Seoul Searching
My story starts like many others; I am a simple-minded kid who stayed home all his life. I never left California before, heck, I never left Southern California. To this day, I still have no idea what chain of events led me to that plane, but I am sure it had to do something to do with an identity crisis I have dealt with for nearly my whole life. I always had an irking feeling that I never understood myself. Sure, I was happy and comfortable, but when you begin chipping at the external things in my life, I was naked and lacked confidence. One day, I walked past a study abroad opportunity for a film school, and the sheer idea of studying abroad amazed me.
So one thing led to another and I enrolled at Dong Ah Institute of Media and Arts (DIMA), a technical college in South Korea that focuses on media design, production, and communication. I never actually had an interest in other cultures, but the idea of going to technical college for media production appealed to me. At this point, I never thought that I would be leaving all my loved ones. That is until the night before I left, my sister woke me up in the middle of the night and cried on my blanket. This seemed so silly because I knew that I would be back home in three months, but I didn’t say anything. I hugged her and drove to the airport with my eldest brother. We arrived in LAX with minor traffic delays and he dropped me off. I tightly packed my 176 pound brother into my arms, and a sensation of sadness welled over me. It seemed that my sister understood this trip more than I did.
While on the 13 hour plane ride, I watched a variety of movies. One movie that I remember vividly was “Interstellar.” There was a moment in the movie where Cooper leaves Earth on the Endurance, a spacecraft, and finds a new habitable planet for future humans. The parallelism between the Cooper leaving his family and my life made me cry. The flight itself was smooth, and I arrived in S. Korea in about 13 hours. Nobody tells you about the moment you step out of the airport, and you realize that you are no longer in familiar territory. There was this small moment of silence, when I realized that, “Everything familiar is gone.”
The first few weeks were rough. On top of not knowing the language, not knowing anybody, and being so far away from home; we, the American exchange students, were responsible for working a part-time job along side being full-time students. There were moments where I felt like just flying back because the workload and my inability to vent things out. I admit there were some weekends where I stayed indoors just to simply collect myself and gather my thoughts. Surprisingly, it seemed as if the Korean students enjoyed having American students to practice their English. I knew that I had to leave and experience the beauty of the unknown.
There were a few other students from the U.S. and although we weren’t initially comfortable with each other; over time, our relationship developed and we went on all sorts of adventures together. Moments we shared ranged from getting completely drunk at random nightclubs and sleeping in a bathhouse to visiting the eastern and western coast of Korea. We also hiked on one of the tallest mountains in Korea, visited various temples, and explored the DMZ. Just simply being around these people pushed me to see the beauty of everything. They were curious souls who searched for an adventure. Sharing these memories and experiences with those people helped realize the importance of pushing forward and enjoying the moment.
From a technical standpoint, this trip taught me many filmmaking skills, such as color grading and non-linear editing. Through my courses, I acquired an intermediate understanding of a few video production programs, Final Cut X and Da Vinci Resolve. It was with these new tools, that I worked my first documentary alongside a team of Korean and American students. Sadly, this documentary is forever lost in a hard drive within LAX storage rooms, but the memories of producing it will remain with me.
At the end of the day, I might’ve not learned some ultimate truths about myself, but I definitely learned the importance of taking the first step towards my passion. If I stayed in California, then I would’ve been denied all of these beautiful experiences. I simply learned to not live my life in fear and comfort( my comfort zone), but to strive towards enjoying today. It is empowering to realize that I have some sort of control of my own life. I always thought I had to find myself, but this trip made me realize that I have to make myself.
