Movement is inherently a part of my cultural identity-between languages, between continents, and across the seen and unseen lines of belonging. I have called multiple countries home, but the anchor of my identity remains in my South Korean roots—a culture whose traditions, values, and histories have shaped how I understand myself and the world around me.
Writing this cultural autobiography pushed me to practice global self-awareness more explicitly: not simply having “culture,” but articulating how my identity operates within a global context-how power, privilege, and oppression show up in different ways depending on where I am, and how my own cultural habits and biases shape the way I move through the world.
Growing up in a Korean household, food was never just nutrition; it was a way to tell a story and to connect things. My earliest memories are the smell of sesame oil and garlic as my mother prepared bibimbap or kimchi jjigae—dishes that linked our daily lives with the people who came before us. Every meal was a form of jeong, that peculiarly Korean feeling of warmth, devotion, and psychic cohesion that holds communities together. Even today, when I go to temples like Bulguksa or Bongeunsa, I see something not dissimilar—an unobtrusive deference: a mindfulness anchored in balance and gratitude.
But this activity made me realize that these intimate cultural practices are not only “personal”—they are also social systems in miniature. The rituals of eating together, showing care through preparation, and prioritizing collective harmony are ways of organizing responsibility and belonging. Seeing them as “systems” helped me connect my everyday life to broader global structures: how communities transmit values across generations; how migration pressures families to preserve certain practices; and how what looks like “tradition” can be both a resource and a constraint, depending on the context. This is part of what GEM frames as an understanding of how human actions and organizations are having differential effects across local and global systems.
My identity has also been constituted in the experience of migration and adaptation. Living abroad exposed me to social frameworks where individualism and assertiveness are more valued than collectivism and modesty—values deeply embedded in South Korean culture. I often found myself negotiating between nunchi, or the art of reading social cues, and Western expectations of self-expression. I hope through this autobiography to name this negotiation as a real communicative skill rather than a vague feeling: learning how meaning shifts across verbal and nonverbal norms, and how “confidence” or “politeness” can be interpreted differently depending on cultural context.
Belonging to multiple cultural groups has also profoundly shaped how I think about privilege and perspective. To be an East Asian woman means that I can be both a racialized minority in Western societies and part of the dominant ethnic group in Korea. These intersecting locations taught me that privilege is never absolute; it is contextual. In the United States, I am often filtered through the “model minority” stereotype; the same accent or behavior can brand me a gyopo in Korea, known and strange simultaneously. Naming these dynamics is part of what the GEM learning goals describe: to recognize positionality and how power operates in global contexts, not as abstract, but as something that organizes everyday interaction and expectation.
Language is the string that both unites and divides my universe. Korean is the language of family, of closeness, while English is the language of school, of ambition. Navigating between them means navigating between modes of thought—from Korean honorifics and collective pronouns to English’s more individualized syntax. Reflecting on this through GEM’s lens of perspective-taking and empathy helped me realize bilingualism was not a matter of translation; it is an ongoing practice of interpreting different worldviews, noticing what is assumed within each of them, and acting with care when those assumptions collide.
This activity helped me connect my family story to global systems beyond identity labels. My family’s experience epitomizes post-war South Korea’s national trajectory: reconstruction through education, discipline, and corporate institutions in which brands like Samsung, Hyundai, and LG became symbols of stability and national pride. Framing this as a system clarified something important: what my parents often describe as “common sense” success was shaped by historical conditions and state-economic structures, while my generation inherits a different global economy that rewards flexibility, mobility, and self-actualization. That gap has made me more attentive to how opportunity is produced—not only by individual effort but by policies, labor markets, and global expectations that distribute risk so unevenly.
Finally, turning my autobiography into a learning reflection asks me to consider responsibility—not guilt, but what I do with this awareness. In their wording, the GEM goals emphasize taking informed action and “bracketing” judgment while engaging with cultural difference. For me, that means treating identity as relational-something made through interactions and expectations—while still seriously taking the material consequences of stereotyping, diaspora labeling, and cultural misunderstanding. It means practicing a form of openness that is active: listening for what is unsaid, asking better questions before assuming shared meaning, and noticing when “neutral” norms are actually norms of power.
