Fifty Years of the American Dream (4)

Nonsan Training Center

I completed my military service in Korea before coming to America. There was a choice between 18 months as a student soldier and 36 months as a regular enlisted man. In my third year of university I ran out of tuition money, and I went down alone to the Nonsan Training Center. I volunteered, thinking that serving as a regular enlisted man I would be able to keep attending school. On my first day, head shaved and in uniform, I went to the barracks I had been assigned. There I met trainees who had been drafted from the countryside of Chungcheong Province. Among them were young men from the mountain valleys who had done nothing but farm and who had come to Nonsan riding a train or a bus for the first time in their lives. The atmosphere was unfamiliar, but I had come prepared in my mind, so it was not hard for me.

The next day, when I hung my dog tags around my neck, put on combat boots and a steel helmet, and looked at myself in the mirror, I looked nothing like the student I had been only a few days earlier. I looked comical, cute, and a little bit gallant, too. Thirty men slept in one barracks and woke to the bugle at six in the morning. After washing up, we sat in the barracks, fifteen on each side facing one another, with pots of rice and soup passed from hand to hand set before us, and waited for the platoon leader's command: "Eat!" Three times a day we ate rice mixed with other grains and beef and bean-sprout soup, and when kimchi occasionally came along with it, it was a great celebration. The joke that the bean sprouts you eat in three years of army life, laid end to end, would circle the globe rang true.

Now and then something amusing happened. Thirty rice pots had been passed from hand to hand, but the last trainee's pot never arrived. The mess-duty soldier and the platoon leader lined up all the men and searched the entire barracks, but they couldn't find the hidden pot. They made up one more pot, and when the pots came back after the meal there were thirty-one. We had eaten in two rows facing each other, and there was no way to know who had worked the magic to eat an extra bowl.

The Privileges of a University Student

Our platoon leader, Captain Park, learning that I was a student at Seoul National University, picked me as his assistant and had me clean the office and run errands. I delivered the platoon leader's rice pot from the officers' mess, and when he went out I ate it, so sometimes I had great fun sharing it with the trainee next to me. Captain Park gave me various privileges. I distributed the cigarettes and hardtack delivered to our platoon among the men, and perhaps because they saw I was fair, they came to follow my lead, and order seemed to be kept.

But there was always a troublemaker somewhere. He lost his temper often, and country-dialect curses I had never heard in my life flew out at the end of every sentence. At last a fight broke out with another man in the platoon. One of the men trying to stop them brought two bayonets (the blades fixed to rifles), gave one to each side, and drove them out of the barracks, telling them to go out and fight like men. When the two came back a little later, the soldier who had cursed and raged was dragged in bleeding. A medic was soon called to treat his wound, and that was the end of it.

The training of that time followed the army training methods of the Second World War under Japanese colonial rule, and human rights abuses were severe. Beatings during training were harsh, and once the body of a man beaten to death was found in a latrine and reported in the newspapers.

An Unexpected Crisis

At dawn on January 13, 1958, such a crisis came to me as well. I learned that military police in combat fatigues had appeared with trucks to carry trainees off to the front line facing North Korea and were looking for me. It was the process of taking student soldiers to the front. Realizing I had been mistakenly listed as a student soldier, I immediately hid myself under the floor of the training center office. A few hours later the truck left, carrying a number of student soldiers.

The space under the floor where I had crept in the darkness was bitterly cold and piled full of hospital waste. I made up my mind to wait there until Captain Park came to work in the morning. Afraid that if I fell asleep in nothing but my sleepwear I would freeze to death, I pricked my palm with a shard of glass and endured the pain. When the dawn light came in, I saw that I was lying flat on my stomach on top of broken syringes, needles, and bloody operating-room waste.

The Worst Beating of My Life

A little later a cleaning soldier dumped a bucket of trash into the hole, and all of it landed on my face and head. Unable to bear it any longer, I crawled out and went to the military police unit. The MPs were all out on guard duty, and only one MP, who seemed to be drunk, was there. As soon as he saw me he knew I was a trainee, handcuffed my hands, and began punching and kicking me.

I covered my face and stomach and tried desperately to dodge, but my nose burst bleeding, I couldn't breathe, and after a while I lost consciousness. It was the first time in my life I had been beaten so badly. When I came to again, an MP officer was in the room. Learning that I had enlisted voluntarily and alone, he began interrogating me to see whether I might be a spy. My whole body was covered in blood and my face was bruised, and I drifted in and out of consciousness. Apparently I passed out again and collapsed while answering. When I came to some time later, I was lying on my bed in the barracks, and Captain Park was beside me. He explained that the whole incident had happened because some clerk had mistakenly processed my registration as a student soldier instead of a regular enlisted man. Fortunately I recovered without serious injury, and I suppose I got a thorough training at the training center.

One weekend my mother came to visit. At the entrance to the training center there was a visitors' building, and families were given a room for visits. As soon as I saw my mother I burst into tears and forgot everything I meant to say. My mother, too, shed tears, feeling guilty that, pressed by my older brother's medical school tuition, she hadn't been able to help with mine. While my mother and I were sharing news of the family and relatives, from the next room came the loud, ecstatic cries of a man and a woman. After my mother left, I asked an MP how these rooms were used.

The MP, a man in his thirties, laughed and explained. When a young man from the countryside marries and then comes to the Nonsan Training Center, his bride comes to see her groom on the weekend. Visits were allowed only during the day, he said, so there weren't enough rooms. He said there were also unspeakable hardships hidden there: in some cases a bride who had waited a long time went back without seeing her groom, and the MPs at the visitors' building played the husband's part for her. For the first time I realized anew that instinctive love was alive in one corner of a training center where men shed blood and sweat every day. Captain Park offered to introduce me to his younger sister, though I had never thought of marriage, but I soon finished my three months of training and was assigned to the 63rd Army Hospital in Daejeon, where my uncle was the hospital director.

Witnessing Life at Its Most Harrowing

I was given the role of assisting the medics. While I carried the patients' meals and cleared away their bedding, I soon became friends with them, and for the first time I learned how hard it is to live suffering in a sick body. Some of the patients were truly wretched, and with those whose health seemed to have recovered a little I became close friends. When they recovered and were discharged, I was happy, and sad to part. But there were also patients who longed desperately to recover and in the end lost their lives. With my own hands I spread a blanket, wrapped the body, laid it on the bed, and kept vigil beside it through the night until it was carried to the crematorium the next day. Feeling the emptiness of life as I did then, and yearning for religion, was an experience that shook the view of life I held in my youth.

One day I saw a patient who had been evacuated after losing both feet and one arm in a landmine explosion. After the armistice agreement was signed in 1953, landmine accidents were still seen now and then at the front. Every time I saw that patient my heart ached, and I worried how he would go on living. One day a comrade from the front came to see him. As soon as he saw his friend, who had come with a pitying heart, he said, "Hey, I almost had it, you know! How glad I am to be alive and see you," and threw his one remaining arm around his friend's neck. In that moment I saw that patient's hope, and I saw the will to live. Ah! How precious a living life is! Afterward, no matter what hardships came to me on the road of life, I remembered this patient, gave thanks for my own life, and found courage again.

Absorbed in Literature in High School

There was a time in high school when I took up an interest in literature. While serving in the military I found time again to write poems and keep a diary. At twenty-one, I seem to have gone through the precious experience of wandering in search of my own view of life.

The army doctors grew even kinder once they learned I was the hospital director's nephew and a student at Seoul National University. My uncle arranged for me to earn College of Engineering credits while I served, so I graduated from university only six months late, in September 1961, and was also able to finish my service as a regular enlisted man without trouble. Medical school took six years and engineering four, so my older brother and I graduated in the same year. Two years after I finished training, my brother entered the Nonsan Training Center. When I visited him during his training, Nonsan had been reformed with American-style military training, in sharp contrast with the training center I had known. Human rights protections had improved, and the barracks facilities and mess hall atmosphere gave the impression of a university dormitory, so I could see at a glance the efforts of Paik Sun-yup, commander of the three armed forces, to reform the military along modern lines. The contrast — I having gone through Japanese-style militaristic training, and my brother, two years later, receiving American-style democratic military training — showed a fragment of the modern history of the Korean military.

A Sudden Illness

When I came to America, I carried in my pocket the $50 permitted by Park Chung-hee's military government and a single shoulder bag that came with the plane ticket my brother had arranged for me in America. There were times I wondered whether my ability to come to a foreign land and stand on my own feet was thanks to this military training. For we brothers adapted to life in a strange land ten thousand li from home relatively easily. But during the years after finishing graduate school, when I was absorbed in design and drafting as a novice architect in America, I didn't know that bad habits and illness were growing in my body.

On my way home after work, loving sports as I do, I would play tennis with friends. After sweating buckets and washing up, I felt wonderfully refreshed, and the stress of work seemed to melt away. One day when I came home after playing, my right arm began to go numb. When the numbness wore off, it even hurt. It got so bad that when I woke at night my right arm had no feeling and couldn't move, and I had to lift it and set it down with my left arm. My wife urged me to see a doctor right away. When I saw a friend who was a surgeon, he had me admitted at once, and after X-rays and blood tests I met a neurosurgeon. He said a nerve seemed to be pinched in the spine at the back of my neck, and that the next day they would inject dye into my blood vessels, pinpoint the exact spot with X-rays, and operate right away.

That night I lay awake in my hospital room, agonizing. "Inject dye into my blood vessels for tests and operate on the spine in my neck?" My friend the doctor's words screamed in my ears. At dawn the next day I left a note for my doctor friend saying, "I'd like to go home and have time to think," slipped out of the hospital, and went straight into the sauna at the tennis club to give myself heat treatment my own way. The right arm I used to draw plans, write, and play tennis was broken, and the future looked black. At that moment, something I never expected happened to me. In that desperate situation, an angel came to me like a savior.

A tall, sturdily built middle-aged man of German descent walked in naked. As soon as he saw me he asked why I had left the hospital. I was startled out of my wits. I asked him how he knew I had come from the hospital. He said I had a hospital band on my wrist, and he had wondered whether I was a mental patient who had escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Laughing, I explained my situation from beginning to end. He laughed too, and told me that a few months earlier a nerve had been pinched in his lower back, his leg had hurt terribly, and he had nearly had surgery on his lumbar spine, but Dr. Ernest Johnson had saved him. He told me Dr. Johnson was a doctor at Ohio State's hospital, and that with two weeks of physical therapy and following the exercises, I would be healed within a month.

Dr. Johnson, My Savior

I immediately rushed home and called Dr. Johnson. His office staff said he had too many patients and couldn't take new ones for the next two years. I didn't despair; I asked for the doctor's assistant and earnestly begged to be allowed to see Dr. Johnson, explaining that I was an architect with a family and children, and that this illness, which had struck suddenly while I was exercising, was fatal to my livelihood. About ten minutes later, Dr. Johnson called. He told me to come the next morning with my blood test reports and X-ray films. While I waited after arriving at his office, I saw his face and articles in international medical journals and in America's Time magazine, and I realized he was a world-renowned physician.

His words were printed in Time magazine like this: "Many people, when a bee flies around inside their car while they are driving, cause an accident trying to swat it to death," he said. "They don't go through the simple procedure of stopping the car and opening the window to let the bee out. Rather than looking for an easy way to treat where the patient hurts, they rush into surgery, not knowing they will suffer a greater wound."

He examined me and reviewed the records I had brought, then had me show him how I sat working at the office, the posture in which I bent over the drafting table, and how I sat driving a car. Then he explained to me: "Human beings had bodies that crawled on four legs until millions of years ago, but at some point, after they began to stand and walk, they stopped using the muscles they used to use, so one in every ten modern people walking upright on two feet lives with problems in the neck and lower back."

The Angel Who Came to Me

He referred me to a physical therapy clinic where his students worked, and I went. They covered my neck and back with hot towels to relax the muscles, then felt along the nerves and muscles running down from my neck to find the knots that had hardened. When they found a knot, the therapist pressed it with his thumb with all his strength to release it. The knots being pressed hurt so much that I had to fight the urge to scream and endure it. I learned exercises and calisthenics to strengthen the muscles at the back of my neck and repeated them. Just as the man I met in the sauna had said, I was completely healed in less than a month. A few months after that, a nerve was pinched in my lumbar spine and sciatica set in. Using the principles I had learned from Dr. Johnson, I exercised my lower abdominal muscles, treated myself, and soon recovered. I do not know who the middle-aged white man was who came to me and introduced me to Dr. Ernest Johnson when I sat in the tennis-club sauna, facing adversity with a physical disability. Rather than thinking it a coincidence, I gratefully think of him as an angel, and I came to live trying to be an angel to others as well.

From then on I had muscle massages now and then. When I went to Korea I stayed at hotels rather than at the homes of relatives or friends, and each time there was a younger cousin who came to find me and gave me a massage.

My Uncle by Marriage

He suddenly went blind in high school. About his father, my uncle by marriage [my father's sister's husband], there is a story I remember as something mysterious, like a legend.

Right after liberation in 1945, my uncle trained as a policeman at a young age and was soon assigned to a police combat unit. While working with responsibility for cracking down on violent criminals, he married my aunt at twenty-four and had a son. After the Yeosu–Suncheon Rebellion and the Korean War, my uncle was promoted to commander of a combat unit and rose as far as the post of commanding the suppression of communist guerrillas around Jirisan.

The partisans, made up of Korean People's Army stragglers and local communist party members, hid by day and operated by night, so the suppression fighting went on every night, moving around the villages of Jirisan. The police side was well equipped with combat gear and equipment, but the partisans lacked equipment, so in every battle the partisans' losses were always heavy. My uncle was promoted to police superintendent and rose to the post of police chief in cities around Jirisan such as Jinju, Namwon, and Gimhae, but he was always absorbed in combat. When I was in high school, during summer vacation, I stopped by to see my uncle and aunt and my younger cousin. Over the course of a few days, a sergeant who served under my uncle told me various stories of his battles, and among them he told me an astonishing fact.

A Story Like a Legend

"That night Superintendent Jeong surrounded some twenty armed guerrillas, led from the front himself, captured five alive, and shot dead all the rest of the partisans. But in that battle, a subordinate whom Superintendent Jeong had cherished like his own body and loved like a brother for more than ten years was hit by a partisan bullet and died. All night he couldn't sleep for grief and rage. The next day he buried the body on the mountain and drank all day long. Then at night, alone, he drew the Japanese sword that always hung on his wall, dragged the captured prisoners outside one by one, and beheaded all five of them. The blood dyed the valley of Jirisan red. And for three days he locked himself alone in his room and neither ate nor spoke."

That night, after hearing the story, I found myself shedding tears and couldn't sleep. Still only eighteen, of high school age, I seem to have had no choice but to cry alone, feeling at once the grief of the families left behind on our side and the other, and the unavoidable horror the times had brought. After that my aunt and uncle had two daughters and became a family of five. When he was police chief of Gimhae, as the train carrying President Syngman Rhee was passing near Gimhae, a drunken farmer who had fallen asleep with his head pillowed on the railway track was struck and killed by the train. My uncle, without understanding why, received a notice of dismissal, and from that day on he was unemployed.

My uncle moved the family to Seoul and tried working at jobs here and there, but he couldn't stay at any of them for long, and came to spend his days at home looking at my aunt's face. Then one day he disappeared alone. The family began searching for their husband and father, and many relatives searched everywhere in every corner of the land as three years went by. In the meantime my aunt fell ill with a sickness of the heart and passed away, their son suddenly lost his sight and went blind, and all the family's property vanished. Then one day, one of the relatives said he had seen my uncle living with his head shaved in a hermitage deep in the mountains somewhere in Gangwon Province. And after that, all word of him was lost again.

Families Separated by War

The painful memories of what we went through in the turbulent years after liberation are fading one by one as half a century passes. Even now, parents, brothers, and sisters whose families were split between South and North, who have never seen each other again and have lived a lifetime of longing, are leaving this world one by one with bloody sorrow deep in their hearts. As if resigned to a fate that cannot be undone, history dawdles lazily. Even now, the land of North Korea is a country without freedom, where people cannot see the world outside, cannot say what they want to say, and cannot go to see family and friends even when they long to. It is the world's only Hitler- or Stalin-style dictatorship, making its people tremble in fear with merciless public executions and developing nuclear weapons and missiles to continually threaten the South.

Every time I feel the frustration that the free people of the world have not been able to rescue our compatriots in North Korea into the free world for more than half a century, the sorrowful tears of the Jirisan suppression unit that night have not dried in my heart for half a century. There is the fear that, just as our family never found the uncle we lost, South and North Korea will never unify and will remain divided into two countries forever. The wall between the North, growing poorer as the years go by, and the South, leaping forward to become one of the world's advanced nations, seems to grow ever higher. And if that wall falls, will it be like East and West Germany, or will it be great chaos, like the tsunami in Japan? Is a day waiting before us when we will meet the family we waited for until we could die of it, while still alive, and tears will be sublimated into laughter?

A New Contract in Guatemala

Nashville, the capital of Tennessee — there, in 1982, I signed on as a consultant to the Iyeoud Johnson office and came to design a national hospital in Guatemala in Central America. Guatemala City sits in the middle of a volcanic region 1,500 meters above sea level. On the day we arrived, when the plane our party had chartered descended onto a runway that began at the edge of a cliff, the pilot was extremely careful. Guatemala City is surrounded by active volcanoes spewing black smoke every day, and just a few years earlier, in 1976, a great earthquake there had left some 23,000 victims. Here, the morning greeting begins the day with talk of the volcanoes.

A civil war had been going on since 1960, so we began designing the army hospital under the protection of the military government. Because of the psychological fear of earthquakes, no building could be more than three stories tall, and so we allocated the first floor to wards for officers and high-ranking figures, the second floor to wards for soldiers and civil servants, and the third floor to wards for ordinary patients. The interpreter we had brought was Mexican, and two days after arriving he fell under suspicion by the military and was deported. With meetings halted for lack of an interpreter, our party put me, as the one with experience of foreign languages, in charge of interpreting. Though I didn't know a single word of Spanish, drawing on my experience of living abroad in Japan, China, America, and elsewhere, I managed to interpret for two days with gestures of hands and feet and quick wits. The next day a new interpreter arrived, and we were able to hold proper meetings.

My First Earthquake

The Camino Real Hotel where we stayed was a sixteen-story building designed in America, and we were staying on the fourteenth floor. After dinner our party was in the fourteenth-floor meeting room discussing preparations for the next day's design work. Six of us were sitting around a big table with blueprints spread out, meeting, when suddenly an earthquake shook the world. A deep, eerie roar rose loudly from beneath the ground, and we seemed to drop about two feet, then tilted two feet to the left and right and swayed this way and that. Since it was the first time in my life, I didn't know what to do and sat gripping the table with both hands, while the other five had all fled to the stairwell and were gone. Only later did I learn that when an earthquake hits a high-rise, the areas around the stairwells and elevators are less dangerous.

Most houses were built of stacked mud bricks, so in an earthquake they were bound to collapse, and everyone had no choice but to evacuate outdoors. When an earthquake strikes a city it causes the greatest loss of life, but economically they were in no position to prepare for earthquakes. Modern buildings erected in earthquake zones use two kinds of seismic design. One installs joints between the building's foundation and its superstructure so that shaking is not transmitted, and the second is a design method in which the steel frame is woven like a basket to absorb vibration. The high-rise where we stayed had a flexible steel frame, so even though it shook so badly, there was no damage to the building and we were all safe.

Guatemala had been in civil war since 1960, so it was an era of military rule, like our Park Chung-hee military government. At night gunshots were sometimes heard, and every day the front page of the newspaper carried news of guerrilla fighting. One morning a story in the English-language paper told of a father and son riding a motorcycle along a road between rice fields. The father suddenly shouted to his son to get off the motorcycle and run away fast. The son escaped and made it home, but the father, a schoolteacher, was seized by thugs and never came back. I read the newspaper report that the father's body, which the family found the next day, had every joint in his hands and feet broken and all his fingernails and toenails pulled out. I felt it was more ignorant and cruel than the Korean War we had gone through.

In our party there were members who quit and left, frightened by the earthquake and the social climate they were seeing for the first time. Although I had my wife and a daughter in kindergarten at home, there were so many things I wanted to learn while working far abroad on assignment that I wasn't particularly afraid, even in such an environment. Before returning home after finishing the design, I made time and began exploring the Maya ruins of Guatemala's history. In about six months we finished the schematic design of the national hospital and handed the detailed design over to a Mexican architectural firm. I took two weeks of vacation and immersed myself in studying the Maya civilization throughout the Yucatán Peninsula.

Exploring the Ruins of Maya Culture

Seeing that Maya glyphs, like Chinese characters, each carry the meaning of a single word, are shaped to fit inside a square, and are read left to right or top to bottom, I imagined the possibility that they might have been the mother form preceding the Chinese characters that were standardized in the Han dynasty before the Common Era. They differ from the oracle-bone script of the Shang dynasty, but in the way numbers were expressed in the I Ching of the Zhou dynasty through combinations of dots and straight lines, I saw something Chinese characters and Maya glyphs had in common. From then on, over the past twenty-some years, I have explored the national museums of that region and the Olmec, Teotihuacan, Aztec, and Maya cultural sites throughout the Yucatán Peninsula in Central America. Through many books, academic materials, and conference attendance, I looked for the commonalities between East Asian culture and the native cultures of the Americas.

The arch in Maya stone architecture is the same form as the stepped ceiling (corbel arch) seen in Goguryeo tombs. The tall stairways on Maya stone pyramids, which seem to connect heaven and earth, resemble the ancient East Asian religious architecture that survives at the entrances of Chinese temples and in Japanese Shinto shrines. The stairways of our country's Bulguksa Temple and the miniature stairways on the Dabotap Pagoda show the same meaning. The stone pyramid of El Tajín near the Yucatán Peninsula recalls, in its scale and shape, the stone pagoda at the Mireuksa Temple site of Baekje.

Maya Culture of the Yucatán Peninsula

The dragon built into the ruins of Teotihuacan in Mexico looks exactly like the dragon of East Asia, except that its body is made of bird feathers instead of fish scales. At Chichén Itzá on the Yucatán Peninsula, you can also see dragons coiling around columns. The dragon's face, the gwimyeon [demon mask], is the form seen on the roof tiles of our Silla architecture and is common in the carvings on Shang dynasty bronzes. It is also said to be the face of Chiyou (蚩尤), creator of metal weapons in the ancient history of East Asia. The demon mask with an elephant's trunk carved on Ming dynasty incense burners is easily seen on the facades of Maya buildings.

Just as there are the religious concepts of yin and yang and the concept of the Five Elements, they used two calendars, like our lunar and solar calendars, and just as East Asia has the twelve zodiac animals and a sixty-year cycle, they have thirteen individual year symbols and a fifty-two-year cycle. The offering of human sacrifice existed for a long time in East Asia's ancient history before Confucianism. The site plan (伽藍配置) of Maya temples, with a north–south axis, a pyramid at the center, and gates on four sides, is similar to the layout of East Asian palaces and temples. In war, building beacon towers on high places, lighting fires to send black smoke into the sky as a signal, and beating drums to send signals far with sound are also phenomena commonly seen in East Asian sites.

The five animals symbolizing the Five Elements were represented by the serpent, eagle, jaguar, crocodile, and toad, a phenomenon that corresponds to the Five Elements symbols so common in our Goguryeo culture — the Blue Dragon, Vermilion Bird, White Tiger, Black Tortoise, and the yellow center figure. The ancient Chinese made jade into round coin shapes with a round hole in the middle, wore them on the body as ornaments, called them taotie, and said they warded off evil spirits. Taotie are commonly seen in the dress and ornaments of the Maya nobility. Just as the bodies of Shang kings had their bodies and faces covered with pieces of jade, the bodies of Maya kings had their bodies and faces covered with pieces of jade. The dress of Maya commoners is similar to the Japanese loincloth (fundoshi).

Using millstones and mortars to grind grain and using a winnowing basket to blow away husks in the wind are the same as ours; they flailed grain and used treadle mills; and the loom on which they dried hemp to make cloth for their collared jackets is similar to ours. In the customs of Central America they raise and eat dogs, chickens, and pigs. Just as we love to eat food with hot chili powder, they love to eat hot Tabasco. They smoke tobacco in long pipes and love to play the flute. In their present way of life and in the forms of their sculptures, you often see hatted figures resembling the dol hareubang [stone grandfather statues] of our Jeju Island.

An Extension of Our Culture

Museum exhibits show that the custom of cranial deformation, flattening a baby's head, which existed in East Asia and in our country, also existed in Central America. They had the custom of decorating lavishly with bird feathers and wearing brightly colored clothes, as seen in our old customs. As recorded in our Samguk Sagi, ball kicking was played at the royal court, and in Central America, too, the ball game was the most important of the court ceremonies.

The connection between East Asian culture and the native cultures of the Americas is a clear fact of world history, but such research is not welcomed by white people. For they still insist that the native cultures of the Americas, and even Asian culture, began from European culture. We are the descendants of intellectuals who studied from the textbooks of the Japanese colonial view of history, and a generation who studied the white invaders' view of history in school, so we cannot escape the tendency to believe only what we were taught. Isn't it our task to find and show the next generation a true history free of prejudice?

Arguments proving that the native peoples of North and South America share our blood and belong to the Dongyi peoples of East Asia have been published since the mid-1990s. Gary Stix's article in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American developed further and set out more precisely the content of Cavalli-Sforza's book The Great Human Diasporas, published earlier in 1995. The chart below, published by National Geographic, shows the history of kinship hidden in humanity's bloodlines.

Our people's bloodline divides into M174 and M130: M174 appears to be the ancestors of Goguryeo, continuing through Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet, and M130 appears to be the ancestors of Baekje, passing through Siberia and Alaska to reach North, Central, and South America. Modern humans lived in their place of origin, Africa, around 100,000 years ago and then began to migrate east toward the rising sun. After leaving, they were the first in the world to come around along the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, and around 60,000 years ago they settled and lived together in Southeast Asia, where social life formed and language developed.

It seems that when they reached the western Korean Peninsula 50,000 years ago, they faced winter for the first time. The roots of our people — developing kimchi, grain liquor, and fermented foods, and building ondol [heated-floor] rooms to survive the winter — must have ripened from this time. Our bloodline is the great artery of human kinship, the one that in the history of human bloodlines penetrated inland the longest ago and connected along the coastlines.

The Ancient Civilization of East Asia

China's most recent archaeological excavations have found that the Hongshan culture and civilization of the Liaodong Peninsula, around 9,000 years ago — the earliest in the world — began building stone fortresses, making pottery, and crafting carved jade. Their stepped stone tombs make one think that human culture and civilization may have begun in East Asia. The history of Gojoseon, continuing through the Xia and Yin (Shang) dynasties, seems to have become the foundation of Chinese civilization. It is said that our ancestors, who began in the Manchurian region, started raising horses and dogs in their households tens of thousands of years ago. The Book of Documents, a Zhou dynasty record, states that when the Zhou destroyed the Yin (Shang) dynasty, they received dogs and horses as gifts from the surrounding tribes. The dog names sapsal-gae and balbari are also old Korean words.

Sima Qian's records show that around 5,000 years ago, when the Zhou, of the Chinese people who had grown up along the middle reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers 35,000 years ago, conquered the Yin (Shang) dynasty and other nations of the Dongyi peoples, a migration of some 250,000 people scattered overseas. The Dongyi's metal culture and their pyramid culture, which began with ancestral religion and celestial religion, seem to have spread to every continent of the world along with navigation skills that produced the compass. Mightn't they have fled East Asia desperately and drifted to the banks of the Nile in Africa and to the continents of Central and South America?

The Maya, a Branch of East Asian Culture

The Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacan, on the outskirts of Mexico's capital, are ruins of the Aztec people and are thought to mark the peak of Native American culture, in the period corresponding to Korea's Three Kingdoms era. It had a larger population and city than the city of Rome in the Roman era of the time. This urban civilization is known to have had a major influence on the formation of the Aztec and Maya civilizations, the cornerstones of later Mexican civilization. Teotihuacan is counted as the best-preserved native city of the Americas in Mexico and is said to have been built around AD 150. The Pyramid of the Sun is the third-largest pyramid in the world, 70 m tall with 248 steps.

The plaza seen from the Temples of the Sun and Moon opens to the south onto a street about two miles long where festival processions were held. The Spaniards who invaded in the fourteenth century disparagingly explain it as "the Avenue of the Dead, the street along which people to be offered as sacrifices were bound and dragged." At the south end of the avenue, the huge dragon pyramid and its carvings of dragons that seem alive and writhing prove the connection with East Asian culture. The fact that the Sun and Moon were built together also makes me feel a connection with the yin-yang philosophy of East Asian Taoism. The festival avenue begins at the Pyramid of the Moon and extends south, and the plaza where it meets the Pyramid of the Sun, located a little to the east, is surrounded by several small stepped pyramids.

Before this pyramid culture of around the turn of the era began, the custom of digging ponds and building earth mounds (mound) at the southern end of the Korean Peninsula connects to some 3,000 earth mounds along the banks of the Mississippi River, and the dolmens of the southern Korean Peninsula and around the Yellow Sea in China are relics of the Neolithic. The religious rite of hauling great stones from afar and erecting them, at the time when East Asia's metal culture began, shows the evolutionary process before pyramids were built. This evolutionary process of the pyramid cannot be seen along the Nile in Africa or around the Yucatán Peninsula in Central America. It can be seen only in East Asia.

In his book Voyages of the Pyramid Builders, published in 2003, Robert M. Schoch, a professor at Harvard University, suggested that the Maya culture of Central America was an extension of the Shang dynasty culture of East Asia, thereby suggesting that the origins of pyramid-building technology may lie in East Asia. In the Jilin Province region of Manchuria there are thousands of stepped stone pyramid ruins, and the General's Tomb (Janggunchong) is a completed form, as in the photo.

The first nomadic peoples, who lived mainly by hunting, are thought to have appeared in the Maya lowlands and highlands around 11,000 BC. They are presumed to have been a branch of the peoples who crossed from Siberia to Alaska and spread across the North American continent, arriving by way of Mexico. According to Maya records carved on stone slabs found here, the world came into being in 3113 BC and Maya civilization began around 2600 BC, and radiocarbon dating of artifacts found in Belize on the Gulf coast is said to have confirmed that they date from the 2000s BC. From this time, it is said, Maya farming villages arose and Maya civilization took shape. Archaeologists explain that writing came into use around 700 BC, and that from around 400 BC a solar calendar carved in stone was used.

(The Festival Plaza before the Pyramid of the Sun)

East Asia, the most advanced region in the distribution of humankind across the world, seems to have been a place where, over sixty thousand years of repeating a regular life in step with the changes of the four seasons, order took root in daily life — a place where maritime and inland activity fused, and a point where farmers and nomads contended. As an advanced people of the world, I hope we will find our proud roots and take back our rightful place in human culture and civilization.