{"id":2769,"date":"2015-02-23T10:53:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T18:53:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2769"},"modified":"2015-02-23T10:53:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T18:53:17","slug":"finding-the-korea-in-california-and-the-california-in-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2769","title":{"rendered":"Finding the Korea in California and the California in Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nA few minutes\u2019 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\u2019t advertise \u201cCalifornia Cuisine since 1999\u2033). 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 \u201cSurf City\u201d of Huntington Beach, and simply \u201cCalifornia Farm Country.\u201d 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). <\/p>\n

In Seoul, however, the latest trends confront you right there on the street, immediately and constantly. On the sidewalks, in caf\u00e9s, 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 \u201cDodgers Baseball Club,\u201d of \u201cHomi\u00e9s South Central\u201d and \u201cBerkeley California 1968,\u201d of Venice Beach and the LAX Theme Building, of the \u201cCalifornia Road Trip,\u201d 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 clich\u00e9s invoked on the streets of Seoul reached a whole other level.<\/p>\n

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\u2014and the equally customary second round of dinner and drinks after that\u2014I found myself sharing a dimly lit booth at a bar with my Korean-born girlfriend\u2019s cousins, two sisters in their twenties. We\u2019d drunk halfway through our hefty copper pot of greenishmakgeolli<\/em>, a fermented rice wine long written off as a poor farmer\u2019s drink that is now enjoying a well-deserved renaissance, when the older cousin\u2019s boyfriend turned up to help finish it off. He wore a bright, white polo shirt decorated with the words \u201cSAN DIEGO IN CALIF.\u201d Looking quite literally for common ground, I asked him, as best I could in my still-shaky Korean, when he\u2019d spent time in San Diego. He explained, with what I\u2019ve come to think of as a characteristically Korean mixture of pride and embarrassment, that he\u2019d never left his homeland. The California dream burns particularly bright, it seems, within those who\u2019ve never come near the state. <\/p>\n

On a group bike ride through Changwon, a suburb of Busan (South Korea\u2019s 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\u2019d come from Los Angeles, she let me in on her own California dream. \u201cI want to live there,\u201d she explained. \u201cI want a big house\u2014and a dog.\u201d 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\u2019t have the heart to tell her that, at least as far as I can see in Los Angeles, the dream of the \u201cbig house,\u201d and indeed its viability, has entered a slow but inexorable downward slide. (The market for dogs, on the other hand, does look strong.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at\u00a0Boom: A Journal\u00a0of California<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few minutes\u2019 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\u2019t advertise \u201cCalifornia Cuisine since 1999\u2033). Then, a few blocks later, came a shop called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,9,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea","category-los-angeles","category-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2769"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2774,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2769\/revisions\/2774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}