Some of you might know the turning point that brought me to Korea. Some of you don’t. But now is the time to share that with you. I need to start off with some history. I grew up in Greenock, Scotland. I moved to Dumfries and Galloway in my early twenties and took on a part-time job as a barista. There, I met two people who had a greater influence on my life than they realise. One was my manager. She was studying an English as a Second Language course and later moved to Thail

Caged Birds is a short story I wrote as a submission for an anthology in Korea. They rejected the story with a letter expressing that they liked my poetic style, but didn’t think the story was right for their anthology. I understood. They wanted more of a foreigner’s perception or experience in Korea. I didn’t want to write that. I didn’t want it to become a piece containing all the things that bother me—which I feared it would be. We foreigners will always be outsiders here,