I remember how she chatted about everyone else’s look. She chuckled over thick calves of other girls, over the dirty school uniform of a boy passing by, and over the weird lip color that her teacher wore that day. I remember how the volume of her voice varied – it got larger when she was backbiting the English teacher who did not understand Korean, and smaller when she talked about a girl sitting next row. Her voice often diverted me from the class to her chats and offended me when she talked about my beloved ones.

 

I remember how the red and greasy soup of Jjamppong noodle made me sweat like a pig in the middle of July. The red and orange soup of it always aroused some kind of will to challenge myself – to see how well I could tolerate the spiciness that tortured each and every taste buds on my tongue. Eating Jjamppong noodle in winter wasn’t so difficult since its warmth and spiciness seemed to soothe the coldness from outside which made me pull up my coat’s collar, but having it in summer was solely to have that challenge and test my limits. I just remembered that I had had 짬뽕 in summer once for a different reason – to cure a hangover with that greasy soup which I believed to have ability to coat the walls of my intoxicated stomach)

 

I remember the loud beats from the MAC in Union Square. The loudness of them made me put my hands over my ears but they still squeezed in between my fingers. All the English lyrics that I couldn’t even remember nor understand were telling me that I was now in a different place. I remember that soon after, the high-pitched voices of the MAC’s staffs blended together with the unrecognizable lyrics of the song.

 

I remember the dryness of the long and thin rice from the breakfast that I had at University Center. I was afraid if I would be disappointed by the food on the first day of school, so I tried to make the menu as plain and easy as possible. I ended up putting only scrambled eggs, a single piece of bacon and some rice on my plate. I remember how the first spoon of rice frightened me even before it reached my tongue. The rice particles scattered around the plate because of its dryness, unlike the Korean rice which all particles are stuck together as if there is a glue between them. Having scattered rice in my mouth felt as if I was chewing hundreds of weak rubber pieces and swallowing them. I eventually couldn’t eat about a half of my dish because of that unfamiliar rice and salty side menus. I didn’t know that I would miss the sticky Korean rice and unsalted herbs that I used to mix in one bowl from the first day that I started living in New York.

 

I remember driving on the George Washington bridge with my aunt. From far away I could recognize the Empire State Building and many others, their windows shimmering randomly with sunlight.  Staring at the biggest city from outside made me speechless –the random height of pointy ends of the skyscrapers seemed like the spines from the hedgehogs. Soon after, I started imagining the scenes from the movie I saw – the King Kong jumping and hanging on the thin needle on top of the Empire State Building and helicopters flying around.

I remember that things were different inside than what I saw from outside. The neat arrangement of the buildings of same height seemed to be repeating on every street, making me feel more lost. The arranged, narrow streets made the buildings look even higher as their shadows overlapped with each other’s, hiding the people walking within them. When I got off the car, I felt as if I was framed, surrounded by the building forest that I cannot find a way out.

 

I remember the same dreams about flying that I had numerous times. Living in Seoul for most of my life, I wanted to travel outside the city and go to somewhere else that I had only seen through the screen. In the dreams that always began with me running outside the window of the 14th floor of my apartment, I flew above the sky slowly like an eagle, and looked down at the landscape below me that changed to wherever that I would wanted to go – I saw every part of Seoul that was home to me, and even other countries and places like New York. Viewing the city from outside and not being able to fly between them made me feel restricted, and until then, New York was just a background of dream for me that I could never be really inside of.

I remember how this memory popped up at any moment when I felt that I was really in New York – when the passers-by talked to me in English, when I saw the sign of the Phantom of Opera in Broadway, and even when I missed Seoul. I am now in New York, and this is not a dream.