Only Connect
In my first season of first dates after moving to Boston, I was asked over and over what I did for fun. My answers varied from reading (but everyone reads, chimed a voice in my head) to writing (but I was never ready to talk about it) to exercising (“I don’t believe anyone enjoys exercise,” a prospective date once retorted). In a given week as a resident physician, I had on average one day off, the contents of which could be distilled into a few scenes. The opening minutes would feature me lying sideways in bed half-awake, cocooned in the warmth of my comforter while methodically scrolling from one social media app to the next on my cell phone. What followed would be a montage in which I ran all the errands that had accumulated over a week of adult life, pushed buttons on the dishwasher, washed my laundry, vacuumed everywhere—hardly thrilling conversation. I developed a habit of eating dinner alone while watching travel videos on the Internet in order to more accurately fantasize about my future vacations. Eventually I realized that “traveling” was listed on virtually everybody’s online profile. It seemed to me a euphemism for privilege.
By early winter, I finally thought of a hobby: languages. As a child, I moved to the Midwest knowing hardly a word of English yet became conversant with my schoolmates without any recollection of the effort it took. As an adult, I struggle to maintain the few languages I know rather than acquire new ones, a constant diligence akin to keeping plants alive. Some people garden while others cook (and the rare angel on earth manages both)—I listen to the occasional ten-minute Spanish language podcast and call it a day.
I had few opportunities to travel when I was younger, so I made every effort to do so as an adult. I instantly appreciated the advantages of being an English speaker and the discomforts of traveling to a country whose languages I did not speak. In my final year of medical school, I spent a month shadowing cardiology, obstetrics, and neonatology in Tokyo. Being a foreigner in Japan brought out a schizoid side of me that I had never seen and could not replicate in any other realm of my life. Because I looked East Asian and was living in an East Asian country, every stranger I met naturally assumed that we shared a mutual understanding. In fact, I managed to learn almost zero Japanese, and I was reminded of how much I despised the feeling of letting someone down. Eventually I dreaded encountering people entirely, which defeated the purpose of traveling in the first place.
Not long after moving to Boston, I visited my grandparents. They lived on the second floor of an apartment building in a coastal city in China known for its beer (a relic of the German occupation). The stairs leading up to the apartment were made of a drab, grey concrete. The stairwell featured a motion-detecting light bulb that went out unless you stomped on every landing. On the door of each apartment hung a latched mailbox for the safekeeping of the daily newspaper and a pouch of fresh milk delivered in the early morning by a milkman I had never seen. On my last visit, I noticed that my grandparents had stopped ordering the milk. It never struck me as something I would miss.
My travels in China are a battleground of sorts. I speak conversational Mandarin at the first grade level, and I am essentially illiterate. Sometimes I hear what my relatives say but not what they mean; sometimes it is the other way around. There always seemed to be words left unsaid and loose ends that would never be tied. On one trip, I visited a newly opened Starbucks café with my father in the hopes of instilling some familiarity into what was an otherwise isolating experience. He decided not to follow me inside. Alone, I struggled to order an espresso and ended up with brewed coffee. I felt suddenly the extent to which my Mandarin had withered and that if only I had better cultivated it, I would not have been so unmoored.
I think of Mandarin as my mother tongue. Breath after breath, the language chastises me and tells me I will never be enough. A part of me feels constantly under construction. Only recently did I realize that the biggest obstacle was not my meager vocabulary or shabby grammar but simply allowing my two selves to coexist.
At the end of one of these family visits, I escaped to Seoul. An hour-long plane ride from my grandparents’ apartment, it seemed a world away. I had Internet again. I had a laundry list of travel recommendations and a sense of adventure. I did not speak the language and could not wait to get lost.
On my first night in Seoul, I ate at a Korean barbeque restaurant in Itaewon a few blocks from the apartment I was staying in. Sheepishly, I asked for a menu in English. My waitress spoke Korean and, as I later discovered, Mandarin. For the first time, Mandarin saved me. I asked if I had ordered too much, then tried to add on a side of grilled vegetables. She rebuked me. “Why order vegetables when you are worried about being full?” It was the sort of thing my mother would have said. She was right—it was enough.
The next morning, I walked around Myeongdong, browsing little shops and stalls. At some point, I wandered into a beauty store. I asked the clerk, awkwardly, in English, to recommend an eye cream. She spoke to me in Korean, then Japanese, then Mandarin, and I was rescued again.
That afternoon, I walked through various neighborhoods in search of restaurants by copying and pasting the Hangul into a map on my cell phone. Eventually I came upon a discreet noodle shop. I sat down at a booth and ordered by pointing to a photograph of ground pork noodles with dumplings. As I cradled my bowl of steaming noodles, I was interrupted by an unbidden memory of a patient I had once cared for who had been hospitalized with advanced cancer. She had moved from Korea, started a small business, and raised a family. I wondered if she had ever made noodles like these. I had the bizarre feeling that I had traveled halfway around the world only to find myself right back where I started.
It was November in Seoul, and the temperature at dusk hovered just above freezing. A few hours before flying back to Boston, I met a group of strangers at a bar. They had come from Chile, Norway, and other parts of the world I had never seen. I told them I was from Boston. It seemed simpler than recounting the periodic uprooting woven into the tapestry of so many modern lives.
At some point, almost imperceptibly, the strangers melted away and I spent my final hours talking to a man I had just met. He had grown up outside of Seoul, on the last stop of one of the metro lines. He wanted to go to America someday. On his right forearm was a tattoo that read, Don’t worry, be happy. “I want to erase it,” he told me, before apologizing for his broken English. It was hardly broken. The opposite forearm read, Heaven helps those who help themselves. That one he was planning to keep. Immediately distal to the word Heaven was a scar about a centimeter wide that traversed the entire volar aspect of his wrist. Jokingly, I asked if he had gotten into a fight. It was a burn from welding.
Soon enough, we were out of time. In a parallel universe, we would still be talking, but in this one, I had a flight to catch. Before we parted, he asked for my email. I said no, finding myself suddenly entangled in a web of my own imagination. I saw myself returning to Boston and caught once again in the rapids of my own life. I would never reply. Funny how at times we crave human connection only to barricade ourselves when it presents itself in the purest of forms.
I thought at first that I was trying to prevent the intrusion of this life—the one in which I wandered the streets of Seoul, merely human, without title or identity—into my regular existence. Then I realized it was really the other way around. Here was the experience I was trying to shelter, a pure, joyful memory that could be neither recreated nor undone.
It was dark and the stars were shining. Suitcase in hand, I made my way to the subway, the train, the airport. Waiting at the gate, I searched for his name before realizing that I did not know how to spell it. Somehow, against all odds, I found his profile photo—the same undercut, straight brows, slightly vacant stare. Next to his name was a little button—a friend request—that would have bridged our two worlds. I lingered. The waiting area around me filled, my fellow passengers each enchanted by her own screen. Then, almost instinctively, I kept on scrolling.