I want to be honest with you: last week was a lot.
Back-to-back showings. Offer negotiations that stretched into the evenings. The kind of week where you’re running on coffee and calendar alerts and you keep telling yourself you’ll slow down — just not yet. If you’ve ever worked in real estate, you know exactly what I mean. When the market moves, you move with it. You don’t really get to choose the pace.
By Friday, I was done. Not burned out — just full. Full in the way that happens when you’ve given a week everything you had.
So I did something for myself. I went to see TWICE.
A Name That Means Something Different to Me
If you don’t follow K-pop, TWICE is a nine-member Korean girl group — one of the biggest acts to come out of South Korea in the past decade. Their music is bright, hook-heavy, and genuinely hard not to love. They’ve built an enormous global fanbase, and for good reason.
But here’s the thing about TWICE and me: they were the soundtrack to a very different chapter of my life.
About ten years ago, I was serving in the Korean military. It’s mandatory service — something most Korean men go through — and it’s exactly as structured, demanding, and far-from-home as you’d imagine. During the rare windows of downtime, music was one of the few escapes you could actually count on. TWICE had just debuted. Their songs were everywhere — on phones, in barracks, hummed quietly by guys who were tired but still young enough to be hopeful about whatever came next.
I listened to them more than I realized at the time. Those songs became embedded in a specific feeling: the feeling of daydreaming about the future. About what life might look like when this chapter was over.
I didn’t know I’d end up in Boston. I didn’t know I’d become a real estate agent. I didn’t know any of it.
Standing in That Arena
The venue was packed. Thousands of people, Candy Bong lightsticks glowing pink and white across the dark, the entire floor humming with anticipation. When the show started, the energy hit immediately — the kind that travels through the crowd and lands in your chest before you even register it consciously.
And then, out of nowhere, it hit me differently.
One of their songs came on — one I hadn’t thought about in years — and something shifted. Those memories from the military came back, but they didn’t feel heavy. They felt like distance. Good distance. The kind that shows you how far you’ve traveled.
Ten years ago I was a young Korean man in uniform, listening to this song on a phone with a cracked screen, somewhere I didn’t choose to be. Last night I was standing in a packed Boston arena, free, doing work I care about, living a life I built on the other side of the world.
I’m not going to pretend I didn’t get a little emotional. I did. And I wasn’t sorry about it.
What Boston Keeps Giving Me
I’ve lived and worked in this city long enough to know its rhythms. Boston can be relentless. The real estate market moves fast, the winters are unforgiving, and the pace of life here doesn’t really pause for you to catch your breath.
But Boston also does this: it hands you nights like this one.
A world-class concert, a city that showed up in full force, an energy in that room that reminded me why a city like this is worth the grind. The confetti that rained down during the finale, the crowd singing every word, the whole arena lit up pink — it was one of those nights that resets something in you.
That’s the thing I don’t always talk about in this job. The work-hard part is visible. The play-hard part — the part where the city rewards you for staying in it — that’s what keeps me here.
To Anyone Else Who Was There
If you were in that arena last night: you felt it too, right?
And if you’ve been grinding through a long stretch and haven’t given yourself a night off — I’d gently suggest that you do. Boston will give you one, if you let it.
As for TWICE: they were everything. Nine women who have been doing this for a decade, and they still make it look like pure joy. That’s rare. That’s worth showing up for.
Park is a Boston-based real estate agent specializing in Greater Boston and MetroWest. He works with first-time buyers, investors, and Korean-American clients navigating the Massachusetts market. Reach him at parkbostonrealtor.com or 857-370-1114.
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