"I Have Walked These Streets for Seventy Years. Now I Get Lost on Them."

A man who has lived in Jangchung-dong since 1948 says he now stops at corners he has known all his life, unsure which way to turn. The barbershop, the tobacco shop and the old flea market are gone, and the few places that haven't changed have become his anchors.

I was born in 1948 in a rented room in Jangchung-dong. My parents had come down from Pyongan Province with almost nothing. I have lived within a twenty-minute walk of that room my whole life.

​

When I was a boy, the arena on Dongho-ro was the center of the world. It opened in 1963, the first indoor arena in the country, and on wrestling nights my father and I squeezed in to watch Kim Il. When he finished a match with his headbutt, grown men stood on their seats and shouted. Afterward we ate jokbal in the alley on little stools.

In the 1970s I met my wife in front of Taegeukdang. Everyone met there back then. On Sundays I took my sons to the tteokbokki alley, where a DJ read out letters from students. I bought my first radio secondhand in Hwanghak-dong, from a man who sold everything

from army boots to brass bowls.

These days I go out for a walk and stop at corners, unsure which way to turn. The barbershop where I had my hair cut for thirty years is now a wine bar. The tobacco shop is a bakery with an English sign I cannot read. My friend Byung-ho's old house is a café, and young people sit on its roof taking pictures of each other. The flea market was cleared away years ago. The arena is still standing, but its new outside looks nothing like the one I remember. It is like seeing an old friend in a stranger's clothes.

I don't want to sound like an old man who hates everything new. The young people are polite, and some of them hold the door for me. The streets are cleaner and brighter than they used to be. But when every familiar thing disappears, you stop feeling like you live somewhere. You start to feel like a visitor.

A few things are still the same. Taegeukdang still sells its monaka ice cream. The jokbal still tastes like the jokbal I ate with my father. I go to those places more often now, not because I am hungry, but because they are where I still know where I am.

When I close my eyes, I can still walk the old street from one end to the other. I don't know how much longer anyone will be able to say that.