It may seem weird that all fields above are marked, "NA" or not applicable. That will be explained as my situation is somewhat unique than most. I do not have a hometown, not in the literal sense anyways.

I did not grow up in the great United States of America, although I was born in San Antonio, TX. My father was in the Air Force and when I was only six years old he moved me and my family, my two other brothers and my only sister, to Misawa, Japan. It was an amazing time for me, because it was chance that not many six year old kids experience. But that is not the root of my dilemma, for how does one define a hometown.

Does one judge a hometown based solely on where they lived the most during their childhood or the place they loved to be. In that case, although I loved Misawa, that would not be the place I would choose for the town I loved the most. That category would be the town of Songtan, South Korea, where I spent the remainder of my senior year of high school (I moved from Misawa, Japan to Seoul, South Korea after my freshmen year and then after my junior year at Seoul American High school a spent the first half of my senior year at Mascoutah Community High School in Illinois).

It was there where I felt as if I truly found my place. Songtan was a town jampacked with businesses and restaurants, so cluttered with buildings to the point of being ludicrous but that was also one of its more endearing aspects. Each building was a new adventure waiting for me and my friends to uncover its secrets. It was a different world there, one that required no car, where you could walk anywhere you wanted to, or take taxis that were as numerable as the people that walked the streets. In that place, sidewalks were never empty and people were amassed in the place we called "The Strip" (A long street that was populated with stores and vendors, and what were called HOF's, or as we termed them, coffee shops) like a New York City afternoon.

Their were other Americans there, ranging from little kids to people my own age, to older men and women and in Songtan there were three kinds people, the military, their dependents, and the Korean people themselves. The military of course was ruled stringently by curfew and uniform codes of conduct and appearance and the Korean peoples themselves were governed by their own government's laws, yet the group that I fell under, dependents, were not governed entirely by military rules and never under Korean law. We were virtually immune to harassment from either, which brought a wonderful sense of freedom to do as we wished.

Freedom was a key that I had needed sense growing up under the somewhat stricter rules of my father. It was what I dreamed of, and incidentally why I wanted to go to college so badly, to be away and on my own. To grab hold of that freedom with a grip like iron and never let go. Yes, I may not have a real hometown, one that I could write down in the fields above, but I have a town that I loved, where I was free and where the rules really didn't apply and that town was Songtan, South Korea. Where the buildings were crammed together with delicate beauty and the people walked the streets in masses and each building held a different view and a different adventure.

Rustin P

Submitted: Wednesday 31st March 2004, 11:52 AM

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