My first winter in Seoul taught me the meaning of warmth — by taking it away. I had grown up with Midwest winters, and thought I knew cold, but this was different — less about endurance than attention. In 1990, my apartment in Jamsil looked solid enough from the outside — concrete, utilitarian, built to last — but inside it held the cold. Not drafty, exactly, just unyielding. The windows were sealed tight, yet the chill lingered in corners and walls, settling quietly overnight. One morning, I went to retrieve my clothes from the laundry room and found ice layered on the walls and windows, my clothes frozen stiff in the unheated space. It startled me — not the cold itself, but how calmly it had arrived while I slept. Then there was ondol. I had heard of it before but didn’t yet understand it — not really. The first night, the floor began to warm, slowly and invisibly, the heat moving beneath me the way it was meant to. I sat on the floor because that was where the heat lived. The chill retreated upward, lifting from my bones in stages. The room stayed cold. The air offered
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