MORNING CALM TALES Colorful hues of springtime in Korea
My first spring in Korea, way back in 1991, began with a sky that looked wrong. The daylight had turned a dull yellow, as if someone had drawn a thin veil across the sun. Seoul seemed muted, the distant buildings fading into haze. “Yellow spring,” someone told me. At first, I thought it had to do with all the yellow flowers — forsythia — which I saw blooming around my home in Jamsil, as well as Deoksu Palace. But soon enough, I learned it meant the seasonal dust storms that drifted across the peninsula from the deserts of northern China and Mongolia. These days, everyone seems to know when "hwangsa" or "yellow dust" is coming. There are forecasts and smartphone alerts, advisories and people wearing masks. But in the early 1990s, there were no warnings. One morning, the sky simply looked different. Standing there beneath that strange yellow sky, I suddenly thought of a line from T. S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:" “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes …” Eliot was writing about the air pollution of London, of course. But that morning in Korea
Mar 24, 2026By Jeffrey Miller
