Living at my own pace, exploring a wide world.

Dear reader,

If you’ve ever visited Korea in summer, there’s a sound you surely remember. A piercing cry ringing down from the trees, blanketing the entire city from morning to evening. It’s the soundtrack of the Korean summer: the sound of cicadas (매미, maemi).

Loud enough to drown out a conversation

Korean cicadas are seriously loud. Loud enough to cut through all the noise of a busy city. According to Korea’s Ministry of Environment, the call of the malmaemi (the large brown cicada) can reach up to 90 decibels, on par with an electric drill or a motorcycle engine. In downtown Seoul in summer, there are plenty of moments when the cicadas are louder than the traffic. First-time visitors often stop and ask, “What on earth is that sound?”

Let me clear up a common misconception. The cicadas didn’t get louder by evolving to fit the city, and no new species appeared. What actually happened was a change in numbers. There’s a particular species called the malmaemi that is exceptionally loud, and it used to be hard to find in Seoul. But since the early 1990s, its population has surged in the urban environment. The cicadas didn’t become noisy. The noisy cicadas simply multiplied. Urbanization and climate change are cited as the reasons behind this shift.

The signal that summer has arrived

We may grumble about the noise, but the truth is that for Koreans, the sound of cicadas is summer itself. When they start to sing, that’s when you feel the season has truly begun. Just as spring arrives with cherry blossoms, summer in Korea arrives with the cry of cicadas.

The childhood memories are part of it too. Summer nights when a cicada landed on the window screen and the whole family rushed over to catch it. Peeling empty cicada shells off tree branches and collecting them. Most people who grew up in Korea carry a summer scene like this. The cicada is a strange creature: noise and nostalgia at the same time.

Speaking of which, cicadas show up in the Korean language too. They can be a metaphor for someone or something that clings on and makes a racket in one spot, and as an emotional symbol of summer, they appear often in literature and songs.

The long wait underground

You can’t talk about cicadas without their remarkable life story. The cicada you meet in summer is actually living out the last short act of its life.

After hatching from an egg, a cicada burrows underground and spends years as a nymph, feeding on sap from tree roots. Korean cicadas generally spend a few years below the ground, depending on the species. After that long wait, the nymph climbs to the surface at dusk, crawls up a tree, sheds its shell, and emerges as a winged adult. Those empty shells clinging to branches on a summer day are the traces of that exact moment.

And yet, the adult life it prepared so long for is astonishingly short. Just a few weeks. In that brief window, it sings to find a mate, breeds, leaves its eggs, and dies. Once you know that the cry filling your summer is the sound of a creature desperately living out the few weeks it waited years for, the cicadas start to sound a little different.

Sleepless summer nights

Cicadas are supposed to sing during the day and rest at night. But in Korean cities these days, they cry at night too. Why?

The reason lies with us. According to a study by the Seoul Institute of Health and Environment, the city’s excessively bright night lighting disrupts the cicadas’ internal rhythms, keeping them awake and crying in choruses well into the night. Add a tropical night (Korea’s term for a night that stays above 25°C) and it gets worse. In apartment complexes affected by the urban heat island, cicada noise during tropical-night periods was found to be 8 to 10 percent higher than during other periods. The light and heat the city gives off keep the cicadas singing all night, and that sound in turn torments people who already can’t sleep in the heat. A strange vicious cycle.

Still, the sound of summer

To a traveler, the sound of Korean cicadas may be startling at first, maybe even a little too loud. But after a few days, that sound will have become part of the Korean summer for you. The blazing sun, the deep green of the street trees, and the cicadas pouring down from above. Put those three together and you have summer in Korea.

If you happen to visit Korea in summer, try listening to the cicadas for a moment. It’s the sound of small lives singing with all their might through the short summer they waited years to reach.

See you in the next letter.

From a cicada-filled Seoul, whigoori