There is a Korean word, han, that has no precise English translation. It describes a collective sorrow, a grief that is not purely personal — the accumulated weight of historical injustice, of longing, of things that were lost before you were born and whose absence you nonetheless feel.

My grandmother used this word the way other people use weather — as ambient context, a condition of being. Growing up Korean-American in a family that had survived the war, the partition, and three generations of displacement, han was the water I swam in without knowing it had a name.

I named it in eighth grade, in a Korean language class I had been resisting for years. The teacher explained han not as depression or sadness, but as a form of cultural memory carried in the body. I went home and asked my grandmother if she felt it. She looked at me for a long time before she answered. She said: 'I thought it was just Tuesday.'

That sentence opened something for me. The things we carry without naming them are still weight. The grief that has no occasion — that predates us and will outlast us — is still real, still worth understanding, still worth the work of translation.

I've since studied the concept formally: in Korean literature, in comparative cultural psychology, in the emerging field of epigenetics and transgenerational trauma. The science suggests that historical trauma can leave biological traces — that what my grandmother lived through may have shaped not just her psychology but her physiology, and possibly mine.

At Yale, I want to study psychology and East Asian studies together, to build the vocabulary for what my family has been carrying. Han taught me that some of the most important words are the ones that don't exist yet in the language you're given.