Translator: Ken Harvey Reviewer: Denise RQ
Our identities are intimately tied to the stories
we tell ourselves and others.
The scene is 1970, Korea.
My father is a young and ambitious man.
He has a wife and two young children,
and he has just started working for a Korean government agency
which is promoting trade.
For his first assignment,
he's sent to Rabat, Morocco, in northwest Africa.
Now, this is a country he has little knowledge of.
He only knows it as the location of Casablanca, the movie.
(Laughter)
And what's more, he was sent there
because he had taken one semester of French in college.
(Laughter)
Later, when I asked him, "Why Morocco?"
he said it was to sell fish nets to Moroccan fishermen.
Fish nets!
Korea had yet to become the country of cutting-edge technology
it is known for today.
In those days, if you wanted to get a car in those parts,
you had to travel to Gibraltar, in the south of Spain.
So my father went there,
and he bought a white Volkswagen Beetle.
He was so pleased with himself.
Here he was, new family, new job, new assignment,
and now even a new car
which was an unimaginable luxury for most Koreans at that time.
He wanted to celebrate, so, you know, on his way back,
he stopped by a restaurant
and treated himself to a really nice meal.
When he came out, there was a huge dent in the side of his car.
He said he was upset for weeks,
until a senior colleague of his gave him some wise advice:
that cars are meant to be dented, and this would be the first of many dents
he would experience in his car, but also in his life.
My parents have shared this and so many other stories with me,
but they fade, and I lose a lot of the details.
So this summer, I decided to purposefully create
a protected space where I could ask and listen
to my parents' stories and record them.
They told me stories about the white VW Bug,
but also stories about the Korean War they experienced as children,
about the devastation, the hunger, and the misery,
and the near-death experiences,
and the complete loss of their childhood.
I realized that these stories were at the core of their identities:
war, poverty, hunger,
but also growth, change, and opportunity that happened after the war.
And the loneliness of being a foreigner in unfamiliar lands,
but also the love, and the family.
Our identities are formed and informed
by the stories we tell ourselves.
But these stories need protected spaces
for them to emerge, develop, and to be shared.
Humans have had a long history of sharing stories.
We share stories about ourselves and who we are
when we meet strangers for the first time.
Thanksgiving is just around the corner,
and many stories will be shared around the Thanksgiving dinner table.
We roll our eyes at some of the embarrassing stories
that get shared over and over and over again,
but these stories are important,
because they say something about who we are.
When I was growing up in London, I remember my American cousin Ron
coming to visit and stay with us during his winter vacation.
He had long hair and a cool American accent,
and we talked about F-14 fighter jets, and movies, and arcade games.
He has been my favorite cousin ever since.
But he had this strange habit
of sleeping with the covers entirely over his head.
And I asked him why he did this,
and he told me it was because of an especially cold winter
he experienced as an exchange student,
and this was the only way that he could fall asleep,
and it has been his habit ever since.
I've shared this interesting story
with many family members at many family gatherings,
and these are some of the last stories Ron and I shared together
before he passed away of cancer just a few years ago.
Tribes and communities have their stories too,
of the heroic acts of ancestors
or the hardships and challenges they overcame as a community.
Companies have stories
about how they were started in garages and in basements
by geeky college students who went on to change the world.
One of the things that has really fascinated me
since moving to the States some 20 years ago
is its identity as a country.
Whether you agree with the historic narrative or not,
these are stories that get shared and repeated
in textbooks and in classrooms
and in names of streets in small towns
as well as the impressive monuments that line this country's capital.
These stories form the basis of a common identity,
whether that be for a country, a community, or a family.
So, how are we telling our stories today?
Do you remember the early days of the World Wide Web?
(Laughter)
I remember the excitement that I felt when I created my first web page.
It had a little story about myself and a whole bunch of hyperlinks
to things that I found really interesting.
(Laughter)
It even had a counter that counted how many people visited the web page.
And I was so happy when that counter reached 100.
(Laughter)
It was amazing; but this was my space.
This was my identity to the world,
and this was my story the way that I wanted to tell it.
Of course, the Internet has evolved and progressed quite a lot since then,
and it has made it really easy for us to tell our stories now.
It started with hand-coded HTML web pages,
and then we had web logs, or "blogs" as we now call them.
And now we have social media.
We follow each other's feeds.
We consume each other's photos, links, and likes.
We post pictures of the food we eat,
the friends we hang out with, and the places we visit,
not just life's precious moments.
We have become our feeds, our foods, our friends, and our funny videos.
I have become my LinkedIn profile,
my Facebook, my Twitter, and Instagram feed.
The social media revolution has been truly breathtaking
and connecting people like never before.
It connects people both far and near.
It is so interesting, so immediate, we can't take our eyes off of it.
And in many ways,
this has become the de facto way we share our stories today,
but we should recognize it for what it is.
It's a feed that needs constant feeding.
And there's a difference between this constant flow
and a protected space.
And I believe we sometimes need to stop,
step outside the flow, and ask ourselves,
what are the stories we're telling ourselves and others?
I have a protected space.
I often get up very early in the mornings,
and as a means of waking up, I hand grind my coffee beans
and do a slow pour-over with my goose-neck kettle.
This is obviously a habit I've picked up since moving to Seattle.
(Laughter)
But I find that this is the only time that I have
when I'm truly disconnected and alone
and allowed to let my thoughts just wander.
Families need protected spaces, too.
And if I hadn't created that protected space
for my parents to share their stories,
I don't think I would have ever heard some of stories that they told me.
The important thing about a protected space
is that it's a space
where we can be patient, and we can be vulnerable.
We don't always have to look happy all the time,
and we don't always have to be constructing our public personas.
These are stories at the heart of our identities.
But these stories need protected spaces
for them to emerge and to be shared.
Our children especially need protected spaces.
We need to give them the patience and the security
for them to share their stories and form their identities.
My children are constantly inventing new stories
and I don't want them to ever stop.
Protected spaces can come in many forms,
but essentially, a protected space is a space set aside deliberately
for the purpose of sharing stories.
They could be both physical and virtual.
They could be as simple as some time set aside in the day for yourself,
or they could be family spaces around the dinner table,
where we deliberately decide to disconnect from our devices
and actually talk to each other.
They could be gathering spaces where communities come together
to share their stories, and to listen, and to also collect their stories.
My daughter, when she was little, she asked me a very tough question.
She asked, "Daddy, what do you do?"
It's hard to explain to a six-year-old
that you work as an Internet technology consultant
to nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies.
(Laughter)
So I told her I make the Internet easy to use
for those who want to make the world a better place.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And she said something like, "That's pretty cool, Dad."
(Laughter)
As I work with Internet technologies,
I see the huge potential it has in connecting people,
and the ability for us to form deeper human relationships
if we just give it a chance.
And I believe that we consciously need to create and protect spaces,
both physical and virtual, for ourselves, our families, and our communities,
to share stories and form identities,
especially in this age of overwhelming flow of information.
And it's my hope
that we continue to create spaces like this one here today
where we can stop, reflect, and share our stories.
Thank you.
(Applause)