Nostalgia in the Land of the Morning Calm

There are certain moments when the past does not feel distant at all. It arrives quietly, without warning, usually through something small. A song overheard in a café. The smell of rain on a cool autumn morning. The metallic sound of a subway train pulling into a station.

Lately, I have been thinking a great deal about nostalgia. Not as sadness exactly. More like a kind of emotional gravity. The strange pull certain places, songs, and memories continue to have over us no matter how far we travel from them.

Living in Korea for so many years has given me an unusual relationship with time. Sometimes I can walk through my neighborhood in Daejeon early in the morning, before the city is fully awake, and feel as though several different versions of my life are walking beside me at once. The young man who arrived in Seoul in 1990 with two suitcases and very little understanding of what awaited him here still feels close sometimes. I can still picture those crowded subway platforms on Line 2. The newspaper kiosks where I bought my smokes and an occasional Snickers bar. The cassette tapes being hawked by vendors along the sidewalk.

Back then, Korea felt both ancient and unfinished at the same time. Seoul was changing rapidly, but there were still moments when it felt rough around the edges in ways that are difficult to explain now. Olympic banners still lingered in places. Neon signs buzzed over narrow streets. There were handwritten menus taped to restaurant walls and tiny coffee shops where people sat for hours talking quietly while snow fell outside.

I remember riding the subway from Jamsil into Gangnam in the early mornings, sometimes stopping at a bakery before class and thinking, almost in disbelief: Am I really living here? At the time, I assumed those days would last forever.

Of course, nothing does.

That may be why nostalgia hits harder as we grow older. We begin to understand that many moments only reveal their importance after they are gone. While we are living them, we are usually distracted. Busy. Tired. Thinking about tomorrow instead of realizing we are already standing inside what will someday become memory.

Music does this to me more than anything else. A few days ago, I was sitting in Lotteria in Daejeon when The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” came over the speakers. Suddenly I wasn’t in Korea anymore. I was back in 1979 at George Air Force Base in California, eating a burger in a snack bar while that same song played on an LA radio station somewhere in the background. For a moment, both places existed at once. The older man sitting quietly in Korea and the young man listening to rock music in the Mojave Desert were connected by nothing more than a melody drifting through the air.

That’s what nostalgia really is, I think. Not merely remembering the past, but briefly reopening a doorway to who we once were.

Sometimes it happens through old letters. Sometimes through photographs faded around the edges. Sometimes through movies we watched as children on Saturday afternoons in small Midwestern towns that seemed enormous to us back then. A diner. A theater marquee glowing against winter darkness. The sound of your mother calling you home before the streetlights came on.

And sometimes nostalgia arrives through ordinary mornings.

The older I get, the more I appreciate those quiet walks through Daejeon before sunrise. Delivery scooters moving through empty streets. Elderly people already awake. The soft glow of convenience stores. The city slowly gathering itself for another day. There is something comforting about those moments because they remind me how much of life is temporary and continuous at the same time.

Cities change. People age. Entire decades disappear.

Yet certain feelings remain untouched.

I think that is why people hold onto nostalgia so tightly now. In a world that moves too fast, memory becomes a form of shelter. Not because the past was perfect—it wasn’t—but because remembering allows us to reconnect with pieces of ourselves we thought had vanished.

And maybe that is one of the hidden gifts of growing older. You begin to realize your life is not made up only of major events. It is made up of subway rides, old songs, rainy evenings, classroom laughter, handwritten letters, conversations that lasted too long, and moments you did not recognize as important until years later.

Sometimes I think nostalgia is really another word for gratitude.

Gratitude that we were there at all. That we heard the music. That we walked those streets. That for one brief stretch of time, the world belonged to the younger versions of ourselves who believed life was still unfolding endlessly ahead of them.

And somewhere, in some quiet corner of memory, it still is.