high school reunion pt 1 -- meeting the American MBAs

When you first decided to move to Oz, you decided to not go back to the US. Your sticking point was not the society, the weather, the cost of living, or the future career opportunities. It was the people. Over 300 million people currently live in the United States, this 300 million includes almost every single significant friend you have ever made in your life prior to your two years in Korea. Your choice to make your home in a place not called Korea or the US is a Big Deal; while you know you will keep in touch with many, you also know that you will never actually be present in person for their lives, and, from Oz, you will not be able to truly share the important things… only follow along from a distance. As they are doing with you, through this blog.

You have many friends in the States, as you have many friends in Korea. You care about them a great deal. And as new and exciting as Oz is, and as good a fit as it is for you, you wish you could move everyone you care about to this wonderful place, this paradise. But you cannot. And since Melbourne is so geographically far from Korea and the US, you have all but given up unplanned face-to-face meetings with anyone from your past, a past that you adore, one that includes some of the best memories and some of the most internally beautiful people anyone could ever be fortunate enough to meet.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, about 40 NYU-Stern MBA students came to Melbourne Business School as part of a ‘global-business’ something. At first, you are surprised that they picked Melbourne... but you quickly understood because they are studying business in New York. To many New Yorkers, global awareness is taking a flight down to Miami and speaking broken Spanish to the McDonalds cashier… a cultural adjustment means moving to San Francisco and adjusting to the non-angriness while waiting in an amorphous line for overpriced Starbucks. You are sure that at least a significant minority of these New York Visitors have never left their homeland prior to this trip, you are also sure that the vast majority will never work anywhere besides the DCs and Chicagos of the US, which seem insignificant when compared to the Bangkoks and Shanghais of the world. You are sure because, for roughly the last two years, you have been a New Yorker.

No longer. For the next two weeks, you are from New Jersey.

Yesterday, you attended an MBS-sponsored dinner with these NYU-Stern people; the people that made the opposite choice you did and are currently living the alterlife you chose to reject. In true alterlife fashion, each one of them asked the question that you have been at peace with since the beginning; this peace lets you know that you did, in fact, choose the correct continent; at least, a more correct continent than the one you were born in. This, you are sure of.

In the span of 15 minutes, you met more people from Jersey than you had met in the past 5 years combined; people who not only knew that Jersey was a state, but also knew exactly where you were born based the Mental Map of all true locals, much like the Seoul subway map that will be engraved on the back of your eyeballs for the rest of your life. Your Gwanghuamun and Gangnam is their Cherry Hill and Paramus; your transfer at Sadang Station is their, your, exit 8a on the Turnpike. But they will almost definitely never see Gwanghuamun or Gangnam or even Itaewon. Because they will never work abroad.

It is then you realize that you are not, can never be, one of them. You have grown too much, your path unique and impossible to follow. You are a traveller, a citizen of too many places to list. Your heart is still in Hawaii, in Seoul, in your university, in your New Jersey boarding school, in a thousand other people you may never see again.

You are not sure you could get it back even if you wanted to. You are sure that part of it belongs somewhere else. In your own alterlife, perhaps, with the possibilities and people you’ve left behind.

Their heart, on the other hand, is where it has always been, where it will always be. With them.

^_^