Daily Sauntering

This morning we hurried beneath Seoul, riding the subway toward Gwangjang Market,

and before the market itself revealed its thousand faces, a nine-month-old girl riding in her stroller offered us the first greeting of the day.

Her mother beside her, her grandmother watching, the child opening her eyes to strangers without fear—

and we exchanged soft words, small sounds, the universal language that existed before nations, before politics, before commerce.

Joy traveled with us between stations.

Then the market opened.

O Gwangjang! Ancient artery of Seoul!Living river more than a century old!

Born in 1905,when Korean merchants gathertheir courage against the tightening grip of empire, founding their own market, their own house of exchange, their declaration that ordinary people, too, possess history.

Descendant of Baeo-gae Market, keeper of old Seoul’s commercial memory, survivor of war, survivor of fire, survivor of every prediction of disappearance.

I walk your narrow passages, a mere meter and a half wide, yet containing continents.

The traffic of humanity moves in two directions at once.

Bodies brushing past bodies.

Languages colliding.

Laughter crossing argument.

A woman carrying dumplings.

A young traveler holding a phone above his head.

A cook waving smoke toward the ceiling.

Visitors from every corner of the earth.

Some faces stubborn as granite.

Some faces bright as spring water.

Each searching.

Each hungry.

Not only for food.

For memory. For belonging. For satisfaction.

YouTube may offer images.

But here the blood itself circulates.

Here life arrives unedited.

The current of the crowd pushes and pulls with tidal force.

Another battle of the globe unfolds here—not with missiles, not with armies, but with appetites, desires, dreams, histories, all pressing shoulder to shoulder through a single passageway.

I remember the market’s wounds.

The war that burned wooden buildings into ash.

The reconstruction in concrete.

The fires of 1966.

The fires of 1998.

The merchants rebuilding again and again.

As reeds return after floodwater, as grass rises after winter, so the market rises.

For what is a marketbut the stubborn will of ordinary people to continue?

Past stalls of silk and hanbok cloth, past fabrics once measured for weddings and military uniforms, past the famous foods of modern Seoul—beef tartare, mung-bean pancakes, sundae, jokbal, gimbap rolled with the speed of practiced hands—

the generations continue their exchange.

At last we sat inside a small eel restaurant.

A room no larger than memory.

Four men in their seventies occupied the next table.

Politics arrived before the food.

One voice rose above the others.

Friendship of decades balanced upon disagreement.

Credit unions,loyalty, betrayal,conviction.

The loudest man insisted.

The others resisted.

The room vibrated with democratic thunder.

How alive they were!

How gloriously alive!

For democracy is not silence.

It is often four old friends refusing to surrender their opinions.

Later we searched for a hanbok for a one-year-old boy.

One shopkeeper did not possess what we needed.

Yet she abandoned her own store, stepped into the crowd,guided us through human currents, from one merchant to another, then another.

No obligation.

No profit.

Only generosity.

I watched her disappear and reappear among strangers, a shepherd leading us through the moving wilderness.

Perhaps this, too, is Korea.

Not merely ambition.

Not merely enterprise.

But kindness carried quietly beneath both.

And then, as if the market itself wished to offer a final blessing,

among hundreds of thousands of visitors, among endless aisles, among all the noise and motion of the day,

we met again the baby from the subway.

The same child.

The same astonished eyes.

The same mother.

The same grandmother.

For a moment the crowd parted.

Recognition flashed.

Joy leaped into the air.

And I stood there wondering:

How can a city of millions still create such meetings?

How can chance feel so much like grace?

O Gwangjang Market!

Market of merchants, of survivors,of cooks, of grandmothers, of arguing elders, of wandering visitors, of babies beginning their first memories—

I celebrate you.

Not because you are old.

Not because you are famous.

But because beneath your roofthe human river still flows,

and in its flowing

I hear the enduring heart beat of Seoul, of Korea, of this restless and beautiful world.

— TaeHun Yoon, June 13, 2026