Home
It's about two weeks or so before I leave for college. Turns out I can fit most of the life I've lived in this house into a checked suitcase and a backpack. I'm sitting at my desk, fiddling with a bag that just won't close right, when my harabeoji walks in and hands me two USB sticks, meticulously annotated with tiny, scotch taped labels. Their names are Summit 1 and Summit 2.
Plugging them in I find a curated collection of moments from the past 18 years of my life. While my grandpa isn't fond of being in photos, he sure is proud of taking them. As I scroll through I relive 18 years in a few minutes. There's the big moments, the awards, the graduations. But there's the little things, too, that my grandpa felt important enough to include with the limited 8gb he had available. My uncle and I playing Lego Batman, my brother and I with cotton candy smeared across our faces, my first ever hockey goal.
He tells me to remember it all - to remember as much as I can. Because it's going to go fast from here, and it can be easy to forget home.
Gramps is a pretty stoic guy. His hands are calloused from years of labour and he hails from the generation of Korean guys that are really good at being emotionally moderate. But this time there's something hiding behind that quiet smile he's always wearing - and I just can't put my finger on it.
Soon I'm on that plane to SFO. My first quarter of college breezes through and I find myself back in Calgary for winter break.
I've forgotten a little bit about what it's like to live in Calgary. Stepping out of the airport I'm immediately given a Canadian welcome by freezing winds and about a foot of snow. I pass by buildings that were frameworks for some of my earliest memories. As soon as I enter the house my grandpa hands me a fresh bowl of crisp, freshly peeled apples - his way of saying I love you. I manage to get in a quick "what's up" before my brother and grandma rush out in a desperate flurry to rush to school.
In essence, I relive the same day that I lived for 18 years of my life. I'm sucked back in to the pas de deux of our household and the rhythms of its dance. And yet the household motion seems glacial to me. Its steps feel a measure too late, like a sort of chaotic syncopation. Home feels disorienting - and slow.
As I reconnect with old high school friends many ask me how college is. I haven't really been sure how to answer that question; it feels like a much bigger question about how life in general is.
For starters, college feels fast. I usually wake up and experience a blur: gym, classes, library, dining hall, group study sessions, basketball runs. There's little concept of chill at Stanford, and you can definitely feel it in the bones of every building, the tendons of every conversation, and the breath of campus itself.
Sometimes the swiftness of campus isn't a good thing. Stanford is a place where opportunities are thrown around everywhere and ambition thrives, and while I understand trying to make the most of it, some people seem to take it a little too far. I tend to dislike the overzealous aspiring VCs the most, the ones who talk to you for your corporate value and post about some dog tinder startup's series C funding on instagram. And there are the nerds, but the grating, irritating kind - the ones that straddle the fine line between passion and arrogance. And while we're airing out grievances; I find it miraculous that the dining halls can coat chicken drumsticks in every conceivable sauce and still manage to make every iteration as bland and sawdust-esque as the last.
For all the complaints I can manage, I don't think I can say that Stanford, or college, or youth in general - whatever it is I'm experiencing - isn't special.
Life feels fast. But for the most part, I think it's fast in a good way. The kind of way you feel when biking downhill with a breeze pushing you forward. You feel like you're flying, passing by different houses and stores you never knew existed, exploring a little slice of the world. But you still go slow enough to take in your surroundings and appreciate them.
I've now slept on the floor of a Berkeley dorm and trudged half a mile through a flash flood, all just to witness Stanford completely blow a 21-10 lead in big game. I've sat in on countless lectures on countless topics and discovered firsthand that there's a club for you to learn just about anything you want to - from fixing your bike to making your own shitty NFTs to launching stuff into orbit. I've learned how to ferment my own rice koji, from a third generation soy sauce master no less.
I've done and learned a lot here, and I feel that I've enjoyed every moment of it. Everything everywhere seems to be happening all at once, substituting monotony and boredom for chaotic entropy.
A few hours after finals are done everyone seems a little bit relieved. Dining halls aren't empty anymore - there's lots of very happy people eating lots of very unhappy chicken drumsticks. Libraries are now overrun, not by stressed, sweatpant-clad students, but by people playing the new OG season of Fortnite. My roommate is one of them, and he tells me all about his duo partner's terrible object permanence.
As I pack for my flight back to Calgary I notice the two neglected USB sticks. I scroll through and find one of the rare photos my grandpa is in himself. He's standing in front of a mountain of barbecue short-rib, grinning from ear to ear, with a childhood version of my brother and I.
College life isn't entirely perfect, and sometimes a new rejection or a failure pops up in my life. Then a tiny part of me wishes I was back home, eating barbecue with my grandma's laugh and my grandpa's quiet smile as company.
But home isn't Calgary anymore: it’s the cramped dorms of FloMo, those stuffy sandstone lecture halls off of main quad. It’s this fast paced, eclectic rollercoaster. And I’m not sure how to feel about that.
I miss the old maple in the backyard of my home in Calgary. It would shed its fiery leaves with each gale, and its roots seemed sturdy and grounded. But the Earth around it has shifted and cracked from the time I first introduced myself to it. Its bark bones bear the scars of some trimmings that happened last year. I failed to notice its slight shriveling over the decades.
Childhood felt permanent, like the earthen roots of that maple seem. And yet I find chunks of childhood withering in my memory, as gradual as the decay of the leaves and as swift as the head of an axe.
Home is as transient as foliage and branches are. And that fact can feel wrong, almost paradoxically unnatural, especially when it comes to the only things I've ever known: that one house, or that consistent routine, or that reliable familial bond.
Out of the blue my brother told me that my 3 month absence in the house felt like a year. With one swift goodbye at convocation what home used to be ceased to exist, and something new came along.
I think it's coming to terms with that which feels most difficult. Especially when I visit Calgary and have to open the door to what home used to be, stay in the room that was once my room.
Anything that stays constant tends to be extremely valuable. Pi lets us study circles and spheres, which I'd say are pretty valuable shapes. The fact that energy in a system is constant gives rise to a miraculous number of physics equations. Invariants let us create unifying theorems and descriptions of the chaotic systems they describe.
We seek family rituals, special places, and even relationships to hold on to, things that we can always turn to no matter how entropic life becomes. And in some way, they help us describe that entropic life. When we're asked who we are we often identify the very things that feel constant in our lives: what family we've chosen, what our profession is. And when we ache over the loss of what is not the same, part of what we're confronting is that feeling of being in the dark, of losing something that helped us define our life a little more clearly.
Despite our crave for constants, humans seem to be, by nature, filled with dynamicism and growth. We follow bizarre paths in life, zigging left this way and dancing to the right that way. If anything, we should be comfortable with change and the growth that usually accompanies it. And it seems like that growth is even more valuable than the constants we seek; I, and many others, certainly like to think that we're comfortable with change and fast environments.
And yet we often get this weird feeling that we wish we could go back. I feel this is what nostalgia is closest to - some desire to want to go back to how things were.
I'm not deluded by a sense of nostalgia, and I recognize that clawing my way backwards is futile. Nor would I wish to go back. I feel a complete freedom to define my youth for what it is. I've found a group of amazing people I feel truly gifted to call my friends. I get to experience and learn whatever I feel like, which is a privilege very few people are lucky enough to ever exercise. If given the choice between going home and staying in college, I'd choose college every time.
But I can't help but wonder sometimes - wouldn't it be nice to go back to childhood? Would I appreciate that childhood magic, that feeling that every single undiscovered corner of the world held some sort of whimsy? Would I live a fuller childhood if I was cognizant of what growing up meant?
I think to myself that this is the source of sadness I feel when I wish to be back home, that this is what my grandpa was hiding behind his uneasy smile.
It's a strange sadness derived from things coming to an end. It's a sadness that emphasizes missed opportunity. All those little disagreements and temper tantrums in childhood felt so significant then, but they wash away and remain as transient as everything else about home is. You almost feel like you could have appreciated it more and not have worried so much about the insignificant, unhappy moments.
Change will come. And embracing dynamicism feels like a hard thing to do. But I feel this is how we live to the fullest. To live in the moment, appreciate all of the little things and do our best to remember, in some vivid detail, what fills our hearts at any given moment on this jagged rollercoaster. To put our hands up and let us shoot right and zag left, to feel almost weightless as we fly upwards.
Sometimes, though, it's nice to pause for a moment and remember those things that once brought us joy.
When I look at the photos on those USB sticks I feel transported to the moment it happened. I can almost smell the smoky barbecue, hear the laughter, and taste the spring air.
I'll never experience home in that same sense again. But thanks to grandpa I can feel what home used to be, with everything that I do.
Somehow, that seems like enough.