Nayeon Kim

The year is 2013, and I am sitting in a large conference room on the fourth floor of MIT’s Stratton Student Center. The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper, is having its staff meeting and I am uncomfortably watching a heated discussion that’s happening between several editors.

I scan around the room to suss out if I am the only one who’s confused by what’s happening, and I finally notice a girl on the other side of the room, sitting with the business ops crew, whom I haven’t seen before, and who looks equally as dazed as me.

Looking back, I find it both miraculous and entertaining that the same person who made me feel better about my discomfort that night would in a year move into the same on-campus house I lived in, would in four years become my housemate in San Francisco, and would in ten years be making me tteokbokki in her Hayes Valley apartment.

Her name is Nayeon—or Nay, as most of us call her—and the year is now 2023, and we are indeed eating tteokbokki on a cold July night in San Francisco. Nay lives with her husband Paul in a gorgeous apartment overlooking the Civic Center neighborhood, with the slight caveat that, in one month, Nay and Paul will give up the same apartment and go to Japan and South Korea for several months. With no plans of what happens after that.

“The seed of this idea,” she tells me as we serve ourselves spicy rice cakes, “was that we wanted to travel before settling down. But also, we wanted Paul to meet my extended family in Korea. We thought about it for a while, how we would make it work with our jobs, and then the layoffs happened. And, I’m an intuitive person. I like to take signs. So, I saw that as one.”

Nay lost her job in June, which—for the first time after years of working hard—gave her some space to slow down, enjoy life, and think about what really mattered. And some of that was realizing that she had spent so much of the last decade trying to meet unwritten societal expectations. When I ask her what she means by that, Nay pauses.

“I’ve just gone through many changes, many leaps into uncertainty,” she answers, “from moving away for college, then moving to San Francisco, then working as a software engineer, then changing jobs and switching careers to become a designer, then changing jobs again, and then becoming unemployed, and with each phase, I feel like I was always back to square one, and there were expectations of how to do each phase right.” I am struck by this answer at first, but after some thought, I realize that it makes sense.

You see, if there is one word that I associate Nay with, it’s craftsmanship. Anything she does or produces is done with immaculate precision and is of the highest quality. In my apartment, just as an example, I have more than ten clay mugs and vases that she had made, each one so unique in color and shape and texture that I practically spiraled into full-blown grief when I accidentally shattered one across my living room floor.

Last Christmas, she gave me a small cardboard box, packed with an assortment of yummy cookies that she had baked, on top of which there was a card that had a drawn legend of each cookie and its flavor.

Her skill is one of macroscopic scale as well: she was one of the software engineers at Instagram who brought live video to life, and then later a product designer at Samsung working on the single-take mode release on the S20 Galaxy phones, and most recently a product designer at Lyft working on designing more predictive and efficient booking experiences on the rider app.

The tricky thing with craftsmanship is that it sometimes can be a bit like the techne of the Greek tragedies, in that it’s a virtue that can be both a blessing and a curse. In Nay’s case, craftsmanship also meant that she always needed to have the perfect answer—she needed to get it right. “I think about the time when I was a child, before all this,” she adds, “and when I just did things. I didn’t care about the outcome.”

She’s searching for the right word to describe this perfectionistic state that she had found herself in, and she lands on “inhibited.” The way she sees it, she needs to learn how to relax and how to not be inhibited.

When we meet a week later to spend the day together for her interview, we meet this time on Valencia Street in the Mission and I jokingly ask Nay how the un-inhibition is going. “It feels freeing in a way that it didn’t feel before,” she answers, “because before, everything was just so planned.” I mention that maybe her conscious effort to embrace discomfort with uncertainty is in turn giving her an empowering sense of agency. She noodles on this idea for a bit and says she’s into it.

Funnily, our day is planned with infallible attention to detail. Nay has segmented our hangout into three chapters, and we’re starting the first chapter, which she calls The Infinite Potential Period, at Stonemill Matcha. There are a few reasons behind this choice. One, fantastic chicken katsu sandwiches. Two, the restaurant was located on Valencia Street, which was the centerpoint of Nay’s life in San Francisco from 2016 to 2018. Particularly, it was during this time that Nay and I became housemates, sharing a big house with three other friends.

“Valencia Street played a huge role in this chapter,” she says of this period, “and everything in SF was so new and sparkly. Objectively, I had a crappy room in our house, but I loved it. I loved the sunny days, walking on Valencia, going to Sidewalk Juice, going to Ritual, and just hanging out with everyone. Every place on the street is very sentimental to me.”

Her nostalgia is not unjustified. Our time in The Mission was probably the closest we will ever get to a TV show script. Our house was a revolving door of housemates, friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, and just about any permutation you can think of. We turned the living room into another bedroom, which meant we spent all of our time in the kitchen. We threw parties, after parties, dinner parties, movie nights, board game nights, and so on. In the last year of our time living together, there were at least several nights per week when there were more than ten people in the house.

“I missed the nights when we cooked together,” she says with a bittersweet tone, “the corkboard in the kitchen filled with our polaroids. Or even coming to your room and seeing people just hanging out on your bed.”

The fact is we were all doing our first jobs, had no idea how to do adulting, and found solace in the fact we could come home every night, find someone in the kitchen and sprint to the Latin American Club for their deathly margaritas. But, as is usually the case with these phases of life, they come to an end.

“There was definitely a clear cut,” Nay adds, “a clear end of an era.”

New jobs, new relationships, people moving away—slowly but noticeably, the house became quieter and everyone became busier. For Nay, specifically, the work-hard-play-hard mentality that is so prominent in the tech industry quickly lost its charm. As she puts it, “I realized if I wanted to destroy myself at work, I could.” She also wanted to switch careers and do what she’d been wanting to do for a long time, which was to become a product designer.

And then, loss entered the picture. Her grandma passed away in 2018, and shortly thereafter, in 2019, Nay lost her dad as well. These seismic shifts in her life suddenly made her aware of the finiteness of human existence. It was this awareness that kicked off an intense but an important one-year period, from 2018 to 2019, that became the second chapter of Nay’s life in San Francisco: The Reshuffle.

For this chapter, we take the 49 bus from The Mission to Cow’s Hollow to stop by one of Nay’s favorite coffee shops. On our way there, we first stop by Smoke Signals, a newsstand and cigarette shop, and we check out a few magazines. Nay ends up buying a copy of The Monocle. She’s excited to go through it and tells me that she recognizes my sense of aesthetic when she looks at the magazines in the store.

At Saint Frank’s on Polk Street, where Nay is taking us, people are chatting and bathing in the sunglow coming down from the coffee shop's skylight. Nay orders an orange-zest latte, a flavored coffee that reminds her of carefree internship days in San Francisco. Nostalgia, as I learn, has been such an ingrained sensibility for Nay that she found it shocking when other people didn’t share the sentimentality for things like parents keeping VHS tapes of their kids.

What’s special about Saint Frank’s, other than being a den of reminiscence, is that it is close to the pottery studio Nay started going to in 2018. “When I was at Instagram,” she explains, “I worked with a designer who did a lot of art, and I wanted to spend more time with her, and, with that, to spend more time with designers.”

The passion for design, fortified by an increasing awareness of human finiteness, spurred a lifestyle of no moment wasted, one that became the defining characteristic of the second chapter. Once Nay switched to design and started working at Samsung, she would spend the nights at the pottery studio. The excitement was unwavering, so much so that there was a period during which Nay went to the pottery studio every day, eventually launching an Etsy store.

I remember one week from that period, while we still lived together, when she picked up a strange cough—a side effect of the clay-heavy lifestyle. She laughs when I mention this. “Yeah, I realized I could reach flow state very easily when doing pottery. And, once I started working at Samsung, the pottery studio was so close to my office. And to Saint Frank’s as well.”

Switching to design was a pivotal transition, and it’s worth noting what an atypical transition that is for a software engineer. Design and coding are unofficial polar opposites when it comes to jobs, which further proves just how talented Nay actually is. “Engineering is very objective,” she adds, “it’s very measurable. Design can be more subjective, in ways that writing code is not. But even so, when I was an engineer, I felt that designers were the ones who were solving the really interesting problems.”

In that bizarre and magical way of life, as Nay unlocked the new sense of self, life started to slowly peel away the structures that she had—in her own words—built from the outside. The Covid-19 pandemic hit, she closed the chapter of living with housemates and moved in with Paul, then started working at Lyft in a fully-remote world, and found herself with a notably contracted social circle in a version of San Francisco that suddenly looked very different. What initially seemed like an unwanted period of solitude turned out to be possibly the most satisfying period of Nay’s life in San Francisco.

She calls this third chapter, which began in 2020, The Centralization. For this chapter, we take the bus from Cow’s Hollow to Alamo Square, where Nay would often come during the pandemic. This period brought peace because she was no longer trying to do everything. The slowness and silence of the pandemic helped her get more in touch with her introverted self, which did wonders for her mental health.

Bit by bit, she started structuring life from the inside. She began doing interior design for her and Paul’s new apartment, she started cooking meals that would make her Chapter-1 self’s head spin, and she even did several rounds of fostering kittens. April of last year, Nay and Paul got married.

We take a seat on one of the benches overlooking the Painted Ladies and talk more about this latest chapter of her life, which is clearly the chapter in which Nay got to become Nay. She will be turning thirty later this year, but is not even remotely freaked out by that milestone. Nay instead sees it as a period that’s all about “the gift of time.” She is excited to give herself the time to do projects just for herself, to spend the next years not living according to a template, to live life a little bit more unplanned, and to continue doing what she loves: design. “Design is where I feel most myself,” she concludes.

Then again, it wouldn’t be Nay if there wasn’t a little bit of planning involved. And, right now, the little bit of plan is to move out of her apartment, keep learning some Japanese, and prepare for South Korea—the first leg of her and Paul’s journey. I underline the last week of her Korean trip in my notes, during which she, Paul, and her extended family will all gather for Chuseok, a major holiday and harvest festival in South Korea that is often dubbed in the US as “the Korean Thanksgiving.”

One month after our interview, Nay and I meet up again, this time for dinner. We are going to my apartment afterward because she is helping me with creative direction and visual design for the magazine. At this point, she has already moved out of her apartment and is staying over at a friend’s place in Embarcadero for a few days before she and Paul leave the city.

Moving out is a nightmare, especially when you are putting your things in storage, not knowing where things will be stored and how they will be stored and whether they will look the same when you get them back. Nay had a solution for this looming crisis. She made a Figma file and used it to design the exact arrangement of her apartment furniture for the storage crew.

“I showed them the design and told them ‘This is how I think things should be put together in storage.’”

“How did they react?” I ask laughingly.

“They just looked at it,” she answers, “and then kept doing what they were doing. And then I got closer, put the designs in front of them, and said ‘No, you don’t understand. This is how you have to do it.’”

The crew did listen in the end and Nay ended up being right. Her arrangement was the only way to fit everything together. Which is why I also listen to her advice when she tells me that the two types of fonts I had on the website will not work together.

“They’re both sassy,” she tells me, “and they’re competing for attention.”

She helps me finalize the typography and shows me the final layout of all the assets we will use for the magazine. Everything is beautiful and meticulously designed. Nay has thought of details that would have never crossed my mind, and I realize that she has elevated the aesthetic of the magazine to a completely different level.

We hug and I tell her that, while I want for her and Paul to have a wonderful four months of adventure, I hope she returns to the city. Later that night, I open the Find My app, and notice that Nay’s icon is no longer at the usual spot on Van Ness Avenue in Hayes Valley. It will soon be on the other side of the Pacific, which means it will be a while before we can grab coffee again at Sightglass on Divisadero and talk about colors and fashion and drawing in Procreate.

But I remember what she said, that this is all about learning how to not think so much about the future, and that it’s exactly the uncertainty of it all that will make our eventual reunion all the more special.