I used to hate answering the question “Where are you from?”. It sounds simple, but it never was for me.
The answer is, “I’m from Seattle.” But that always led to follow-up questions. As an Asian in the US, people asked about my ethnicity or where my parents were from. In China and Singapore, people assumed I was an American-born Chinese. So I’d end up explaining that I was adopted by caucasian parents when I was 4 months old, but was actually born in Korea. Then the usual questions: “No, I don’t speak Korean.” “No, I haven’t found my birth parents.” “Yes, I call my adoptive parents mom and dad.”
For a long time, I kept these conversations short. It wasn’t that I was ashamed of who I am; it’s just complicated, and it was easier to downplay or simplify things. Over the past year, though, I’ve started to embrace my identity instead of minimizing it. I’ve been surprised how much it has helped me grow and connect with people. I’ve realized that the surprising things about my background are part of what I’m made from. And sharing more openly doesn’t complicate things; it helps people understand more of who I am.
And there are surprising things about me that people wouldn’t expect by looking at me. I grew up as suburban Americana as it gets: bologna sandwiches and RC cola, tuna casseroles and minivans. I was a die-hard NASCAR fan and never missed a race from around ’93 to after Dale Earnhardt died. I threw thousands of pitches against a board in the backyard, listening to Dave Niehaus call Mariners games on the radio. I had a mullet for most of my teen years, and my first concert was Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. But that didn’t seem easy to share, even with friends I’d had for years. I didn’t think much about it for years, but at some point, I realized this wasn’t just my experience; most people do some version of the same thing. We share a simpler, safer version of ourselves with the world in an effort to protect ourselves.
When I stopped editing my story down to the safest version and started sharing more, interesting things started happening. People opened up to me, too. Someone I knew was also adopted. Someone else had lost a parent. Another person felt conflicted about their heritage. These conversations built deeper relationships. It wasn’t that I was turning every conversation into an autobiography or listing my quirks as an ice-breaker. I was just being more open about who I am, and people responded to it. I didn’t know it at the time, but minimizing my identity wasn’t just about avoiding awkward conversations; it kept people from really knowing me.
I also realized that I’d pushed parts of my past so far down that they barely felt connected to me anymore. I’d kept my story neat and short for so long that I stopped thinking about the details myself. When I started being more open, those old influences and memories resurfaced, not in a nostalgic way, but in a clearer “this is part of me” way. My tastes, preferences, and daily habits have changed a lot over the years, but that doesn’t mean those earlier versions of me weren’t real or meaningful. Growth doesn’t require erasing the past; it just requires putting it in context.
As I’ve opened up more, I’ve realized something else: identity isn’t fixed, but silence can trap it. When you avoid telling certain parts of your story, those parts don’t disappear, they just go unexamined. And when pieces of your past stay unexamined for too long, they start to feel distant, almost like they happened to someone else. I didn’t understand that until I began sharing more and saw how much of myself I’d boxed away simply because it was easier.
There was also a cost I never noticed. When you only share the polished version of who you are, people can’t form a real picture of you, they can only react to the mask you’ve curated. And when they respond positively to that version, it reinforces the temptation to stay small. Opening up isn’t about oversharing or forcing depth; it’s about giving people a fair chance to know the real you. I spent years thinking my story was too complicated, too unusual, or just irrelevant. It turns out it was the most human thing about me.
A lot has changed since those mullet-and-country-music years, but that’s still a part of who I am. Those things shaped me. These days I can’t tell you who won the last Daytona 500 anymore, but as new chapters of my life unfold, I’m learning not to shrink the story. The more I share, the more I connect. I’m still learning how to tell the fuller version of who I am, but it starts with not hiding the parts I used to leave out. For now, that feels like real progress.
