Lately, I’ve been drawn to stories about brands. Why someone started one. How another made an unlikely comeback. Why a successful name suddenly vanished. I began organizing ideas for this paper, but a sentence from a business founder echoed in my mind: Do the thing that feels most like you. So I closed the page on other people’s stories. This one is mine.
It is about becoming. About how being a stranger turned into a kind of freedom. And how that freedom grew into something I now call independence.
A longtime New Yorker once told me, “The best and worst part of living here is that you’re always a foreigner.”
Back home in Korea, even stepping outside felt like a task—each corner held the chance of bumping into someone I knew. But when I arrived in New York, I found an unexpected joy in the anonymity. No one knew me. No one expected anything. I could disappear into the city like a drop of ink in water. I wasn’t ready to belong. I liked that. I liked that the shop clerks didn’t greet me with performative smiles or exaggerated friendliness. I liked the silence.
Six months passed. A routine began to take shape. The laundromat down the street remembered I came every Friday. I knew which market had the best vegetables, which one carried the crispiest snacks. I found a clay studio and touched earth again. But as these familiar places settled into my life, I noticed something shift. The feeling of being a stranger began to fade. And oddly, I missed it.
One day, I was searching for a storage box—for my pens, my notebooks, the small tools of a quiet life. I found one I loved. A London brand. Only one showroom. In London.
I didn’t hesitate.
I bought a ticket.
It might’ve been madness. I still don’t quite know why I went. Maybe I just wanted to see it with my own eyes.
I’ve always felt that impressions formed without touch or taste were borrowed, not earned. That’s why I love showrooms. They ask you to show up. To feel, not just look. So I went to London. To see a storage box.
Before leaving, I went to fix my cuticles—long grown wild without their usual care. I stepped into a nail salon and met a Korean artist. New York is full of Koreans, but she felt different. Maybe because she was close to my mother’s age.
Despite my promise not to speak Korean for a while, I told her everything. That I was leaving. That I wanted to live more honestly. To feel out of place again.
She smiled and asked,
“Do you know what real independence is in New York?”
I hesitated. “Maybe… living alone?”
She laughed. “No. It’s saying hello.”
Hello. The simplest of gestures. The beginning of any knowing. In a city where “sorry” and “how are you” slip off tongues like buttons pressed by habit, it should’ve been easy. But I had been hiding inside my silence, using “foreigner” as a kind of armor.
She told me: When you move into a new building, greet the doorman every morning. When you find a café you love, ask the barista how they’ve been. Independence isn’t about being alone. It’s about having more people to say hello to.
And still, finding joy in your solitude.
When I asked for gel nails before London, she shook her head.
“No one will look at your hands there,” she said.
“Look at London instead. Look at its trees.
Look at the people walking past.
Use that time to see more, not less.”
And as I left, she handed me one last piece of kindness:
“When you move, come back. I’ll buy you toilet paper.
In London—keep stopping. Keep taking pictures.
Of anything. Everything.”
Her salon was called Oasis Nail.
I decided that was my New York hometown.