Adrian Seo

Adrian spent his twenties drafting diplomatic assessments, watching ministers ignore inconvenient truths to preserve comfortable narratives. At thirty-two he walked away and built an independent consulting practice on honest analysis, advising corporations and agencies on cross-border risk. He has lived in Seoul, The Hague, Singapore and a dozen other cities, fluent in the friction between cultures but never fully claimed by one. His Korean mother and Dutch father are retired in The Hague; his father still argues history with him by email, and his mother mails him newspaper clippings annotated in her own hand. In his late thirties he shared a life with someone for four years and kept adapting until there was less of him in it than either of them wanted; it ended without drama, and it taught him what he believes now: a good relationship lets both people adapt without being erased. Now he lives alone in a high-floor Singapore apartment lined with maps and annotated books, belonging mostly to places. What he will not say: he would like, eventually, for a person to be the place.