“Come to Greece during Thanksgiving! My mom will make you great food.”

It was a hot Saturday afternoon in July. While talking about my upcoming adventures in England, my friend had told me of her plans to fly back to Greece during Berkeley’s Thanksgiving break. The invitation that promptly followed was incredibly natural, emanating her sense of home. The feeling resembled that of an invitation from my grandmother, who had lived in South Korea her entire life.

The more I talked to her, the more I understood that she was incredibly sure of her identity as a Greek woman. She wasn’t an immigrant, she was an international student; the United States wasn’t her home, but Athens was. She didn’t fly back to Greece to revisit her roots; she did it to be with her family, to be at home.

As a first-generation immigrant who hopped on a plane across the Pacific when I was 11 years old, I don’t have a definite sense of home similar to hers. During my 20 years of existence, I spent half of it in South Korea and half of it in the United States. In retrospect, I had established a strong sense of self within Korean culture by the time I was 11; but as a scared and insecure child who was abruptly thrown into a school full of white children, I forced myself to forget, erase and rewrite my consciousness as an American.

Through my tumultuous years as a puberty-stricken child, an adolescent and a young adult, I convinced myself that I was fulfilled as a Korean-American — a culturally American individual who acknowledges her Korean roots and backgrounds. I drew parallels between myself and the four daughters of the Joy Luck Club women — it was the textbook definition of the Asian-American immigrant experience.

But as the years passed, I’ve grown restless within the mold of an “Asian-American.” My hyphenated identity doesn’t quite explain my compartmentalized existence — I am wholly Korean, and I am wholly American. It’s a simultaneous warring of two different identities within myself, each given equal weight and legitimacy.

In his seminal work “The Souls of Black Folk,” W.E.B. Du Bois first articulated the notion of “double consciousness.” He described his African-American identity as a binary one, with which “(o)ne ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

Indeed, Du Bois’ articulation of his “twoness” is a historically different one from mine. Du Bois wrote that the long history of oppression and devaluation endured by African-Americans has made it difficult for them to unify their Black identity with their American ones.

My own sense of “double-consciousness” is not derived from a long history of racial oppression. Nevertheless, the phrase lends well to a sensation experienced by many first-generation immigrants who were thrown into a new culture in times of fragile adolescence.

For me, patriotism doesn’t exist, because my sense of “home” doesn’t exist. Not having a sense of “home” means that there isn’t a place in this entire world that can give me a complete sense of comfort and belonging. My sense of “double-consciousness” — as a Korean and an American — renders me as a perpetual foreigner, both to myself and to others, wherever I go.

Having a definite sense of “home” — a culture in which you can feel wholly content, fulfilled and happy — is an incredible gift. In a world primarily grouped by physical and cultural boundaries, that gift can be a source of power.

When we discuss immigration and race relations in the United States, this particular form of power manifests as the ability to staunchly divide “us” from “them.” We often distinguish foreign-born immigrants from American-born citizens of different ethnicities, dictating a line of cultural affinity that separates those who supposedly doesn’t belong.

However, what we often forget is that there are people like me, strung in an awkward limbo, unintentionally straddling two cultures and identities. Contrary to our conventional understandings, the immigrant experience is an extremely complex one that speaks volumes about the changing realities of the globalizing world.

In her biting manifesto “Tomorrow Is Now,” my idol Eleanor Roosevelt said, “If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.” In both national and individual levels, existential uncertainty is an opportunity to push past given boundaries, explore and constantly redefine.

So I’m taking my multicultural identities — often confusing, frustrating and painful to endure — as an opportunity toward self-liberation.

Yoojin Shin writes about the uncomfortable truths of showing, hiding and possessing privilege while working toward dismantling societal injustices.