My Reflection on the SNUAA USA Scholarship in Korea – Arrim Jung

Coming back to Korea, I had the peculiar experience of being part of the majority rather than the minority. Everywhere I looked I felt a greater sense of kinship to strangers who looked like my aunts and uncles and grandmas. I felt a sense of privilege having doors and sinks be at a comfortable height. Snacks that I could seldom find in America were on every street. It was a Goldilocks moment of feeling like everything was “just right”… perhaps the feeling of coming home.

Something I didn’t expect from the program was the number of international friends it gifted me. The people I was staying in the dorms and going to classes with were from Italy, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. While exploring Seoul or ordering delivery food together, I was able to see Korea through the lenses of multiple cultures. This also gave me the opportunity to learn the various aspects of Korea that drew them into the program.

Of the cultural excursion trips we went on, the most memorable was the one to the DMZ. It was deeply moving to be in a place holding the harshest wound of my country. However, I was also struck with the ironic commodification of tourism through amusement parks, souvenirs, and promotion of wildlife preservation in the area. The lack of written information at landmarks also left me wanting more gravity in the portrayal of our own history.

Seoul has so much to do and the countryside has so much to soak in. In the city, I bounced around from comic book cafes, board game cafes, cat cafes, study cafes, escape rooms, and coin karaoke. On every corner of cities like Hongdae or Gangnam there were rows of tantalizing accessories. Restaurant owners were competing to lure any wandering eye into their shop. On the other hand, the countryside roads had stretches of pine trees and sparkling rivers. I settled into my grandmother’s house and bit into fresh, rich peaches that enlightened my taste buds. I sat down for a picnic with my family and ate glutinous corn in the mountains. I felt my soul come to a respite it had missed for years.

I was also uniquely able to get integrated into the community of Christian college students at Seoul National University. After worshipping together in a bilingual service, we would eat lunch together and hang out in the club room. Although I was in the same dining halls and school buildings with them as I was with my international friends, I admired the different feeling of being there with SNU brothers and sisters. Their humor, references, slang, and even the way they made decisions was at a higher speed and caliber than I was used to.

My summer in South Korea was the greatest blessing of the year, not only connecting me back to my culture but allowed me to see Korea through a foreign, diasporic, and insider perspective.