It’s Thanksgiving. I’m at my aunt’s place in Cumming, Georgia, an hour away from Atlanta. (I know, what a name. I’m not sure if my first-gen immigrant aunt fully grasps how ridiculous the name is.) My aunt and her friends gather around the kitchen floor, julienning two big mounds of Korean Radish — the plump white and green ones — to make this year’s Kimchi. It’s an annual thing. It even has its own name — Kimjang. I’ve done it every year growing up in Korea. It’s a whole ordeal. The air will smell like pepper and garlic for weeks to follow.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” I offer, towering over the three women hunched over big buckets (“darai” is the word for it. It’s a Japanese derived Korean word, because ~colonialism~) of radish and green onion. I ask without expecting I’ll get assigned anything of importance. These ladies know what they are doing. I am at best a nuisance.
“Nah, it’s okay.” My aunt says that, while her eyes make a quick scan until they meet two beady mischievous eyes across the kitchen. Behind the kitchen doors, now barricaded by a makeshift fence, is Stanley. Stanley is my aunt’s Pembroke corgi, a certified good boi. He’s been eyeing the mound of radish. Can dogs even eat radishes? I’m not sure. But Stanley is definitely ready to fuck around and find out. “Actually, can you take the dog out for a walk? Don’t forget to take a poop bag!”
So here I was. Walking around the neighborhoods of Cumming, Georgia. Conveniently located 20 minutes away from Duluth, the Korean-American capital of Georgia. A predominantly white neighborhood with a nice rec center in the middle. The kind of neighborhood where the HOA committee would have annoyingly specific rules around what colors of Christmas lights you can put on and how long you can put them on. I peer into the houses, the driveways and their minivans twice the size of an average car in San Francisco, the half-ajar garage spaces lined with things that were probably bought at Costco. It’s an old hobby I used to share with my college roommates during Covid. We would walk twenty minutes up north, away from the dorms and the college bedrooms where empty vodka bottles lined every other window, to casually peek into the massive family homes in the Northern Chicago suburbs. “I mean, the decorative glass tile window is gorgeous, but the white on brown wainscoting is just not it.” we would say, as if we knew anything about home renovations and interior design. And then I’d be hit with a sense of fake nostalgia, followed by an emotion that can only be described with the word envy, for a childhood I never had. All the prom dates I never had, all the Christmas decorations I never put up, the hand-me-down car I never got when I turned 16 — The hallmarks of American teen life I never got to experience.
And I wonder if those things could have fixed me.
Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for my teenage years and I was very lucky to have had the upbringing I had. But gratitude is a learned emotion — jealousy is the toddler who drops everything and bawls at the toy aisle at Target because she just wants another one.
I love Korea. I really do. I was born and raised there, in the southern suburbs of Seoul, until I moved to the United States for college. Korea is the only place I will ever call “home” home. But I love it like one would love their estranged parent. The kind of love that overwhelms you as you stare at your own palms and trace all your flaws and inevitably wonder if they were the root of all your problems. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so lonely if all my friends and families lived in a 100 mile radius. Maybe my heart wouldn’t drop imagining my parent’s reaction to me telling them I liked a nice non-Korean, non-white boy with kind eyes and a really sweet smile if my parents lived in Orange County or Virginia instead. Maybe I wouldn’t feel the need to be validated by the big tech company job I landed if I didn’t grow up in a place where little kids learned to step on top of each other’s throats to get into Big Name schools and Big Name companies that seemed to guarantee you a lifetime’s happiness. Maybe I’ll know how to process rejection, loss, and grief if the message I’ve gotten through a number of national tragedies that directly affected people of my generation wasn’t “Womp, womp. They were just really unlucky. Get over it.”
The truth is, it may very well be that my issues have nothing to do with where I grew up. It probably is just a matter of who I am as a person and my emotional maturity. It’s a sign for me to go do more figuring out, go do more therapy. (Hey, remember that shiny tech job I mentioned? Good news — they have really good insurance coverage!) But it’s easier to point at the backdrops of your past self than to confront your inner child and nurture it with the care you always wanted.
So I walk through the suburbs, imagining a version of me who grew up here, in the depths of American Suburbia. I hope she’s at peace. I hope she had more time in her teenage years to figure out what she wanted to do with her life because I don’t feel like I had that time. I hope she feels a little less exploited, but wishing that makes me a little sad. Then I tell myself my mantra- a mantra I’ve had since the Thanksgiving of 2021: Everybody ends up in therapy. (Yeah, that’s a whole other story, I’ll follow up on this one.) She probably has her fair share of issues too, which is a consolation. And I pick up Stanley’s warm, fresh poop and slowly head back to my aunt’s.
