One of my oldest and perhaps most stubborn dreams is to live in the countryside. Each summer, my family stayed at my grandparents’ in the mountains, and those days must have been imprinted on my temperament. Though I hail from Seoul, spent my twenties working in New York City, and now call Shanghai my home, I have always longed for a life amid greenery, away from the overcrowded, overpriced, and overrated cities, with my only chores being tending a garden and finishing a book.

So the first few days in the Dragon Hall Cottage were the dream itself. The silence was interrupted only by the indignant honking of geese, and with long northern summer days pouring through the skylight, I could fully immerse myself in the manuscripts I was translating for hours on end. I left the cottage only to jog or to buy provisions. At dawn, the run along the River Wensum was usually accompanied by only a few pigeons and a swan family, whose cygnets put on visible weight each morning.

The swan family

When I did venture out for groceries and the hope of meeting other human beings, I was easily distracted by old buildings—or ancient architecture, rather, to my eye accustomed to Northeast Asian cities once destroyed by colonisers and now competing to develop and redevelop ever-higher, shinier skyscrapers. To see St Julian’s Church and Norwich Castle casually standing there, seemingly unscathed by centuries, felt nearly surreal, especially as I was only on my way to pick up a couple of packs of ramyeon from an Asian grocery store. Solitude suited me, with my peace broken only by my feathered friends and the sudden marvel of stones that had outlasted generations.

But old habits linger, and the city-dweller in me began to miss the crowd a little. After all, I had grown used to mornings that began with bumps against the shoulder on Line 11 of the Shanghai Metro. Unlike the big cities’ skylines that light up even brighter at night, Norwich’s little shops were quick to close for the day; after seven p.m., only the doors to pubs were kept open. Tucked under a blanket at ten p.m. with the sky still yet to fully give in to the dark, I understood why the verb “cackle” is used to describe gulls’ cries; they indeed sounded like witches’ cackling, mocking the fragile urbanite that I am.

Then there was the Summer Fayre.

I have always had a soft spot for street markets. Something about the festivity makes me feel part of a bigger crowd and loosen the purse strings. Thanks to new writer friends, I found myself on those very Norwich streets on the day of the Fayre, and—I was absolutely mindblown.

The crowd!

I encountered a crowd I had never imagined in a small, quaint British town like Norwich. The characteristically windy, hilly lanes filled and kept filling with people, people, and more people… For a moment, it felt like a Saturday at the shopping districts along the Bund in Shanghai, or an evening in the restaurant-lined alleys in Gangnam, Seoul. As we waded through the flood of bodies, we wondered, “Where did all these people come from?” Dodging families with strollers and dog leashes, the merry cacophony of it all, somehow made me feel more at home. They say home isn’t a place but a person; in my case, it was the nameless crowd and the incidental intimacy we shared.

After a couple of hours of drifting like droplets in the ocean waves, we escaped into a nearby park’s quiet, each of us holding paper-wrapped food from the stalls. I suppose clamour has a way of smudging specifics; I remember having a chorizo sandwich, but I don’t recall what cheese it had inside, which vendor it was from, or exactly which park we found refuge in. What still remains vivid is the grass softly brushing my bare calf, our conversation about literary journals and short stories we loved, and the sky so blue and clear, dotted with only a few dollops of white clouds.

After that enchanted Sunday, I returned to my usual lonely self in the cottage. Not too long after, the weather turned dreary, with the grey sky shooting down vehement streaks of rain all day. Days of no jogging went on, and my forays were reduced to cursory trips to the Riverside Morrisons and its awfully standardised aisles. On a particularly gloomy Monday, with no will to cook and feed myself, I finally set my mind to check out “that one Korean restaurant” in Norwich, only to find it closed on both Sundays and Mondays. (I had believed that all Korean restaurants abroad, like those in New York Koreatown, were run by overworked Korean immigrants and opened daily until four in the morning. I have disabused myself of that notion ever since.) The days growing shorter after the summer solstice only seemed to add to the town’s greyness.

But when the solitude weighed down and the gulls sounded unkind to my ears, I would fondly recall that one hectic Sunday and its hidden cheer, and think, everything I have yearned for, and will go on yearning for, it’s all still there.

Joheun Lee (July 2025)

Joheun (Jo) Lee is a literary translator from Korea. She was selected for the 2023 and 2024 Translation Academy courses at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea and the 2023–24 Emerging Translators Mentorship in Korean at the UK National Centre for Writing.

She is particularly drawn to works that address various social issues, including sexuality, labor rights, self-discovery, and sustainability, often highlighting women’s powerful voices. Her book translations for Holy Boy by Lee Heejoo (Harper Via, Picador) and The Forest Called You by Amil (Harvill Secker) are both forthcoming in 2026. Jo now lives with her partner and four cats in Shanghai, China. Joheun Lee’s residency was supported by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.