Maximum City

Seoul is tomorrowland, teeming with models, actors, activists, and musicians who are breaking molds and leaning into what's now and what's next. Monica Kim takes stock of a brave new world. 

- Monica Kim

What is it about Seoul that has the world in its thrall? I have fielded this question so often of late, tossed it back and forth, particularly with Koreans, as puzzled as I am by the sudden fervor. The Seoul of the ’90s that I knew as a child—as an American girl growing up in the Midwest, my mother taking me twice a year to the country of her birth—was rooted in smallness. 

Seoul was the pack of yogurt drink left swinging on my grandmother’s front door, the windowless market where we’d buy sticky rice cakes, the underground hall where fake Chanel wallets tumbled from black garbage bags like stone fruit from trees. It felt like a stunted city yearning for sophistication. My American classmates could not place it on a map. “Is it like Beijing? Tokyo?” they would ask. “North or South Korea?”

As I entered my teens, I began to dread the prospect of flying 14 hours for dull department store lunches and walks along an ever-gray river. I craved the worldliness of New York, or Paris, or Tokyo, and wanted to own a real Chanel wallet instead of a convincing fake. Immature, I thought that Seoul lacked savoir vivre, and said so to my mother, who acquiesced and we ceased our yearly visits. The city faded from my view.