Hello! This is Hye Jin. So I'm the first one to introduce the topic. Because it is the first topic and we don't know each other very well, I was thinking what topic would relate to our class discussion and somehow introduce ourselves.
After reading Walker Percy's essay "Why I live and Where I live", I have thought about my life and said that I have mostly lived in a place and once in nonplace, based on Percy's definition of place and nonplace.
I was born in Seoul, South Korea but lived there for about 7 years total. I have lived in Chennai, India for 8 years and 3 years in Irvine, CA. I was also in Kiev, Ukraine last summer because my parents lived there at that time. In my opinion, Seoul, Chennai and Kiev is a place. These cities are huge and are full of history of the country. The modern building and the historical buildings in major parts of the city blend with each other very well.
(left is Seoul, center is Chennai, and right is Kiev)
However, Irvine, in my opinion is a nonplace. Irvine is a suburb that does not have unique and historical architects. It is a city that clearly differentiate residential area and shopping area. Automobile is required to go some where. The main reason why Irvine is known to people is because of its academics. Although my father's workplace was 30 minutes drive from Irvine, my father wanted our family to live in Irvine because of my high school academics. Due to the high reputation of academics, a lot of Asians currently live in Irvine. About 50 % of my high school students were Asians. Because of the increase in population and more malls coming in to the city, it might be considered as a place. Nevertheless, most suburban people tend to live on their own inside their houses, according to my observation. There was no interaction between neighbors.
Yeah, so that's how I defined the cities I lived to place and nonplace. So the topic for this week is to introduce where you have lived throughout your life and discuss if it was a place or a nonplace.
