It’s not a trick question. It’s something that I’ve always been confused about since I was a child. To this day, I don’t really know the right answer. But I’ve thought that drawing out a timeline might make it easier to grasp at this usually innocent question. Here’s my definitive (but not really) answer:

  • Hello World! Dec 1995
    Born in Gangnam (Yes, from the song), Seoul - South Korea.
  • Paris, France Sep 1996
    Celebrated my first birthday here. My earliest memory is casually drinking milk while my dad carried me in his arms, as we both took in the Paris night skyline from the balcony of our apartment.
  • Tehran, Iran Aug 1999
    Yes, very random indeed. Although my parents would eventually return many years after. I lived here until a month before the tragic 9/11 incident, so I remember it as a very peaceful place. Another super random fact - I went to an Italian kindergarten during this time.
  • Seoul, South Korea Aug 2001
    My first real experience of living in the motherland. Finished my Kindergarten and my first year of grade school here.
  • Brussels, Belgium Jul 2003
    Attended the International School of Brussels (ISB). Didn't know how to speak a word of English when I first came but kids pick up languages insanely fast and so did I.
  • Geneva, Switzerland Mar 2005
    Also went to an International School here (You guessed it - International School of Geneva). Lived so close to the border of France that my mom would grocery shop in France and come back. Here I really started to take on English as my most comfortable language. My Korean was also fine since I (had to) spoke Korean with my parents, even to this day.
  • Seoul, South Korea Mar 2007
    Finished grade school and the first 2 years of my middle school at an all-boys middle school.
  • Brussels, Belgium Feb 2010
    Round 2! Came back full circle attending the same International School again, this time finishing high-school. My passion for building things and computer science began when I coded up a blackjack game in Visual Basic for an elective.
  • Los Angeles, U.S. Sep 2013
    Worked hard (and played even harder) to get my undergradute and graduate degrees in Computer Science at UCLA. The longest I've ever stayed in one place without moving (almost 6 years!) - fortunate to have made most of my lifelong friends here, and LA will always hold a special place in my heart.
  • Seoul, South Korea Feb 2019
    Military Service. Fortunately, I don't actually have to go to the military since, with my masters, I could qualify for a program to just work as a software engineer for 3 years. I will be working at Buzzvil as a Machine Learning engineer.
  • ??? ???
    Stay tuned!


Pretty long answer, right? To get a better sense of everything time-wise, let me use some graphs (I never thought that bar graphs and piecharts would become this useful to describe my personal identity):

my-crazy-timeline
My crazy timeline. You tell me where I’m from.

in-out-korea
I am “Korean” - # of years I lived in each continent

As you can tell, even though I was born here and am ethnically Korean, I am culturally American (There’s a reason why I am writing my blog posts in English). However, that’s not even entirely true. I say American because it’s the closest thing that I can identify to. I only recently came and left the U.S. for college and graduate school and, looking at the piechart above, it would seem like I would be more culturally European (whatever that means). Yet, I went to an International school when I lived abroad in these European nations, speaking English and befriending mostly American friends.

I think the most apparent reason why I feel culturally American is simply because I stayed there the longest compared to anywhere else. Looking at the timeline, you can see the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place was 5.5 years in LA - this is 2 years longer than the runner-up of 3.5 years in Brussels during my high-school years. Considering that my average occupation time in each of these countries is 2.6 years, living in LA for that long has certainly been an outlier (to be precise, at least 2 std dev. away). And consistency goes a long way - coupled with the prior expectation that I would stay in LA for at least 4 long years to finish my undergrad, I settled into the American ways of life much more comfortably and easily than anywhere I’ve lived before.

To be honest, I’m not trying to come to any grand conclusion about myself. Like many things in life, this question about my identity raises more questions than clear answers (so ask away down below in the comments).