Part One: Values built between worlds
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it really means that I lived in Korea for twenty years. People hear that number and nod, but I don’t think anyone, including me, truly understood the weight of it until recently. Twenty years is not travel. It is not a phase. It is an entire adult life. It’s long enough that people I knew here had newborns when I left, and those children are adults now. It’s long enough for the place you lived to shape your instincts, your expectations, and the way you understand relationships. I didn’t just live abroad. I grew up there in every way that matters.
What I absorbed in Korea was not “Korean values” in the cultural sense that locals live them. I didn’t assimilate. I observed, worked, translated, adapted, and built my own frameworks within the structure of that society. What stayed with me were the parts that made sense to my own ethics: showing up for people, the idea that a promise is a promise, the instinct to solve problems together rather than leaving someone to struggle alone, and the expectation that relationships create webs of care that flow in both directions. These were not gestures. They were the logic of everyday life as I experienced it. I didn’t internalize the hierarchical pieces, the obligation by status, the shame, or the deference that didn’t align with me. I kept the structural principles of collective care and left the rest.
Those ideas became the backbone of how I function. They were reinforced again and again in the expat ecosystem I lived in for two decades. That community was always shifting, with people arriving, leaving, and reinventing themselves, but over long stretches of time you begin to see patterns that short-term residents simply can’t. The turnover itself taught me how to read relationships as systems. Living that long inside a constantly changing community made it impossible not to notice how people rely on one another when they are far from home. That understanding of reciprocity, practical, unspoken, and necessary, became part of me.
Coming back to Canada after all that time was disorienting in ways I wasn’t prepared for. My first year here was almost entirely isolated. I was back in my mother’s basement with no real social network, no foothold, and no shared cultural logic with the people around me. Canada values independence, politeness, low emotional intensity, and the idea that needing others is a burden. The norms here are to manage your problems privately, to apologize for taking up space, and to avoid anything that might create discomfort. My Korean-informed model, directness, reliability, shared responsibility, did not map easily onto these expectations. The mismatch was sharp and constant.
Eventually I met people who were trying to build community in their own way. They talked about connection and mutual care, and I could tell they genuinely wanted it even if they didn’t always know how to live it. Their efforts weren’t perfect, but they showed me that the desire was there. The tension I kept seeing wasn’t that Canadians don’t want community, it’s that they’ve never been given a functioning model for reciprocity. They’ve been taught to take care of themselves first, to minimize impact, to avoid appearing needy, and to keep their struggles invisible. This creates confusion around when to show up and when to step back, and people often default to withdrawing even when they wish they wouldn’t.
I also began noticing how these cultural habits collide with economic disparities in community spaces. People want fairness and access, but without shared expectations about contribution, things get murky. Who pays? Who volunteers? When is labour freely given, and when is it being exploited? How do people participate meaningfully if they have fewer resources? In that ambiguity, misunderstandings grow easily. Motives get misread. Sometimes people with charisma or resources accumulate unintentional influence. And people like me, who lead with generosity and assume reciprocity will follow, can end up in uneven exchanges that aren’t anyone’s fault.
Right now, the imbalance I’m living in isn’t simply that I’ve given more than I received. It’s that the web itself isn’t fully connected. I’m giving more than I can sustain in some directions, and in others I’m relying more than I can repay. It’s multi-directional. It’s the kind of imbalance that happens when the surrounding culture doesn’t support a shared understanding of reciprocity, and the system can’t distribute care evenly. It isn’t about blame, it’s about structure.
It took me a long time to understand that what I brought back to Canada wasn’t Korean culture and it wasn’t Canadian culture. It was a hybrid I formed by living between worlds. I kept the reliability, loyalty, and collective responsibility I saw in Korea, but I paired it with Canadian ideas about autonomy, consent, and individual ethics. I took the idea that community is a living web, something I understood intuitively from both expat life and ecological systems, and combined it with my own rejection of hierarchy and obligation. None of this was intentional. It was simply the set of values that made sense to me as I navigated two very different societies over two decades.
At some point I realized that what I had formed wasn’t either culture’s framework. It was its own system. People who grow up between cultures often build new structures instead of choosing one or the other. There’s a name for this: third culture adulthood. I didn’t fully see that in myself until recently, even though I recognized it instantly in the newcomer students I worked with when I first returned. That was the entire premise of my first business name, Third Culture Kids Connections, which in hindsight feels like I understood the truth before I could even articulate it. As a third culture adult, I was looking for connection.
Everything I’ve been experiencing makes sense through that lens. I am not “too much,” not confused, not culturally inconsistent. I am simply someone who lived enough years elsewhere to develop a worldview that doesn’t match the norms here. My way of doing relationships, direct, reciprocal, interconnected, comes from a synthesis of lived experience, not from misunderstanding or miscalculation. I wasn’t importing foreign habits or failing to “read the room.” I was operating inside the only system that has ever made sense to me.
Understanding this brings clarity to the years since I returned. It explains the confusion, the isolation, the moments of connection, the mismatched expectations, and the misunderstandings that grew from cultural gaps rather than personal flaws. It also lets me see that the values I’ve been holding onto are not unrealistic. They are simply the result of a life lived across boundaries, shaped by long-term experience in a culture built on collective care, filtered through my own ethics, and brought home to a place that doesn’t always know what to do with that.
Naming it isn’t the whole solution, but it helps. It lets me speak more clearly about who I am and why I move through the world the way I do. And it helps me find the people here who can meet me in that space, not because they share my history, but because they share the values that grew in me between those worlds.