A pedestrian walks past a sewing shop on the Sewing Street of Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul, on July 29. PARK SANG-MOON For many Seoulites, Changsin-dong in Jongno District, central Seoul, barely registers. Tucked into the hills of the district, the neighborhood isn't widely considered a place to meet — it's not Hannam-dong, not Seongsu-dong. But for the Nepali community in Korea, it is the address. Whenever Nepalis in Korea want to get together, the instruction is always the same — let's meet in Changsin-dong. That is because Changsin-dong is where the Nepali community took shape — where its restaurants, groceries and associations gave two decades of arrivals their first foothold in Korea. Bhattarai Roshan, who owns and operates an Indian-Nepali restaurant, Lumbini, in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul, poses for a photo during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on July 29. PARK SANG-MOON Bhattarai Roshan, who runs an Indian-Nepali restaurant in the heart of Changsin-dong, is a living record of the neighborhood's formation. He has been in Korea for more than two decades; he holds Korean citizenship; he has raised a child here. His first week in the country, back in 2004, began with something both unexpected and, to a Nepali tongue, oddly familiar: banana milk. “When I first came, I knew nothing — not the language, not the food,” Roshan said during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily. “I went into a shop to buy sugar and came home with salt. For almost a week I lived on banana milk and rice, because in Nepal we eat banana and milk with our rice, so that taste felt like home.” He had come to Korea because Nepal was a tough place in the early 2000s; a friend had already made the trip; and his relatives said that a person could actually earn something in Korea or Japan. 릴게임오리지널 So he had come, in part, on an image — the 2002 World Cup, the dramas, the sense in Nepal that Korea was a decent country worth going to. What the image left out was the salt, the silence, the week of banana milk. The work, when it came, was factory work, in Uijeongbu and Yangju, factory cities located on the outskirts of Seoul and far removed from the cheerful image of Korea he had arrived with. The plan was the standard one: earn remittance money, then go home — until it hardened into going home for good. Roshan had decided that he would leave Korea soon. What changed his mind was a conversation. A full Nepali meal served at an Indian-Nepali restaurant, Lumbini, in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul PARK SANG-MOON “I had decided to go back to Nepal,” Roshan said. “But I met the owners of Everest Restaurant here in Changsin-dong, and they told me not to give up, that I could build a future in Korea. That is how I started in the food business.” He learned the trade at Everest, one of the first Nepali restaurants in the neighborhood, then at Lumbini, another Nepali restaurant, where he eventually became the owner. Since then, Roshan put down roots in Changsin-dong. He naturalized as a Korean. His child goes to Changsin Elementary. He has, by his own account, now lived longer in Korea than he ever did in Nepal. Seoul's textile district To walk in Changsin-dong back then was to enter the workroom of Seoul’s clothing trade. The neighborhood is Dongdaemun’s production floor. 온라인바다이야기릴게임 By most accounts, more than a thousand small sewing workshops still work its alleys, and the streets move to their rhythm — motorbikes threading uphill with bolts of fabric and stacks of finished garments, cut pieces and trims shuttling between one-room factories, the churn of machines behind half-open doors. The bright clothes that fill Dongdaemun’s windows are assembled up here in Changsin-dong, a few at a time, in a division of labor so fine that a single garment can send a rider up and down the hill several times before it is done. The industry is partly why Nepalis came to Korea in the first place. In the 2000s, Changsin-dong offered cheap rooms and work you could get without much Korean, and the first Nepali restaurants and grocers took root on top of it. But Roshan is careful not to overstate the link now. Decorations at an Indian-Nepali restaurant, Lumbini, in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul, are seen on July 29. PARK SANG-MOON Nepalis have become one of the larger migrant communities in Korea — close to 90,000 live nationwide, by government count — and Changsin-dong is one of the main places they have gathered. “Fifteen years ago, many Nepalis worked in the sewing shops, but not many today,” Roshan said. “The workers who come through the EPS [employment permit system] mostly go to farms, to construction sites, to factories in other places. Here it is more restaurants, more businesses.” Roshan believes it's human connections, rather than any particular industry or occupation, that holds Changsin-dong together. “It is the network,” Roshan argued. “The restaurants, the Nepali grocery shops, the associations, the embassy close by, and the students. Wherever a Nepali lives in Korea, they will say, let’s meet at Changsin-dong.” And they do keep coming back. A Nepali can hardly pass through Korea without turning up here at least once, according to Roshan. 바다이야기 확률 On a festival weekend, you’ll find them lined up from Exit 1 to Exit 8 of Dongmyo Station, the entrance to Changsin-dong. Employees of an Indian-Nepali restaurant, Lumbini, in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul, including Bhattarai Roshan, far left, pose for a photo during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on July 29. PARK SANG-MOON Not just restaurants, but a community To many Korean visitors to Changsin-dong, the Nepali food street is an exotic excursion — curry, naan, tandoori chicken, a photo, gone. To the people who built it, it does two entirely different jobs. “For us this street is two things,” Roshan said. “It is where we eat food from home, and it is where we meet people and hear news — about work, about visas, about someone’s child and their school.” The menus show the difference between the Korean and Nepali palates. Koreans order curry and naan; Nepalis order dal bhat — rice with lentils, the everyday meal — and momo, or Nepali dumplings. And Roshan cooks to accommodate both groups. “Koreans think Nepali food is curry and naan and tandoori,” he said. “But we eat dal bhat and momo. For Korean customers, I make it a little softer, and for Nepali customers I make it the way we make it at home.” The headquarters of the Non-Resident Nepali Association South Korea (NRNA Korea) is seen in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul on July 29. PARK SANG-MOON Changsin-dong's rhythm follows the community, not the tourists. Weekends fill; holidays overflow. During Dashain, the largest festival on the Nepali calendar, people visit Changsin-dong from all over Korea, and the street stops being a row of restaurants and becomes — at least for a few days — the closest thing to home that a few thousand people can reach without a plane. 릴게임황금포카성 Korea took its time noticing what was happening in Changsin-dong, according to Roshan. “Around 2015, Everest Restaurant was on television, and after that people were lining up,” Roshan said. “Then the bloggers came, the YouTubers came. Before that, Koreans didn’t really know this place.” The mix in his dining room has changed since; it now runs roughly half foreign and half Korean. The neighborhood was not built as an attraction and then filled with Nepalis. The Nepalis built a place to live, and the rest of the city discovered it later. Scar under the alleys Changsin-dong’s name stitches together two older ones — Injang-bang and Sungsin-bang, Joseon-era districts whose middle characters were fused into “Changsin. The neighborhood's shape was cut, quite literally, for the downtown area further downhill. Under the packed housing is the old face of a quarry. The granite hauled out of Mount Naksan went, records say, into the stone landmarks of early 20th-century Seoul — the Bank of Joseon, Gyeongseong Station, the Government-General building — when the country was under Japanese colonial rule. Then, after the Korean War, as the city’s population swelled and housing ran short, people threw up shanties along the old fortress wall and the quarry’s cut slope — and the dense, stair-threaded housing that gives Changsin-dong its layered texture today grew out of that improvisation. Roshan sees the terrain of the neighborhood with a kind of nostalgia. “The hills, the stairs, the narrow alleys of Changsin-dong — they remind me of Nepal,” he said. “When I walk here, I think of Kathmandu, of Thamel.” What is a scar of colonial extraction to a historian is, to him, a resemblance to home. 모바일 바다 스팀 게임 Stone was cut from this hill for the city’s colonial monuments; clothes are still sewn in its alleys for Dongdaemun’s shop windows; and now Nepalis begin their Korean lives on its slopes. Decorations at an Indian-Nepali restaurant, Lumbini, in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul, are seen on July 29. PARK SANG-MOON Keeping Changsin-dong real The neighborhood is changing again, in the way discovered places inevitably do. The Nepalis are less conspicuous than they were, Roshan thinks — not because there are fewer of them, but because Vietnamese residents have also arrived, so the street no longer reads as singularly Nepali. The students, though, have multiplied: Roshan estimates that something like 500 Nepali students now live in the greater area, against perhaps 200 longer-term Nepali residents in Changsin-dong itself. As for the restaurants, there are more than 18 Nepali cuisine shops, according to Roshan. The cost of the new attention on Changsin-dong is the usual one. Decorations at an Indian-Nepali restaurant, Lumbini, in Changsin-dong, Jongno District, central Seoul, are seen on July 29. PARK SANG-MOON “In the last three or four years, the rent has gone up a lot,” Roshan said. “Students ask me to find them a room, and now it is hard and expensive.” The prettier the neighborhood gets — the cafes, the viewpoints, the walking routes he’s mostly glad to see — the harder it becomes to actually live in. What Roshan wants for the neighborhood, when you ask him, is modest and specific. “I hope they don’t rebuild the old alleys too much,” he said. “I want them to stay as history.” Roshan does not describe Changsin-dong as a place he passed through, or is still passing through. He describes it as the place his time went, and the place other Nepalis come to when they need to find their way through life in Korea. Not a shelter, but a neighborhood. BY LIM JEONG-WON [ out was t