I always feel uneasy when people ask where I’m from. I was born in Korea to ethnic Korean parents, but I spent my childhood in Chile with a brief stint in Nicaragua, and now I live in Queens, N.Y. Depending on how well I know the questioners, I’ll give them the short answer,“I’m Korean,” or maybe I’ll take a chance and say “Chile,” which gave me the language and culture that feel like my own. But these answers feel incomplete, because the real story is more complex.

It was easier when I lived in Chile. My family and I looked different, but since there weren’t many other Koreans in my hometown of Arica, it made the conversation a straightforward immigrant story: out with the old country and in with the new. I didn’t know Korean food, I knew nothing of Korean history, and I spoke almost exclusively Spanish. My Korean was so poor that my cousin had to translate for me when I visited our grandparents in Santiago. People accepted this story for the most part, but my parents never agreed with it; instead telling my siblings and me to speak "our language" at home, not Spanish.

When I was 10 years old, an older kid asked me whether I spoke Korean. Our school wasn’t large; a Chilean pre-K to 12 with perhaps 600 or 700 students, and people took notice of the Kim siblings. I wanted to deny having anything to do with Korea, so, when we were both exiting the bathroom, I told him I didn’t speak it. It was only partially true, I spoke the language with my parents to the extent they were only able to decipher the ways in which my Korean was broken.

I didn’t like it when Chileans asked me about Korean things. They were pointing out I was different, and they reminded me I belonged in Chile only with their approval. It didn’t happen all the time, but it happened often enough that I felt I can never say I’m Chilean. Instead, I can only say I grew up there. Even though I consider Korea a foreign land, I’ve kept my Korean citizenship. Being a Kim, it feels like a less precarious way to identify myself, especially since my parents tried to instill their Korean identity in my siblings and me.

Carrying a minority face anywhere in the world forces one to identify with that group of people, no matter how distant one's relationship with that country might be. The racial essentialism that runs deep in the world's psyche—-from which I don’t exclude myself—-won’t let us do otherwise.