Obsidian Essay | Culture Shocks] From Seoul to Toronto to New York to London: A Life in Translation

Hi All,

There is a peculiar moment that happens every time you uproot yourself from one culture and plant into another — the moment when you realise that the world you knew was just one of many worlds.

I’ve lived through that moment more than once.

What began in Seoul — where hierarchy, family duty, and emotional restraint shape the air you breathe — expanded into Toronto’s multicultural ease, evolved again through New York’s restless ambition, and now continues in London’s quiet confidence and centuries-old class codes. Each move has carved new contours into how I speak, listen, lead, and belong.

These reflections have been accumulating for the past two decades — small shocks, subtle observations, and those internal rewrites that happen when the familiar becomes foreign again. Recently, while watching The American Countess (and laughing through its commentary on culture shocks), I felt a nudge: it’s time to finally write my own.

This is a personal field guide to living between cultures — and becoming someone who can belong everywhere and nowhere at once.

So here is my invitation to you:

If you’ve ever crossed borders — literally or internally — what surprised you?
What challenged you?
What rewrote the way you see yourself?

Because sometimes, the most important journey we take isn’t measured in miles —
but in the distance between who we were then, and who we are now.

Where I Started

I was born in Seoul, South Korea — one can argue it is a relatively homogeneous society with a unique, uninterrupted 5,000-year history. Family trees are carefully recorded; if you’re curious enough, you can easily find your ancestral lineage without relying on ancestry.com or DNA tests. In many family clans, including mine, there are even dedicated buildings and official clan associations that maintain these records generation after generation.

Korea is one of the few civilizations that has survived intact — culturally, linguistically, spiritually — despite every attempt to challenge its sovereignty. China and the Mongol empire pressed down on the peninsula for centuries, but never fully claimed it. Western colonization never arrived. Only Japan, for a brief and painful 36 years in the early 20th century, interrupted that independence — and even then, the cultural memory endured.

Continuity shapes identity.
It gives you a sense of “this is how things are,” without ever needing to say it out loud.

So when I moved abroad for the first time at 14/15 — first to Toronto, later to New York City, and eventually to London — the shocks came quickly:

Different ways of speaking.
Different ways of disagreeing.
Different values about work, ambition, intimacy, power.

Suddenly, the familiar frameworks that shaped my world — respect for elders, collective belonging, the subtle performance of hierarchy — were not universal truths. They were Korean truths.

And that realization opened a doorway.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of living, studying, and working alongside people from almost every part of the world — the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East. Each encounter reshaped something in me. Each friendship rewired how I understood what it means to belong.

This is where the journey begins: at the crossroads between the continuity I inherited, and the complexity I stepped into.

The Journey Begins

I left South Korea as a teenager to study abroad — 14, maybe 15 — too young to understand the magnitude of what it meant to step away from everything familiar, yet just old enough to crave a wider world.

Canada became my first classroom in difference.

I lived with German and Israeli host families.
My high school felt like a diplomatic experiment that somehow worked:
half Jewish, a third Hong Kong families who arrived after 1997, another third Muslim communities from Afghanistan and the Middle East — and the rest a vibrant constellation of Russian, Indian, Pakistani, and Irish heritage.

Somewhere along the way, I became an honorary Muslim, German, Jewish, Irish girl — celebrating Eid, lighting Hanukkah candles, eating challah on Fridays, and discovering that Guinness was the only beer I would tolerate. Our school calendar held both Canadian and Jewish holidays, which meant the rhythms of our year were shaped by multiple histories at once.

Even the grocery aisles reminded me that identity could be plural — every package printed in both English and French. From a homogeneous culture to one officially multicultural, my Canadian years were my “zero to one” moment. A new operating system installed.

Then came New York.

If Canada introduced me to diversity, New York taught me how to live in it — boldly, loudly, and often with a Spanish soundtrack in the background. My apartment overlooked the United Nations, which meant diplomats and their families were my neighbours. I joined ShARE, a global university network with chapters in over forty countries — my social life became a living map. My closest friends at the time were from the Netherlands and Brazil (#threemusketeers); together we travelled, explored, and spoke in a shared language that wasn’t English, Portuguese, or Dutch — but curiosity.

Life felt like a perpetual UN assembly:
animated, restless, electric.

In 2017, London arrived — and with it, a new layer of understanding.

I found myself living with Germans again, and surrounded by friends from Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, and France who ushered me into Alpine culture and European elegance. I also learned about the lived experiences and history of the former Soviet Union culture from my friends from other parts of Europe. But London also opened an education I hadn’t received before: empire, colonization, migration — not as distant historical facts, but as lived experiences carried by my African, Caribbean, and Indian-descendant friends. Their stories revealed where my story intersected with — and diverged from — the legacies of power that shaped our modern world.

Each city taught me to see in a new dimension.
Each friendship expanded the borders of who I could become.

Everyday Realities (As I Experienced Them)

*Germany/Israel: Based on host family experiences during high school and as flatmates—not full residency.

What Stands Out to Me Now

• The coldness: Korean winters are no joke — we earn those Siberian winds at –10 to –20°C. But Canada introduced me to a different kind of cold: the kind that sweeps across flat land with no mountains to block it, a gust that feels like it has intentions. Ontario taught me that snow can fly sideways and that beauty can also sting your face.
• The cultural coexistence: Life with a German host family meant structured afternoons, cake at precisely the right hour — a gentle ritual of order.
  Later, my Jewish host family welcomed me into Shabbat dinners, Yom Kippur reflections, and holidays that stitched ancient tradition into everyday life.
  At school, identities weren’t erased — they were brought to the table. Everyone honoured where they came from. Somehow, it worked.
• The labels: In the US, “Asian” typically points to Northeast and Southeast Asians. In London, “Asian” refers almost exclusively to South Asians — Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi heritage.
  Same word. Completely different map.
  Language reshapes the world you see.
• The energy: New York is pure kinetic force. Masculine in its ambition.
  Survival-driven. At times, negotiating in a fish market feels similar.
  But the beauty of NY is that the escalator is never fixed — you can move up if you’re willing to sweat. Homeless individuals and millionaires share the same subway car. Tourists swirl around you. Everything is possibility stacked on contradiction.
• The rules: In Canada, you can’t casually buy a beer at a convenience store like you can in Korea. Alcohol lives behind the velvet rope of government ID checks and designated shops. It was my first introduction to the idea that countries regulate fun very differently.
• The French everywhere: Walk into an Ontario grocery store and every product greets you in both English and French — a bilingual reminder of shared history. But once you cross into Québec, the training wheels come off.
  Road signs, packaging, announcements — tout en français.
  If you don’t speak French, good luck. You’re officially the foreigner.
• The London weather: It doesn’t need explanation.
  Just… London weather. You learn to always bring an umbrella, even when the sky looks innocent.

Why I’m Sharing This

After twenty-two years away from home, I finally feel ready — and grounded enough — to speak in my own voice.

I’ve lived more than half my life outside South Korea now.
And something interesting happens when you are away from your birth culture for that long:

You stop reacting to it emotionally.
You start seeing it clearly.

Not as a child embedded inside a family system.
Not through expectations, obligations, or unspoken rules.
But as an adult with perspective — someone who can observe the culture she came from and the cultures she adopted… with neutrality, curiosity, and choice.

My upbringing was unique in that I didn’t migrate with my family.
I left alone.

Most immigrants remain tightly connected to their cultural community. I, by contrast, was entirely shielded from mine. Korea existed in my memory, not in my daily life. It took almost twenty years for me to find my way back — to reconnect, reconcile, and begin appreciating where I actually come from.

Only now can I hold two truths at once:

➡ Korea shaped me
➡ Leaving Korea also shaped me

And both were necessary.

These reflections are not academic.
They are lived experience — interpreted over time.

My first major leap — South Korea to Canada — was surprisingly smooth. Canadians truly live up to their reputation: inclusive, gentle, curious. New York was a different kind of welcome — loud, ambitious, and oddly familiar. I thrived in the multicultural chaos.

The hardest move was from NYC to London.

London required years of inner work — learning to read social codes, class layers, colonial histories, and a kind of restraint that felt eerily familiar. In some ways, Europe reminded me more of Asia than of North America: old-fashioned, conservative, governed by lineage and hierarchy. Men spoke with a louder voice. Systems were built by and for them.

And I found myself silently laughing at the irony.

I had left Korea to escape a heavy patriarchal system — one embedded not only in modern norms, but in centuries of dynastic expectation. Class and gender always mattered. And in my family, that weight was amplified by legacy: we come from royal lineage and generations of public servants. Honor was inherited. So was pressure. Especially for daughters.

Often, I think about the unnamed women in my lineage — the great-great-great grandmothers whose lives never made it to textbooks. A queen who may have been brilliant and capable, yet confined to palace walls. Her worth reduced to producing an heir. Her love measured against political usefulness. Her identity bound to the King, her family, and the state — never quite her own.

Lonely. Isolated. Brilliant in silence.

Sometimes I carry her with me — a reminder of what she could not choose.

Freedom.

A luxury unimaginable for many of my female ancestors after the 13th century, when Confucianism reshaped Korea’s cultural DNA. Before that shift, Korea had queens and female rulers; women held equal rights to property, inheritance, education — even divorce. But the system changed. And so did their lives.

And now here I am — a woman who crossed continents alone at fourteen. A woman who chooses her career, her city, her love, her own unfolding story.

As an introvert raised to protect family privacy — my father once held a public role in Korea — I struggled to introduce myself in London. Silence, which was meant as humility, sometimes appeared as mystery or aloofness. And in societies where hierarchy still whispers beneath the surface, people often fill silence with assumptions.

But gradually, I learned something essential:

I am not here to escape my lineage.
I am here to evolve it.

The freedom I live today is the answer to a prayer one of my ancestors never had permission to speak aloud.

In London, identity can be assigned to you before you have a chance to speak.

It was here that I first heard terms like “Global South.” Friends from formerly colonized nations would say “people like us” — even though Korea’s history doesn’t fit neatly into that category. It taught me that identity isn’t only about facts; it’s about how the world receives you.

There were moments of classism, racism, sexism — the quieter kind that hides behind politeness. The commonwealth relationships felt more seamless: UK, India, South Africa — shared institutions, shared trauma, shared adaptation. It was a story I had never been taught.

But then the pandemic happened — and something in me shifted.

As I learned more history, and connected with real lives behind it, I realized:

Most of the time, it’s not personal.
People are warm and kind everywhere.
I simply needed to become comfortable saying who I am — clearly, proudly, without shrinking.

For a long time, I carried cultural confusion.
In Korea, I wasn’t “Korean enough.”
Abroad, I wasn’t part of the immigrant story.
Among first-gen Koreans overseas, I was a “banana” — yellow outside, “white” inside.

To others, I was often just a student, a foreigner, an expat — an outsider with no box to fit into.

For a while, I tried to call myself a “global citizen,” but realized that only a small subset of people truly understand what that means. Most want a simpler answer.

So here I am — writing the complicated answer.
The true answer.

This is a living document — a reconciliation.
Between past and present, belonging and independence, roots and wings.

I write this for my future children and my future partner — so they understand where I come from.
I write this for friends who have always been curious.
And I write this for anyone who has ever asked themselves:

Where do I belong,
when I belong to many places?

The journey continues — and I’m finally ready to share it.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

I’d love to hear from you:

• What culture-shock moment eventually became something you now find comforting or normal?
• Did any of my observations resonate — or feel completely off?
• What small ritual defines “home” for you that outsiders might never notice?
• If you’ve moved between cultures, what’s one thing you wish you’d known before the move?

Share your reflections in the comments or message me directly. As I continue exploring how colonization, migration, and identity show up in daily life, I’d love to hear your stories too.

Let’s build a more honest, kinder map of our shared experiences — one story at a time.