I’m grateful I was born short. A lot of people told me short people had a hard time succeeding in life. I was told women didn’t like short guys and people didn’t respect short people.

They spoke it as if it was a fact when it wasn’t. But, it forced me to work harder to make up for this “deficiency” I was told I had.

I don’t think I would’ve worked so hard in everything else if I didn’t have this thing I couldn’t change weighing down on me. As it turned out, being short didn’t get in the way of getting high-paying jobs or dating the most beautiful girl in my class. In fact, I think it was in part thanks to being short. 

Whether it was in height or ethnicity, I’m grateful I was a minority everywhere I attended school. I was a minority in Hong Kong and Canada. In fact, Chinese kids bullied me harder for being Korean than Caucasian kids did for being Asian. My experience is that skin colour doesn’t matter.

People will find a way to subjugate those who are different, it’s just what we do. But it taught me how to survive. I never expected to be treated like what the “majority” felt.

I don’t even know what that’s like other than understanding the language when I’m back in Seoul. But even in Seoul, people think I’m a tourist because I don’t dress like them—they ask me if I’m Singaporean most of the time.

I’ve had a number of times when old Koreans in suits would get mad at me for speaking English when I visited Seoul—it’s not so frequent now as it was even 10 years ago. But never fitting in has been good.

Without it, it wouldn’t have been so easy for me to make friends at new places and adapt quickly to new environments. It’s also made it easy to ignore other people since I never seemed to fit in in the first place. How freeing is that? 

There’s so much to be grateful for being different. Being a minority in everything has been awesome. Why be part of the majority? It seems so boring to be like everyone else. They’ve been devoid of the feeling of having to adapt.

I can’t imagine what life would be like only speaking one language or only knowing one culture. It was a shocker for me when I would speak with cousins in Korea in this mono-specific situation. It seemed quite a disadvantage to be among the majority.

How blessed are we to be minorities? We get to experience something few get to and there’s always something to learn from such an experience.