BEARING - Maphead - page 22

automaticallysay,“Seattle,”eventhoughIneverspentmorethantwoorthreeweeksayear
there. This was pregrunge, and nobody thought Seattle was a particularly hip place to be
from,soIwasn'tbeingaposeur—Ijustdidn'twanttodealwiththefollow-upofhavingto
explain why, despite all appearances, a white kid was claiming to be Korean. The sociolo-
gist Ruth Hill Useem coined the term “ Third Culture Kids ” to refer to nationality-confused
globalnomadslikeme,because,shesaid,wefuseourbirthcultureandouradoptedculture
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 ex-
actly 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 ima-
ginable: Milford, Laurel, Harrington, Lewes. * To me, half a world away, they were exotic.
Fast-forwardtwodecades.MindyandIwerelivinginSaltLakeCityandhappilysettled,
butIsuddenlyfoundmyselfworkingfromhome,andwerealizedthat,asaresult,wecould
really be living anywhere we liked. New York? Europe? Where would you go if you could
go anyplace? We'd visited Seattle a couple times over the years, and I'd always cleverly
arranged these visits for the summertime, when Seattle likes to fool out-of-towners by not
drizzling three weeks out of every month. Mindy fell for it; she wasn't “imprinted” on the
Pacific Northwest like me, but it was growing on her. I proposed a trip up to Washington
and Oregon to see how we felt about moving there. It was May, and everything—even the
parkinglotoftheextended-stay hotel wherewewereencamped—smelled like rainandce-
dar. Nine days later we put down an offer on a house outside Seattle, where we still live
happily today.