where are you from?

The number of times I’ve written “Start my blog!’ in various to-do lists before actually doing so is probably unreasonably many. For a long time, I’ve dreamed of writing and sharing my ideas and reflections with others through the internet, and yet before now I haven’t had the courage to do so. But here I am, finally, and perhaps the words that I’m typing from one side of a screen will reach someone else on the other side of their screen, halfway across the world.  

I thought for my first entry I’d write a bit about myself and what I plan to do on this platform. My name is Hannah, and I’m half-Korean, half-Danish; I was born in London but my family now lives Paris. This is how I normally introduce myself to people when I first meet them. Sometimes, if they don’t look completely befuddled by this barrage of countries, I’ll mention that I lived in Singapore as well, and that while my family lived in Paris I went to boarding school for five years in the UK. 

Currently, I’m on a gap year, having just graduated from school in May 2019. (For those who are interested, I took the International Baccalaureate, or IB for short.) After a summer of travelling with friends and family, I did a two month internship in Paris, and I now have one month left until I leave for South Korea at the beginning of December. I’ll be living there for a few months to improve my Korean (I’ve enrolled at Yonsei’s KLI) before heading off to uni at Cambridge in October 2020. 

Being mixed, and having lived in a few different places around the world, I have a love-and-hate relationship with the question, “Where are you from?” On the one hand, I feel proud of my multicultural background and mixed parentage; on the other, I never really know what the person asking wants to know – where I live? where I was born? what my ethnicity is? where I came from just now, before meeting them?? Mostly, it’s a question I dread, because after giving them my life story, I’m inevitably asked, “So you can speak how many languages?” to which the answer is – disappointingly – one. 

Actually, I love languages and literature, and it’s a deep source of shame for me to say that I can only speak English fluently. I can speak French well enough and have a basic understanding of Korean, but I wouldn’t consider myself fluent in either. Next year I’ll be reading Chinese Studies at uni, so my ultimate goal is to master all of these languages, and hopefully one or two others(!). This seems super ambitious for someone who is currently only comfortable in one – but I want to be able to connect and communicate with people, and language provides the surest way of doing so. Still, it’s somewhat daunting; in the future I plan to write more about my language-speaking (and other cultural & non-cultural) insecurities here, too.

Alongside issues and reflections relating to my mixed identity, you’ll find random ruminations and attempts at prosaic passages on my blog. It was my childhood dream to become an author and an illustrator – as a child, I felt very smug explaining to people that I would write my own stories and draw the illustrations accompanying them. I read Horrid Henry, Geronimo Stilton and Molly Moon (suffice to say that my tastes have changed somewhat, now); I’d listen to Harry Potter audiobooks read by Stephen Fry every night to fall asleep. My imagination would lead me to fill notebooks with story ideas and drawings, and I could spend whole afternoons crafting complex webs for the lives of my Sylvanian Families.

My passion for both literature and art has continued as I’ve grown, if a little restrained by the conforms of academic school life. So now that I’ve finished school and am no longer tied down by my office internship, I have no more excuses and have finally set up this blog. It’s intended to be an outlet for my creative expression, in tune with my thoughts and reflections, and capable of evolving. Travel updates, music recommendations, book reviews, personal musings on myself and different aspects of society – you can expect to find these all here, in addition to life in Korea once I move there.

Looking back over this, I realise it reads a bit like a personal statement – I guess I haven’t quite let go of that more academic strain of writing ㅠㅠ … If you’ve made it til here, I thank (and congratulate!!) you. I’d love to know what you think and where you’re from (or whether you have mixed feelings about this question too)!