Busan functions as Jungkook’s first named place of belonging and as one of the novel’s most important absent locations. Mentioned during an intimate conversation with Shelby, it is not presented through a detailed landscape or a return journey; instead, it enters the narrative through memory, compressed biography, and regret. That absence gives the city emotional force: Busan is less a backdrop than a place carried within Jungkook after departure.

Definition and Setting

Busan is the South Korean city Jungkook identifies as his place of origin. He tells Shelby that he comes from Busan and that he lived in Seoul before arriving in Seattle at the age of ten. The sequence establishes a movement across cities and countries—Busan, Seoul, Seattle, and later the American settings in which Jungkook builds his adult life—while preserving Busan as the starting point of his personal geography.

The city is discussed on a pontoon while Jungkook and Shelby are drinking together. Their conversation takes place away from the pressures surrounding their ordinary lives, allowing geographic origins to become a form of emotional disclosure. Shelby says that Los Angeles still calls to her after moving to Ellensburg, and Jungkook recognizes the feeling rather than treating it as simple nostalgia. Busan therefore becomes the point at which their separate displacements briefly correspond.

Memory, Departure, and Regret

Jungkook does not describe leaving Busan as an uncomplicated adventure. He says that he sometimes regrets having left, even though there are events connected with the place that he would like to forget. The city thus holds two opposed meanings at once: it is the lost home he misses and the origin of memories he cannot willingly preserve. Its significance lies precisely in this contradiction, because belonging and pain remain joined rather than resolving into a single emotional verdict.

His later life is marked by repeated movement, conflict, and attempts to put the past behind him. Against that trajectory, Busan represents a past that remains active despite physical distance. Jungkook’s statement does not provide a complete account of what happened there, but it reveals that his history predates Seattle and that migration did not erase the emotional claims of his childhood environment. Busan becomes a concealed pressure beneath his adult identity: a place he can name, mourn, and partially refuse, but not simply abandon inwardly.

Relationship to Jungkook’s Story

Busan helps explain the layered identity Jungkook presents to Shelby. In the immediate circumstances of their conversation, he is a student and Shelby’s companion, yet his recollection places him within a longer history of relocation. Saying that he lived in Seoul before reaching Seattle at ten supplies a concise chronology for the person he has become: his Korean origins, his early transnational displacement, and the distance between childhood and adulthood are all contained in a few sentences.

The disclosure also deepens the bond between Jungkook and Shelby. Shelby has already expressed homesickness for Los Angeles, and Jungkook responds with recognition grounded in his own attachment to Busan. Their shared understanding does not depend on identical histories. Instead, each recognizes in the other the strain of having left one place while continuing to inhabit it emotionally. The city therefore serves as a bridge between them before their relationship becomes more explicit.

Narrative Significance

Busan is part of the novel’s broader pattern of using places as vessels for memory. Other locations are encountered through return, crisis, family history, or mourning; Busan is distinctive because it remains offstage and is reconstructed entirely through Jungkook’s recollection. The narrative turns a missing setting into an interior one, showing how displacement can make a location more psychologically present rather than less.

Its final significance is tied to the novel’s idea of rebirth. The closing reflection describes renewal as leaving the past behind in order to welcome a better future, while also acknowledging that the process may take months or years and that each person must move at a different pace. Busan embodies the difficulty contained in that principle. Jungkook may continue forward, but moving forward does not require pretending that the place, its losses, or its painful memories never mattered. The city remains an origin that can be carried into change without dictating the whole of the future.