Student Showcase
This is Hoonji
I hold my sides with laughter. It is the most marvelous moment to talk in different languages with people who have very different appearances. Could I have imagined this scene four years ago? No. For fourteen years, I had never been to another country. I had never had a passport. I had never thought that my life would be different from the way I had lived. But now I am in New York, across the Pacific Ocean, without my family and friends.
People ask me, “What is the most different thing from your country?” And I say, “Myself.”
Now I admit this transition, but at one time, I did not want to accept the difference because I strongly believed that I would not change, like a rock, regardless of any situation. I couldn’t stop pretending to others that I had not changed. One day, when I was joking around with my friends in English and laughing, I suddenly realized that I had changed. I would not be the same person as before.
So was I sad and depressed? No. I love my life and I am satisfied with my present self. To tell you the truth, I don’t know where and what began to change initially. Perhaps it was at first an unnoticeable change, but these tiny changes accumulated and eventually changed my whole life and created the current Hoonji Jang.
I had to decide every important matter by myself and all decisions involved risks, but these decisions made me rational and determined. Rather than relying on my parents and friends, I had to rely on myself, and the responsibilities of my newfound independence made me stronger. Also, the experience of being abroad gave me a new outlook of life. In Korea, I was a frog in the well who knew nothing of the great ocean. I didn’t know that the world was vast. But now the wide and unlimited world excites me to look for what I want to do and what I can do.
Possibly, coming to the US was the most risky choice in my life. But this risk became the point where as Robert Frost once said in his poem, “two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” Yes, it was the turning point.
