Hard to Be Everything and No One

I've been a foreigner my whole life. Not in the way expats usually mean it — not the "I moved abroad for work" kind. I mean I have never, in any country I've lived in, been considered one of the locals.

I was born in Uzbekistan. My native language is Russian. As a kid, I couldn't connect with the other children — I looked like some of them, but I didn't speak Uzbek well, didn't share the culture. I was the Russian kid. So when my family moved to Russia, I thought — finally. I know the language. This is my culture. These are my people. But it turned out that in Uzbekistan I was Russian, and in Russia I became the Uzbek. I had an accent. I worked to get rid of it, and eventually I did. But my face stayed the same. I was still the Asian kid. Still not quite right, still answering questions about where I'm "really" from.

So I moved to Korea. I'm ethnically Korean — koryo-saram, third generation. My grandparents were repressed as children during the Soviet era. They never got a proper education. They didn't speak Korean well, didn't speak Russian well, didn't fully speak anything. My father got a Soviet education, where nationality didn't matter much — everyone was equal, at least on paper. I got a Russian education. Somewhere across those three generations, whatever Korean culture my family once had simply disappeared. There was nothing to pass down. No language, no traditions, no stories about the homeland. Just a Korean last name and a face that looks the part.

I thought coming to Korea would mean something. That there would be some kind of recognition — a feeling of return, maybe. That the ethnic connection would matter. It didn't. To Koreans, I'm a foreigner. I look Korean, I have a Korean surname, but the moment I open my mouth, the illusion breaks. At my first job here, people yelled at me because I couldn't understand what they were saying. That was years ago. My Korean is fine now. But I'm still the foreigner. I always will be.

I work at a company with two thousand employees. I'm the only non-Korean. When colleagues address each other, they use surname plus title — Kim-gwajang, Park-juim. When they address me, it's Alexander-juim. My surname is Kim, same as half the office. But using it for me would feel strange to them, I think. Or maybe it's just more convenient. I try not to read too much into it. But it's hard not to notice that you're the only person called by their first name in a room where nobody else is.

There's a pattern at work that I've learned to live with but haven't learned to like. When something goes wrong — a misunderstanding, a conflict with another department — the explanation is always ready: he's a foreigner, he didn't understand. Sometimes it comes from a place of genuine care. Sometimes it's just convenient. Once I got into a real disagreement with someone from another team over a work issue. I wasn't wrong — it was a clear case of misallocated responsibilities. But my team lead smoothed it over with: forgive him, he's a foreigner. It stung. Not because I wanted the conflict to escalate, but because I was right, and being right didn't matter as much as being foreign. The complex parts of my work — medical insurance calculations, specific payment methodologies — involve specialized Korean terminology that even native Korean employees struggle with. We have a whole department of former nurses to handle it. But when I struggle with the same material, it's because I'm foreign. When a Korean colleague struggles, it's because the material is hard. The explanation is always different for me.

I've stopped fighting it. I moved into architecture work — designing systems that affect the whole development process instead of fixing bugs in billing logic I'll never fully own. That was a good decision. But it was also, if I'm honest, a retreat. I found a role where my foreignness matters less because the work is more universal. Code architecture doesn't care about your accent.

My family is here in Korea too. My mother, my relatives — they all made the same journey. And I watch them struggle with something I recognize: they're not Korean, they're not Russian anymore, they're not Uzbek. They exist in a gap between cultures, belonging to none of them. No Korean language ability, no connection to Russian culture after years away, no Uzbek identity to fall back on. Three generations of displacement, and what's left is a kind of cultural vacuum. I love them, but I see in them what I'm afraid of becoming — someone who moved so many times that there's nothing solid underneath.

That's why I'm so grateful for my wife.

We met at a Korean language course over ten years ago. She's Tatar — speaks five languages, lived in Japan, ended up in Korea. We've been together since. Her family is everything mine isn't, and I don't mean that as an insult to my own. Her family has roots. Teachers for three or four generations. A genealogical tree that goes back centuries. They live in a small national village where everyone knows everyone. When I visit, it's something I've never experienced before — not a return, because I was never there, but a glimpse of what it feels like to belong to a continuous story. There's no bitterness in it. Just something new, something warm that I didn't know I was missing.

I grew up without a culture of my own. My grandparents' was taken from them. My parents' was Soviet — functional, universal, not really anyone's. Mine is Russian by language, but I haven't lived in Russia for over twelve years. I'm not Russian anymore. I'm not Korean, despite the passport I'm applying for. I'm definitely not Uzbek. When people ask where I'm from, I never know which answer to give, because none of them are fully true.

My wife's family took me in, and I don't just mean they were polite at dinners. I mean they gave me something I didn't have — a sense of belonging to something older than myself. I'm lucky that I grew up in Uzbekistan, actually, because the culture there is close to Tatar culture in ways that made it easier to understand and fit in. The food, the hospitality, the family dynamics — it wasn't foreign to me the way Korean culture still sometimes is. For the first time, I found a cultural home that wasn't mine by birth but felt right anyway.

At home, we speak Russian. It's the one language that's fully ours, the common ground between a Tatar woman and a Korean man in a Korean city. Sometimes I think about our future kids and wonder what language they'll dream in, what box they'll check on forms, what they'll say when someone asks where they're from. I hope they'll have a better answer than I do. Or maybe, better yet, I hope they won't need one.

I'm applying for Korean citizenship now. I should be excited. Part of me is. But a bigger part already knows it won't change how I feel. I've been collecting documents my whole life — birth certificates, residence permits, visa stamps, permanent residency — and none of them ever made me belong. A passport is paper. Belonging is something else.

Wherever my wife is — that's home. That's the one coordinate in the world where nobody expects me to speak a different language or look a different way or explain where I'm "really" from. Where I'm just a guy trying to live. Everything else — the countries, the documents, the cultural identities I've tried on and taken off — is negotiable. She isn't.

I've been everything. Russian in Uzbekistan. Uzbek in Russia. Foreign in Korea. Korean by blood but not by culture. Twelve years an expat. Soon, maybe, a citizen. It's hard to be everything and no one. But I'm starting to think that home was never a place or a passport. It was always a person.

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