A few minutes’ walk from the apartment I rented on my first trip to Seoul, I happened upon a branch of the Novel Cafe, a restaurant I know well from my life in Los Angeles (though the ones back home don’t advertise “California Cuisine since 1999″). Then, a few blocks later, came a shop called Who A.U. California Dream, selling clothes and accessories emblazoned with names and images of places such as Yosemite, the “Surf City” of Huntington Beach, and simply “California Farm Country.” Although it is an international brand, Who A.U. rode a particularly high wave of popularity across South Korea in the summer of 2014. Even in the biggest American cities, you hear the media agonizing over fashion trends long before you notice those trends in real life (if indeed you ever do).In Seoul, however, the latest trends confront you right there on the street, immediately and constantly. On the sidewalks, in cafés, and riding the subway, the youth of South Korea presented me with constant invocations of my own current hometown: of USC and UCLA, of the Lakers and the “Dodgers Baseball Club,” of “Homiés South Central” and “Berkeley California 1968,” of Venice Beach and the LAX Theme Building, of the “California Road Trip,” and of Los Angeles itself accompanied by the inexplicably chosen zip code 90185. Young people the world over have dreamed of California for decades, but the sheer number and variety of California clichés invoked on the streets of Seoul reached a whole other level.
The mystery as to why deepened the closer I looked. Late one night during that trip, after the customary first round of drinks and food—and the equally customary second round of dinner and drinks after that—I found myself sharing a dimly lit booth at a bar with my Korean-born girlfriend’s cousins, two sisters in their twenties. We’d drunk halfway through our hefty copper pot of greenishmakgeolli, a fermented rice wine long written off as a poor farmer’s drink that is now enjoying a well-deserved renaissance, when the older cousin’s boyfriend turned up to help finish it off. He wore a bright, white polo shirt decorated with the words “SAN DIEGO IN CALIF.” Looking quite literally for common ground, I asked him, as best I could in my still-shaky Korean, when he’d spent time in San Diego. He explained, with what I’ve come to think of as a characteristically Korean mixture of pride and embarrassment, that he’d never left his homeland. The California dream burns particularly bright, it seems, within those who’ve never come near the state.
On a group bike ride through Changwon, a suburb of Busan (South Korea’s second-largest city), I struck up a conversation with a woman a few years out of college and employed at a local department store. When I told her I’d come from Los Angeles, she let me in on her own California dream. “I want to live there,” she explained. “I want a big house—and a dog.” She longed for the idea of a traditionally Californian lifestyle somehow as alien to me, someone born and resident in the state, as any lifestyle I saw in South Korea. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, at least as far as I can see in Los Angeles, the dream of the “big house,” and indeed its viability, has entered a slow but inexorable downward slide. (The market for dogs, on the other hand, does look strong.)
Read the whole thing at Boom: A Journal of California.