Cozmopolitan Sunkyoung

As I twitted, from today onward, Koreans can travel to the USA without visas for up to 90 days. On this historical day, I would like to talk about my link with the USA.

Since my first living abroad was in the Netherlands, I have become pro-Europe but I’m quite certain that if it was in the States, I’d have been at the forefront of promoting its culture like I’ve been with the Irish one. Interestingly, however, before I went to the Netherlands in 2003, my view on the Western world had been formed heavily based on how the US was projected in me from my childhood.

My parents, who were very keen about education, bought me a set of English books and cassette tapes directly licensed by the American publishing company when, if I could remember, I was three years old. Through a family of anthropomorphised rabbits in the books, I could observe the different settings of the Americans’ daily lives: two-storied house with a garden and a garage, big shopping mall where people carries carts, school bus, Christmas and so on. And as lovers of pop music, my parents also had a big collection of 60’s to 80’s pop music and I think I listened to these songs more than to children’s songs.

When I grew up to be a teenager, I recall it was a booming period of absorbing American culture and most of the channels were through media. You could easily imagine how I understood the Western world - which practically meant the US only at that time - with the names I list as following:

• New Kids On The Block - These five boys from Boston had a significant influence on my interest in English language because what I did during my spare time in junior high school was mostly singing along their songs and trying to understand what the lyrics meant. I actually thank them for this and next February in Amsterdam, I’ll finally see these now-men after nearly two-decade since I became their fan. Not only their songs but their music videos - yeah, we are the generation of MTV - stimulated my curiosity about the Western life with the sights and incidents filmed in the videos.

• Toy Soldiers- As an adolescent girl who reached the stage of valuing friendship most in life, this movie fired my fantasy of the perfect friendship, trouble-making at school, dormitory life, and teenage hero. I liked the film so much that I bought the video tape from the video rental shop, which was very rare for anyone of my age at that time, and that I even rewrote the story by adding myself as a troublemaking girl who was sent by her parents to the boarding school, where there are only boys, as a very exceptional case. I named her (or myself) Kevin to defeminise her original name, Catherine, with a thought at the time that the first sounds of these two names were the same. Anyway, this is not the end of the story. I even wrote my first-ever fan mail to Sean Astin to the Tri Star in Hollywood, which produced ‘Toy Soldiers’ and which was listed by a Korean film magazine to send a fan letter to. (The mail was returned to me a couple of months later, though, with a stamp of wrong address.) Now you can imagine how sad I was when I saw Sean Astin in the first piece of the Lord of the Rings. I was really shocked at how much a person can change over a decade.

• TV Series - The Wonder Years, Doogie Howser, M.D., Beverly Hills 90210 up to my teenage and Ally McBeal and Sex and the City in my adulthood: No more words needed, right?

With this visa waver programme, I now can directly experience the American culture without the heavy burden of application with the various documents and a lot of money. As much as the gap between fantasy and reality, my future experience in this vast territory of Northern America will be different from what I had learned and saw from all those pieces of American pop culture. However, I’m excited to be able to see and feel them in their own country, recalling the fanatical curiosity about the world outside from my childhood.