A few months into freshman year, my Wigglesworth roommate told me that I had been talking in my sleep the previous night. Given that his bed was in such close proximity to mine in the pillbox of a room that we both had to turn sideways to scooch our way out between the bed frames, I was inclined to believe that he’d heard me. Yet I was incredulous when he swore I was having full conversations with my dreams in fluent Korean.

Impossible, I said, as I was still in Korean Ba, the lowest level possible and even lower than the Korean Bxa class for Korean heritage advanced beginners that I had shamefully failed to be placed in. Sorry, you don’t remember the alphabet and have no idea if I just asked for your name or social security number.

No, the roommate affirmed again, you were speaking fluently in another language. There were no more speaking in tongues, insomnia-induced miracles, but the incident lingered.

Perhaps it was like Daniel Kahneman’s famous behavioral psychology experiments: The narrative brain paints one picture of reality, all the while the subconscious sculpts a different model entirely, influencing my behavior. Maybe beneath the surface, I was fluent all along because of my blood – whatever that meant biologically, let alone ideologically.

More practically, it reaffirmed my reinvigorated interest in studying the language of the motherland. It was a mystifying 180-degree turnaround from when 12-year-old me, preferring naptime over foreign grammar, signed a legally invalid but morally upheld piece of paper with my brother swearing to my mother that we’d never blame her for letting us stop studying the language. Not aware of the implications beyond another free hour every Saturday, we signed away at the dinner table, chagrined mother looking on.

The paper is lost, but the story was canonized in family lore under the file “Mom is Always Right.” Yet, in spite of the contract, it’s now clear that internally I continued to wrestle with the implications of my ethnicity even as I had effectively suppressed it from open discussion.

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Another erudite Fulbrighter of Korean descent rightfully pointed out that the “Korean culture, language, and ethnicity had never been detached from one another, and all three were tightly bound to the Korean homeland,” separated only by foreign intervention and conflict. “Now, it is possible to grow up speaking Korean in a culturally Korean community, yet live in America or Kazakhstan; it is possible to retain Korean culture without much of the language, or vice versa,” he writes. “And in the case of those sent abroad for adoption in the sixty-five years since the Korean War…it is possible to be ethnically Korean but grow up with neither the language nor the culture.”

Assured that the ethnicity and at least a share of the cultural point of the trinity maintained by birth and partially assimilated grandparents, the unspoken (and likely unrealized at the time) question was whether the third point—language—was to be a part of the triumvirate or absent, the byproduct of a third generation’s trilemma. Notable during my high school years was the struggle with skin color; I spent much of a sophomore creative writing seminar opining undecidedly over the implications of that reality, ominously (maybe just self-aggrandizing) titling a final 15-page piece “Whitewashed.” Though the paper is lost to a pre-2010 hard drive, I remember committing the literary faux pas of using tired fruit-related gustatory metaphors to analogize my Asian-in-a-white-world situation (Coconut, banana, oreo, other tired tropes), which I naively assumed to be unique to me given that no one else seemed to be talking about it openly.

In my weak defense, this was still the tail end of the world of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, where being “colorblind” was still a loose a synonym for tolerance, not ignorance. I saw plenty of color at my predominantly white, private Pasadena high school, but it never really came up in front of my face. When there was a fight, however rare, it was because someone was being an asshole and simply that, generally without any racial pejorative attached.

No wonder then that my subconscious felt “whitewashed,” though it came short of explicitly wanting to be white, like many SoCal-tanned Asian-American authors such as Helie Lee felt in lusting for The OC-style tan and beach blonde look. Instead, this translated to discrediting the need for a personal sense of “multicultural understanding” (ironic, given my middle school assigned a book titled exactly that). In addition, it morphed into me projecting foreignness onto my grandfather in essays due to our language barrier.

My complete change in opinion regarding the latter is especially startling to me given my current residence in Korea and quasi-enshrining of my late grandfather on a mental pedestal. It is akin, on a personal level, to time traveling to mid-2017 and claiming that President Trump and Chairman Kim will meet in person a year later.

Before leaving for Cambridge to start freshman year, my mother came to me with a tense expression, as if foreshadowing an argument. My grandparents (father’s side) were willing to finance part of my collegiate education, with one key stipulation: they would only fund me as long as I enrolled in Korean language courses. Knowing that I had long since forgotten the alphabet, let alone anything more than hello and goodbye, my mother thought this requirement would be the proverbial fly in the ointment. To her surprise, I replied that I had already planned on starting Korean and showed her the Google doc I had been course planning on that had a slot for a Korean course already blocked off.

Where was the U-turn? Narratively, it would be easy to point to a weeklong volunteer internship at the Korean Academy For Educators conference that was held at the Korean Cultural Center in LA: My first reintroduction to Korean culture from someone else outside the family. Yet reality is more complicated; the most salient memory is a crush I developed for one of the other high school volunteers and her recommendation that I apply for another educational program that fall that she had enjoyed. Which I did, entering the Reischauer Scholars Program, an intensive online program that spent a semester introducing American high schoolers to U.S.-Japanese diplomacy. My educationally cosmopolitan approach in secondary school suggests that there was a different—or at least additional—motivator to my pre-college shift in attitude that I have yet to place my finger on.

Yet there I was, spending a quarter of my course hours for the first year at Harvard (worth $14,000 in tuition, no sum to sneeze at), struggling with basic grammar and pronunciation of a language that I still had no intention of using professionally, or personally for that matter. Economics tells me that this is the pinnacle of irrational decision-making, given the irrecoverable sunk cost of courses I could have taken (CS minor! GSD classes! Comparative Literature!).

Two summers in Korea and another two semesters of language courses later, I could plausibly justify the tradeoff at graduation with vague platitudes of ‘being more roots-conscious’ and ‘culturally self-aware,’ though far short of fluent. The biggest feather in the cap was speaking in the language with my grandfather before he passed during junior year fall semester. A significant achievement it may have been; but tell me four years prior that hundreds of hours would be spent to culminate in those rewards alone, and I might have reconsidered.

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Between the visits from Korean relatives, continuing to study the language has truthfully been closer to an exercise of academic discipline and personal pride rather than practical gain. Certainly, spending an hour every weekday in the teacher’s office nose-deep in a textbook has the useful side-benefit of apparently “living up to my Harvard’s student reputation,” in the words of one English teacher, ensuring that I’m left alone in the teacher’s office. But to be honest, I don’t foresee myself using the grammatical verb ending “used for justification, almost exclusively in formal written documents and declarations” anytime soon. Severe diminishing marginal returns set in about half the textbook ago.

Was it worth it? Considering what I gained—a new part of identity, communication with relatives, living abroad—there is no doubt. As I taper off from studying the language, perhaps for the last time, the sensation is one almost of ambivalence, if not underwhelming. There are probably yet emotionally unpacked reasons for why this is the case, but for now I point towards the fact that it was impossible to foresee that each step closer to Korean fluency and cultural affinity represented a step further into the no-man’s land that separates American and Korean cultures.

I’m not referring to the common oversimplification that is American Protestant individualism versus Asian Confucian collectivism that is often trotted out in lazy academic panels across college campuses, though perhaps, like many stereotypes, perhaps sources to some essence of truth. By this gap I mean the distance that comes with a fresh perspective.

On one hand, gaining Korean fluency has predictably brought me closer to understanding Korean society and its people, especially the high school environment I’m immersed in. However, on the other is the knowledge that I both would never be able to fully assimilate myself into Korean society even though I visually blend in fine and the realization that I’m increasingly unsure whether I will fully re-acclimate to certain stitches in the fabric of American daily life.

To name a few: The blatant lack of safety in many American boroughs contrasted with walking anywhere, anytime, alone or not, in Korea. The crippling high cost of healthcare (an unplanned, uninsured day-of doctor’s visit and medication for the flu cost me less than $35). The lack of affordable, healthy restaurant food. Harmony with one’s neighbors. Respect for the elderly. My own racial representation in the media. Clothing that fits right. Efficient and affordable public transportation.

Of course, there are a litany of negatives of Korean society that counter the pluses, maybe even surpassing them on most days. The hierarchy embedded in the language. The ethnic homogeneity and systemic racism, sometimes spilling over to fascist overtones. The “us versus them” mentality. Gender and sexual discrimination. Homogeneity everywhere, down to the hairstyle. Technology addiction. Patriarchal stubbornness. Capitalism as religion. Lack of seatbelt use. Stifling of academic creativity. The salaryman mentality. Smoking and drinking as a stress reliever.

The difference is returning to America fully cognizant and wholly unsatisfied with realities that, up until now, I had been ignorant or accepting of. Knowledge can be both empowering and uncomfortable simultaneously. Logically, I can reassure myself with the rationale that life and its ups and downs is a constant tradeoff and balance. Realistically, I think I am somewhat apprehensive of reacclimatizing to life in America.

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Arguably, this year’s Fulbright fellowship in Korea has made my Korean study worthwhile upon revisiting the question retroactively, ex post, as has the crystallization of a connection between myself and my relatives across the globe. Furthermore, it has helped mature my desire to maintain an explicit connection to our family’s racial heritage given my sibling’s up-till-now ambivalence towards it.

These abstract achievements have emotional value, felt as a comforting burning deep within the chest that far exceeds the benefit of now confidently typing ‘Korean (proficient)’ on a resume. The sort of feeling of 정 (jung, roughly understood as a family-like emotional connection between peoples) that eludes written translation and makes you wish you could place two fingers on other’s head so that they can really, truly understand, Spock-style.

I think the ultimate lesson of the year has been that practical and the meaningful are not always inextricably intertwined. There are times when the former must be sacrificed for the latter. Though I have sought to add practical goals to my impractical time in Korea, the core remains both full of purpose and lacking in practical application. The journey has exposed personal weaknesses and faults, even as the journey itself was practically useless at face value, like turning down the wrong road on purpose even though you know it dead ends.

In the end, it’s almost impossible to quantify the value of identity beyond knowing it lies somewhere between 0 and infinity, averaging somewhere in the middle.