A Place in Stories

I was recently talking with someone, and they asked me, “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”

I thought about all the “normal” answers that people say. Names of large cities and famous monuments passed through my mind. They all seemed interesting, but none any more than another. I was stuck.

As a person who never traveled much, this question is not one I often ponder. I sifted through stories of places people had visited or lived. And then I remembered it. The place where in my head all stories come from. In my childhood, the place where everything was traced back to. The place I always dreamed I could go and was always told I could not. Pyongyang.

As a storyteller, I have always taken inspiration from the family oral story tradition. In my childhood, that meant baby hanbok, making sausage by hand, hwatu cards, and measuring the time until sunset with your thumb. Whenever I was told stories of my mother’s family, I could invision where it happened. I may have never been to that specific property, but I had seen the Dakotas. I had been to her childhood town. There was a reference. But when my father told me stories, it was magical. Pyongya and Seoul were far away places to me, not tangible. It was exciting to hear about, what felt like, mythic lands. As someone who has the privilege of knowing my family heritage and history, it has always been a dream of mine to see it, to have that visual reference when hearing and telling stories. But I know that the place I have heard about in stories does not exist anymore. Time has continued, technology has evolved, and communities have changed. And I desire to see what this magical land of stories has grown into over the decades. Maybe I would find shadows of tales, but I come from a “never let the truth get in the way of a good story” family, so you never know.