On an early summer night, looking up at the night sky filled with bursting fireworks celebrating America's Bicentennial, I lost myself for a moment in wistful memories.
In the spring of the year I turned twenty-one, as I was walking across campus, a poster pinned to the bulletin board in the main plaza caught my eye. It announced a contest organized by a local government in South Korea to select college students for a research delegation to New York aimed at boosting local tourism.
The day the document screening results were announced, the night I received the news of my interview results. How could I ever forget those moments when my young heart trembled with nervous anticipation, completely unaware that what lay ahead would change the course of my entire life, no matter how many years may pass? To make a long story short, after pushing through fierce competition and multiple rounds of selection, I joined the team as its youngest member and set foot on American soil for the very first time. It was the early morning of July 4, 2012, at JFK International Airport, and by coincidence, that day also happened to be Independence Day.
Over the next two weeks, we split into several teams and thoroughly explored Manhattan, the very heart of New York City, a world-famous tourist destination. Even now, I still feel a lingering regret that I, who had almost zero interest in food or shopping, happened to be assigned to that team and had to spend all day exploring vintage shops, department stores, and all kinds of famous eateries. But back then, I was too young, and the opportunity was far too precious, so I didn't even dare to complain about a single thing.
Indeed, every single day of those twelve or thirteen days shook every cell of my body and soul from the inside out, awakening me to my core. Even the filthy trash cans covered in graffiti, the poetic signs held by homeless addicts, and the ordinary display shelves of worn-out grocery stores pounded relentlessly on the doors of my tired old world in real time.
Sneaking into Cooper Union, a small but world-renowned college in downtown Manhattan, famous above all for granting full-tuition scholarships to all undergraduates, and wandering through its buildings and classrooms was in a similar context. It was also for the same reason that, when our group crossed the Brooklyn Bridge together, everyone else’s gaze was drawn to Manhattan’s breathtaking nighttime skyline and towering skyscrapers, while I alone couldn’t tear my eyes away from a high school building right beside the bridge. 'How could I get into that school?' 'How would my life have turned out if I had gone there?' Surely, those people from the local government hadn’t spent all that money to bring me all the way to America just to have me asking questions like that, yet I had no idea how to calm that nameless surge rising within me like an earthquake, like a revolution.
Well, don't people sometimes do strange things when pushed to extreme stress? Caught between forcing myself through the exhausting daily schedule on the outside and wrestling with a fierce longing to escape my old world on the inside, unable to go either way, I was growing increasingly gaunt. And eventually, one night, after getting thoroughly drunk with the older members of the team, I went back the next day, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, to seek out the homeless man I had encountered a few days earlier, the man who had been holding that poetic sign. And I put every last bit of money I had into his tin can. I still remember the startled look on his face as he asked, “Are you serious?”
And then, turning the corner of a street off Fifth Avenue to part with that moment forever, I genuinely felt like I was going to collapse. Even now, more than a decade later, it is still not easy to explain exactly why I did what I did. But what’s interesting is that from then until the end of the trip, my mind became miraculously peaceful and settled.
It might have been the day before our final night in Manhattan when we were finally given half a day of free time. From early morning, the older members scattered toward famous NYC landmarks, those iconic spots straight out of movies and TV shows. Having spent two weeks visiting shopping centers and flashy restaurants that didn't interest me much, I, too, had countless places I longed to see. Yet, for reasons I can't quite name, I chose to surrender them all, following a quiet pull in my heart.
Instead, I headed straight for Times Square, sat right in the middle of it, and read a book, sipped coffee, and wrote. Yes, maybe I hadn’t really wanted to travel anywhere at all. All I truly wanted was probably to live there, if only for a little while.
Back then, I could never have imagined that, more than a decade later, I would be living in that very country, in a life much like the one I have today. Nor had I ever dared to hope that a miracle disguised as coincidence would one day cast me onto the stage of this life. Yet on this early summer night, beyond the dark sky where the fireworks were fading away, I finally began to sense, as I gently traced the arc of the years I had lived through, that this was less a matter of pure coincidence than a trick played by a mischievous God.
In that moment, my eyes met the eyes of Him, who had been watching over me all along, and we exchanged playful, knowing smiles, each seeing right through the other.
And I prayed once again. 'Dear God, even ten years from now, please cast me once again into a landscape I wouldn’t dare even imagine. There, too, I will live each day as a celebration of being alive, and I will live it with a depth of feeling far beyond what You could ever expect of me. And to make that happen, today, I will do everything within my power.'
© Text & Photos by Tao Jung