I’ve written before about what a strange place Ilsan is. I’ve compared it to a space-station, because of its modern artificiality. I’ve described it as “Sim City” because of its regular and somewhat boring urban plan. Its upper-middle-class, highly educated and “aspirational” demographics make it rather unique in my experience of Korean places, too.
I went up over the weekend for a very brief visit to drop off my paperwork for my visa renewal with my new boss, for my new hagwon job that will start May 1. I was walking around this strange place that feels like “home.” It’s as different from Hongnong as Iowa is. It’s not even like the rest of Seoul, although I know there are other enclaves around Seoul, other “new cities,” that resemble Ilsan. But Ilsan seems unique because of its scale (more than half a million residents) and the vast regularity of its grid-like layout on basically flat land (in and of itself rather hard to find in Korea). Manhattan-on-the-rice-paddy.
I had a new insight, on Saturday, as regards my own strange “destiny” with respect to Ilsan. When I was young (a child) I would often draw maps of imaginary places. Ilsan, in fact, has some rather striking resemblances to the kinds of “designed” or “engineered” places that I often tried to create, based on my rather utopian-yet-gritty (if that’s possible), naive conception of urbanism – recall that I grew up in a small town and my relationship with cities was intense (I loved them even as a child) but limited (my parents did not love them).
So my destiny, in Ilsan, lies only in that it resembles a kind of “city as I imagined it” as opposed to being a “real” city. Perhaps this is also similar to (but not causally connected to) my strange feeling that Korean is a a “langauge as I imagined it” as opposed to a “regular” language, too. Not to deny the fundamental, external reality of either the Korean language or of the city of Ilsan. Just that they have certain striking predecessors in my imagination, and hence I feel a weird connection to them.
Now… if only I could “figure them out.”
