“What is homesickness like when you have many homes? It is a displacement of the body, mind, and heart and a yearning to be in one place when you are in another. Or perhaps, more strangely, a wish to be in many places at the same time. When I first immigrated to the US from Korea, I always longed to be back in my hometown of Seoul, but now, thirty years later, I find myself missing Washington’s cityscape when I travel to Seoul, and desiring to combine both cities that now reside in my heart. You learn to live telescopically, loving one place while your feet are in another, or flying to one destination while your eyes are looking in another, cardinal direction, before realizing, amidst all this back and forth, near-far sickness, that you need to redefine what you understand to be “home”.
