If you think about a classic Hollywood story, it often starts with a discovery: a young star being scooped up from nothing thanks to a benevolent eye. I have a child star story and it began in Itaewon, Seoul Korea, a shopping district known for selling affordable knockoffs and international cuisine and providing cheap ways for young American soldiers and high schoolers to drink as much soju as possible.

I was 11 when a woman came up to me and my mother and said I could be a model. She was an agent, and she would put me on television, she said, if I rode in her car, went to shoots and made shows with her on the weekends. As a young gay child interested in fashion and acting, I was waiting for the world to realize I was special and this woman had seen what I was waiting for everyone else to pick up on. She was going to make me a star.

But my mother looked at this woman sideways, trying to analyze this potential kidnapper who she thought was openly plotting to steal her kid. Their conversation was pretty stilted: My mother didnt speak Korean; the woman only spoke a few key phrases in English. So my mom took the womans card and decided to consider whether it was a legitimate offer.

The situation was strange but unsurprising given what my family was doing in Korea to begin with: My father spent years of my childhood abroad for his military tour of duty, and from 1997 to 1999, my mother, three siblings, 18-year-old dog and I all made the trip abroad, too. There was a luxuriousness to life in South Korea, one that lent a specific importance to my dad. He said his job and the job of Americans living in South Korea was to be model citizens and ambassadors of our country. We were there to protect and help Koreans because as long as the DMZ exists, dividing North and South Korea, the Korean War was still being fought. Thats what my dad told us again and again when lived on the Yongsan Garrison military installation, which felt a lot like Central Park.