The Superpower (Code-switching)
Growing up with two cultures sometimes felt like living in two worlds at once, constantly switching between them like the joker. It was a practice of observing your surroundings and adjusting your behaviour simply to fit in.
I found out later in life, this is called code-switching: the art of smoothly adapting to different cultural and social environments. And for children of immigrants, it’s not just a skill—it’s survival. It’s what we had to do to belong and be accepted.
The Superpower
At its best, code-switching is a superpower. It teaches you to read the room, to adapt, to communicate across cultural differences. It’s why growing up, there was the outside world: school, friends, pop culture and the inside world: where our Korean roots, language, elder respect and excelling was overly emphasised.
It’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve realised that it’s not easy to have two views of the world. There’s a certain exhaustion that comes from constantly shifting gears, from feeling like you’re never fully one thing or the other and from feeling as if the onus is always on you to adapt. It’s the subtle pressure to dilute yourself to fit in, to make others comfortable, to belong.
The Struggle for Authenticity
The real challenge of code-switching is figuring out who you are when no one else is around. Your identity can be pulled in multiple directions between your cultural roots and embracing the dominant culture.
For me, it’s taken almost 30 years to realise that code-switching doesn’t have to mean losing yourself. It can be about choosing which parts of yourself to bring forward in different contexts—not erasing who you are but amplifying parts of you to create bridges and understanding.
When I switch from English to my parents’ language mid-sentence (what I call Konglish), or explain a tradition to a friend who’s never heard of it, I feel the weight and privilege of my heritage. I feel gratitude for the sacrifices my family made to create this in-between space for me—a space where I can thrive as both who I am and empathise with multiple cultures.
As a new mom, I think about how I want my kid to be proud of his heritage and cultural make up. He may not grow up being trilingual and I wouldn’t expect that of him, but I do expect him to show authentic curiosity about his lineage. As a child I felt that my Korean culture was something that made me different and odd and that was the impetus to be hyper aware of myself in space.
For my kid, I want him to celebrate and enjoy his multiple cultures without feeling pressured to change his identity to fit in with every culture. I want him to code switch for a different reason than I did. He should be more than a sum of his parents and his environment, he should be himself.
