On going home, to a home that had moved on without me.
August 4, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung
So … some years ago I went back to Korea for the first time in fourteen years.
Fourteen years is a long time. I left as one kind of person and came back as another; older, greyer, more Canadian than I’d realized. I thought I was going home. I had pictured it the whole flight over: the mountains, the rivers, the rice fields, the streets I’d walked as a boy, the houses, the smells. I had kept all of it, carefully, in the place where you keep the country you left.
And then I arrived. And I couldn’t find it.
The mountains I remembered were gone, or hidden behind towers. The rivers, the rice fields, the low familiar streets all gone. In their place, row after row after row of high-rise apartment buildings, highways, overpasses, shopping complexes, and then more apartment buildings. Did you know more than half of all Koreans now live in apartments? The whole country had given itself a face transplant while I wasn’t looking.
I stood there in the city where I grew up, turning in a slow circle, and the only thought I could manage was: Where am I ? I think I’m in the wrong city.
Now, I want to be fair. Almost everything had changed for the better.
The streets were cleaner. The air was cleaner. There was less noise, less shoving, fewer angry people. When I was young there was a saying — “ugly Koreans” — about how rough and short-tempered we could be in public. Not anymore. Taxi drivers said thank you. Some of them even smiled. People were gracious, patient, well-mannered. It was, by every visible measure, a more beautiful and civilized place than the one I’d left.
And I’ll confess something small and slightly ridiculous: I was a little disappointed. Some stubborn part of me had wanted to find the old rough Korea, the one I remembered, the one that matched the picture I’d been carrying. I’d half wanted to be annoyed by it. Instead it was lovely, and improved, and completely unfamiliar. It had moved on beautifully without me.
That’s the strange grief nobody warns you about. Not that home got worse. That home got better, and did it without you, and doesn’t quite remember you were ever there.
You have to understand what this does to a person like me.
I am what they call the 1.5 generation. I came to Canada as a teenager that was old enough to be thoroughly Korean, young enough to become thoroughly Canadian, and so I ended up not quite either. For fifty years I’ve lived with the low hum of it: too Korean for the Canadians, too Canadian for the Koreans. You learn to carry two homes and belong fully to neither.
And there’s always been a quiet consolation in that the idea that the real home, the first one, is still back there. Unchanged. Waiting. That if it ever got to be too much, you could go back to where you started and finally, simply, belong.
Standing in that unrecognizable city, I understood that the back-there home doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe it never did, except in me. The Korea I was homesick for wasn’t a place on a map. It was a time. And you cannot buy a plane ticket to a time.
I don’t say this to be sad about it. I’ve made my peace, mostly. But it taught me something I keep having to relearn.
We spend a lot of our lives believing that home is somewhere else … back there, back then, or up ahead when things finally settle. We keep a picture of it, and we measure the present against the picture, and the present always comes up short. The house we grew up in. The church the way it used to be. The version of the family before everyone scattered. We get homesick for a country that has quietly turned into apartment buildings.
But the home you’re actually homesick for isn’t waiting behind you. It’s a feeling you’ll have to build where you are — in this city, with these people, in this ordinary present that will itself, one day, be the “back then” that somebody younger aches for.
I flew back to Vancouver after that trip. To Sue. To a condo that is nobody’s ancestral home, in a country I chose rather than was born to. And somewhere over the Pacific I realized that this … the chosen, unglamorous, right-here place … was more home than the city I’d just failed to recognize.
Home, it turns out, is not the place that remembers you.
It’s the place where someone is still glad you walked in the door.
Richard
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Prior Newsletters from Slow Wisdom :
The Day Jesus Was Rude … July 28th
My Fifty Dollar Titanic … July 21st
I Shouted At The Prime Minister … July 15th
I Told My Church I Ate Grasshoppers … July 7th
Thankful For The Hospital Food … July 1st
My Goal Was To Finish and Not Die … June 24th
The Wedding Afro … June 17th