Some Bad Traffic

I thought my hometown Seoul had the worst public traffic. I could fell the heat and breath of people near me in a crowded subway as I read the piece. The language use is so vivid that I felt like being in a subway during rush hour--eww. The situations in the story is exactly like what people can experience in large cities. Has anyone here ever experienced getting on a bus or subway while worrying about pickpockets or sexual harassment by strangers? I have, whenever I am in Korea. But that was my home country. In the piece, Amanda Fields is experiencing it in a foreign country. The thing she most worries about being stared at because she is a foreigner. This is something I am familiar with, actually--Koreans tend to do this as well, even though less prominent nowadays. Nobody wants to be an exhibit in a foreign country. But it cannot be helped at times. At lease I was glad that the women she met in there were the nice ones.

The whole piece has a realistic feeling--being in a foreign country, culture shock, being stuck. Visualization of a text all depends on how much the writer can bring out the scene in great detail, yet not making the sentences long and tedious. Amanda Fields did an excellent job here and I felt like I was in Cairo subway for sure.

Hae-Lim Lee