noodles cut by hand from flour dough, boiled in the soybean broth, finished with a spoonful of sugar. The other was cold, with strands of agar jelly stirred through it. A taste no one else could ever imitate.
My grandfather went first. I was in my teens. My grandmother followed some years later, when I had not long turned twenty.
They are things I can no longer have. Warmth that survives only as a far-off memory. I miss them.
After that, I went to Jinsang less and less. There was less reason to go.
But the house never stood empty.
My mother is one of eight. Even after the two of them were gone, her brothers and sisters went on tending that house — so that it would never become an empty one. They mended what had worn down and made it easier to live in. All the while my visits were thinning out, someone was still walking that yard.
Then my father retired and moved into that house. My father is a Seoul man. I had assumed he would live out his life in Seoul, and instead he began again somewhere unfamiliar. And — this is the part I am grateful for — her brothers and sisters gave him the best room in that house, the separate quarters that stand on their own.
So I began going back to Jinsang often.
3.Golden Egg Mart
This summer, too, we went to Jinsang. The children were on their break.
My sister's family came as well. With her three sons, that made five children in the yard.
I have a son and a daughter eight years apart. Which is why I go around saying I am raising two only children. In this yard alone, that isn't true.
The children play in the yard. They catch the stream that comes down off the hill behind the house and splash in it. They go into the vegetable patch and put their hands in the soil. They see frogs. In Seoul there is no occasion to.
It isn't so different from the way I played in this yard as a child.
But their favorite thing is something else.
Ten minutes on foot from the house there is a shop called Hwanggeumal Mart — Golden Egg Mart. The children walk all the way there, each choose one snack they like, and eat it on the walk home. That walk is what they love.
For the children this place is travel. There is water to play in, there are things they have never seen before, and once a day there is a shop to walk to. Seoul has no summer like this.
When I was small there was a shop in more or less the same spot. We would go down in a swarm and buy the cheap sweets the grown-ups called junk.
It isn't the same shop. They aren't the same children. But ten minutes on foot is still ten minutes on foot, and eating it on the way home is still eating it on the way home.
4.The Mat
One day we drove an hour to the sea.
The children were all in the water. I sat on the mat, watching our things.
And then it struck me as strange. In this summer, as a child, I had been the one in the water. The grown-ups sat on the mat, and it never once occurred to me to wonder what they were thinking there. Now I am the one sitting.
The same summer. A different seat.
Sitting on the mat, I ran through the places I had been. The strange city where I first landed alone. The places I had gone to twice. The ones I have set aside to return to someday.
Jinsang was not among them.
Even though I had gone every year, all my life. Because it was my mother's family home. Because it was going to see relatives. It never occurred to me to attach the word travel to that.
It wasn't that I hadn't known. I had simply never put it together.
For the children it was travel from the start. For me it was not, for a very long time.
I came back to Seoul. Seeing this city as a place to travel was something I had to decide on. And yet there was one place that had been travel long before any decision.
So I added one more.
The place I have gone to longest. The place I never called travel. Jinsang.
When summer comes I will go to Jinsang again. And tomorrow I will walk Seoul.
Both of them are travel.