Essay Collection: Recordings from Seoul. (Summer 2025).

Hey everyone — it’s finally here!!
I’ve completed my essay collection from a recent visit to Seoul this summer. These writings are more than just reflections—they’re a homecoming of the soul.

Hi, I’m EJ Elena Shin. I’m an impact investor, writer at heart, and third-culture woman—born in Seoul, raised in Toronto and New York, shaped along the way by Israeli and German host families and UN diplomats, and now based in London—living somewhere between expat and becoming immigrant.

For the past 22 years, I’ve lived abroad alone away from the family—longer than I ever lived in South Korea—while building a career in global finance. During those years, Seoul became a frozen place in my memory: a backdrop to my origin story, yet distant and unresolved.

Through this collection of essays, I return to my birth city with new eyes—tracing memory, identity, and belonging across time, place, and bloodline. This work is both a homecoming and a reckoning. A reflection on what it means to break from legacy, choose freedom, and walk the path of sovereignty and mission. It’s also a record of ancestral healing and reconciliation—with the old self, the past, and the land I once fled.

I hope that in reading these reflections, others navigating diasporic identities, intergenerational memory, or personal thresholds might feel a little more seen—and a little more whole.

Thank you for holding space for my voice.
And when was the last time you wrote… just because?

Full collection can be downloaded here (Korean / English):