The Three-Body Problem
Read time: 2½ minutes
Welcome to issue #062 of Unicorn Parents. Each week, I share practical insights and reflections to help you build a profitable business without missing the magic at home. If you’re serious about winning at work while raising great kids, you’ve come to the right place. This is a community built for ambitious parents who want both.
My son has pink eye.
He’s been away from school for two days.
While we’ve been worried about him and trying to protect his little brother from catching whatever he has…
…he’s been thrilled.
Absolutely thrilled.
Because he doesn’t have to go to school.
That caught me off guard.
I don’t remember hating school.
To me, school was where my friends were.
It was where I got to become my “other self.”
Not fully Korean.
Not fully American.
But somehow both.
Growing up between two cultures has its gifts and costs.
The gift?
You learn to code-switch early.
Languages.
Social cues.
Worldviews.
Rooms.
Identities.
You become adaptable.
You learn how to survive in different ecosystems.
You learn how to read people fast.
In many ways, I was doing this before I even knew what the term “code-switching” meant.
But the cost was depth.
There’s something powerful about growing up deeply rooted in one culture.
The stories.
The references.
The humor.
The books everyone somehow read together.
I didn’t really have that.
Especially with reading.
Ironically, my love for books came much later in life.
My parents loved me deeply.
They sacrificed enormously for me.
But reading wasn’t something modeled in our home the way it is in many book-loving families.
There were no bedtime discussions about novels.
No family trips to bookstores.
No “let’s read together for fun.”
My mother mostly tried to force me to read through discipline.
And honestly?
It worked temporarily.
But it didn’t make me love books.
Life did.
Eventually I discovered that books were more than homework.
Books were conversations with people I could never meet.
Mentors I could access for $20.
A way to borrow decades of insight in a single weekend.
Now as a father, I think about this constantly.
Not:
“How do I force my children to read?”
But:
“How do I help them fall in love with learning?”
Because those are two very different things.
One creates compliance.
The other creates hunger.
Then life played a strange trick on me.
I’m raising my kids in Vietnam.
As a Korean American.
My sons go to a Korean preschool.
They speak English with me.
And Vietnamese surrounds them everywhere else:
the street
the market
the neighbors
the noise
I grew up translating between two worlds.
They’re growing up inside three.
Before they can even read.
I used to think the cost of my childhood was depth.
That I never got fully rooted in one culture.
That I was always slightly outside of everything.
But maybe that’s not a lack of roots.
Maybe it’s roots growing in three directions at once.
I didn’t have a word for what I was becoming when I was young.
I discovered “code-switching” long after I was already doing it.
My kids may never have a word for what they are either.
Because what they’re becoming may not even have a name yet.
And maybe every generation inherits a different gift.
My parents gave me grit.
Displacement.
Adaptability.
Ambition.
Maybe my job is to give my children rootedness.
Security.
Wonder.
The freedom to become whole before becoming useful.
I still don’t know which path creates the “better” human.
The hungry immigrant child often becomes someone the world can’t ignore.
But the deeply loved child may become something even rarer:
Peaceful.