“Honey, we’ll come back in time for school, you can see your friends then,” my mom replied with a sigh. “Two and a half months is all you’ll be gone. Now go get to sleep. You still need to go to school for a week, remember?” I dragged my body upstairs as I flung myself onto the bed, not feeling an ounce of excitement for my first-ever trip to Korea. Questions swam around in my head. Would I like it? What were my grandparents like? What were the people like? Could they speak English there? I squirmed around, wishing for an answer to my naive questions, but only receiving a wave of tiredness.

Soon enough, school was over and the dreaded day to go to Korea was here. As I sat in the car, thoughts of second grade sadness filled my head. Why couldn’t I have just stayed home with my friends? Lost in thought, I entered the airport and then boarded the sterile-smelling airplane that took me 13 hours away to the foreign country that had only existed to me through my parents’ vivid descriptions. When I walked out of the airport for the first time, I was met with the unfamiliar scent of smoke, gas, and spicy street food that I would later recognize as the strangely comforting scent of Korea. Taxis honked, and Korean words and people could be heard and seen everywhere. I was overwhelmed with the amount of things that were new to me: my precious, protective bubble that had been around me since I was born had really been popped, if it already hadn’t been before.

The bubble had first been popped when I went over to a New Years Party at my friend’s house. At the time, my friend was in middle school, and she had also had one of her friends over, who was of another ethnicity. When I tried to talk to my friend about the latest Korean cartoon that I had watched, her friend laughed from the side and said, “You Asians are into such weird stuff sometimes!” For the first time, something had poked my protective bubble I grew up with. My second grade self had finally realized that maybe there was something that was different about me due to my race.

Despite what I had experienced back at home, as I attended the local elementary school in Korea for the summer, I was immediately welcomed by people who didn’t discriminate me because of who I was: Korean. The cheesy Korean cartoons that I had watched at home with my brother were the talk of the town, the glitzy, plastic character stickers I had that were once called weird were now the hottest thing among elementary school girls, and I could break out in Korean song and everybody would sing along. I soon went from being a sourpuss about my trip to Korea to not wanting to ever leave: it felt like home. I finally felt like I belonged and was accepted, and was proud to be who I was.

A week felt like an hour to me, and I wanted time to slow down. In the blink of an eye, two and a half months had passed, and it was time to go back to Ohio. My friends and I at the school I had attended said our sad goodbyes, and I found myself fighting back the tears that threatened to spill over. As a young, clueless second grader, I had discovered my love for the place that I had once hated: Korea. Korea was now the special place that made me realize that it was perfectly fine to be and express myself. It was a place that made me the girl I am today; the girl that freely fan girls about Korean pop music at school and doesn’t care about what others say, the girl that will crave Korean food until the day she dies, and the girl that dreams about going back to visit the country she will always love.