23 - Living in the Hyphen

Happy New Year! 

My first guest of 2023 is Henry Hwang, a dear friend from my high school days in Korea. We've known each other now for over 17 years, so long in fact that I forgot that he was a third-culture kid. We became friends before we even knew what being a "TCK" meant, so this episode felt like opening up a box of treasures in the attic.

Henry spent his childhood in New York, Hong Kong and Seoul. Having attended college and grad school in the U.S., he is currently a biomedical engineer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

When I asked him the identity question, Henry said Korea contributes about 60% of his cultural identity, primarily because he thinks about it a lot. "I think about whether I'm living up to my self-imposed ideal of what it means to be a Korean." I wonder this too, in no small measure.

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