This evening I had my first celebrity sighting in Korea. Well, that is to say, I recognized my first celebrity. Since there are so many celebrities I don’t know, any person whom I bump into while walking down the street could actually be the most popular actor in Korea right now and I wouldn’t necessarily know.

Regardless, the celebrity I saw is pretty recognizable. Today I was in Gwanghwamun perusing Kyobo Books, which is a huge bookstore with a sizable foreign language section. After joyfully buying a new reading book—between terms of Korean class and I can pleasure read!—I saw André Kim, Korea’s most notable designer, buying a huge stack of large hardbacks.

I first walked very close to him without noticing, but seeing as he really is unmistakeable—he always wears sprayed-on hair, heavy eyeliner, and some variation of a large, white spacesuit—I kind of lingered in the bookstore doing the awkward celeb-watching thing.

But, I at least attempted to bury myself in the graphic design books nearby, unlike other less-discreet gawkers.

Some people were snapping pics on their phones and one person actually pulled out an SLR, but to be honest, I think taking pictures from afar of celebrities who are trying to take care of daily tasks is horribly tacky. Sure, that’s a little snobbish to say, coming from one of the people least likely to be a [Korean] celebrity. But regardless, I feel a bit more comfortable ganking a picture from a website to post instead. (Well, perhaps that’s a bit uncouth, too…)

This got me thinking about what it means to be a celebrity, naturally. People in Korea recognize 앙드레 김 씨 (André Kim-ssi), but if he walked around New York City he’d probably just be seen as an eccentric. Frankly, despite being a force in some other parts of Eastern Asia any Korean celebrity would be free of paparazzi if they were to meander through L.A., London, Paris, Delhi, or Moscow. And despite certain ones being known here, many American celebrities are less famous abroad than they might like to think.

Fickle and fleeting as fame is, it nonetheless seems über important—including to myself. Since our culture(s) often attach importance to notoriety, seeing people-you-know-of (instead of people-you-know-in-fact) pulls at our sympathies and egos in very strong ways.

I may make this all quite cerebral, but I’ll nonetheless get a very visceral feeling whenever a famous person is somehow connected to me, whether in geographic or relational proximity—the latter of which doesn’t necessarily have to be too close. (I even thought it slightly noteworthy when a student from my alma mater told me his current colleague knew my Korean celebrity crush in high school.)

In reality, I’m quite disconnected with so much of what goes on around me in Seoul. I have my little life of work, study, and play. It’s sort of overwhelming that there’s so much about which I don’t know, much less understand. On the flip side, is not knowing really any different from knowing yet not being apart of it?

Sigh. I guess that’s living our lives.