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I’ve started a new Korea Blog<\/a> for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and my first post there<\/a> addresses the question of why I left Los Angeles for Seoul in the first place:<\/p>\n Three weeks ago, I moved from Los Angeles\u2019 Koreatown to Korea itself. The relocation happened not suddenly but after years of planning, and as the date of the one-way flight came within a few months\u2019 time, I found myself more and more frequently pressed to answer the same question: why? Why did I want to move across the Pacific Ocean to a country the size of Indiana, a country many Americans know only for a poorly understood war back in the 1950s (and then mainly through the 1970s television dramedy ostensibly set in it), an impoverished and feistily militaristic northern neighbor, and, more recently, squadrons of pop singers often sonically and visually indistinguishable from one another?<\/p>\n But I\u2019ve hardly gone to Korea without precedent. Nowadays, most of those Americans who couldn\u2019t describe Korea in even the broadest strokes themselves know a few other people who\u2019ve been, whether as members of the U.S. military stationed here or, more often among Californians, college graduates who do a year or two of English teaching here to pay off student loans. The soldiers and English teachers still do more than their part to color the Westerner presence in Korea, but I didn\u2019t want to join their ranks; I had to come on my own terms, outside of the established roles and acknowledged types.<\/p>\n This sort of venture has more of an association with Japan, inspirer of so many English-language expatriate memoirs and observational writings since the Second World War. I\u2019ve enjoyed those books, and even taken their tradition as something of a research interest, but the Westerner-in-Japan narrative has, by now, assumed a pretty standard form. The Westerner-in-Korea narrative, however \u2014 essayed by Isabella Bird Bishop and the astronomer Percival Lowell in the late 19th century as well as Simon Winchester, Michael Stephens, and Clive Leatherdale in the late 20th, though none of them made a permanent home in the country \u2014 has yet to really take shape. The desire to experience that narrative for myself counted as one reason to leave America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n