Holding What Never Comes Back, Gently ― Choi Baek-ho's "About Romance" and My 66 Years

Photo by Wanghao SANG on Unsplash

How I Met This Song

I first heard this song years ago, during a business trip to Korea, in the years between running Japanese restaurants and factories across Europe. After dinner, an older business partner sang it at karaoke, a little shy about it. I understood almost none of the lyrics at the time, but the melody itself — damp, like a rain-streaked window — stayed with me.

I later learned that the song is the signature piece of Choi Baek-ho, known in Korea as the "romantic troubadour." For an older generation of Koreans, it's practically the closing number of any gathering — much like the one wistful song someone always sings near the end of a Japanese year-end party.

A Perspective I Didn't Have in My Twenties

In my twenties, I was running around the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant in London, scrambling to get a foothold in a country where I barely understood the language. If I'd heard this song back then, I probably would have let it pass right through me. Heartbreak and longing for lost youth were still too raw to be turned into something to be fondly missed from a distance.

Your twenties are a decade when almost nothing has ended yet. First love, dreams, friendships — they are things happening now, not things to look back on. The quiet tenderness this song's narrator shows toward a faded memory, sitting in a rainy-day tearoom, was a feeling I simply wasn't ready for yet.

A Small Question About Life ― Parting from What We Love

In Buddhist thought, one of the "eight sufferings" is ai-betsu-ri-ku — the suffering of being parted, eventually, from everyone and everything we love. What the narrator carries in his chest — that space where something that will never come back once was — feels like exactly this kind of suffering.

What strikes me is how deeply this theme runs through Choi Baek-ho's own life. He lost his father in a traffic accident before he turned one — just five months after his father had been elected to the National Assembly — and lost his mother to cancer when he was twenty-one. Loss wasn't an abstract idea for him; it was where his life began. That may be why his voice, when singing of someone who can never be met again, carries something more than mere sentimentality.

There's no avoiding this kind of parting. The more fully we live, love someone, and give ourselves to something, the more we eventually stand to lose. But what this song offers isn't a lament over that emptiness — it's a way of holding it gently, the way one might quietly turn a glass in hand on a rainy afternoon, letting the hollow become something to cherish rather than resent.

What I Hear Now, at 66

At this stage of life, splitting my time between the UK and Japan, this song lands very differently. Back in 2015, when I first got into property and stock investing, I jumped in on momentum alone and paid for it with some painful losses — but even that pain now feels like proof that I truly lived through that period. Having stepped away from the path toward becoming a doctor and instead lived several lives — in the Japanese food business, in acupuncture and herbal medicine — I have more than a few things that will never come back: promises made in my twenties, the future I once imagined for myself, old friends I haven't spoken with in years. Every one of them quietly overlaps with that hollow space the song's narrator carries.

And yet, oddly enough, that hollowness no longer feels only like loneliness. Deadheading the David Austin roses in my UK garden, I sometimes catch myself remembering the smell of a Japanese tearoom from decades ago. Sometimes the same drifting thought comes to me while listening to my ragdoll cat Meg dozing on my lap. In that moment, what rises isn't regret for what's gone, but a quiet satisfaction — the sense that I truly did live through that time. Growing older, I've come to feel, means gaining not only more things you've lost, but also a growing store of memories worth being fond of.

Closing

"About Romance" isn't a song urging us to reclaim what's gone. Precisely because we know it can't be reclaimed, it teaches us a more mature way of looking at that emptiness — one of quiet fondness rather than grief.

This "Songs of a Lifetime" series is itself an exercise in that same spirit — revisiting songs I loved when I was young, and through the writing, slowly deepening my own understanding of the changes, in body, mind, and relationships, that come with growing older. And doing that work alongside a new kind of companion, generative AI, has brought its own small joy: the sense that even at this stage of life, there are still new walls worth climbing.

If there's a small hollow in your own chest right now, for something that will never return, I don't think it needs to be hidden away or rushed to fill. Somewhere in the world, someone else is sitting in their own rainy-day tearoom, gently holding onto a memory that's faded but not forgotten. Just knowing that can make growing older feel a little less lonely — and a little more worth living.

Choi Baek-ho's own essay collection, 잃어버린 것에 대하여 ("On What Has Been Lost"), has not been translated into Japanese or English. So instead, here are two English-language books that share the same tone — an affection for a bygone era and youth, and the maturity of carrying that loss gracefully.

K-Pop: Popular Music, Cultural Amnesia, and Economic Innovation in South Korea by John Lie is an accessible yet scholarly book exploring the pre-history of K-pop, examining the socio-historical background of 1970s–80s Trot and Folk music (Gayo) and how popular music transformed within South Korean society.

*The Dwarf* (Modern Korean Fiction) by Cho Se-hui is a masterpiece of Korean literature depicting the light and shadow of 1970s South Korean society, the lost human affection and youth amid rapid urbanization, and a deep, poignant melancholy. It resonates powerfully with the atmosphere and lyricism of 1970s–80s Korean popular music. (As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Reference Links

• 최백호의 낭만 is Back (Choi Baek-ho's official YouTube channel)
• About Romance (낭만에 대하여), Choi Baek-ho's official channel recording (watch on YouTube)

Read the Lyrics (Bugs): https://music.bugs.co.kr/track/76873Please enjoy the full lyrics on the external lyrics database site linked above — they are not reproduced here.

About Choi Baek-ho

Choi Baek-ho is a South Korean singer-songwriter born in Busan in 1950. His father, elected to the National Assembly at twenty-nine, died in a car accident just five months later, before Choi turned one. His mother, who had worked as a teacher before running a small shop, died of pancreatic cancer when he was twenty-one. Drafted into the military shortly after her death, he was medically discharged after being diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis, and spent his recovery near his hometown's Ilgwang Beach teaching himself guitar over two years.

He debuted in 1976 with the title track of his first album, "My Heart Has Lost Its Way," a song steeped in grief for his mother, and followed it with hits including "Geuja," "The Night Before Enlistment," and "A Friend from Yeongil Bay." After a quiet period, he released "About Romance" in 1994, at age forty-five, on his sixteenth album. The song drew little attention at first, but became a nationwide hit after being featured in a popular 1996 KBS television drama, earning him the nickname "the romantic troubadour." The song's title also lent its name to "Romance Era," the SBS radio program he has hosted for many years.

Alongside his music career, Choi is also an accomplished painter, holding his first solo exhibition in 2009. In the 2010s, he collaborated actively with younger musicians such as IU, a period often described as his "second heyday." In 2026, he released an album marking his fiftieth anniversary as a recording artist, and remains active as both singer and painter in his seventies.