2016 Fall at Yonsei

On my vision board—which I use instead of a bucket list—there is an item called the Classics Reading Challenge. It is a personal project driven by my desire to read canonical works of literature spanning from antiquity to the twentieth century. Knowing that this challenge would take a long time to complete, I decided to start a blog to document the journey.

I was not a child who naturally gravitated toward literature. I spent my school years moving between cultures: Born in South Korea, I moved to Ivory Coast, a country located in West Africa at the age of three, where I attended an international French elementary school—briefly transferring to a local Ivorian school after the French school was destroyed during the 2002 ivorian civil war—and later an international American middle and high school. Constantly switching schools and struggling to keep up with new languages, I found science and mathematics far more approachable than language or literature. At school, there was a prevailing stereotype that Asian kids were good at math, and I had no desire to challenge that assumption. So I leaned into it and I liked being praised for being good at something.

Children who grow up in a country different from their parents’ nationality are often called Third Culture Kids. They are unable to fully belong either to their parents’ culture (the first culture) or to the culture of the country they live in (the second culture), and are thus tasked with constructing their own culture and identity—the “third culture.” Those who, like me, grow up in environments where multiple races and cultures intersect often carry a persistent sense of instability, of never fully belonging anywhere. To cope with this inner conflict, many seek spaces that offer emotional grounding. These “emotional sanctuaries” can take many forms—art, music, sports, or religious communities to name a few. For me, that sanctuary was mathematics and science, disciplines where honest effort reliably led to clear answers.

That sense of identity, however, came to an end when I applied to university. I applied to departments such as biotechnology, chemistry, and physics at universities in Korea, and was rejected by all of them. I took another year to prepare and applied again, this time including humanities programs—and was accepted only into the humanities. And so, almost against my will, I found myself majoring in French language and literature.

Studying my major often felt like torture. Language courses were manageable because, like science, they had structure and rules, but literature was something else entirely. A mind trained in formulas does not easily shift into free, interpretive thinking, and no amount of diligence seemed enough to get the As. Literature felt unstructured and intangible, like chasing a sensibility I could never fully grasp. In my class, there were students who seemed like genuine literary prodigies, effortlessly discussing abstract ideas and drawing connections between old, forgotten texts and the realities of their own lives and contemporary society. Through their interpretations, what felt distant and archaic became vivid and relevant—highlighting a gap I keenly felt, one that made me acutely aware of my own limits in approaching literature.

Then I encountered a literary work that moved me deeply: Albert Camus’s L’Etranger, which I read during my final semester of university. The novel opens with a strange, almost indifferent sentence: “Today, mother died. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t know.” What follows is even more unsettling. There is no trace of a son’s grief over his mother’s death. Not only grief, but any emotion at all seems absent. The prose is spare, almost brutally precise. Though the story takes place in the height of summer, the emotional temperature of the novel is chillingly cold. The imagery struck me with such force that everything appeared vividly before my eyes, as if I were inside the scene itself. I could even feel the thin sheet of ice beneath the scorching heat. Even now, recalling my first reading gives me goosebumps. That Camus could captivate even a literary illiterate like me is proof enough of his genius.

Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.
(Today, mother died. Or maybe yesterday; I don’t know.)
Albert Camus – L’Etranger (1942)

Meursault, the protagonist of L’Etranger, embodies what Camus calls the “absurd world.” The absurd refers to the fundamental conflict between humanity’s desire for meaning and order and a world that offers neither. We strive to find meaning in life, yet the world we inhabit is inherently indifferent and hollow, providing no answers in return. Just as readers struggle to understand Meursault, we, too, cannot fully comprehend this absurd world. According to Camus, there are three possible responses to the absurd. The first is suicide—giving up on life because it lacks meaning. The second is to escape the absurd by surrendering one’s fate to religion or some external power. Camus rejects both approaches as unhealthy and instead proposes a third: rebellion.

By rebellion, Camus means recognizing and understanding the absurd, yet refusing to give up—and instead choosing to create one’s own meaning within that realization. There is a difference between searching for an inherent purpose in life and accepting that none may exist, while still choosing to create one’s own meaning. Camus argues that even while knowing that our reasons for living, our relationships with others, and everything else are ultimately futile, we must continue to strive to understand ourselves and others, and to create meaning within those relationships. Though The Stranger appears cold and antisocial on the surface, it contains one of the warmest and most life-affirming philosophies at its core.

Il faut comprendre.
(We must understand.)
Albert Camus – L’Etranger (1942)

Understanding the futility of life and creating one’s own meaning within it—this message is as powerful as the novel’s stark prose. In The Little Prince, this idea is expressed through the concept of “taming.” When the Little Prince sees thousands of roses on Earth, he realizes that the rose he left behind on his planet is not unique. Confused and disappointed, he learns from the fox that although the rose itself is ordinary and absent of special significant, the time and care he devoted to it make their relationship profoundly meaningful to him.

C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante.
(It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – Le Petit Prince (1943)

Similarly, Céline, the protagonist of the film Before Sunrise, suggests that in a meaningless world, we create meaning through the effort to understand others. I am especially fond of the following line:

I really believe that if there’s any kind of god, he wouldn’t be in any one of us—not you, not me—but just in this space in between. If there’s some magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone else, sharing something, even if it’s almost impossible to succeed. But who cares—the answer must be in the attempt.
Before Sunrise (1995)

We can never fully understand life, ourselves, or one another. At best, we can keep trying—and it is in that effort itself that meaning resides. Life does not move with the clarity of a mathematical formula. It unfolds in ways that resist understanding, shifts constantly, and remains stubbornly unpredictable. Literature, then, is not something opaque or impractical, but a generous companion—one that helps me carry on a quiet, honest conversation with myself.

I have spent much of my life living as a stranger in unfamiliar places. And yet, the truth is that I was never alone in that estrangement. We are all, in one way or another, strangers to one another. The question “Who am I?” therefore does not belong solely to Third Culture Kids; it is a profoundly universal question, one that accompanies everyone who chooses to live on their own terms.

Holding onto the conversations I began with L’Etranger, and the sense of exhilaration I felt while reading it, I hope to continue encountering other works of literature and to extend those conversations here on this blog.

You can find the complete list of books included in my “Classics Reading Challenge” here.