Will I Ever Get to Live the Life I Want?

I was born in Jamsil, in Seoul—right next to where Korea’s tallest tower now pierces the sky. We didn’t stay long. When I was three or four we moved a few miles east to Gildong in Gangdong-gu, into an apartment provided by the bank where my father worked. Most of my childhood lived there.

Looking back, it was maybe ten years in total. Ten recent years fly by; those ten felt endless. We moved a lot, even within the same neighborhood. Because we were on a key-money lease (the Korean jeonse system), we hopscotched from one apartment complex to the one next door, then the next.

Once, around age twelve, my father was transferred out of Seoul and we moved to Suwon. I had to change schools for the first time. The day before we left I said awkward goodbyes to my classmates; the next day I was the new kid again. As kids do, I adapted faster than I’d expected. A year later my father was sent back to Seoul, and I returned to my original school as… another transfer student. That round trip taught me something: you never really know what’s ahead, so don’t speak too confidently about the future. And when you part, part well. You never know how or when paths will cross again.

I was not the kid who filled a room. I was small, often sick, and shy. Smoking or drinking? Unthinkable. I didn’t even set foot in the neighborhood arcades. Video games never really grabbed me. I wasn’t a prodigy either. I encountered English for the first time when it became a formal subject in middle school. With all the moving, my study rhythm—when I could find it—broke often. At my best I hovered around tenth in my class. I was the boy you might not notice even if you sat next to him.

When I started ninth grade, our family moved again—this time to Suji in Yongin, then a brand-new satellite city, more construction site than neighborhood. Backhoes carved up the hillsides and piles of dirt rose like small dunes.

We decided to stop renting and build. My parents bought a small lot and put up a simple, boxy three-story row house. We rented out the first and second floors; our family took the third floor and the roof. On the roof we added a tiny room—the Korean kind people call an oktapbang, a rooftop room. It sounds makeshift, but to me it was perfect: quiet, snug, and finally mine. For the first time I had a space that felt like it could hold long stretches of attention.

My first day at the new middle school, I walked down the hallway in a crisp uniform and a tie. A boy by the window said, half-laughing, “He’s wearing a tie.” I thought, Ah. Ties here are not the move. I stuffed it into my bag and didn’t wear one again until graduation.

The school itself felt different from Seoul. The new-town boom had pulled in kids like me from the capital—and pushed out others. Some classmates had families uprooted by redevelopment. Once, when our class ordered Chinese takeout, the delivery driver was a boy from our own homeroom on his weekend job. Another time I hiked a hill behind the neighborhood with my father and ran into a kid from the next class hiding with a cigarette. At that age I didn’t have language for any of it. It just felt like a small jungle where the stronger animals made the rules.

A few days in, the metaphor turned concrete. A pack of boys with popped collars and half-buttoned shirts barged in during the break, yanked a few kids from the back row into the rear of the classroom, and made them lie down. One of the boys pulled the handle off a mop and whipped their thighs—payback, he said, for “snitching” to teachers about a runaway hideout. I froze, then snapped awake. Survival strategy first, I told myself. I needed to get through the year in one piece. Otherwise, the rest of life could get very bleak very fast.

So I became a chameleon. I leaned hard into the “glasses-on, study-only” version of myself. Luck helped: on the first ninth-grade exam I placed second in the class—far better than I’d ever managed in Seoul. And I stumbled onto a funny social physics: extremes respect each other. The toughest fighter in school told me, almost ceremonially, “You focus on studying.” In exchange, when he and his crew got in trouble, I’d try to speak for them to the teachers. It wasn’t a formal pact, but it worked. Under their umbrella I could study; under my umbrella they had someone to translate between worlds. By the start of summer break I had done something I’d never done in my life: ranked first in the entire school.

Around then my parents brought home a brochure for a boarding school in the countryside—Geochang High School. It promised “open education,” but two details won me over instantly. First, because it was fully residential, there’d be no cram-school grind after hours. Second, on the first snowfall, the entire student body allegedly dropped classes to trek to the school’s orchard to “catch rabbits”—a quirky, decades-old tradition that read like a storybook. That was that. I set my sights on Geochang.

When we traveled down for an admissions visit, Geochang-eup—the small county seat in South Gyeongsang Province—looked like a postcard of rural Korea: few buildings over five stories, the faint sweet smell of cows drifting in if you cracked the car window. The school sat on a hill. There wasn’t even a proper gate—just a bare, worn entrance. A man in a tracksuit was picking up trash near the path. We asked him for directions to the office; later I learned he was the principal. It was not a typical high school. I liked that.

At the time the school admitted about 190 students a year, and the entrance exams across regions happened the same day. If you took Geochang’s test and failed, you couldn’t pivot to a different school—you’d lose a year. Because of that, the staff gently steered only realistic candidates to apply. Even so, predictions are guesses; applicants still outnumbered seats. We sat the exam and, by late afternoon, the results went up. My name was on the list. Next to me, a family shuffled by—parents quiet, a boy staring at the ground. That was the first time I felt, in my body, that my joy could be someone else’s loss.

Most new students moved into the dorms the day they enrolled. Each room looked a bit like a barracks: a raised wooden platform the height of your knee took up half the floor for sleeping; along the far wall stood a line of wooden lockers, one per student, with neatly folded bedding stacked on top. Your slice of personal space was maybe 50 centimeters wide by two meters long—twenty inches by six-and-a-half feet. Twelve boys to a room, grouped by home region so that the faces and accents felt familiar. There was a Seoul room, a Busan room, and so on.

I landed with the Gyeonggi Province kids. We unpacked in silence, stealing glances without quite knowing how to start. They were still more middle-schoolers than men, all awkward elbows and uncertainty. These were the faces I’d wake up with and fall asleep near for the next three years.

When I think about my school years, what stands out is motion. We moved houses, I moved schools, and eventually I moved into a dorm in a county hours from home. Every time I began to belong, I left—or I returned and had to relearn how. In all that, the one thing I could not control was… everything. Maybe that’s why I kept reaching for something that wouldn’t wobble. What kind of life do I want to live? What kind of person am I trying to become? I didn’t have answers yet. I only knew I wanted, someday, to live in a way that felt like mine.