It’s the great paradox of large metropolises: millions of people packed into a single place and nearly everyone is lonely. I sense it most when I have a hyperopic view of a city: driving over the hills towards the Los Angeles basin at night, or ferrying across Victoria Harbor to get the “million dollar view” of the Hong Kong skyline. On my last night in Seoul, my friend took me up to the observation deck of the N Seoul Tower for 360 degrees of unobstructed city viewing. We could see for miles, city roads and blocks of buildings pouring out as if from a bottomless bucket. The sun was setting, lights flickered on one by one, then two by two, and so on. Roads streaked white on one side and red on the other. The blue sky turned greenish yellow then orange for a moment before receding to a deep violet. It was a view spectacular enough to induce loneliness in a grown man.

Ever since I uprooted myself to get back on the boat, I’ve missed the sense of belonging, of being tethered to daily rituals and familiar faces. Everywhere I went – Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong – I asked myself if this could be the place to drop anchor. Seoul, however, I knew would be different. It is, after all, the heart of the land in which I was born. And it was different. I had an extended deja vu experience: everything was simultaneously new and familiar. People spoke words I didn’t understand in a language I’ve known all my life. I wondered if I was home. But there I was on my last night, with a sweeping view of the land. I’d be lonely in Seoul, I thought to myself, just like everyone else here. And everywhere, for that matter.

In every major city I visit, I encounter locals in their 20s and 30s who are amused by my enthusiasm for their city. They say their city is boring, polluted; they complain about the people – too shallow, too snobby, too unsophisticated, too fat. They complain about working conditions. And above all, they complain about how hard it is to meet people – people they really connect with. I’ve heard this in enough cities to know that it has little to do with the place and more to do with human nature. I don’t mean to sound like a Debbie Downer, but maybe loneliness is just part of our existence. Or maybe it has to do with young adults in this generation, having grown up in a world made small by the Internet, without any of the traumatic wars that shaped three generations before us. We have money to distract us, time to spend on idle rumination, education to delude us into thinking we know it all. And we’re desperately lonely, and therefore restless.

When I boarded the Cathay Pacific plane to return to Hong Kong, my head was clogged with confusion. Even now, I’m trying to make sense of what Seoul means to me. Of what it means to be home, and if such a thing really even exists. Deep thoughts that go nowhere. When I sat down, the elderly couple seated next to me asked me in Korean if I was also Korean. I said yes, and they seemed delighted. We talked, testing the limits of my Korean, about all sorts of things, but mostly about Korea. They told me about the famous traditional homes in their small town and its beautiful coastline. They boasted about the modernization of Korea, and how it’s opening up to foreigners and becoming an easier place to live. They talked about the food, the clean energy projects, the railways, the students. Korea is a good place to live, the man concluded with a mix of pride and affection. Then the woman, sitting at the window seat, looked out and exclaimed to her husband that a cloud looked like a horse. It does, he said with the enthusiasm of a young boy, it does look like a horse. He looked at me, pointed to the window. Look, he said, look at the cloud that looks like a horse. For a long time they stared out that window with the wonderment of children way up in the sky, though in fact they were anchored to a land they love, where they belong.
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