Korea: 아쉽다

아쉽다 (ah-shweep-dah) is a bittersweet word in Korean. It's often used in sappy pop songs to describe heartbroken lovers. It was once used by my friend to describe the way pressure from his dad to get a girlfriend in his first year of college made him feel.

아쉽다 is a hard word to translate, because the feeling doesn't quite translate either. To non-Koreans, learning what is 아쉽다 is not just a vocabulary lesson, but also a lesson on how to name and evaluate your feelings.

아쉽다 is that aching feeling in your chest when you miss something or someone. 아쉽다 is the feelings that make you choke up or make tears well up in your eyes when you relive a happy memory in your mind. And yes, like those pop songs say, 아쉽다 is the feeling you have when you see your ex happily getting along with another person and all you can think about is how you want them back.

Think of 아쉽다 as a Korean drama where the main couple finally find out who they really are and that they can love each other, but suddenly one of them also finds out they have a terminal illness.

아쉽다 is how I felt Saturday coming home from a conference in Philly. Everyone in the car was jamming out to some American rap music and I felt utterly culturally lost. I was given shotgun with the expectation that I could control the radio. Not only was the system of buttons to operate the radio confusing (not only have I only been in private cars a limited number of times in the last year, but jesus christ I have never had to operate a Lexus before!!) but when I scanned stations, I had no idea what I wanted to listen to, or what I "should" want to listen to. It was humiliating and so I just let the backseat take over with their iPods. I wished that I was in a car with my best friends from Korea so we could all just put on some KPop and rock out.

As I write this post, I'm staring at all the sticker pictures I took in Korea with my friends, as well as Korean bands' trading cards I collected, and some other random Korean memorabilia. It's hard to break away, even while doing the most mundane things.

Later that night, we went out to Korean BBQ in Annandale, VA aka Koreatown of Virginia with our 선배 (school upperclassman). I had been looking forward to this all week. We ordered a ton of food. Apparently it was somewhere in the neighborhood of $250, all of which our 선배 snuck off alone to pay for without asking us if it was okay. A typical 선배/후배 Korean relationship between older and younger, but in the USA it's just weird.

Eating at that Korean BBQ place (예촌 if anyone in the DC area is interested) made me feel the most "at home" that I have felt...in a long time. I explained how to eat the meat, how to make little 쌈 wrap-ups, what all the sauces were, how to eat the rice and the kimchi, making suggestions, pushing the call button and asking for more rice in Korean. There was all the familiar foods, 김치 kimchi, 무 radishes, 쌈 wraps, 닭찜 spicy chicken, 됀장찌개 soybean paste stew, 갈비 beef ribs.....

I felt like I was in my element, which is not something that happens to me very often nowadays.

And on the long ride back to campus, I sat quietly in the back seat, scrolling through all the pictures on my iPod taken in Korea.

난 너무 아쉽다. 한국 친구가 보고싶다. 언젠가는 한국에 꼭 돌아올게요.