Starting the past spring my wife and I talked about moving near to my son’s family in Manhattan, New York.

After discussions with my son and daughter-in-law, we went to their condo at Franklin street, made visits to rental apartments near their condo, but it was quite a tough situation to find an acceptable one in view of high rentals, old buildings, and noisy and busy streets.

Therefore, we changed locations from NYC to New Jersey areas and finally settled to one unit out of the twins called the MODERN, the 47 story skyscrapers.

We settled on the 7^th floor. We, therefore, moved from Rochester, NY to Fort Lee, NJ on June 3.

It took us several weeks for settling in this new town including the search for health insurance.

Despite the smallest unit with one bed and bath, it has a large living room with 180 degrees view showing my favorite George Washington Bridge, which I had crossed through the pedestrian path in December 2018 and March 2019.

At that time I never thought of my future moving into one of the tallest buildings for a living.

Soon after our move here, we realized it a very unusual and very attractive place for the following reasons:

First, it is genuinely a Korean town with Korean restaurants, Korean hair salons, Korean pharmacy, Korean notary public, Korean Doctors and Dentists, Korean Solomon agency corps, and others, many of them near our apartment so that I can walk easily.

Secondly, they are located very conveniently so that we can walk or call for Korean taxi.

Then my daughter-in-law started to talk about getting rid of our car, which I can’t drive to NYC since there is no easy place for parking. So I gave my old Toyota SUV to my son, Jim, who will keep it as a spare car.

Our simple life is getting even simpler nowadays. My key chain holds only two keys, one for the mailbox, another for operating the elevator of Cast Iron House where my son’s family lives. Here in the MODERN, elevators and apartment doors are opened by a card.

In my prime years, I used to carry almost ten keys for two homes, two office buildings, two cars, and some more, but now I am left with only two tiny keys.

Certainly, we are heading to the state of 무소유(無所有): Not to own anything unless absolutely necessary like Walden’s Henry David Thoreau.

Certainly, we shall discover some more interesting situations, so there will be follow-ups.

Kwan Ho Chung - July 22, 2021