Hothouse

‘I am growing up,’ she thought, taking her taper. ‘I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones,’ and she paced down the long gallery to her bedroom. — Virginia Woolf

Looking back, it was a peculiar aloneness that I felt during those months in Korea—donning the superpower of invisibility. The first night I landed, with only two suitcases in tow, I felt the strange and chilling freedom of finally being alone. This was the homeland of my parents, a city of 10 million strangers. Here my black hair and Korean eyes did not make me different and the clamor of voices in a familiar language, my mother tongue, blurred into a distant hum. Yet, here, no one knew my name. 

Aristotle’s Politics describes isolated people as being “either a beast or a god.” As the blearing lights of Seoul’s skyline came into view through the fog of the bus window, I couldn’t help but wonder: ‘What is this isolation going to make me? A god or a beast?’ I sat in the silence of the packed bus, my signal-less phone idly in hand, overwhelmed, perhaps for the first time since childhood, by the loudness of my own thoughts. 

***

A few weeks into my six months in Seoul, I took the blue city bus from my dorm to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Jongno District. It was an especially cold February day, and my thickest coat from Texas did little to protect me from the biting chill. I was there to see a special exhibition of one of my father’s favorite artists, Lee Jung Seop. The showroom was warm and crowded, filled with only the sound of the clicking of shoes on the polished floors as people silently made their way through the maze of paintings. These works, donated from the personal collection of Samsung’s founder Lee Gunhee after his passing, had never been displayed before. Lee Jung Seop’s signature oxen painted with bold strokes and teeming with vitality hung near the entrance under the soft glow of the lights. 

Lee is beloved as one of the greats in Korean modern art, his most renowned work, Bull, is instantly recognizable to any Korean schoolchild. However, as I made my way through the displays, I noted how the monikers of ‘tragic artist’ and ‘lonely painter’ have haunted his legacy. As the Korean War ravaged the peninsula, Lee was separated from his wife and two sons as his family fled to Japan as refugees. He remained alone in Korea. The letters and postcards that he sent them hung on the walls of the exhibition, revealing his fond doodles and affectionate nicknames. Poverty-stricken and mentally deteriorating, Lee immersed himself in painting and turned to heavy drinking. He died alone from hepatitis at the age of 40. Perhaps it was the loneliness that killed him. 

Towards the middle of the exhibition was a section with dimmed lights, kept low to preserve the art. Curiously, I approached the display and was met with a kind of shiny foil adorned with a careful but abstract sketch of two children embracing, all tangled together.

(Lee Jung Seop, ‘Eunjihwa 19’) 

I learned that during the war, Lee did not have enough money to buy proper supplies to paint, so he etched his art onto the inner foil wrapping of his cigarette packs. Peering into the glass at the delicate carvings, I wondered what desperation, what courage kept him drawing. The more I stared at the etching, the more it stared back at me. I thought of the beast and of the god. It was loneliness that drove Lee mad at the end of his life but it was also loneliness that drove him to create amid despair. How much had he yearned for warmth? For love? Dozens of his foil etchings lined the room– an artistic cry in his war-torn and lonely reality. These were drawings born from necessity, of a pain that demanded to be expressed. A pain that demanded to be shared. 

***

My dorm room was long and skinny, fitting only a bed, a desk, and a closet, with an attached private bathroom and balcony. I lived in a hallway of singles, surrounded on all sides by girls like me, alone in their rooms. I wondered what we looked like to God from above. What would he think of the walls we’ve built? 

Like Lee’s art, those months in Seoul taught me how painful loneliness can be. The times it seems like no one truly hears us or sees us. When our bodies and minds cry out to be known. Aristotle never knew that that isolation in the 21st century is being simultaneously always and never alone. Aristotle didn’t know the beastly isolation of having hundreds of Facebook friends but no one to call. 

Cities, I’ve found, are often the most lonely places on earth. On my daily evening walks through the ritzy financial district in Gwanghwamun, I would stare up at the hundreds of windows on the corporate offices of Seoul, some dark and some filled with golden light. I sometimes saw strangers moving about inside, revealing a strange paradox of exposure and separation. 

I had always believed that a person was lonely because they were alone. But on that first night in my Korean dorm room, when I overheard the boisterous laughs of my neighbor in the room to my right as she called her mom, and later in the quietness of the night, I listened to her muffled sobs of homesickness seeping through the thin wall that separated us, I wondered how I felt so connected to this girl whose face I barely knew. 

Even as I began to make acquaintances with classmates and girls that I shared a hallway with, on most days in Seoul I ate meals alone and took the bus alone and stared at the dark ceiling at 3 AM alone. I had been scared to face myself, to truly be alone with her. She knew too much—my every thought, my every fear. The thing about solitude is that it gives a person superhuman hearing. It is only in the very quiet where you can hear the sound of your own heart beating. 

In high school, my English teacher spent four weeks teaching about the American transcendental movement of the 19th century, assigning Thoreau and Emerson. I remember reading and re-reading “Self-Reliance” and “Nature,” asking myself: What would I become if I set down the burdens of history, tradition, and religion? What did he mean by “man is a god in ruins?” The texts had struck something in my 17-year-old self who could not be herself because she was too busy being who she was supposed to be. When my friends would complain about how boring it was to read about some guy who lived by a lake all by himself, I feigned agreement. I remember being embarrassed about the Emerson quote that I had secretly scrawled down on the front of my planner: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” 

Seoul’s solitude taught me that I love eating alone and hate sleeping alone and that my chest sometimes gets tight when I think too much. It showed me that the cure to loneliness is not simply meeting new people but befriending oneself. The power to hear yourself above the noise is to be divine.