When I was eleven, I had a dream about Remus Lupin. I was sitting across him in a train compartment at sunset, struck for the first time by what a deeply sad person he was. We did not talk. For a long time, we just sat there together in the beautiful light. When I woke up I was beset by the awareness that life was an unacceptably painful series of rejections and losses for him.
What was surprising was that I hadn’t given him much thought as a character before. I have no recollection of feeling deeply sad for another person before this dream. My world consisted of books; my parents who didn’t communicate emotionally with me; my much older sister, whom I loved but only visited once a year from her US college; and zero to one friends at a time. If my sister had showed me grief or vulnerability I probably would have unlocked sadness-for-another, but she never did.
If you want to put it one way, I had had a (developmentally delayed?) empathetic breakthrough in my sleep. In another, I had discovered whump.
After that dream I walked around in an emotional daze, feeling the raw pain of another person, albeit one who didn’t exist. I’d unlocked a whole new quality and quantity of emotion in one night. Chasing the intensity, I tried to continue the dream on subsequent nights and failed. Not knowing what else to do, I, uh, googled him. Fanfiction came up, and I read several stories about him without any context for what fanfiction was or why someone would have written these things. As I kept reading, the concept of fanfiction clicked. I started writing a hundred thousand word fanfic of my own, in which Harry Potter was raised by a sect of assassin OCs who lived in a hollow mountain.
I now had a practically unlimited archive of English fiction to read, instead of a few hundred well-thumbed books at home. And I was pouring words back into the world, too. This kept my fluency alive when it might have otherwise faded in my teens.
After fanfiction.net I went to Livejournal. After Livejournal, following friends – I had friends!– tumblr. I was testing very well in English language exams, and only medium-well in Korean ones. My family supported me in applying to a feeder high school for US colleges. And that is part of how I came to America.