In late October 2016, Gwanghwamun Square in central Seoul was packed with hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, single and in couples, and families with small children. They carried candles and red paper signs, which read: “Park Geun-hye step down.”

The nearby subway exits were lined with thousands of riot police. Dressed in neon-green uniforms and carrying plastic shields, they appeared threatening at first glance, but then I noticed that they were just young men, barely in their 20s, looking bored, or tired. They were the army reserve. Because the two Koreas are technically still at war, all Korean young men must serve in the military. In South Korea, the mandatory draft is for 21 months; in North Korea it is 10 years. Dozens of blue-and-white police buses were parked one behind the other to form a barricade, barring the path to the presidential residence and blocking the streets from the subway exit. It seemed a pointless effort, since all one had to do to enter the area where people gathered was to walk around a few blocks to bypass them.

The square is the focal point of Korean nationalism, where a 10-lane avenue leads to the royal palace. In the middle of the sprawling avenue stands the giant bronze statue of Admiral Lee Sun-shin, a 16th-century military hero who fought the Japanese invaders, and a few steps north sits the golden statue of King Sejong who, in 1446, invented the Korean alphabet. Nestled behind the royal palace is the Blue House, the presidential residence.

The protest was scheduled for 6pm, but by early afternoon the crowd already extended as far as the eye could see, each protester demanding that the president step down. The organisers were a loose association of labour unions, students and civic groups. Somewhere in the distance, one of them got up on a stage and shouted, “What kind of a country is this?” The crowd responded, in unison, “Impeach Park Geun-hye!”, and then, “Arrest Park Geun-hye!” Volunteers handed out the candles that have become a symbol of defiance in South Korea. On stage, a succession of musicians – of all styles, from hip-hop to folk – performed songs that attacked the president, with lyrics telling her to “piss off” or “disappear”. The mood was jubilant, and the crowd was orderly. At midnight, people began to leave, though many stayed behind to clean up and recycle the garbage.

I had flown to Seoul from New York, intending to stay just a few days on a stopover after a book festival in the region. Back in the US, the nation was gearing up for the final push before the presidential election. I was in need of a break from the American news as the campaigns became increasingly belligerent. For the first time ever, a woman was about to become the president of the United States, and her rival for the job was a real-estate mogul and reality TV star. In South Korea, Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female president, was mired in a corruption scandal that threatened to unseat her.

Autumn was bleeding into winter, and the leaves were just beginning to turn. Seoul is my childhood home, where I was born and raised, and I get nostalgic in autumn, which any Korean will tell you is the loveliest time to visit the country’s mountainous landscape, but that was not why I found myself stalled there. Every few days, I would wake up and phone the airline to postpone my return flight to New York. This ritual became so familiar that before long I knew the airline’s reservation number by heart.

The two countries, on opposite sides of the world, both of which I considered home, seemed on the verge of something significant, and I felt stuck. This feeling of being caught between two places and cultures is, in many ways, the condition of being an immigrant. There is the native home you have left, and the adoptive home in which you make conscious efforts to assimilate. Since I moved to the US as a teenager, it has been, for me, both a refuge and the future. Or, at least, that was the mantra I adopted to cope with the challenges of settling down in a land where I was perpetually viewed as “other”. And until recently, when Donald Trump rose on an anti-immigrant ticket that proved unnervingly popular, I felt I had done so largely successfully.

So this stopover in Seoul was meant to be a brief reprieve. I had spent my childhood there. It was where everyone spoke my mother tongue, where my skin was not described as being “yellow”. In Seoul, a part of me readily returns to being a child – my natural self, one that had been there before I learned to be “Asian” in America; and yet, on this visit, Seoul was no refuge. The country was reeling from each new revelation about its president. Tens of thousands of South Koreans took to the streets, and that number would grow and grow, eventually bringing down the president and blowing open the biggest political scandal the country had seen.

The unrest had been brewing for months. On 19 October, the principal of Ewha Womans University, one of the country’s top colleges, resigned after a series of student protests. The demonstrations were against the favoured treatment of Chung Yoo-ra, a 20-year-old national equestrian who had been granted a place at the university without the necessary qualifications, and who had later received top grades without once attending classes. After the principal stepped down, it was revealed that Samsung had donated millions to pay for Chung’s horse and training, and that she was the daughter of Choi Soon-sil, a close friend and confidante of President Park.

As the corruption scandal unfolded, it emerged that about $70m had been paid by Korea’s biggest companies to foundations set up by Choi. In return for these huge sums, it was alleged, Choi used her relationship with the president to influence Korean policy.

Besides using her friendship with President Park for financial gain, Choi, a private citizen with no security clearance, had been given access to classified documents and was said to be advising the president on state affairs. Choi had edited drafts of major presidential speeches, including the address Park made in Dresden, formerly in East Germany, in 2014, in which she called for the reunification of Korea. Investigations revealed that Choi was in charge of decisions large and small relating to the president, from the choice of handbag Park carried, to the nonprofit foundations she championed – some of which were, in fact, shell companies created by Choi.

The story then took a strange twist as it was revealed that 60-year-old Choi was the daughter of Choi Tae-min, founder of the Church of Eternal Life and Park’s longtime mentor until his death in 1994. The president’s close relationship with both father and daughter became the focus of popular outrage. And the reason it so infuriated the public was that Park was unlike any other president.

As the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the military dictator who ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1979, Park had grown up in the public eye. She spent most of her childhood in the Blue House. In 1974, when Park was 22, her mother was shot and killed by a North Korean sympathiser, who had actually been aiming at her father. After her mother’s death, Park became a surrogate first lady, accompanying her father to state events.

Soon after her mother’s death, Park met Choi Tae-min, who claimed to be a messenger from her dead mother. Forty years Park’s senior, he was a low-ranking policeman turned Buddhist monk turned pseudo pastor, who had changed his name six times and married seven times. Park’s emotional dependence on him became so extreme that her father and siblings tried to intervene. When Park Chung-hee was assassinated in 1979 by the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, the killer testified that his actions were provoked by the president’s inability to end Choi Tae-min’s influence over the first daughter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Masked protesters posing as South Korean president Park Geun-hye, depicting her as a puppet being operated by her confidante Choi Soon-sil. Photograph: Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

In 2007, the US embassy in Seoul sent out a memo saying that Choi Tae-min “had complete control over Park’s body and soul during her formative years, and that his children accumulated enormous wealth as a result”. After Choi Tae-min’s death in 1994, it appears that his daughter took his place at Park Geun-hye’s side.

In 2013, Park was elected, less for her political expertise than because she had been both a daughter and a mother to the nation. Her strongest supporters were older voters who, with the passing of time, felt oddly nostalgic for her father’s authoritarian reign. They forgot the repression and the torture of prisoners, remembering only the rapid economic growth of his era. Also, for many Koreans, whose spiritual foundation is family-centred Confucianism, there was sympathy for Park, whose parents had both been murdered, and who herself has never married or had children. During her election campaign, Park often claimed that she had married the nation.

With no family or dependents, and estranged from her siblings, Park was also free of any temptation to enrich her family while in office. For the public, then, this corruption scandal felt like a deep betrayal. Park was elected on her promises to ensure “an era of hope and happiness” by building a stronger economy and taking a tougher stance against North Korea. She had also made a commitment to stamp out corruption in the country’s biggest companies, yet she ended up being accused of conspiring to extort money from those very same organisations.

The unfolding revelations also dredged up an incident that had badly damaged Park’s credibility: the Sewol ferry disaster. In 2014, a ferry capsized with 325 high school students on board. They were ordered to stay in their seats as the vessel sank, while the captain and crew escaped in lifeboats and the coastguard botched the rescue effort. South Korea is one of the most digitally connected nations in the world, which meant that the horror was witnessed live by huge numbers of people. The trapped teenagers texted and video-chatted their parents until their final seconds. A total of 304 lives were lost, but in those desperate hours, Park was nowhere to be found. No statement was issued by the Blue House until she finally appeared seven hours later, looking dazed and asking: “Why is it so hard to find the students if they are wearing life jackets?”

Park never did explain her whereabouts at the time of the sinking. Two years later, it would be revealed that for at least some of those missing hours, a hairdresser from a salon in Gangnam, a trendy area of Seoul, was at the Blue House, styling the president’s hair. Many reports compared photographs of Park’s face before and after that day, suggesting that she might have been receiving anti-wrinkle treatments under anaesthetic at the time, which would explain why she was missing during a national emergency and appeared incoherent when she finally emerged. (It was proven that Park had frequented an anti-ageing clinic in Gangnam, which Choi also frequented, under a pseudonym, and that several plastic surgeons, including Choi’s doctor, made secret trips to the Blue House to treat the president.)

On 25 October 2016, Park made her first televised apology to the nation, which lasted just one minute and 40 seconds. She acknowledged seeking advice on her speeches from Choi Soon-sil. She described Choi as someone who helped her “during difficult times”. On 31 October, Choi was arrested on a charge of exerting inappropriate influence over state affairs. Park’s approval rating fell to 5% – the lowest of any president in South Korean history.

In early November, I was planning to fly back to the US when Donald Trump was elected. The first thing I did upon hearing the news was postpone my return to New York once more. I told myself that I should stick around in Seoul to see how the protests panned out, but in reality, I just did not want to go back to America.

I was afraid, and the root of my feelings stretched back deep into my immigrant past. That fear seemed to undo everything I had worked towards since I first landed at John F Kennedy Airport, aged 13, without a word of English. I moved through several inner-city schools. I very rarely met white Americans, except for a few teachers, because they did not seem to live in the outer boroughs of New York City where my family had settled. I learned that I was looked upon as “Asian” in this new world, which was segregated according to the colour of one’s skin. I also learned that those of us who had freshly arrived, who were not white or black, were invisible. The white teachers mispronounced my name so often that I ended up using a shortened version, a bit different from my Korean name. That is how I became Suki, and how, as the years went by, the name I was born with stopped feeling like mine.

I was still a child then, but old enough to feel a pinch of humiliation that never quite went away. Those were my mute teenage years, in which I persevered because, having so little, there was no choice but to hold on to America as my future. To this day, I cannot bear Charles Dickens, because Great Expectations takes me back to the time in high school when I stayed up all night translating each word with a tattered dictionary. To survive in this new world, where I recognised nothing and had to start anew, I had to push away Korea, even in my deepest dreams. I missed it profoundly, but I knew that if I succumbed to that feeling, I would not be able to stand being where I was.

For immigrants, home is a complicated thing. The act of leaving your country of origin – the place where your people have lived for generations, and where your parents or grandparents will live out their old age without you – and relocating to the unknown suggests that the forces that compelled you to leave were desperate. For many of us, our native home is mired in nostalgia, regret and guilt.

I fled my childhood home in the dead of night when my father, who had owned a shipping company, a mining venture and hotels, went bankrupt overnight. During the volatile politics and economy of 1980s Korea, many independent companies folded, and bankruptcy was punishable by jail. After a year of hiding from police, we moved, penniless, to New York. My parents worked tirelessly at whatever job they could get; there was not much choice for non-English-speaking immigrants in their late 30s with three children. My father once told me that it was at the airport that an immigrant’s fate gets decided. Depending on whoever comes to pick you up – an acquaintance or a distant family member who might now work in dry cleaning, a fish market, or a Korean deli – you follow that person and get hired through his introduction. Having grown up under the care of a governess and a chauffeur, I had never seen my parents do manual labour. The cost of the American dream was decades of hard work and heartbreak.

My father was an undocumented immigrant until he became a naturalised citizen through an amnesty. Any mention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service still fills me with dread. When I got to college, I applied for US citizenship; not so much out of patriotism, but because it was where I lived and I didn’t feel secure without a certificate to prove my legitimacy.

Now, at 73, my father remains grateful to America for giving him a chance to raise his family. With time, though, I have come to realise that my father’s America isn’t really my America. For him, America meant working non-stop at jobs in which he was often treated as lesser, and chastised for not speaking English. Sure, he should have learned the language, but working seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, doesn’t leave much time for ESL classes; moreover, the only thing left he had of his home was the Korean language. So perhaps it was on his behalf that I pursued my adoptive language with a vengeance. When my first book came out, reviews in papers such as the New York Times did not seem to impress him. It was only when the book was translated into Korean and reviewed in the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo that he seemed truly excited. In his mind, he always reaches back to Korea for meaning.

Immigration is never a simple equation. You do not subtract the most intimate part of yourself and replace it with another. It is a long, painful journey to make oneself a home in a strange land where the established norm is different to what you are and what you know. The act of placing your palm upon your chest and swearing allegiance to the flag is not what makes you American, but the fact that, by the time you have that opportunity, you have given the toughest and most tender parts of yourself to this country. My father has spent half of his life in America while dreaming of his Korea. I have often wondered if his life was happy. If America had been worth all that for him.

I was, and still am, afraid of the answer. So instead of returning to America, I remained in Seoul and took my place among the people on their weekly protest at Gwanghwamun. Park had now apologised twice in televised addresses, both times briefly, without taking questions. On each occasion, she denied any personal wrongdoing and fired several of her top aides. The number of protesters surpassed a million, and the world was finally paying attention. The mood on the streets was jubilant, and everyone said that people were taking power back. They seemed hopeful that things might change at last.

Having grown up in South Korea during Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship, witnessing the suppression of public protests, it felt oddly familiar to see the crowd now gathered against his daughter. Intricate layers of history had led to this moment. Korea’s modern democracy suddenly looked fragile. Park – the closest thing Korea had to a princess – had conducted herself in the manner of an absolute monarch, and now the masses were revolting in front of the ancient palace.

But the modernity of America, too, felt under threat. The progress embodied by the election of its first black president had come at a price, and now the country’s racist past was rearing its head, as white supremacists took hold of the news agenda to promote their favoured candidate. Joining the demonstrators in Korea, I felt stuck between my own past and future. There was Korea on one side, and America on the other. Both were in turmoil, and neither offered a refuge.

Marching amid the crowd to the Blue House, I was silently protesting against an America that no longer felt safe.

By late November 2016, “Viagra” was the most searched word on Naver, South Korea’s equivalent of Google. It was revealed that the president’s office had ordered large quantities of the drug at the taxpayers’ expense. A Blue House spokesperson explained that 60 pills of branded Viagra and 304 pills of PalPalJung, the generic Korean version, had been purchased in preparation for the president’s official tour of Africa, as a remedy for altitude sickness. Treating altitude sickness is one of Viagra’s lesser-known uses, but that did not explain why the Blue House had suddenly switched from the drug it had traditionally used for this purpose in the past, or why they had ordered two different brands.

The local media went into lurid detail about what it imagined the president might have wanted the drug for. Speculation as to the identity of her lover centred around 48-year-old Cha Eun-taek, a pop video director who had landed many lucrative projects as a result of his acquaintance with Choi Soon-sil.

Among the hundreds of other medicines purchased by Park’s office between March 2014 and August 2016 – worth a total of more than $17,000 – were injectable doses of anti-ageing human placenta extract, garlic extract and vitamin shots. There were also quantities of Emla 5%, a numbing cream widely used for Botox treatments, facial rejuvenation laser treatments and dermal filler injections.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest South Korean lawmakers and opposition party members hold placards demanding the impeachment of Park Geun-hye in December 2016. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP

The steep increase in these pharmaceutical orders should have sparked inquiries about the Blue House’s dealings with the companies that supplied them. But instead the media focused on the possible personal use of the drugs, smearing the president as a loose, vain, silly woman and calling her leadership skills into question. Park already suffered from a widespread bias against women, and as the scandal grew, her gender became a liability.

Bizarre reports surfaced every day, including a story that Park, a confirmed Catholic, had shamanistic rituals performed in the Blue House. The president’s office denied that any such thing took place, but offered no comment on a shamanic fortune ritual, arranged by her party, that had been held at the parliament earlier that year. For many Koreans, there is a collective shame about the folksier elements of their own culture. Shamanism, though an essential part of the country’s spiritual life, has always been dismissed as an old woman’s belief, yet here was the president apparently endorsing it.

Reports also appeared about the so-called “eight fairies”, a group of women put together by Choi who had no official roles but supposedly held secret meetings at a downtown sauna and advised the president on national affairs. Before long, every story focused on the negative stereotype of the ahjumma, or middle-aged woman – their superstitions, their predilection for shamans and fortune tellers, their obsession with cosmetic surgery and soap operas. For the nation to learn that it was ruled by such women was wounding to its pride.

The way the protests grew and spread across the country reflects the complexity of Korean society. Caught between the larger powers of China and Japan, Koreans have historically been seen as resilient, obedient and emotional people. Centuries of feudalism and Confucianism lie deep within the national psyche, and help explain why people can feel both subservient to and resentful of a social hierarchy that allows the likes of Park Geun-hye and the heads of big corporations to rule the nation. The line between an individual and the nation can often be blurred. For instance, when they talk about the Sewol ferry disaster, it is common to hear Koreans claim the victims as “my children”. In a society where such group thinking dominates, public demonstrations have become a cathartic ritual. All through that winter, in rain or snow, people took to the street every Saturday in peaceful protest.

With the number of protesters across the country now in the millions, and a federal corruption investigation under way, the Blue House panicked and Park made her third public apology. However, the speech, on 29 November, was catastrophically misjudged. Two things in particular outraged the public. Park said she was sorry to have mismanaged those around her, and that she would resign “at the will” of the parliament. This might sound like an apology, but its meaning was precisely the opposite. Park had refused to take personal responsibility for the actions of her administration and had, instead, shifted the blame to her subordinates. In addition, the Korean public had been demanding that she step down immediately, of her own volition. The Korean parliament does not have the authority to force a president to step down, so by saying she that she would only resign if it told her to, Park revealed that she had no intention of doing so at all.

On 3 December, following the “apology”, a record number of protesters – an estimated 2.3 million of them – came out to Gwanghwamun Square. Three days later, on 6 December, the heads of nine chaebul, or large conglomerates, including Samsung’s Lee Jae-yong and Hyundai’s Chung Mong-koo, were summoned to a nationally televised parliamentary hearing on the bribery scandal. On 9 December, parliament voted, with an overwhelming margin of 234 to 56, to impeach Park. (She became the first South Korean president to be removed from office, as ordered by the constitutional court, on 9 March 2017. She was arrested on 31 March and is currently in jail, as South Korea prepares to elect a new leader on 9 May.)

Finally, I ran out of excuses to postpone my return flight. And yet I still did not leave right away. My indecision was fuelled by fear, and something else I could not name. I was worried for New York, my home across the ocean, where people were marching in protest to Trump Tower, and I felt guilty for not being there with them. But I was also angry at the way things seemed to be heading, and I was immeasurably sad. That fury and sadness kept growing inside me every day that I could not find my way back to America.

On 29 January 2017, I took the New York subway to JFK airport to join the demonstration against president Trump’s travel ban, which had blocked the entry of nearly 100,000 people – including refugees and the holders of visas and green cards – in transit. All weekend, lawyers offering free advice, interpreters and protesters had been flocking to airports across the US.

As the train zipped beneath Wall Street, passing Ground Zero, which I still avoid 16 years after the 9/11 attacks, I recalled the last time New Yorkers rushed to help one another. Back then, in the days following the attack, I spent my days at the Family Assistance Center, volunteering as an interpreter. There were more than 50 languages represented at the centre, because so many of the dead were immigrants. The first tower fell at 8.46am. At that early hour, many of the people already at work were junior employees, many of them on their first jobs out of college, pursuing their American dream and making their parents proud. I spent many weeks holding the hands of those parents, some of whom still believed that their children were trapped alive in the debris.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A demonstration against the Muslim immigration ban at John F Kennedy International Airport in New York, on 28 January 2017. Photograph: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images

The train rumbled along ever so slowly. New York subways are awful, dirty and unpredictable, but they get us where we need to go. I was trying to trace a map of how this all began. I recalled the way that the Bush administration exploited people’s horror and anguish to wage what it named the “war on terror”. Sixteen years later, Trump’s administration is waging war against its own people.

I recalled how valiantly people in South Korea rebelled against injustice. Korea is a small country where people rally easily, where they listen to organisers, where they are polite, and, despite differences in political opinion, mostly peaceful. I wasn’t sure if mass protest could be peaceful in the US, which is vast and deeply divided. The polarisation of the country scared me, and I wondered how many people across its thousands of miles were right now heading to their nearest airport to protest.

Tracking back to the past is what we immigrants do. We always circle back to make sense of the present. Part of us is always left behind in the place we came from. On that cold January day, I rode the subway all the way to JFK, and by the time I arrived, I was weeping.

America seems to be slipping away from me at dizzying speed, and becoming something I do not recognise. On the subway, I felt like that 13-year-old girl again, arriving in a strange, scary place where I knew no one – except that now I speak the language, and I have the best weapon for the fight ahead: my tortured, devastating love for America. So I soldiered on to the airport that had opened up a whole new world for me decades before, the place where it all began.

Main image: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty; Chung Sung-jun/Getty; Monika Graff/UPI/Barcroft; Lee Sang-ho/Xinhua; Guardian Design

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