Hi — I’m Global Girl. The nickname stuck back in my undergrad years, and it took me a while to understand why it fit so well.
I grew up Korean, which means I grew up reading the air — 눈치. You learn early to switch your whole way of speaking for someone even a year older, to scan a room for what’s expected before you so much as open your mouth. My artistic, slightly rebellious side never loved that. So the strange thing is where I finally felt free: in rooms where I was the only Korean. My foreign friends didn’t have a script for me to follow — the French shrugged at the things I thought were “too much,” the Americans were so bluntly honest that I never had to hide — and somewhere in there I stopped performing and just became myself. The bonus: when you’re the one local in the room, people trust you with their secrets. How they think, how they fight, how they love. I didn’t study being a bridge between cultures. I just kept ending up as one.
Later I made it official-ish — a cultural studies degree, and a stint as a correspondent at a global newswire that was my dream job until it taught me the hard lesson behind half this blog: even the most careful, fact-checked journalism is never truly neutral. Someone always decides which facts, and for whom.
So here’s what this place is. Every section is the same move, pointed at a different surface: getting underneath the label to the real thing.
Meaning under the music. Reality under the image. The person under the difference.
- Gempathy — the meaning an algorithm can’t read. I have a stubborn gift for memorizing lyrics (I once held entire conversations replying only in song lines — it worked, somehow). Songs carried me through a stretch when I couldn’t do much but listen, so I dig through the noise to hand you the ones that might do the same.
- Reel vs. Real — the reality the image leaves out. What the screen says Korea is, versus what it’s actually like to live here — using the media theory I can’t unsee, worn as lightly as I can manage.
- Love Me Across Borders — the person underneath the cultural friction. Notes on how people date, text, and fall for each other across countries, so fewer of us lose someone who mattered just because the surface got in the way.
The whole thing runs on one quiet belief: the line between you and me is thinner than we’ve been told. Hate works by flattening people into labels. I’d rather go the other way — underneath, where the real person has been the whole time.
Come dig with me.
— Global Girl
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