Danny ChaiSo here’s the thing about many L.A. Koreans that bothers me, I realized. It’s not the fact that they think L.A. is the best place for everything. I can live with that. What bothers me is that so many of them are completely unable to live anywhere else. They can only be in L.A.
It’s not like that with other places. Like, my friends from Houston have dispersed all over the place and have been able to function wherever they were. It’s like that for other places also. But people from L.A., so many of them have to be in L.A. They just can’t really function away from there and for some reason that strikes me as being strange. I think it’s that they’re so steeped in the subculture, why they can’t function.
I realized this when going to a wedding a couple weeks ago. I asked which hotel they had reserved for out of town guests. And I found out they hadn’t reserved any. They didn’t need to. Almost all of the wedding attendees, family, friends, and the rest, lived in L.A. No one leaves the place, and I thought that was bizarre.
I’m not a particularly well traveled man, but I’m grateful at least for the experience I’ve had with my family living in Houston. It just gives you perspective and I think makes you more able to deal with different life circumstances.