I’d like to take a detour from the summer busking chronicles to explain a bit about how I got here. During the two years following my college graduation, I pursued one of my other dreams. I lived in a foreign country for an extended period of time. I secured a spot teaching English in South Korea, and spent two years living, teaching, and adventuring. Accompanying me were high hopes of ‘finding myself’ in this life-altering journey.
During my stay in Asia, I took advantage of national holidays and the contract breaks to travel not only around Korea, but also other countries in the neighborhood. At the end of my second year teaching, I took the long way home. This month-long trek took me through Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Adding to my earlier jaunts to Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan, I’m happy to have completed a diverse circuit of Asia.
At the time of writing this, I’ve been back in the U.S. for about 4 months. I’m still trying to hold on to that piece of my identity as a world traveler. Time goes on and I have more time to process and absorb all that has happened. I’m continually wowed by all I was able to see and the people I was able to meet. It feels like 10 years of adventure packed into 2.
But the point of this post is not to be a humble-brag about traveling. My point is that although on paper, my travels were a marvelous world adventure, there were still plenty of times when I felt lonely, out of place, and aimless. I learned that travel itself is not a cure for the creeping existential thoughts about who we are. And why we are on this planet.
Quick side note before I begin – this is an original song of mine that I wrote to commemorate the end of my time in Korea!
Life as an English Teacher in South Korea
I’ll acknowledge there were tons of benefits to my time in Korea. I got to work with children and help them build valuable skills for the globalizing world. My hours and responsibilities were not nearly as rigorous as full-time teachers in the U.S. Clocking in around 40-45 was pretty standard. I was provided a small apartment, rent-free, in one of the most captivating cities in the world. I had the opportunity to meet tons of friends, Korean and international, who were open minded travel spirits like me.
But there were also things that really got to me. At the end of the day, I was an outsider in a foreign country. I didn’t have much power to determine the type or schedule of classes I was teaching.
Korea, like other parts of East Asia, suffers from seriously poor air quality during spells of the year. This made it uncomfortable to be outside and really decreased the quality of life. It also got tiresome to be bustling around in huge cities, constantly hemmed in by skyscrapers, traffic, and fellow pedestrians.
Overall, I’m incredibly thankful for my time in Korea and I don’t want to paint it in a bad light. I just wish to present a balanced image for those interested, and not fall into the trap of romanticizing it now that it’s over. It was my dream at the time, and I’m happy to have lived it.
However, even something as bizarre as starting a completely new life in a foreign country can start to feel mundane once the months pass by. You fall into a routine like anywhere else.
After a time it became clear to me that simply ‘being a foreigner in Korea’ was not my end-all be-all life ambition. There were limits to how far I could grow professionally there. Also, I would always be a foreigner in an insular society.
The Limits of Travel Experience
When I visited other countries in Asia, I viewed my precious traveling time as a true carpe-diem pursuit. I idealized it as my ultimate goal and ‘what I was supposed to be doing with my life’ in that situation. But after a time, even that started to feel a little hollow. You always hear the story of the young adventurer dropping everything to pursue life in faraway lands. They have a larger-than-life experience and find purpose in connection with humanity and nature.
I definitely had moments like that. I stood on mountaintops, ancient temples, and beautiful beaches and captured those moments in my memories forever. However, I realized that building a life just connecting moments like that doesn’t have intrinsic value.
I did some of my traveling with friends, but a fair portion of it was solo. During the low moments, I felt totally alone and isolated in foreign countries. I felt like an imposter trying to glean pleasure off an idealized version of life in other countries, a version of life that doesn’t really exist.
I could spend money to eat the local food and see all the landmarks, but that didn’t mean I was really experiencing life as a local. I could meet plenty of other travelers along the way and connect about our ventures. Yet after a while, all the surface conversations about where you’re from and where you’ve been don’t build any kind of meaningful relationship. I realized that in this quest to ‘experience’ all that I can, I would always come up empty.
A truly satisfying life cannot be built just on ‘experiencing’. This is why I did not ‘find myself’ traveling Asia. Did I really think there’d be some idealized version of myself out there waiting for me in the rice paddies of Vietnam, the mountaintops of Thailand, or sleek city streets of Singapore? That once I ‘found’ this illusory doppelgänger, I’d have my identity sorted out forever and I could coast through the rest of my existence? No. There is no version of myself that I could simply find.
It’s About Building, Not Finding
I realized that to have a truly satisfying life, my identity is something I would have to build. There’s no simple finding, or easy way out. Life is meaningful when you work on building yourself every day. Building yourself into someone you can be proud of. Building by investing in skills, relationships, and places. Not by flitting around the world and gleaning snapshot experiences of other people and places.
I haven’t tried to put this all into words before, but I can really feel that it’s something I need to do. Of course, I am immensely grateful for my travels. There’s no other way I would have rather spent the past two years. In fact, writing this article and going back through my photos has still made me very grateful for all my travel opportunities.
Maybe this was the lesson after all. Maybe it was necessary to go out and experience as much as I could, to realize that experiences in themselves wouldn’t lead to ultimate satisfaction.
Overall, I still think travel is an amazing thing, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone considering it. Teaching English certainly has its ups and downs, and I stand by it as an immersive way to experience another country. I just want to emphasize that traveling won’t solve all your problems. You won’t find some enlightened version of yourself out there on a mountaintop. Life is about building yourself.
That’s why I’ve set off on this next phase of my journey – pouring myself into music. No matter where this goes, I’ll be happy at the end for giving my all for something I believe in.
By pursuing music back here in the U.S., I can be satisfied in what I’m building, even though it’s just as murky as a path. The travel spirit has still not left me though, and I’m thinking about ways to take this music show on the road. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for the next update!
Before you go, check out a musical update of my busking progress here!