I don’t remember much from my first day at Gates Elementary—just a backpack too big for my back, waving to my parents through the bus window, and the confusion of not understanding the language around me. Even then, I was learning what it meant to live between two languages. Over the years, being bilingual has taught me that words only hold meaning within layers of culture, context, and memory. This often leaves gaps, where some words don’t have a direct translation. There are countless of these between Korean and English. But if I had to choose, my favorite would be jeong. English dictionaries struggle to capture jeong with all its nuance, beauty, and weight in a single word. Attachment , perhaps?
Warmth, intimacy, or compassion… these are all very similar, sure. Still, no combination of definitions quite captures the shapeless pull of jeong : a kind of attachment that happens before you even realize it has. I imagine jeong spreading like ink in water—barely visible at first, but impossible to extract once it’s there. It flows into every corner, staining you quietly, completely. It’s an involuntary tenderness. A pre-existing condition. Oftentimes, jeong passes by me as if a myth. 6,880 miles away, a whole ocean, and years of diaspora separate me from those who hold jeong innately. Jeong seems to belong to those who share a laugh over bowls of rice or walk through the streets of Seoul. Instead, I grew up in Acton, a town whose name evokes an austere Anglo-Saxon affluence—manicured lawns, vacation homes on the Cape, new cars at sixteen. Treading this space between often felt lonely when I was a kid, venturing alone. Yet somewhere along the way, jeong found me at AB. I’ve felt jeong for this very building—in the way the halls sound at 11:03, in the flood of students heading to Santa Fe on $5 Mondays, and in that one door in the upper west girls’ bathroom that only locks if you kick it with your foot angled upward. I’ve seen it in the warning look from the kids leaving class after a brutal test.
In the space someone makes for you to sit next to them. In the teachers who printed you extra copies, the friends who waited outside classrooms just to walk you to lunch, the people who searched for you in school crowds. It showed up in rides offered. Seats saved. Notes shared. Maybe we weren’t all close. Maybe you and I never spoke. But we shared the same over-salted sidewalks in January. The same humid spring air before APs. The same color of dusk through these classroom windows. We agonized over lost snow days and cheered together at games. We knew those seasons together. And in that knowing, we grew familiar with each other—even if our lives never touched. What we’ve built here is a kind of jeong —quiet, invisible, but deeply rooted. And jeong isn’t limited to this school. The closeness we formed doesn’t disappear when we walk out. It’s not something we’re leaving behind. We’re stepping into a world far bigger than these halls— a world that might feel unfamiliar. Strange. Intimidating. But the thing about jeong is that it travels. It adapts. It follows us, stretching into new spaces. We’ve already learned to recognize connection in its quietest forms—eye contact, held doors, familiar smiles across the hall. The jeong we’ve grown has taught us how to carry others gently, and we’ll bring that instinct with us— into new cities, on new campuses, across countries.
On subway platforms, in dining halls, crowded apartments, and late-night walks—with people who are strangers now but will one day feel like home. Even as we step into new lives, we’ll still carry these years with us. We’ll carry the weight of having grown up together—not always side by side, but still together. Years of shared air, shared noise, shared growing pains. That can’t be undone. Jeong is everywhere, waiting to be seen—like a formless, limitless gas. It grows where we make space for it. That’s what we’re taking forward: not credits or