On 2022
Sunrise at Donghae Beach, Gangwon Province of South Korea.
A day with our dad's side grandparents: clam kalguksu (knife-noodles) and my grandpa's plushie.
Shadowing my dad on his rounds, endoscopy, and bariatric procedure at his new hospital. Falling in love with Jinro soju. 
Family photoshoot with our grandmother, THE Roni Han.
I don't know if I have any strict life mottos that I live by, but I suppose I do have some ways of living that I stick to. Something I firmly believe in is that we need to look back in order to see where we are and to see where we are going. I remember it was the day before I headed back to Korea to be with family during the winter of my freshman year of high school, when my brother sent me an email with a writing template for questions to reflect upon as the year ended. I wish I still had the email, but I lost access to my high school (and middle school) Gmail account because I forgot to back up my files — by far one of the biggest regrets I have in my entire life. (So much for looking back to see where I am.) I forget what the questions were exactly; all I remember was that the document was several pages long and that I barely finished the first page of questions. But from that winter onward I've always tried to take the time to organize my thoughts at the end of each year, and in doing so reorient myself for the new year — in this case, for 2023.
This is the first time, however, that I'm sharing my year recap in public. Which I suppose could defeat the purpose of self-reflection, since some things are better left kept to myself. But I write this to the 15 people who have come across this blog and to my future self with the hope of reaching (all of) you, connecting with you in this invisible cyberspace, and sharing with you what I've realized from my 21 years of living, breathing, eating, sleeping, and repeating on Earth. Please bear with me, this will be long and it might not make much sense. But at least that's how you know it was written by me.
Last photos of 2022.
Stopping by a food stand for fish cake (odeng) and tteokbokki, Pachinko selling at a subway Kyobo bookstore.
Lunch gathering with my extended family on our dad's side.
Meeting a priest my brother worked with who also works in the North Korea field at a church in Paju (near the Korean border).
A day with our grandmother's: the two Korean-American grandma-grandson duos of Berkeley, watching our grandma's favorite Korean music variety show over suspiciously ripe pineapples.
I've said this to my family and I'll say it again: 2022 has felt like such a long year. Maybe it's the fact that I quite literally made a trip across the world, starting in South Korea to Berkeley, California for the school year to Tempe, Arizona for a dragonboat race to Central Europe (Budapest, Bratislava, Vienna, Prague) for an orchestra tour to South Korea for visiting family to Berkeley, California and finally back to South Korea, right where I started. Maybe it's the fact that I went out and did the things I genuinely wanted to try in college, like hip-hop dance (I learned that the way I think I look and the way I actually look could not be more different), or lab research on campus (I learned that mice are just as disgusting as they are cute), or being an RA in a freshman dorm (I learned that I'm an amazing person, I just need to fix my judgmental resting face), or taking a class in astronomy (I learned that astronomy is harder than I thought, and that in college it isn't about the class you take but who you take it with), or playing in a college orchestra and going on tour just like my brother did (I learned that being in the back of the stage where no one in the audience can see me isn't too bad if it means I still get to play great music), or working at a bookstore and flipping through archives of Asian American history and literature (I learned that while I love the texture (no pun intended) of books, I hate getting the dust from old books on my fingers).
(Maybe it's the fact that that was the longest sentence ever.) Or maybe it was finding out that my grandmother was diagnosed with gastric cancer in January and that she would undergo surgery, which meant that a third of her stomach was going to be removed — a gastrectomy. Maybe it was seeing my mom's text two days before my final exams saying that my remaining grandfather suddenly passed away in the locker room during his weekly golf outing.
What I really think it's about is the fact that I am now 21 years old (21 YEARS OLD) — a full "adult," according to the United States — and I am just starting to see how everything really is happening everywhere all at once.
In a way, I suppose that by having lived what felt like a long year, I truly lived the year. Though in the everyday moments I wouldn't have realized that. I remember walking with my family on December 31st by the frozen Hantan River in Korea (it was like a scene in Frozen, one of the best movies of all time), looking up and seeing the sun shining through the clouds un-parting in the winter sky, and thinking to myself, "Wait, so it's still 2022?!"
The irony in the long-ness of 2022 is that it's helped me see just how short our time to live really is. After visiting my grandfather's grave near the small countryside village where he grew up, I got some sense of a closure and slowly began to see how there really isn't enough time in the world to live all the lives that we want to live. More specifically, there isn't enough time to live all the lives that we want to live, in the way that we'd like to live it — in the way that makes us comfortable. Maybe my dad felt some of this too, because for the first time in like ever he actually wrote us Christmas cards. (Talk about a Christmas miracle.) I guess the years can feel long and the days even longer, but life is short and we age all too fast. Life is too short to not say the things we mean most to the people we mean to say the most to. I remember I would toil over how to write (and whether I even could/should write) birthday letters to my parents and especially my older brother, who would always write me long (not to mention illegible) letters. But perhaps it isn't even about what we say but the fact that we are trying to say what we mean and feel, the very act itself, that is what's most important.
Pictures from my grandfather's grave in Yeongdong County, North Chungcheong Province.
As I write this blog post the night before the first day of classes after winter break, I know that I probably missed some important details as to how I got here, to this moment and to this thought. And I am more than okay living with that, because I've at least gotten this far in my writing. I just need to say one last thing, which is what I realized as I took an edible and watched Journey of the Universe, a film that my high school philosophy teacher helped produce, the night before I started RA training for the spring:
We are all headed in the right place, both in time and in space.
If there's anything I learned from taking a class on the Bible and a class on astronomy at the same time, it's that at the end of the day people all yearn for the same things in life: to trace back and write our own history. In my opinion, what we do with the gift of life is ultimately an attempt to either consciously or subconsciously answer the two questions, where do I come from, and where am I going. In a cosmic sense, we quite literally come from star stuff, like that one Carl Sagan quote. The carbon, nitrogen and oxygen that form our bodies are the same carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the first generations of stars that eventually exploded in supernovae, propelling elements across space and time. We come from the Universe itself, and in the same way we're headed wherever our Universe takes us.
And the Bible is arguably the greatest origin story of all time to answer these two questions, of where we come from and where we are going. Where did we come from? God. Where are we headed? Where God is. Something along those lines. The way the Bible was written makes it clear that God's role in the Universe is really to distinguish between good and bad. Not in a moral sense, but good and bad meaning order and chaos, enthalpy and entropy.
I suppose this is where my Christian-ness gets tested again, in terms of how much I actually believe and live by what the Bible teaches. But putting the issue of faith aside, these two months after my grandfather, the most devoted and devout man I knew, passed have made me think that things do happen for a reason. And I'd like to think that I came all this way in my 21 years of living to be here, right here, in this moment, realizing the directionality of the Universe. Life is precious, and I can't quite explain it, but I have a feeling that the Universe is going in the right place.
So on that note, I plan to take 2023 simply as it comes. I do have some New Year resolutions, like eating more leafy greens every day and spending more time being outside just for the sake of being outside. I also think I have something of a vision for the future (for the time being) as well as something of a mission that I want to dedicate my life towards. (Though I'm sure it's bound to change along the way.) And I definitely don't mean to just spend my time as it comes passively. Regardless, in this new year I hope to trust more in the things that happen the way they do. I jokingly told a friend as we were playing a board game that I don't believe in luck, I believe in trust — but it's true. I'm an extremely lucky person to be born in the environment and body that I have today, I always am grateful about that. Yet in terms of living, I'd rather have my life be about faith and trust than luck, which I think are two different things. Call it the Universe, call it God, call it biology and evolution, call it quantum entanglement, call it whatever you want. But I think we all mean the same thing. We come from somewhere and we're headed somewhere too, and I'm confident that eventually we'll end up at the place we were meant to be — both in time and in space.
So for my new year "resolution," I'm going to try stepping into life — into organic chemistry and discrete mathematics, into college spontaneity, into an unrequited crush, into family across time zones and continents, into literally everything my mind and heart stick to, with more trust, hope and faith. The universe didn't expand 13.8 billion years just for me to not trust where it's going. I'm sure it's heading somewhere — it's taking us somewhere — and I believe that whatever direction it's heading, it will be good.
Picture of the sunset my mom nudged me to take on the car ride back from the Church in Paju.
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