(It’s me: a tourist, away from home)

Here’s the final itinerary. I realized that the dates are off by about a day or so in previous posts, so this should be correct:

• Seoul (April 24-27)
• Kunsan, via Daejeon (April 27-30)
• Back to Daejeon (April 30-May 2)
• Seoul sightseeing (May 3)
• Ganghwado island sightseeing (May 4)
• Golf (May 5)
• Visit to the International School (May 6)
• War Museum, Great Uncle, last dinner with random cousins (May 7)
• Outta here! (May

I’ve covered several different themes in my previous posts: family, war, culture, education, pretty much everything under the sun. If there’s one subject that needs to be explored more, it must be this:

Why is this all of this so important to me anyway? Why does all of this necessitate the navel-gazing, semi self-aggrandizing exercise of writing a whole series of blog posts about how all important all of this stuff is?

This being a blog, I really don’t need a justification to navel-gaze and write exorbitantly self-reflective travelogues. But stating a justification feels like a good thing to do, so here it is:

I’m trying to solve the puzzle. I’m trying to piece together something that doesn’t feel whole: my family. I feel like we’re this random offshoot, this odd clump of puzzle pieces scattered in the corner, while the rest of the puzzle is largely intact, but missing a key element. The missing pieces have come back to the rest of the puzzle, but they don’t exactly fit anymore. They’ve been changed by time and distance.

l should probably be OK with the fact that the puzzle can’t be completed anymore, but I’m stubborn. I keep trying to make the pieces fit. I kept studying Korean after I moved to New York. I worked for a grueling year and a half in a Korean-American nonprofit organization. I watch Korean movies and soap operas. I visit the motherland to see how the pieces fit and don’t fit, and I analyze every angle of the experience to see why they do and why they don’t.

The pieces will never fit back into the puzzle, but that’s OK. In fact, the puzzle is really not the best analogy at all. A puzzle is a single picture that’s been cut into many different parts, but a family is an organic, growing, living entity. Right now, almost all of the Lees are in Korea, but there will be more Lees in the United States as the years pass. Who knows? Maybe forty years from now one of the Korean Lees will come to the US looking to fit himself into the puzzle of the Lee family over here.

Until that time, though, most of them are over there, and we’re over here. They’re very different from me, and I probably never will get to really know them. My dad, on the other hand, clearly was able to reconnect to a great extent with countless long lost relatives. But even if he makes more frequent trips in the future, he will always be a visitor from another place. It’s a sobering thought.

Which reminds me of one of the most important realizations I made just a few weeks into my three month stay in Korea in 2004: my home is America. Korea may be the motherland, but America is the homeland. It’s the only home I have, and it’s the only home I ever will have. I knew that all along; it didn’t take two trips to a familiar yet strange place for that to finally dawn on me, but after a long journey, it feels good to say it again.

I’m home.