MORNING CALM TALES Korea's winter cold clings different

Pedestrians carry umbrellas during snowfall, published in The Korea Times Jan. 4, 2003. Korea Times Archive

By Jeffrey Miller

• Published Jan 25, 2026 5:00 AM KST
• Updated Jan 25, 2026 6:27 PM KST

My first winter in Seoul taught me the meaning of warmth — by taking it away. I had grown up with Midwest winters, and thought I knew cold, but this was different — less about endurance than attention.

In 1990, my apartment in Jamsil looked solid enough from the outside — concrete, utilitarian, built to last — but inside it held the cold. Not drafty, exactly, just unyielding. The windows were sealed tight, yet the chill lingered in corners and walls, settling quietly overnight. One morning, I went to retrieve my clothes from the laundry room and found ice layered on the walls and windows, my clothes frozen stiff in the unheated space. It startled me — not the cold itself, but how calmly it had arrived while I slept.

Then there was ondol.

I had heard of it before but didn’t yet understand it — not really. The first night, the floor began to warm, slowly and invisibly, the heat moving beneath me the way it was meant to. I sat on the floor because that was where the heat lived. The chill retreated upward, lifting from my bones in stages. The room stayed cold. The air offered no comfort. But below me, the floor held its warmth, steady and unhurried.

Outside, winter ruled without sentiment. Mornings meant a brisk walk to the subway station, collar turned up, breath hanging in front of me like a thought I hadn’t finished yet. The streets were sharp with cold and noise. The sky often hung low and hazy, smoke drifting upward from apartment buildings, blurring the hard winter light.

By January 1991, before the Gulf War had begun, there was a strange stillness to the nights. Tension hung in the air — talk of Iraq, of oil prices, of what might come next. Neon signs were dimmed or switched off earlier than usual: whether by mandate or caution, I never quite knew. Streets felt darker, quieter. Smoke drifted upward into the winter haze, and the city seemed to hold its breath, conserving light and heat.

Years before delivery apps brought piping-hot food to wherever you lived or worked, Korea’s original delivery drivers — serving Chinese and Korean restaurants — had already mastered the streets. Metal boxes were balanced precariously as they navigated icy roads, one hand on the handlebars, the other steadying the load. Some motorcycles had cold-weather modifications: padded covers, gloved handlebars, small human solutions to a hard season.

Those first weeks of my first winter in Korea, lunch was often in a drafty hole-in-the-wall restaurant tucked inside Gangnam Station, the kind of place you stepped into because you were cold and hungry, not because you meant to. A kerosene heater stood in the center of the room, its metal sides ticking as it burned. A brass kettle sat on top, always boiling, sending up a steady plume of steam. The air carried the mixed scent of kerosene and kimchi. Barley tea was poured into small cups, warming your hands before you drank, the steam easing the dryness from the air.

The warmth stayed behind when you left, but the smell of kerosene followed you. Outside, it rode the air through restaurants and cafés, clung to stairwells and bars, followed you down side streets. Delivery drivers raced through traffic with plastic cans strapped to the backs of their motorcycles, the fuel sloshing dangerously with every turn — heat in motion, necessity on two wheels.

In other places, especially older restaurants, the heat came from squat, barrel-shaped yeontan (charcoal briquette) heaters set low to the floor. The coal burned slowly, stubbornly, radiating warmth that gathered around ankles and knees. Coats stayed on. Scarves were loosened but not removed. Bowls arrived quickly. Kimchi jjigae, sour and alive. Sundubu jjigae, soft and volcanic. Yukgaejang, dark and restorative — the kind of soup that reached places the cold had already claimed. You ate with purpose, letting the heat do its quiet work.

Not far from Gangnam Station, outside places like the New York Bakery, young women stood shivering in miniskirts, bare legs reddened by the cold, while young men waited in thin jackets, scarves looped loosely around their necks. Hands jammed into pockets. Shoulders hunched. Seoul street cool held firm, even when the temperature dropped into the single digits. Winter might bite, but style endured.

I marveled at the market vendors near my apartment complex — mostly middle-aged Korean women bundled in layers of padded jackets and scarves, cheeks ruddy from the cold, sitting low to the ground behind shallow bowls of fruit and vegetables. They barely seemed to notice the winter, hands moving steadily as they rearranged potatoes and apples. I haggled as best I could in my limited Korean, not because I expected to win, but because it was what was expected. We performed the ritual together — numbers, laughter, a shake of the head — until the price settled where it always seemed meant to land.

Hurrying through the streets of Jongno, Myeong-dong and Insa-dong, bundled tight against the wind, I felt like I was back home in Chicago. The same cold pressing in. The same forward lean into it. But I wasn’t home. I was here, moving through a city that carried its age differently. The cold stripped Seoul down to its bones — stone and concrete, old shop fronts, their wooden facades worn and weary, signs painted in Hangeul, neon buzzing overhead, some letters dark, others flickering. Nothing about it was romantic or inviting. And yet beneath the grit, there was a quiet beauty in how the city endured it, in how people moved through winter without complaint, without pause, as if this, too, had been practiced.

Some evenings, I bought roasted sweet potatoes from a vendor just inside the entrance to my apartment complex. They were roasted in an oven converted from a steel barrel, the fire stoked with scraps of wood. He wrapped them in newspaper, the ink smudging onto my fingers, and I peeled back the paper as I walked through the labyrinth of apartment blocks, picking at the steaming flesh, relishing the simple pleasure of a winter treat. Other nights it was fish-shaped bread — bungeoppang — filled with red bean paste. I cradled one in my hands and broke it open as I walked, the filling still molten inside. The warmth was brief, but it stayed with me.

Korea in winter was cold everywhere — on the streets, in stairwells, in the air itself. Heat came anyway, rising from floors, from yeontan and kerosene, from brass kettles and meals eaten close together.

That winter, I was often cold. But inside, something was warming — quietly, steadily — filling with memories I didn’t yet know would last.

Jeffrey Miller is the author of several novels, including "War Remains," a story about the early days of the Korean War, and "No Way Out," a thriller set in Seoul in 1990.