The Abundance of Between: What Immigration Taught Me About Wealth
When people hear I immigrated from Korea at 11, they often assume it was driven by economic necessity. It wasn't. My family wasn't fleeing poverty or seeking basic survival. We were already comfortable in Seoul.
So why leave?
My parents saw something I couldn't yet understand: sometimes the greatest wealth isn't in what you already have, but in what you can access.
The Wealth of Options
In Korea, my path felt predetermined in a way that was both comforting and constraining. Good students go to good universities, get good jobs, follow good life scripts. It wasn't bad. But it was singular and limited.
Moving to America didn't make me richer in terms of money or status. If anything, we took a step down initially. But it made me wealthy in possibilities I hadn't known existed.
In Korea, when adults asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, there were maybe three socially acceptable answers: a doctor, a professor, or a lawyer. In America, suddenly there were careers I'd never heard of, paths that didn't exist in my mental framework, ways of living that challenged everything I thought was fixed about adult life.
This wasn't about American exceptionalism or the "land of opportunity" mythology. It was about discovering that the menu of possibilities is much larger than any single culture can contain. Immigration taught me that abundance often looks like expansion of what you thought was available to you.
The Richness of Perspective Arbitrage
Here's something I didn't appreciate until much later: having deep knowledge of two different systems gives you a kind of cultural arbitrage that's incredibly valuable.
In Korea, I learned the power of long-term thinking, group harmony, and methodical preparation. In America, I absorbed the value of individual initiative, creative problem-solving, and rapid iteration. Most people get really good at one approach. Immigration forced me to become fluent in both.
This dual fluency became a form of wealth that compounds over time. In business situations, I could read the room using Korean-influenced emotional intelligence while proposing solutions using American-style directness. I could build relationships with patience and depth while also moving quickly when speed was needed.
The abundance wasn't in choosing between these approaches; it was in having access to both.
The Currency of Adaptability
Middle-class comfort in Korea hadn't prepared me for one thing: the skill of rapid adaptation. When your environment is stable and predictable, you don't develop those muscles.
Immigration, even comfortable immigration, forces you to become incredibly good at learning new systems quickly. New school structure, new social norms, new ways of communicating with authority figures, new metrics for success. You become professionally adaptable.
This adaptability became its own form of abundance. While my peers were stressed about changes at work or in their personal lives, I had already learned that systems are just systems—they can be learned, navigated, and even influenced. Change wasn't threatening; it was just information about what new skills I needed to develop.
The Expansion of Identity
In Korea, I was just a Korean girl. Unremarkable, fitting neatly into established categories. Immigration multiplied my identity in ways that created genuine abundance.
I became Korean-American, which meant I had access to two cultural tool kits for understanding the world. I became bilingual, which opened up entire universes of literature, humor, and ways of thinking. I became someone who could code-switch between different versions of myself depending on what the situation needed.
This wasn't about losing authenticity or becoming confused about who I was. It was about discovering that identity can be additive rather than subtractive. You don't have to choose between being Korean or American—you can be both, and the combination creates something richer than either alone.
The Privilege of Outsider Status
Being an immigrant, even a privileged one, gives you permanent outsider status that's actually incredibly valuable. You're never fully inside any system, which means you see things that insiders miss.
In corporate environments, I notice cultural dynamics that people who grew up in American business culture take for granted. I see inefficiencies that exist because "that's how we've always done it." I spot opportunities that others overlook because they're too embedded in existing frameworks to imagine alternatives.
This outsider perspective became a form of professional abundance. Companies value people who can see their blind spots, who bring fresh approaches, who question assumptions that everyone else accepts without thinking.
The Compound Interest of Curiosity
Perhaps the greatest abundance immigration created was intellectual curiosity. When you've experienced firsthand that there are completely different ways to organize society, education, work, and relationships, you become permanently curious about other possibilities.
This curiosity compounds over time. You read more widely, travel more thoughtfully, ask better questions, make more interesting connections. You become someone who actively seeks out perspectives that challenge your assumptions rather than someone who stays comfortable in familiar echo chambers.
The True Abundance
The abundance of immigration isn't about accumulating more stuff or even more opportunities. It's about expanding your definition of what's possible.
It's learning that there are multiple valid ways to be successful, multiple frameworks for happiness, multiple approaches to solving the same problems. It's discovering that your way of seeing the world is just one way, and that other ways might have insights that make your life richer.
Most people spend their entire lives operating within the cultural software they were born into. Immigration—even comfortable, privileged immigration—forces you to install additional operating systems. Once you have multiple ways of processing the world, you start to see abundance everywhere.
The real wealth isn't in what you have. It's in how many different ways you can see what you have, and how many different paths you can imagine toward what you want.
That's a kind of abundance that has nothing to do with your bank account and everything to do with the expansiveness of your perspective. And once you have it, no one can take it away.
