When people learn that I am Korean but have lived in Abu Dhabi for twelve years, they usually ask one of two questions. The first is whether I speak Arabic (some, and less than I should). The second, from Korean relatives especially, is more revealing: "But where will you really be from?"
I have stopped trying to answer that question and started noticing what it assumes: that a person must be from exactly one place, formed by exactly one system. My childhood has been an experiment in the alternative. And because so much of any childhood happens at school, what I have really been given is a twelve-year comparative education study, conducted from the inside.
Abu Dhabi is one of the most internationalized education markets on Earth. The emirate hosts schools teaching British, American, Indian, French, German, Japanese, and IB curricula, side by side, sometimes on the same street. My own schooling has been a relay race between systems. My classmates have held passports from thirty countries. Nobody was the default. Everyone was translating.
Every school system, I have come to believe, is a theory of what a person should be. From inside a single system the theory is invisible, the way water is invisible to a fish. The British curriculum I encountered prizes early specialization: by sixteen, students narrow to a few subjects, on the theory that depth forms intellect. The American approach keeps everything open until the last possible moment, on the theory that breadth forms character. Korean education, which reached me through hagwon-style academies, weekend classes, and my parents' expectations, treats mastery through repetition as a moral discipline — almost a form of respect. None of these is neutral. Each installs a different answer to a question nobody says out loud: what is a mind for?
Students absorb the theory, not just the content. My friends from different systems do not merely know different things; they are confident in different ways. In a British classroom, the finished product is an essay that argues. In an American classroom, it is the willingness to speak up first and revise later. In the Korean academies, it is stamina, the kind my Korean-schooled cousins have and my classmates find startling. I used to assume that one of these must be the correct product of education. I now think each system simply manufactures the excellence it decided, in advance, to measure.
Children, it turns out, translate better than institutions do. On paper, my school years look like bureaucratic chaos: mismatched grade levels, curricula that disagree about when a student should meet algebra, three narratives of world history in which the same events play different roles. In practice, the translation itself became the education. A student who has heard the twentieth century taught three ways does not conclude that history is unknowable. She concludes that every telling has an author. Of everything my schooling has contained, that one sentence may be worth the most.
I do not want to romanticize this. A childhood between systems has real costs, and I know classmates who paid them: the ones who moved too often to keep friends, who are fluent in four languages and at home in none, who freeze when adults ask that innocent question about where they're from. Rootlessness is not a curriculum. The researchers who study "third culture kids" keep the ledger honestly, unusual adaptability and perspective in one column, a lingering sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere in the other.
The reason this matters beyond people with unusual passports is that the condition is no longer exotic. Multiple systems, no default, constant translation: that was my childhood, and it is now, roughly, the condition of being young anywhere. A teenager in Seoul and a teenager in Statesboro both toggle daily among the value systems of family, school, and a global internet that answers to neither. Every young person is now educated by competing systems that disagree about what a mind is for. In that sense, we are all in the international school. Some of us simply enrolled earlier.
So when I write about education in these pages, and I intend to, it will be from this angle: not which system is best, but what each system is silently teaching, and what happens to the students asked to live between them. As for the relatives' question, I do have an answer now, though not the one they are hoping for. The place I am really from is the in-between itself. Its costs are real, and I know them at closer range than I have admitted here. But it is more crowded than you would think. And it has a better view.
