Hi Frank,
I found your Litro profile while searching through the site for other work set in Korea. I’m also a Litro contributor. I also live in Seoul. And I’ve also been writing about life in Asia for the past few years. You might like my Litro essay, but I think you might be more inclined to enjoy my most recent publication… Please give “Beware Paul Theroux!” a read and let me know what you think.
I clicked send.
Frank–a total stranger–read my email, then my essay, and responded:
Greetings Daniel,
Thanks so much for reaching out and making the connection. It seems we have a good bit in common, though you’ve outdone me on time spent here in Korea. From your Paul Theroux piece I gather it’s been 17 years for you…. Also, that you’re around 40, which is just about where I stand. Where are you from in the States? Where do you reside in Seoul? Myself I’m a native Pittsburgher… We ought to meet up sometime, and sometime soon.
Frank, it turned out, was more than a contributor; he was a literary citizen. He responded to my subsequent email stating that he enjoyed reading the ‘reflections on being an expat (or perhaps an immigrant?).’ Furthermore, he made a claim that ‘the term doesn’t exist, but we’re definitely American-Koreans by now.’ His response was considered and thoughtful. Moreover, his use of the pronoun “we” implied connection, or maybe even a kinship in the coinage of a shared pseudo-nationality. His emails were as interesting to read as his essays. His responses were full of verve, vigour, and insight. It was clear that Frank was an author.
Five replies later, and we were as familiar as old friends. Another five and I was feeling less like a contributor and more like an author myself. Good writing, I learned, will do that to you–especially good writing in service of connection.
Frank had already published a book by the time I reached out to him. I would later learn that outside of teaching and raising a family, his creative nonfiction memoir, Real Toads, Imagined Garden, was his life’s work. I also learned that his Litro essay–the one that compelled me to contact him–had taken on new life as a chapter in the book, and that in 2023, when it was published, it had been well received by the literary expats residing in Seoul. When I became aware of the book in July 2025, I emailed him.
Our first face-to-face was shortly after. We met in a coffee shop in Dongjak-gu. Sitting in a Scandinavian-influenced room with sweeping views of the Han River, Frank handed me a signed copy of his book. The inscription inside carried forward our previous correspondence: ‘Here’s to homes and homes away from homes.’
Then, without a moment’s hesitation, he described how the series of vignettes within the book had been organised by jeolgi, the twenty-four-season agricultural calendar in use for thousands of years. This summary didn’t quite prepare me to read the book, but his preamble was certainly a demonstration of his Korean cultural fluency. I would later learn that Frank was also fluent in the language and that his interest in others (other cultures and other peoples) was on full display on every page he had written. The book was an artefact, carrying the universe of this man within its pages, and we both knew that I’d just have to read it to fully understand.
It’s hard for most authors to talk about their writing. If writing is, as all writers know, a hard-won demonstration of unexpressed knowledge, then speech in reference to text is a poor substitute for the carefully crafted prose it represents. Frank and I were reconciled to this fate. Rather than talk about writing, our conversation veered toward life more generally. We talked about author recommendations and favourite essayists. We discussed the best mountains to hike and where to get a great cup of coffee in Seoul. In fact, it seemed that Frank was far more interested in learning about life than in sharing literary exploits. This, I understood to be another sign that Frank was an author. In other words, he was a man more interested in writing than talking about it.
Before I met Frank, I hadn’t connected with many authors. I had read the work of my undergraduate creative writing instructors, Liza Wieland and Steve Yarbrough, but I was too awed to make any serious inquiries that might pierce the veil between us. They were instructors, and I was a student, and so we maintained professional distance. I only later learned that this relationship was a product of attending public school, where I had inadvertently learned to see people’s roles as hierarchical, bureaucratic, and impersonal. In other words, I had learned to know my place.
It was only in meeting Frank that I realised the true nature of writers. Writers, I learned, are far more generous than I imagined. Writers give away their books to interested readers. Writers want to make others comfortable. They want to understand the world. Writers might, I realised, even be like me. They might be reserved, sensitive, or observant, or even a combination of all three, lending an air of arrogance or superiority, but the writers I’ve met–at least those who were like me–were just people searching for someone to understand their stories.
Authors, I learned, aren’t just names written across book covers and in bylines. They’re flesh and blood people. It may even be the case that, like people, they simply want to be heard, but that writers are unique in that they publish to start a conversation, to say hello, to say I’m here, or to shout “I exist.” Maybe all writers seeking a conversation are expectantly waiting for the fourth wall to crumble. Maybe we would all love a reader to become enraptured by our work, and then to traverse the precarious path between. Maybe we hope that some stranger will humanise us and send a polite email, letting us know that we do, in fact, exist.
This was certainly the case with Frank. I didn’t know it from the outset, but it quickly became apparent that meeting him would change me. You see, Frank is an author, but he’s also a dreamer–one who imagines the lives of those around him in vivid detail. And if his book is anything to go on, it’s clear that he’s somewhat preoccupied with others. What I mean is that he ponders things. For instance, he thinks about the psychological distance between people who are physically close and wonders what it means and why the gulf between them seems so insurmountably chasmic. Meeting him led me to a similar series of questions. Reading his book showed me that empathetic curiosity informs his every action. Why do we not befriend the strangers we encounter daily? How do we form the connections that we do? And to what extent are we all a part of the same grand narrative, living parallel lives that on occasion, but for no discernible reason, intersect?
When I arrived home from our first meeting, I checked to see that Frank’s book was still safely tucked away in my bag. I took it out and set it on the nightstand. It was odd to have carried this abstract form of him all evening. It was odder still to place it so close, knowing that it contained a man, knowing that it would teach me more about a man than I could learn in a lifetime of conversations with its author. And Frank, I surmised, would both know and not know all of this. He would know that I had taken a piece of him, but not know whether or not, nor how, I might care for it.
Later that night, I cracked it open and read the first page. The first vignette had the feel of meeting Frank for the first time all over again. I realise now that I may, in fact, have only met him after cracking the spine and reading a chapter or two.
During our face-to-face in the coffee shop where the city lights reflected off the river, I thought I knew a bit of who he was, but I didn’t know that he was an outsider who looked upon the world to make sense of what lies within. I was astonished that reading the world through his experience was somehow more real than sitting beside him. In retrospect, I realise that he was the author of his own life–a man who had written a book as a way to vivify experience. And it worked. For the briefest moment, while caught in the current of narrative, I became Frank, and learning that he appraised others with the same measure of thoughtfulness with which he had met me, I saw myself through his eyes and wondered how it was that we might be the same.
If there were only one word with which to describe the experience of reading Real Toads, Imagined Garden, it would be found within the meaning of the noun sonder: a term which refers to the understanding that every stranger has a life as full and real as one’s own. Even before I had gotten to the last page, I understood the roundness of life. Frank’s perspective suggested that no character was any flatter than another: not the neighbourhood baker, the local housewife, nor even the aimless child wandering down the street on a warm spring day. And thus through Frank’s eyes I saw that each and every one of us is as engrossed in our lives as the other, and sometimes–quite often really–our thoughts turn to sonder, connecting us in a web of imagination, or maybe in a safety net of hope, but just as easily in a shared pit of despair. And yet, it is the connection that makes life not just bearable but worthwhile, for to see yourself in another is to know you’re not alone.
The Seoul of the book, which is to say the Seoul that Frank Dax walks through, is a city inhabited by generations of people sweeping in and out of contact with one another’s lives, leaving imprints visible only to the literary archaeologist. I know this because I read his book. And this is the thing with meeting an author: you don’t have to ask questions to know who they are. If they write well, you just read. On the day we met, Frank and I were nothing more than two souls falling into brief alignment, but I left with much more than he did: I left with a book in my bag.
Weeks or months after our encounter and well after I had read the book, I realised that if I had met Frank in my twenties, none of this would have happened. He would have just been another guy–a cool dude for sure, but a stranger nonetheless. Twenty years ago, neither of us had published anything of note, and so our lives–our relationships as well as our desires and fears–would have remained unexamined. But meeting in our forties with a string of publications floating around as links on the internet, the two of us were as open as a couple of books.
Looking back, I like to believe that we both knew that our purpose that night was to reify the abstract notion of author, turning our names into tangible human forms before disappearing back into the texts we both haunt. I like to believe that my humanity is as evident in the essays I write as Frank’s is in the book he gifted me. If I could be assured of this–of my own humanity–I think I could finally call myself an author.
