MISTI Blogs

After six years of running the gauntlet of high school, college admissions, and freshman life, I finally had the time to visit Korea again. In a place that was supposed to be like home and a culture that had always surrounded me, I felt hopelessly lost. The hangul script—for all its external praise for being easy to read—was dizzying hard to keep up with, I stuttered when asking basic questions to service workers, and even the fun stories I wanted to tell my relatives all *had* to go through my mother. Despite her best intentions and effort, my Korean remained a handicap and a barrier to further connection, something that made me distinctly “gyopo” (an overseas ethnic Korean).

Returning back to the US and attending my first semester at MIT, I found an opportunity to go back to Korea via MISTI Korea and the KRAFTON AI Fellowship program. Barely scraping by the tests with some guesswork and linear algebra, I learned that I was accepted in the middle of February and signed right on. But with a relatively light semester ahead, I desperately wanted to do more than just survive those two months.

One day, with all of my psets done ahead of schedule, I randomly decided to learn how to type hangul (something I had procrastinated forever). The input system itself is actually quite well-designed: consonants on the left, vowels on the right, just press each character in the order that you write it. After a brutal few days, I could type at 20 words per minute—good enough for now. I needed somewhere to practice my typing, and what better thing to do than journal each day I spend at MIT? From that day on, I set myself a hard deadline. At 11PM, I would stop making further edits to my journal entry and send it off to my (native Korean) mother, owning all the mistakes I made. Within a month, my orthography had completely solidified; by the next, my vocabulary had massively expanded, and things only got better from there. Suddenly, I could talk word by word without stuttering. Reading hangul became automatic. The relational structures of Korean became woven into my verbs and particles, and slowly, I could see the cultural values I have grown up with in the language that they were built for. “noonchi” (roughly “seeing the environment”), “chaemyeon” (face), “baeryeo” (thinking/doing things for others), these and other Korean words just held way more force than they ever had before.

A week or so after wrapping up my MIT finals, it was finally time to fly to Incheon. When I stepped foot onto our plane, greeted the flight attendants, and read the text around me, I was met not by discomfort but instead by an empowering clarity. I wasn’t speaking, *in Korean*, I was just speaking. I wasn’t just reading *in Korean*, I was just reading. And when I met my grandparents in Seoul and began conversing, things hit the groove almost instantly.

A few days later, when I made that first commute to my company’s office in Yeoksam-dong and began onboarding, the story continued unfolding. I could understand virtually everything in the instruction emails, asking coworkers verbally or via Slack felt automatic, and I could speak to my boss in technical CS jargon (“구축,” “실행,” for building and executing respectively etc.) with my new vocabulary. At our first lunch, I found myself engaging in natural small talk, giving and taking stories about recent research, college life, the inhumanely crowded line 2, and the monsoon season about to hit. During dinner, I was even unironically asked whether I was a Korean international student studying abroad at MIT (!), which affirmed for me that I could truly dance on the Korean conversational floor—something that was only a dream a couple months back.

Navigating this new environment obviously did not come without a few hiccups. I still encounter words I don’t know on a daily basis, especially those outside of the domains I specialized for. I hesitate or misfire on honorific speech—extremely hard to fix since most people will usually politely let them slide. In novel situations outside just work and the apartment (e.g. the bank), I do still occasionally freeze up. 

But being able to confidently wield my heritage language in most cases, the clunky “Korean-American” suit is no longer vital; I can just be “Korean” as convenient. My unusual upbringing gets brought up, not in a moment of flustered shame, but in a moment of pride over where I came from. Ultimately, where there was once confusion between my two distinct identities (as MIT American and Korean-American), the rebirth of a pure Korean identity with real expressivity and agency has established separation and harmony among all of them.