Fifty Years of the American Dream (5)

Volunteer Work for Korean War Veterans

In June 1986 I founded AAI, an architectural firm that brought Black and white architects together, and about eight years later, in 1994, when we were honored by the Dayton Chamber of Commerce as that year's small business, we began winning larger projects. While I was designing hospitals, including the Dayton VA, whenever I met Korean War veterans our conversations blossomed with talk of Korea. In 1995, for Ohio's Korean War Veterans Memorial Park project, I donated $120,000 worth of design and construction supervision fees as volunteer service. Seeing my company's name and my own name carved on the monument erected in the Korean War memorial park, I even had the strange feeling of looking at a living man's gravestone.

In 1999 I heard that the Korean Association of Dayton had lost the interest of its roughly 2,300 Korean residents, had no one to do the work, and was in such a crisis that it was going to close its doors. I left that year's work to President Son Sang-hyun, who ran a restaurant business, and as vice president I began preparing the following year's events. When I took over the presidency in 2000, thanks to the Korean-language school fundraising campaign of Woo Ki-hee (now a columnist for the Korea JoongAng Daily's "This Morning" column), who had saved the Korean school at the time, the Korean Association and the Korean school began to build a solid foundation again.

That year's Korean Festival was the biggest event in the history of the Korean Association of Dayton. I brought research materials on Korean ondol [heated-floor] housing from the architecture department of Yonsei University in Korea and built a model of an ondol room. Fried rice, bulgogi, and kimchi sold the most. Requesting support from the Korean government and Hyundai Engineering & Construction, it became a golden opportunity to show Korean culture to the citizens of the American Midwest.

The Korean government informed us of an event for Korean War veterans. They said the Korean associations of the big cities — Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus — could not handle it, and only the Korean Association of Dayton, with the capacity to host 40 people, could. A performing arts troupe, including selected university students and famous Living National Treasures, came to meet Ohio's Korean War veterans. The president of the American veterans' association and I went to see the mayor of Dayton and received permission to use the Dayton Convention Center free of charge. We placed all the university students with American and Korean families so they could stay free for three days and two nights.
The stage performances and exhibits prepared in Korea moved the veterans and their families to tears. When each veteran came up on stage one by one and had a medal prepared by the Korean Ministry of National Defense hung around his neck, it washed away the memory of a poor and wretched Korean War and planted the spirit of a beautiful Republic of Korea in each of their hearts, one by one.

I was grateful to the Korean residents and American families who helped us successfully complete an event attended by 75 veterans who came from all over Ohio, some 100 family members, and high-ranking figures of the state of Ohio. We showed our heartfelt gratitude to those who had given their young lives to defend Korea's freedom and peace. That same year, when we held a concert to raise funds for building a Korean community center and invited opera singer Kim Sung-kil from Korea along with musicians from Korea and abroad, I also volunteered to cover their travel and lodging expenses.

Congressman Tony Hall

Congressman Tony Hall there was a big name in American politics who had won every election and held his Democratic seat for half his life. In 1973, when he was working as chairman of national security in the U.S. Congress, it was the time when Korea's President Park Chung-hee visited President Nixon in America and received a promise of economic aid. President Park installed a direct telephone line to the American president's White House, and a young intelligence agent of 27 accompanied him as English tutor to President Park's children.

Twenty-five years later, around 1997, when I was working as president of the Korean Association of Dayton, Congressman Tony Hall always took a great interest in the Korean community, and he sometimes stopped by the Korean Baptist church I attended, worshipping together with us Koreans and talking with church members. I would interpret at his side, and in election season I ran fundraising drives among the Koreans to support his reelection. My architectural design firm also contributed to his campaign fund.

The Kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung

Then one day I had occasion to have lunch with Tony Hall. That was when he told me the story of how he had saved the life of President Kim Dae-jung. "Late one night in 1973, just as I was about to fall asleep, the phone rang. It was a report from the director of U.S. intelligence about the kidnapping of Mr. Kim Dae-jung that was taking place in Tokyo, Japan. The report said that several suspicious men had bound Mr. Kim and were taking him out to sea off Tokyo, and that U.S. intelligence agents were watching from a distance. At the time, Mr. Kim Dae-jung, as the only hope for Korea's democratization efforts, had been placed under the surveillance and protection of U.S. intelligence agents.

He immediately called President Park Chung-hee. He sensed that President Park knew nothing at all about the incident. President Park agreed that Mr. Kim should be rescued at once. When Tony Hall's order as chairman of the national security council reached the scene through the director of U.S. intelligence, Mr. Kim Dae-jung, his arms and legs bound and blindfolded, was at the very moment of being plunged into the sea. He directed the U.S. intelligence agents to deliver President Park Chung-hee's rescue order to the gang, and to accompany Mr. Kim together with them to the front gate of his own house the next day and remove his blindfold." So he told me, and he described a very positive future for the international community in U.S.–Korea relations.

A few days later, in the name of the president of the Korean Association, I applied in writing to the Blue House in Korea, saying that if President Kim Dae-jung would send Congressman Tony Hall a letter of appreciation, the Korean Association would deliver it. A few days after that, the consul general in Chicago came to the Korean Association of Dayton, explained that President Kim Dae-jung and Congressman Tony Hall were already close friends, told us the time for thanks had long passed, and went back.

After finishing my term as president of the Korean Association, while I was chairman of its board, I had the chance to visit President Kim Dae-jung at the Blue House as a member of the National Unification Advisory Council, but there was no opportunity for such a conversation. Kim Dae-jung's memoir states that he presumes the operation was carried out by then intelligence chief Lee Hu-rak with Park Chung-hee's approval. It also states that besides Tony Hall, aides of President Nixon, including Kissinger, took part as one element of the behind-the-scenes action. Later, Dayton's Congressman Tony Hall was appointed by President George W. Bush as head of the UN food agency and moved to Rome, Italy.

After that I lost touch with him, but because I thought the influence he had on Korean history should be known to Korean society, I also contributed this story to a Korean community newspaper. He was such a heavyweight in American politics, yet the image of him always squeezed into a narrow economy-class seat on the plane, chatting modestly with all sorts of people, is still vivid in my memory and worthy of respect.

A Presidential Commendation from the Republic of Korea

I was appointed head of the Midwest chapter of the National Unification Advisory Council, and I also had the honor of being the first among the Korean association presidents of the thirteen Midwestern states to receive a Presidential Commendation from the Republic of Korea. Because the Korean Association of Dayton was under the jurisdiction of the Consulate General in Chicago, I often stopped in Chicago. It's a six-hour drive. One day a Korean in Chicago let me know he was selling paintings brought in from North Korea. He was exhibiting some twenty oil paintings. Among them, a landscape of Mount Kumgang caught my eye. The painting, 180 cm wide and 150 cm high, was spectacular, as if I were looking at Mount Kumgang itself. With Gwimyeon Rock standing tall in the center and Manmulsang spread out in the distance, it was a masterpiece of Mount Kumgang landscape in which sky and clouds were in perfect harmony. In the corner of the painting was written "Gwimyeon Rock, Mount Kumgang, May '97, Ro Seong-geun." He was said to be known as a young painter chosen by Chairman Kim Il-sung. It was just the right painting for above the fireplace in our home.

Touring Mount Kumgang

While attending the general meeting of the Seoul National University Alumni Association of America as Ohio's representative, I had an opportunity to tour Mount Kumgang in North Korea. I wanted to see the painter Ro Seong-geun and Gwimyeon Rock. Crossing the North Korean border, watching the People's Army soldiers take our passports, my heart raced and I even felt fear. At every scenic spot, slogans praising Kim Il-sung had been carved deep into the rock, and my first worry was how, after unification, they could be erased and the scenery restored. Haegeumgang could be seen far off on the East Sea, and the October autumn leaves seemed to welcome us warmly, but our poor compatriots lived without smiles, and banners had been hung for tourists to see: "We are happy as we are."
A North Korean female guide wearing a Kim Il-sung badge led us and watched us. There were many areas where photography was forbidden, and we often stopped at areas selling North Korean handicrafts. When I met painters selling pictures by the roadside, I asked for Ro Seong-geun. I gave them $300.00 and asked them to pass it to him. When I went back to the same place the next day and asked for him again, I was told he was far away and couldn't come, but I received a watercolor from him. It was Ro Seong-geun's watercolor "Seonjukgyo Bridge."

While sitting on a rock across from Gwimyeon Rock talking with the guide, I was surprised by her varied talents — she sang well, recited sijo [classical Korean verse], and danced. I later learned she was a member of the "Joy Division," selected from all over the country and trained in Pyongyang. As we walked all day along the valley up to Guryong Falls, whenever we were thirsty we drank the water flowing in the valley. The unpolluted environment was truly something to be thankful for. The Mount Kumgang tourist hotel had been built by Hyundai Engineering & Construction, but it was maintained at about the level of a third-rate hotel, and the electricity went out so often that I was afraid to ride the elevator.

Near dawn, just as I was falling asleep, I heard a People's Army marching song from far outside the building. When I went out on the balcony, to my ears it was not a spirited military song but a sad, gloomy chorus. With the faces of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il hung on the wall of every room, it sounded mournful, like a funeral dirge from a life of fear robbed of freedom. The next day on the bus returning to the South, the contrast was heartbreaking between the South Korean tourists, drunk and singing pop songs, and the People's Army soldiers over there across the barbed wire, stunted and thin from malnutrition, in baggy uniforms. The sound of the bus engine, grumbling as it was dragged along, beat against the heart of a valley where time had stopped, and the silence of the rocks by the roadside, saying that someday a sunlit day would come, moved me to tears. On the way back I wrote the following to Chairman Kim Jong-il, and it was printed that year in the Korea Chosun Ilbo (America edition) on December 3, 5005.

To Chairman Kim Jong-il of the National Defense Commission

"To Chairman Kim Jong-il of the National Defense Commission: the Free North Korea Alliance of our people appeals to you. Grant freedom to the people of North Korea. Clear away the political prison camps that are like human slaughterhouses and liberate the people so they can feed themselves by their own abilities. Guarantee them the right to have the value of each life judged fairly in an equal society, rather than living unhappy lives that end after living only for you. The idea of holding the lives of tens of millions of our compatriots in your grip and enjoying power and wealth by hereditary succession cannot be forgiven before our people. Abandon the illusion that you can block the tide of the age of liberal democracy. Chairman, it is already a proven fact that socialist theory is unscientific. We urge North Korea to open its system, guarantee human rights, and stop executing political prisoners and defectors. This is the wish of all our people, who seek to escape the crossroads of life and death created by your father's war of invasion against the South. I ask you to take a bold decision and show courageous care for your people."

My Mother

While pursuing my career and community activities in America, I came to realize how much I resemble my mother. A woman from Jeju Island, she was educated at Gwangju Girls' High School under Japanese colonial rule and married my father, who had graduated from Mokpo Commercial School; she had eight children, lost two daughters, and raised the six of us who remain. My mother, who from high school on enjoyed soft-tennis and playing the piano and organ, was well matched with my father, a track athlete who played the harmonica in front of audiences, and they often taught us too.

She served as neighborhood head, president of the parents' association, chair of her alumni association, and more, and always enjoyed community activities. After first sending the three eldest children to study in America, she cared for my father at home for six years after a stroke left him half-paralyzed. After marrying off the three youngest, in accordance with my father's last wishes, she arranged for them all to immigrate to America. Even though she moved three times in the twenty-some years after I left Korea, my mother carefully kept her children's school records and the materials from Sungnyemun (Namdaemun) Gate, where I worked after graduating from university, and brought them with her when she came to America, the very last of the family to immigrate. So as not to be a burden on her children, she lived in a senior apartment and became active in the seniors' association. In 1981, when President Chun Doo-hwan stopped in LA after his summit with President Reagan, she tied a Taegukgi around her waist and went out to the airport to welcome him on behalf of the seniors' association.

When I became a father and raised my own children, I followed my mother's example. When the children did something wrong, I didn't get angry but pointed out their mistake and explained it. Because out in society you are punished as the price of wrongdoing, a switch always hung on the wall in our house, too, but just as I was never whipped by my mother, I never whipped my children. Still, there were times when they did something seriously wrong and, switch in hand, we argued over how many strokes the mistake deserved, until we ended up crying and laughing together and settling it.

Mother is the sky and the earth in which we grew. While the full moon shines ten times, there is a sea inside our mother's body where we swim, growing in the shape of a wriggling worm, then a fish waving its fins, then an animal moving its arms and legs, until the umbilical cord is cut and we are born crying out into the world. While we grow on our mother's milk, we begin to crawl on all fours and at last stand and walk on two feet, reenacting the evolution of humankind. At first we sing and dance, and then we begin to speak. Isn't this process, in which a single-celled life inside a mother's body grows into a person, a long, long skein of thread through which nature floats up its dim memories of a hundred million years?

A Mother's Unconditional Love

A piece of a mother's body grows into a baby, and the boundless devotion she gives her baby seems to be the root of all life and the foundation of living. If not for the love a mother gives without reserve as she nurses her baby, no life on this earth would have survived. While raising us, my mother bathed at dawn, set out a bowl of fresh well water before the rock in the backyard, and bowed down in prayer with her heart looking up to heaven. The spirit (靈) of heaven to which my mother bowed and prayed I cannot see with my eyes, but I seem to feel it always in my heart and live with it.

The time that flows through life brings tears and laughter and runs now fast, now slow, but the Earth revolves and rotates at an unchanging speed, and just as the sun comes and the moon goes, there is clearly a truth that does not change. When we grow up and a time of hardship in the world comes, adversity arrives: fear overwhelms our faltering thoughts, and loneliness digs a deep pit, trying to knock us down faster than death itself. In that moment I see the heaven my mother planted in me and feel a hand lifting me up, and it pulls me out of my floundering on a lonely road. Not only does it rescue me from the mire, but heaven becomes a friend of the heart, and by that strength people work miracles (奇蹟) that astonish the world — and so they built the Great Wall and raised the pyramids.

Some reach a state of true gratitude where they bow their heads in prayer and tears flow, but a person without a mother's heaven — whether heaven has forgotten him or he has abandoned heaven — may walk a lonely road of countless ups and downs and in the end depart alone into an empty tomb. There is also the final chapter of a life in which a condemned prisoner, asked at the execution ground what last word he wishes to leave, cries out with all his strength, "Mother!", making the prison walls ring, and brings the curtain down on the absurdity of life. On this earth where fighting never stops, might we call mother the goddess of peace, the dreamed-of homeland to which every life returns?

Faith has always lived with people for as long as they have lived, and won't faith go on living with us to the end? Because of a mother's love and faith there is creation; there is the emotion shown in song and dance; and as we live together and begin to speak, intellect follows — and so humankind came to stand as lord of all creation. Because there is love there is life, and within life there is religion, art, and science. That love and faith must be the most precious legacy in life, passed down to us from heaven in our mother's jade casket.

My mother was in a nursing home in Los Angeles near my youngest sibling, and I was spending busy days with my architectural design business in Ohio. When she was 83, in the middle of a lively conversation about the children and family and relatives, I suddenly asked her, "Mother, what was the happiest time in your eighty years?" My mother seemed to think quietly. Then she answered, "It was when you children had just started to walk and were being so sweet." Not long after that visit, when I rushed there at the news from my youngest sibling that she was in critical condition, my mother had already passed away. She left her last wish that when her body became ashes and was scattered over the Pacific, she would follow the waves home to see my father and follow the wind to visit her children — and the last conversation I had with her that day echoes in my heart.

The Greatest Power in This World

When I was a child, I once found a nest of baby birds in the bushes, and just as I was about to go closer out of curiosity, the mother bird flew out from somewhere and struck my face, and I ran away in fright. I imagine that the desperate courage of that small mother bird was, at that moment, the greatest power in the world. I remember well that my mother's courage and wisdom, when after liberation in 1945 our family escaped from Manchuria to North Korea and from North Korea to South Korea, was the great power that saved us six children through war and poverty.

My mother, who bore me and raised me; my mother, who always prays for us from heaven, smiling and shedding tears with us. Mother, whom I still long to see! Mother!

When I went on business trips to Boston in the East, there was a restaurant I always stopped at. The Union Oyster House is near the seafood market not far from the wharf and is the oldest restaurant in Boston. When I went there with three staff members after a hospital design meeting, the first and second floors were already full, and we were shown to a slightly dim but cozy room under the roof on the third floor. A little later the waiter came and asked whether I knew what seat I was sitting in. When I answered that I didn't, he told me to look at the lettering on the back of the chair. There, engraved on a small brass plate, it said this was the seat John Kennedy loved to come to until he became president. I had once looked for a room like this to have dinner with a girlfriend, so I could imagine he had done the same.

A Country Where Even the President Waits in Line

When President George W. Bush visited Dayton, he wanted to have dinner at a famous steak restaurant there. When his aide called the owner to make a reservation, the owner said the restaurant's rule was that it didn't take reservations. The president and his aides stood in line, waited, and had their meal. This is the free and equal society of America. After the president left, the owner engraved a brass plate saying that U.S. President George Bush had dined in that seat and put it up. Many people wanted to sit in that seat, and the restaurant became even better known.

After the Second World War, as the Boston lobster began to win over the palates of American gourmets, lobster dishes began appearing in European restaurants too. On my way home after a business trip, I bought two live lobsters at the seafood market, put them in a box, and carried them home in my hand. When I let them loose on the kitchen floor and they crawled around busily, my wife and two children shrieked with delight. But after I boiled water in a big pot and cooked them, the black lobsters turned red, and when I set them limp on a platter, the whole family turned away from the lobsters and from me, and I was flustered and disappointed. The children, who had grown attached to the busily living creatures, seemed to look on their dad, who had killed them, as cruel. I vividly remember ending up eating them alone, frozen, for several days.

My wife and I seldom had reason to fight. That's because I was devoted to work outside the home and left the household almost entirely to my wife. They say other couples sometimes fight over money and children, but in our house my wife was the master of household finances and the children's education, and I only tried to assist and cooperate from the side. Once — my wife had a hobby of collecting shoes, and every piece of furniture in the garage was filled with shoes. Unable to stand it any longer, before my wife came home I lined up all the shoes on the garage floor and put up a sign on the wall: "The Shoes of Imelda, Wife of the President of the Philippines." When my wife came home and glared at me with the face of an angry cat, nothing like that ever happened between us again.

My First Visit to China

My wife and I made our first visit to China at the invitation of Dayton City Hall. When Dayton City Manager Valerie Lemmie was to visit China with the People to People Ambassador Programs, she asked my wife and me to accompany her. It was a fourteen-day itinerary visiting Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin, and Shanghai, meeting and exchanging with staff at local governments, schools, hospitals, and so on, and doing some sightseeing as well. I had left Manchuria in 1945, the year of liberation, and now it was a proud, heart-filling journey back to China.

On October 26, 1997, our party arrived in Beijing. Construction of a new airport was underway, and amid the shabby facilities we split up into taxis. The inconvenience of sharing old European cars seemed to show that they were not at all prepared to receive tourists. The driver was as unfriendly as an angry man, dropped us and our big suitcases off on a main road near the hotel, and drove away.

When we finally struggled up the slope and reached the hotel lobby, the gloomy atmosphere was no different from the China I had seen at liberation in 1945. A map of China hanging on the wall marked the cities of North Korea, and South Korea was blank. Early the next morning, breakfast was not much different from the Chinese food we eat in Korea or America. Everyone took food from large platters with their own chopsticks, so there was no hygiene at all.

The Forbidden City and the Great Wall

In Tiananmen Square, Mao Zedong's face hung huge, and security was tight. When people heard we had come from America, they wondered how we could travel from an enemy country. Crossing the stone bridge and passing through Tiananmen, you enter the palace of the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City, where 24 emperors of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties are said to have lived, is known as the largest imperial palace in the world, with some 9,000 rooms — so many that a newborn baby sleeping one night in each room of the palace would be 27 years old by the end. Because the old northern part of the palace is in the architectural style of the Yuan dynasty, it seemed there must have been a Yuan royal palace there before the Ming and Qing palaces were built.

Close to the outskirts of the city is the Great Wall. The brick rampart, piled endlessly over mountains and across valleys, is the largest in scale of the "Seven Wonders of the World," which include the pyramids of Egypt. The broad road on top of the wall was a passage for moving soldiers, and here and there pavilions were built where soldiers stayed. Looking at a map, it begins at the western edge of the Korean Peninsula and stretches west across the continent. It was built from around 400 BC, in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period, out of fear of the northern peoples, yet China was ruled by the Mongols, and the Qing dynasty, ruled by the Manchus, became the longest dynasty in Chinese history. One can see that, with south and north of the Great Wall competing and 56 ethnic groups living intermingled, it was a great power that dominated world culture and civilization from ancient times until the twelfth century.

Xi'an

Xi'an was the capital of the Zhou, Qin, Han, and Tang dynasties, which traded with Egypt, Greece, and Rome along the Silk Road, and it is the home of the First Emperor of Qin. Its preserved cultural styles connect with the cultures of Baekje and Silla on the Korean Peninsula and of the Nara period in Japan. The city plan of Xi'an shows commonalities with old Gyeongju and with the temple layouts of Kyoto in Japan, with square walled fortifications built on east–west and north–south axes. The present city wall, rebuilt in the Ming dynasty, is well preserved. In Xi'an's 11,000 years of history, society changed from matrilineal to patrilineal clan society, and it is a treasure house of Asian cultural history in which the records of ancient dynasties are well preserved. Pyramids built of earth are also scattered about, so it is also regarded as a land of pyramids.

The Terracotta Army of the First Emperor of Qin, one of the Eight Wonders of the World, was discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging in the ground, and our party even met and greeted that farmer. About 1 km from the First Emperor's mausoleum, an army of 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots, and 520 horses was molded from clay, life-size and each one different. This enormous excavation, which began then, is still going on today.

Guilin

Guilin in China is a region close to Vietnam, and its rivers and mountains seem to be the source of the beautiful scenery we see in East Asian ink paintings. The peaks standing up one after another are strange and beautiful, like sculptures of the gods. Each peak has a name and a legend, and during the four-hour boat ride drifting downriver I was entranced and lost myself, as if reading a storybook and a picture book. We saw many children swimming naked in the stream, as we did when we were young. We also watched the custom of fishermen fishing at night from bamboo boats with birds whose necks were tied so they could bring back fish but not swallow them. It is said that the Japanese had thought this was a custom native to their own country, but later learned that it came from here. Here, too, our party tasted for the first time liquor in which poisonous snakes had been steeped and aged for a long time.

Shanghai is a city that plays a role in China like our Busan. Beijing represents the north and Shanghai the south, as centers of politics, economy, and culture. Our party visited hospitals and schools. Because China had established the "one child per family" policy to prevent a population explosion, it seemed to be doing its utmost to educate those precious children. Foreign teachers were teaching kindergartners English, and while imitating Western-style education, they were training the children in Communist Party ideology from an early age. The hospital facilities were a great disappointment. I saw that their facilities and medical practice were a long way from reaching the modern medicine we see in America. City traffic was mostly pedestrians and bicycles, with the occasional motorcycle and car mixed in, so traffic order was nothing but chaos. Under Communist Party policy, the rich were nowhere to be seen — who knows where they were all hiding — and in poor households the kitchens and toilets were all shared, and dirty, unsanitary conditions were the norm.

The Lion Waking from Sleep

Our party's visit in 1997 came not long after China's policy of reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping in 1984. Foreign visits had only just begun, so we experienced inconvenience and backwardness in many ways, but I saw that China, called "the sleeping lion" in the Second World War, had now clearly woken from its sleep.
My wife grew up as a child in Hamhung, South Hamgyong Province. It was around the time when thousands of our troops and American troops were surrounded by Chinese forces at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir in the Korean War, killed and wounded, and were withdrawing from nearby Hungnam port. My father-in-law, mother-in-law, and my wife, then eight years old, boarded the last ship and came to the South by way of Geoje Island. While they were living in Busan, as mother and daughter were walking down the street talking, her mother said, "When you grow up, become a doctor and take care of sick people," and so my wife graduated from Kyunggi Girls' High School, finished Ewha Womans University College of Medicine, came to America to study, and became a doctor.

After our four children left home for college, my wife and I found time to travel together. While my father-in-law and mother-in-law were living in Seoul, we visited them every year, took them sightseeing on Jeju Island, and brought them to America to look after their health. My mother-in-law's Parkinson's disease suddenly grew worse after she passed 80. At 83, while she was in Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, my wife stayed in the hospital with her mother. A few days before she passed, in the intensive care unit, her mother woke her daughter and, pointing, said to her, "Look, look at those beautiful clouds. That must be heaven."
Nine months after my mother-in-law passed away, my father-in-law also departed, and we laid them to rest together in the burial ground of Eunpyeong Church in Bulgwang-dong, where my mother-in-law had served as a deaconess all her life. In the year she turned 55, my wife retired from thirty years as an anesthesiologist and soon began attending seminary. In the year she turned 60, my wife was ordained a pastor in the United Methodist Church, and I was ordained an elder. My wife began serving as associate pastor of a Methodist church in Newport Beach in Southern California, and after her parents passed she went to Korea every year to visit their graves. One year, when she had gone to Korea to visit the graves, met relatives, and was coming out of a restaurant near Seodaemun after dinner, she had an unexpected accident.

An Unforeseen Accident

After finishing dinner with relatives, my wife, with three stone steps left to go, fell and struck her face on the ground. When I rushed to her with the startled relatives, blood pouring from her mouth and nose had soaked the front of her chest. The emergency room doctor at Gangnam Severance Hospital said that the cheekbone of my wife's face was crushed from her left eye to her jaw. Examining my wife's brain, eyes, teeth, and so on took a full six hours. My younger cousin, who practices plastic surgery in Gangnam, rushed over and gave my wife emotional reassurance. The doctors and my cousin told us to go back to America quickly and have surgery within 48 hours. The reason, they said, was that once the broken cartilage hardened, surgery would become difficult.

Moreover, they said, if she had surgery here, the treatment period would run more than two months, and the inconvenience of being in a foreign country would be great, so it would be more comfortable for my wife to go home and be treated at a hospital where we lived. We canceled our entire itinerary in Korea. My wife and I boarded a plane the next morning, carefully holding the single CD the hospital had given us.

The One and Only Woman in the World

Looking at my wife, one side of her face bandaged, gazing out at the distant sky, I kept remembering her smiling face when we first met. And from deep in my heart, beautiful memories floated up, billowing like the cumulus clouds outside the window. My wife's face, always smiling gently whenever we met, was more beautiful than any woman's in the world. After we married and had children, I felt anew that my wife's face smiling at our babies was love itself, and I came to love her even more. These days, on days when she comes back from seeing our granddaughters, I often see my wife smiling to herself. My wife, who still doesn't hold back her smiles for me, now a grandfather as the years have passed. She is the one and only woman in this world.

Women love to look in the mirror from childhood. Past adolescence, they begin to put on makeup and go out. Going back and forth between the bare face at home and the made-up face outside, they live a lifetime of painting on and wiping off, over and over. My wife's precious face, which she must tend every day — and the inside pictures of her injured face were stuffed into her handbag on a single CD. My heart felt hollow, and I kept looking at my wife's bandaged face. I worried whether her lovely face would return to what it had been, but even more painful than that was watching my wife silently praying for her recovery.

Originally human skin was covered with hair. As clothing, a convenience of civilization, developed for such humans, the hair fell out and was replaced by fine down. And so, in clothes of every shape and color, people live adorning their faces to suit their clothes. That, perhaps, is one of the ways of life. My wife spent some thirty years in hospital operating rooms in charge of anesthetizing patients. Now she serves as an associate pastor in the United Methodist Church and at the same time does family counseling at a family counseling center as both minister and doctor. With such a life, makeup is simply unavoidable for her. While I was thinking these various thoughts, the plane arrived at LA International Airport.

As soon as we arrived at the airport, we went straight to an Orange County hospital near our home. I felt relieved that the surgery was begun by a second-generation Korean American plastic surgeon of around 50. Remarkably, the single CD we had brought from the Korean university hospital displayed on the computer screen all the information needed for American operating-room procedures. It was a moment when my wife and I, who had left Korea in the 1960s, experienced Korea's astonishing advances in medical technology. The surgery began at 8 in the morning, and around 11:30 the patient was moved to the recovery room. Half her face was bruised blue and swollen, but I could see her old self again. Regaining consciousness, my wife asked me,
"How does my face look?"
"The injured side is prettier than the uninjured side."
The skin of her face didn't move, but I could see the smile in my wife's eyes.

The doctor explained the surgical procedure to us. He said they had opened three places in her face and made supports of titanium to lift it up. He said they operated through the inside of her mouth and behind her ears so that no scars would show on her face, and the place where they had put their whole heart into leaving the smallest scar was a small wrinkle beneath her eye. I was choked with gratitude.

A Blood Clot in My Mid-Fifties

In the days we live, countless things happen that are completely unexpected and startling. Rather than asking why this happened to me, if we look ahead and see it as an opportunity leading to a better future, recovery seems to come faster. An accident that happened on the far side of the globe we took care of on this side. Every time we have met with events beyond human understanding, my wife and I have leaned on each other and put our whole hearts into recovering, and so we have lived until now.

In my mid-forties, after being treated and recovering from pinched nerves in the spine of my neck and lower back, in my mid-fifties a blood clot formed in my body and I came through a crisis. After returning home from a long flight to Korea and China, I soon attended a meeting in San Francisco. The next day, coming home from work in Ohio, my left foot was swollen and it was hard to walk. My wife had already set the dinner table and was waiting.

I thought little of it, assuming I had hurt it exercising without knowing it, and was about to eat, but my wife, a doctor, observed me carefully, left the dinner table behind, and rushed me straight to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. Seeing the urgent and serious way the doctor examined me, I first felt the threat of this illness. They said a blood clot had formed at my left ankle and was blocking a blood vessel in my thigh.

They say blood clots most commonly form as small clumps of blood in the veins in or near the foot or ankle. If that small clot travels up with the flow of the vein and enters the brain, it causes a stroke; if it enters the heart, a heart attack; if it enters the lungs, a pulmonary infarction — sudden death — making it the most frightening of illnesses. The odds of having a blood clot are said to be about one in 1,000. Even in modern medicine, the only preventive measure is taking aspirin.

Fortunately the clot had done no damage to my brain, heart, or lungs, but I continued treatment to thin the blood in my body. A week after I was discharged from the hospital it recurred, and this time I was worried when I heard the doctor say he would install a permanent filter in the lower part of my vena cava for the rest of my life. "Can I keep playing golf?" I asked. The doctor's answer was a masterpiece. "Ben Hogan, famous in golf history, had a filter put in his vena cava and won world championships again and again," he said, laughing. Because the doctor was a golfer, he gave me the most refreshing answer.

Some years after that, wanting to hang a thermometer beneath the balcony in our backyard, I dragged over a chair and stood on it. It was a little too low, so I thought about standing on the chair back, and I even looked for something to grab onto if the chair tipped over. And from the moment I carefully stepped up, I remember nothing. When I came to, I was lying face down, covered in blood from hitting my head at the edge of the concrete floor, still holding a hammer in my right hand. My wife, who came running when she heard my scream, bound my head to stop the bleeding and kept talking to me on the way to the nearby hospital emergency room so that I wouldn't lose consciousness. It was a time when, even if you called an ambulance, you couldn't know when it would come.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, I was treated in the emergency room and woke up after sleeping five hours. On the MRI, my brain had shifted a little to the left and fluid had collected on the right side. The doctor said that with a concussion injury this severe, people usually don't wake from a coma for a long time. Was it because my body had always done a lot of exercise, or did heaven help me? For three or four months I couldn't turn my head, and by living carefully I pulled through.

In the year I retired at 65, a fourth life-threatening crisis came to me. It was a time when I had moved from Ohio to Southern California and was enjoying trips within China visiting historic sites in search of Korea's roots. On the way back from a ten-day trip from Xi'an to Beijing, I came down with the flu. I received emergency treatment in Korea and, as soon as I arrived in America, had a full-body checkup. Hepatitis was found. A black spot 1.5 cm in diameter had appeared in my liver, and two gray spots could be seen. I went to Dr. Han Hye-won in Philadelphia, a friend of my older brother whom I call elder sister, and had the black spot burned away with a laser and the two gray spots treated with medication, and now they have almost disappeared.

I sometimes think that if I hadn't retired and had gone on living in Ohio working hard only at architecture, I might have said farewell to the world from liver cancer. The distance between life and death is that near and yet that far. Each of these four times I came close to death, I did not fear death and left my fate to heaven — is that why I can live on so calmly?