Dear Readers, old and new:

What Is: Nunchi is my new blog that chronicles a Korean-American New Yorker’s life in Boston, and the site was born Dec 12, 2011. I would have loved to keep my old blog “New Yorker in Seoul” (2009-Dec 11, 2011) but unfortunately I no longer live in Seoul, and if I kept blogging on that site, it’d just feel like I was living a lie.

It took me several months to come up with a new blog title and domain name. I culled suggestions from friends and frenemies. They were subsequently shot down, reconsidered, and shot down again.

Here are some of those suggestions:

-NewYorkerinBoston.com: The next logical step, no? The New Yorker moves from Seoul to Boston. Problem is, I have no idea how long I’ll stay in Boston, and I’d rather not invest in temporary real estate.

-PattyinBoston.com: Lame. (No offense to the boyfriend who suggested it.)

-New Yorker’s Guide to Boston Round-Eyes: Jigga…wha? As my friend JS explained it to me: “Because…you’re Korean…and all white people have round-shaped eyes to Asians.”

-DemApples.com: Get it? Like from Good Will Hunting? The site was taken. By Democrats from Harvard.

-PahktheCar.com, PahkChronicles.com, PahkStreet.com, and so forth: Another Boston reference, playing off the Bahhhhston accent. Unfortunately “Pahk” is even less appealing visually than it is aurally.

-And, perhaps most baffling: “Green Blood Patty.com.” This, suggested by my friend CL, took approximately 4 minutes for her to explain. Punning off the Boston Brahmins, aka the blue-bloods, green is both Irish (like working class Boston) and the color that happens when you mix blue (for the blue-bloods) with yellow (for the Korean bloods). For fear that this URL would make me sound like a racist vampire, I move on to:

-Not for All the Tea in Boston: Gratuitous colonial, Boston, and Magnetic Fields reference of a preexisting idiom (ie, “Not for all the tea in China”). How could you go wrong?… until you factor in the associations with the Tea Party. ‘Nuff said.

-ParkLife.com : Great suggestion from a woman I met for about an hour. It plays off my last name AND it’s the name of Blur’s second-best album. Not surprisingly, it was taken.

-Picnic, Lightning: This is the famous 2 word parenthetical explanation for Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert’s mother’s death. It is also the name of a collection of poetry by the poet Billy Collins. Taken.

-Nunchi.com : Plain and simple. Taken.

-NoNunchi.com: Having no nunchi is a big problem afflicting our society. I hoped to spread social awareness by purchasing the URL. Taken.

Taken, Taken, Taken...Finally!

So why did I settle on WhatIsNunchi.com ? Because nobody in the world except the 70 million people of 2 tiny adjacent countries know what that word even means. And even they would not understand its romanized transcription.