Topic Edit: Tears in America (16)

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<strong>First Time Sensing America in a Real Way</strong>

In elementary school, America was just a large shape on the world map pinned to our classroom wall. I knew it was far bigger than Korea, and the American soldiers I sometimes saw on the street looked different enough to make me stare for a moment, but that was the extent of it. Nothing about the country felt real to me.

Middle school changed that. English entered my life—letters that didn’t feel natural in my mouth, sounds that seemed to come from somewhere far away. I memorized the alphabet under the English teacher’s stick, repeated I am a boy and This is a pencil, and even those simple sentences made the place behind the language feel closer, as if it were slowly stepping out of the fog.

Around that time, a small black‑and‑white television appeared in the corner of our family’s egg shop. Through that tiny screen, I watched Muhammad Ali fight. Seeing him—huge, quick, and moving with a confidence I had never seen—I became convinced that America was full of people like him, men who seemed to belong to a different physical world.

But nothing stayed with me like the broadcast of the Apollo moon landing. Even on that flickering little screen, I couldn’t close my mouth. It felt as if America had reached into a place the rest of us only visited in cartoons or dreams. The idea that a country could actually do such things settled into my mind and stayed there.

Not long after, a close classmate told me he was immigrating to the United States. When he actually left, it finally registered that ordinary Koreans could go live there. Still, the thought that I might someday end up in America was beyond anything I could imagine. At that point, all I had gained was a clearer, more tangible sense of the place—something far more real than the vague outline I carried in my elementary school years.

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