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AbOuT ThE WRITER John M. Rodgers is a founding editor of The Three Wise Monkeys webzine and currently acts as Groove Korea’s editor-at-large. He recently completed his graduate studies at Dartmouth College. — Ed. What kept me in Korea and keeps beckoning me back is a nostalgia that builds on itself, growing as time passes like an ever-burbling stream. It is a reflective nostalgia that carries an awareness that I cannot step into the same water at that spot in the stream, but that I can construct and capture a present that will become part of the collective past. across the planet. So I returned. From 2012 to 2013, this column captured that ex- perience to some extent, a turbulent time full of cultural confusion and second-guessing — a stranger in my own land. Had I made the wrong decision? Was moving from that frenetic city of 10 mil- lion to an Internet- and cell service-less house in the sticks, seven miles down a dead-end road, far removed from the vast majority of my professional and personal connections, a sensible strategy? I recently completed my graduate studies and had some work pub- lished, but even now, some two and a half years on, I still don’t know. I don’t know because it’s not over. That transition is part of this one, just as the decisions to move to Korea and repeatedly extend my time there affected everything that followed. Nevertheless, I hear Korea continuing to call as I determine the course I will chart from the woods of New Hampshire. I find it dif- ficult not to place opportunities there above those here; to not see myself amid a class of Korean students or atop a craggy Korean peak with my Korean friends, or around a BBQ table with the ex- pat friends who remain, or walking the bustling aisles of a market as some guy shouts out the latest “saeeeeel,” or riding into some subway station with the announcement filling the car or standing inside a silent palace. What kept me in Korea and keeps beckoning me back is a nostalgia that builds on itself, growing as time passes, like an ever-burbling stream. It is a reflective nostalgia that carries an awareness that I cannot step into the same water at that spot in the stream, but that I can construct and capture a present that will become part of the collective past. From it, I build memories from which I’ll draw later, much as I draw now. Yet as I look out over the bricked campus here in Hanover and on to the White Mountains farther north, a collection of voices tells me that this remains my home, that this is where I was born and bred, that, as my Korean hyeong (older brother) would say, “Your parents don’t wait.” This collective plea has softened over the years with an awareness that the place and people gave me not only roots, but also wings, wings that carried me across the world so that I could put down those roots into new soil. Here and now, more than two years since my return, I feel more like a transplanted tree troubled by the process, changed perhaps forever by that first major uprooting, and persuaded that there exists a place across the seas where a foreign soil feels more like home, where the stream holds many a moment that I couldn’t catch back here. Thus, I look out and see the city again, Mounts Daemo, Cheonggye and Gwanak rising and rolling along its southern edges, the rugged ridges of Mounts Bukhan and Do- bong touching the northern sky and the Han River’s sinuous shores flowing through the center of it all, carrying the current of time, place and perpetuity. Anti-stress Medical Head Spa Anti-Aging Medical Head Spa Luxury Medical Head Spa Aromatherapy Scaling (Scalp peeling procedure) Scalp therapy (RF scalp regeneration therapy) Hair therapy (OX-therapy) Nourishing and revitalizing mask packs based on organic ingredients Relaxing massage (shoulders, neck area) Acupuncture herbal injections Nutrient cocktail (BB food) Duration 2 hrs 3 hrs 3 hrs Price 155 USD 264 USD 450 USD Comprehensive mediCal head spa treatment program The following spa treatment procedures stimulate growth, re- store scalp lipid balance and slow down the hair bulb aging process, which is one of the reasons for the appearance of gray hair. 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