By: Seungho Lee
It feels even stranger that walking the COVID-hit streets of South Korea doesn’t feel that strange. It looks normal, except for the masks on the faces. We come and go as strangers, yet without feeling strange. We are wary of possible contacts, but not that much. Many of us believe in wearing a mask, and we believe in the system. I even feel that the streets are more crowded than they were in the pre-COVID days. We now prefer staying outside, spending way more time in the open. We have become street-dwellers. Streets have become home for us, and walking, a form of dwelling. We’re chatting, sipping coffee, checking phones, and all the while we’re walking on the streets. Without any particular destination, we keep walking because we don’t like going inside, the closed indoors where the virus can stay. We believe in nature, in air and wind, as though they’d never fail to blow away all the germs and viruses, though they, too, are dwellers of this world. Then, suddenly, there appears a guy without a mask. This is the moment when the streetscape feels different, the open world feels like it is rapidly shrinking or suffocating. We avoid him, side-glance him, as if eye contact, like other contacts, is contagious. We look at him in the way that people in the past looked at a leper. We no longer linger. We change our gait, our pace, only to a slightly perceptible degree. We abandon the streets, our temporary dwelling place, and retreat back home, a permanent dwelling place that is contained and controlled. Yes, this is the way we walk in the COVID days. Masked, or unmasked.
Seungho Lee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature. His dissertation, tentatively entitled “Lines of Walking: Reconnecting the Human and the Environment in Anglophone Modernist Writings,” explores the prominent role of walking in Anglophone modernists’ responses and resistance to modernization.