David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
Five reasons I stayed in Seoul
Courtesy of Robson Hatsukami Morgan
By David A. Tizzard
“Seoul is vast. … And yet, vast as it is, once three million seven hundred thousand people actually try to live in it, it proves no easy place to breathe. Everywhere you go, wherever you arrive, it is packed — stuffed to the seams. Houses keep creeping farther out toward the suburbs, yet year after year they are never enough. There are no jobs. People grow sharp-tongued and sly, the authorities groan under a torrent of abuse, and the newspapers do nothing but scream at the top of their lungs.”
Written in 1976, Lee Ho-cheol’s “Seoul Is Full” offers an unsettling portrait of Korea’s capital: overwhelming in scale, overpopulated to the point of psychic compression, and structurally incapable of supplying enough work or shelter for the bodies it contains. Nearly half a century on, the city’s basic conditions appear to have been normalized. Those of us who have succeeded in becoming Seoulites are, to a certain extent, sympathizers and accomplices in this outrageous transformation.
And yet, the attraction remains strong. We want to be in Seoul. Want to walk its streets. Sit by its river. Duck into one of the small private coffee shops. Traverse its mountains, and pontificate long into the night over far too many bottles of soju before stumbling towards our apartment. Whatever outrageous slogans culture ministries might come up with, Seoul is something that draws many of us to it. It gets into our blood. Becomes part of us just as we become part of it.
Though not original, here are six reasons why Seoul is a place that, despite what everyone else might say, I’m happy to have called it my home for 21 years.
Infrastructure as morality
The subways work. The buses arrive. The internet almost never fails. There is something quietly ethical about a society that treats logistical competence as a civic baseline, creating a shared rhythm which all but eliminates the need for contingency, improvisation, and low-grade panic. You are never ushered onto a bus because your train has broken down nor are subway lines closed for a prolonged period of time. Efficiency is a given.
Of course this logistical competence does not make the people here kinder, but it does make kindness more possible when you know exactly what time you’re going to arrive somewhere. And when you do arrive, as writer Colin Marshall has observed elsewhere, there are toilets and an array of public facilities that you can use with trust. Rarely do you fear the stall or the urinal.
Paradoxical comfort of density
Seoul’s crowding does not demand charisma. You’re not required to be interesting if you don’t want to be. Vibrant colors and personalities are not a prerequisite to be a Seoulite (though, of course, they are accepted.) Instead, you can disappear into the public mass. Kiosks and tablets remove the need for small talk.
Streets of long black paddings provide a merciful blanket of anonymity. The density is almost protective. Familiar routes, repeated faces, and predictable flows install a sense of belonging. And this anonymity is a wonderful collective agreement that lets us pass through the city unexamined and unremarked upon.
Food as care
Meals are fast, hot, functional, and repetitive. My Chinese and Singaporean students are actually quick to comment on how monotone the food here seems to them. But what looks from the outside like culinary monotony is a dependable charm, particularly when the temperatures drop. Modest meals arrive anchored by vegetables, fermented things I can’t name, and hot soups that warm parts of your body you never knew existed.
The meals here refuel you. And the vast army of ajjumas who run the neighborhood restaurants seem pastoral in nature: side dishes appear without being requested, with minimal ceremony. No tipping. You eat, you are fed, you leave intact. Your body ready for what comes next.
Health care as patriotism
I have been admitted to Korean hospitals more than once, and, now with a young family, find myself moving through clinics with a frequency that speaks to my wife’s vigilance: there are sneezes that linger, lungs that sound off, throats that do not quite behave, plus the assorted bodily concerns that polite society prefers to leave unnamed. But the most important thing is the absence of dread that accompanies every visit we make. We go to the doctor here without the background calculation of cost. There’s no suspicion that we are about to be upsold or delayed.
Recently, in preparation for a trip to Nepal, we went in for vaccinations and medication one afternoon. Elsewhere this might be a sort of bureaucratic errand that becomes an exercise in scheduling, billing, and irritation. Not here though. After showing our flight tickets, the nurses informed us the treatment would be free.
There was no grandiose rhetoric attached to it and permanent residents like me, despite the different nose height and eyes, were included with a smile. It was simply what was done. Care is administered because healthy bodies are understood to be a collective good. There’s an ethical patriotism that reveals itself in the pharmacies with men nattering away, clutching their prescriptions and those little bottles of vitamin drinks.
Luxury of leaving things
Seoul’s coffee shops feature a strange sight for some: laptops left open, phones charging, bags draped over chairs. And all this is done while the owners leave, sometimes briefly to the restroom, sometimes long enough to cross the street or disappear entirely. But no one seems especially impressed by this. Imagine such a sight in Paris or London? It’s difficult.
Living in Seoul, you slowly stop guarding your things and start trusting the room. Tables are claimed. Belongings act as placeholders. Strangers respect iPhones. And what emerges is a kind of "maeum spacing": an unspoken agreement about how much psychological distance people are entitled to from one another. This is my table. That’s yours. Don’t touch my stuff, and I won’t interfere with yours. It is a small, repeated mercy. And I love it.
None of these reasons on their own make Seoul exceptional. To be honest, they don’t even make it very easy sometimes. But what they do do is make this place livable in a particular, accumulative way. Seoul is a city whose virtues are hard to capture in a video or a slogan. Even here I fear I’ve undersold it. And while the city’s people are varied, eccentric, generous, and peculiarly charming, this piece is really about the city itself rather than its inhabitants.
The beauty of the place is that nothing really happens. It’s the easing of friction, the reliability of systems. It’s the interactions with the grandfathers and shop owners. It’s family. Trust. Rhythms unlike many other places. You accept the density and, after twenty-one years, what remains is affection. I have a settled attachment with this city, built through repetition. And multiplied by the knowledge that the city will, more often than not, meet me halfway.