I learned the sound of airplanes before I learned letters. The color of my father's uniform — he was in the air force — and the names of the places he came back from were as good as geography to me as a child, and while I was growing up in Songhwa-ri, in Paengseong, Pyeongtaek, the sound cutting across the sky was always there, like the backdrop to every day. And yet what happened in a village so close by, where people had to leave behind the ground they had lived on, did not settle deeply into my memory at the time. Living in the same place did not mean knowing one another's lives. As I learn, piece by piece, about migration and settlement in Pyeongtaek, I keep coming back to the fact that the land I call home was, for others, the place they reached at the end of leaving. People moved — as refugees, because of development, because their villages went under dam reservoirs, because a military base was expanding — and their reasons and circumstances were each their own. Some of those moves left almost no choice, and even after arriving there were days ahead of building a household again from the beginning. Beneath a landscape that to me had simply been familiar, those years lay layer upon layer. The word "migrant" says how someone came to leave, but it cannot say everything about the time they have lived where they are. In the course of repairing a house, finding work, getting to know the neighbors' faces, raising children, unfamiliar ground quietly becomes the place one walks through every day. So how long is a person meant to be called a migrant? When can settling be said to be over? And if one has to leave once more the place one has lived in for so long, where do those years remain? What draws me is the side of life that numbers do not show well — how many people moved, how much the city has changed. I want to ask what people brought with them, what they made new where they arrived, which things they kept repairing and using for years. It need not be something that has been with them since they left. A door frame fitted after they settled, a table they sat around for years — these, too, can hold the time of a life carried on in that place. Living now in another culture, away from Pyeongtaek, I am learning again the place where I grew up. I cannot set my own leaving beside flight from war or forced displacement. But I find myself asking, again and again, how living day by day in an unfamiliar place becomes possible, and what someone who has left a familiar place leans on to build a new life. It is with that question that I want to go back and listen to Pyeongtaek's stories. My interest in hyeonpan, the traditional Korean name boards, also comes down to what lies between a name and a place. A hyeonpan sets before people what kind of place this is and what meaning it holds. Yet under a single name live people who arrived by very different roads. The name decided by the administration, the name residents actually call it, the name people keep using even after they have left — these overlap at times, and at times they drift apart. Who decides the name of a place, and whose time remains in that name? So I want to find out whether I might be given wood that the village no longer uses. Before that, I want to hear where the wood was used, who lived with it, and why it is no longer needed. I do not imagine that a single piece of wood can bear witness to the whole history of a village's migration. What cannot be confirmed I will leave unknown, and I will also write down what I change with my own hands once it has been handed to me. To understand Pyeongtaek will begin, I think, with meeting the time of people who were never in my memory: not tying their lives to the single moment of leaving, but listening to what they have built since they arrived, and to what they want to change now. What I want to know is how migration turns into settlement, and who will be able to go on living on the ground that has been made that way.