Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [13]
When my family moved overseas in 1982 so my dad could work at a Korean law firm, I missed my imprinted habitat of western Washington State. In many ways, South Korea was the polar opposite of Seattle: hot in the summer, dry in the winter, crunchy cicadas underfoot instead of slimy slugs. The Seoul air was so polluted that I developed a convincing smoker’s hack at the tender age of eight. Before the end of World War II, Korea had been a Japanese colony, and the peninsula had been stripped of forests to help fuel Japan’s massive industrial and military expansion. The neat rows of spindly pine trees assiduously replanted by the Korean government seemed like soulless counterfeits when compared to the dense, majestic forests of the Pacific Northwest.
I loved it anyway, but I felt very keenly that I had been transplanted; it’s hard not to feel like a stranger in a strange land when you’re the only American kid in a vast Korean apartment complex. Expatriates thrive on this sense of bold outsiderness, and it bonds them into tightly knit communities. But it isolates them from their homeland as well. My family would spend a month or so every summer on home leave in the States, just long enough to be reminded of what we were missing, before we had to hop wistfully on a plane back . . . where? Home? For the next decade, when people asked me where I was from, I would automatically say, “Seattle,” even though I never spent more than two or three weeks a year there. This was pregrunge, and nobody thought Seattle was a particularly hip place to be from, so I wasn’t being a poseur—I just didn’t want to deal with the follow-up of having to explain why, despite all appearances, a white kid was claiming to be Korean. The sociologist Ruth Hill Useem coined the term “Third Culture Kids” to refer to nationality-confused global nomads like me, because, she said, we fuse our birth culture and our adopted culture into some entirely new, blended culture. But I didn’t necessarily feel like a man without a country. I knew where home was; I just wasn’t living there.
I’ve never thought about it until now, but my obsession with maps coincided almost exactly with the move overseas. I wasn’t traumatized by the news that we were going; just insatiably curious. Driving home from a movie with my parents that summer (I’m oddly certain it was Disney’s The Fox and the Hound), my brother and I peppered them with questions about the upcoming move: What country would we be living in? Which city? There were two Koreas? Were we going to the north one or the south one? Crossing an ocean made me feel like an explorer; I wanted maps to explain this suddenly larger world. I bought my very first atlas from the only English-language bookstore in Seoul during our first months there.
But I also know that I spent just as much time looking at maps of the United States, looking backward. Maps became a way to reconnect with the country I’d left behind. And not just the Pacific Northwest but all of it, even places I’d never seen. I was annoyed by a kiddie atlas I’d been given that showed only three cities in the entire state of Delaware. (I can still name them: Wilmington, Dover, Newark.) When I finally got my hands on a Rand McNally U.S. road atlas, I relished the detail, planning imaginary road trips along open highways that seemed so unlike the cramped, noisy urban quarters where we now found ourselves. I recited the tiny towns of Delaware as if they were the most exotic names imaginable: Milford, Laurel, Harrington, Lewes.* To me, half a world away, they were exotic.
Fast-forward two decades. Mindy and I were living in Salt Lake City and happily settled, but I suddenly found