When my parents moved to the United States from Korea in 1974, they originally planned on moving back to Korea after my dad’s medical residency was finished.

Instead, for various reasons, my father accepted a job at a hospital in Western New York (the same hospital where I was born,) and they remained in the US, becoming citizens in 1981.

My parents’ decision to stay in the US and raise their children in the Rust Belt has been the root of the most enduring “what if” of my life:

What if my parents had returned to Korea and I had been raised there, on that tiny peninsula on the other side of the world?

What kind of person would I be?

Would anything about my personality, my beliefs, that which I consider to be the core of my being, be the same?

Or would the difference in culture have resulted in a completely different person, unrecognizable from the person I see in the mirror everyday?

But while I find myself curious about the idea of parallel lives and universes, I am FAR too lazy to study quantum physics and the actual scientific possibilities of their existence. (Research + controlled experiments + advanced gobbledegook science = *shudder*)

So instead, I indulge in cheesy forms of entertainment that explore the idea of,

What if I was THAT person, instead of the person that I am and lived in THAT world instead of this one?