Fifty Years of the American Dream (8)

My Journey to America (24)

On October 25, the Class of '57 of Seoul National University College of Engineering (entered 1957, graduated 1961) visited our alma mater for the first time in fifty years. They say even mountains and rivers change in ten years; this was a reunion of elderly warriors who, keeping half a century of years deep in their hearts like a single picture, came with their wives to visit the hometown of their learning. We entered elementary school in the year of Liberation and lived through the Korean War of June 25. Around the time we graduated from university we led the April 19 student movement and lived through the May 16 military revolution; that we tightened our belts and ran on ahead was the sweat of those born in the Years of the Ox and the Tiger. In the smiles on wrinkled faces beneath faded hair overflowed the gladness of brilliant engineers who lifted a poor Korea into one of the world's advanced nations. Were they not the pioneering geniuses of the technology industry who, in the golden age of their lives, in their forties and fifties, brought about the miracle of world-class economic development in the '80s and '90s, with the IT industry at its core, from the poorest society after the war?

The valleys of Gwanaksan, where the autumn leaves were just beginning to turn red, seemed proudly to show the ripened autumn of the lives of 216 people. When we visited the university headquarters, the affectionate welcome of the dean and professors of the College of Engineering, our juniors full of the fervor of youth, warmly embraced the hearts of their veteran seniors. It is said that engineering education is so vast that the College of Engineering accounts for 40 percent of Seoul National University's operating budget. After graduation, too, engineering graduates seem to stand out in the social activities of Seoul National University alumni. Seoul National University placed 42nd in the 2011 QS World University Rankings published in Britain.
In 1975 Park Chung-hee's military government selected the golf course of Lee Byung-chul, then founder of Samsung, as the integrated campus of Seoul National University. For the nineteen overseas alumni, who graduated from the Taereung Buramsan campus in 1961 and left to study abroad, it was an unfamiliar land they were visiting for the first time in fifty years, but the buildings that had rapidly spread across Sillim-dong in Gwanak-gu and the dense trees on the campus warmed the alumni's hearts.

The Next-Generation Automotive Research Center shows the roots of how Hyundai and Kia Motors are racing ahead of the world. That Kyujanggak, where the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty are kept, is located on the Seoul National University campus highlighted its standing as the national university, and the delicate paintings of court ceremonies, along with the Daedong Yeojido map and others, made our history stand out all the more splendidly. Viewing the national treasure records recently returned from France, I felt proud, as if they showed our nation's standing in the world.

At the welcome dinner held at the Chosun Hotel beside Seoul City Hall Plaza, alumni attended with their spouses, and there was an overflowing joy in meeting one another's wives for the first time in ages, and conversation blossomed with family stories. For the alumni in Korea it was a reunion after twenty years, since there had been a thirty-year gathering under President Nam Jung-hyun, but for the nineteen overseas alumni and their wives there was even a feeling of excitement like meeting unfamiliar in-laws when marrying off one's children.

It began with a welcome speech by Shim Yi-taek, president of the Class of '57, and with a toast by former university president Lee Ki-jun, the dinner and entertainment unfolded. While it proceeded under the emceeing of our classmate Han Yong-ho, a video from our school days showed us as we were as students fifty years ago, which moved us all the more. Next came an entertainment program emceed by our classmate Na Jong-in, who had prepared every part of this event in detail. Following songs by a soprano and a tenor from among our juniors, our classmates showed their talents—a tango dance, a duet, solos, saxophone and piano solos, and a singing contest—with professional-level flair, a proud pleasure that showed off the talents of the Class of '57.

The next day, divided by department into four buses, we set out on a trip to Sokcho in Gangwon Province. We are seventy years old, but the excitement of going on a picnic as children seems to be the same even now. Crossing the Taebaek Mountains, the backbone of the Korean Peninsula, and viewing the superb scenery of mountains and waters around every bend, the alumni's conversation grew heated. As the mountain range shows, the temperament of our people is remarkable. We achieved in just thirty years changes that other peoples could achieve only over 100 or 200 years. World-class economic development; the Miracle on the Han River, including Gangnam and the city of Incheon; the world's cutting-edge IT industry and cyber technology; the Korean Wave, which swept Southeast Asia and is now advancing into the world. Our words ppalli ppalli ("hurry, hurry") and kimchi are now words foreigners too understand and use.

But there are also many empty and shadowed parts that come from growth that was too fast. The confusion of ideologies over the reunification of North and South, the disorder of political society, the contradiction between words and deeds, the gloomy atmosphere of people hunched in subway cars—the stories the alumni shared during the trip were varied. They sounded at times like the grumbling of old men worried about our nation's future, and at times like the wise opinions of the highest intellectuals who had mastered social life. They seemed to ring like the sound of footsteps toward a truly advanced nation.

Eating lunch on a mountain trail bustling with autumn hikers, we prayed for the success of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. The group arrived at the city of Sokcho, where the waves of the blue East Sea surge. For three days and two nights we shared the pleasures of doing things together according to our hobbies—golf, hiking, sea fishing, hot springs, baduk and so on. On the way back we stopped at the Unification Observatory. Gazing into the distance at North Korea's treeless mountains beyond the demilitarized zone and at Haegeumgang, clear as sad teardrops, I recalled the bone-aching pain of the Korean War, felt the hardships of our compatriots in the North who still have no freedom, and earnestly longed for reunification as soon as possible.

Arriving in front of the gates of the Jamsil Olympic Stadium, we embraced one another and shared the sorrow of parting, and the feeling of "once we go now, when will we see each other again?" swept through our hearts. The warm feeling of gratitude for the efforts of our classmates Shim Yi-taek, chairman of this event, Na Jong-in, chairman of the preparatory committee, and Kim Tae-hoon, president of the overseas alumni, and for the many alumni who supported and cooperated, will be remembered for a long time. Their gallant figures from behind as they departed, having made one fine page in the diary of vigorous old men past seventy, were admirable. The shining footprints they have left in society, together with each one's beautiful family, were the grand finale of a history that adorns the modern world and departs toward a better future.

The Far-Seeing Blue Dragon (千里眼靑龍)

Since the days I worked as a Ministry of Education cultural-heritage specialist in Korea, I have habitually enjoyed visiting museums and have collected antiques. In an antique shop in Southern California I happened to see a palm-sized jade carving of a winged blue dragon. With its two eyes bulging forward and its pose crawling on four legs, the fact that it had wings caught my eye. Like the Sphinx beside the pyramids of Egypt, it has three toes, and the feathers of its wings are also divided into three.

Its head and chest are pale blue jade, and its dark blue jade tail curls around powerfully. Its left forefoot is raised as if about to pounce, and its other three feet tread the ground as it crawls cautiously forward. It looks as if it is about to spread its wings and leap into flight. Its mouth bares its teeth as if growling, its ears are pricked up, and its long whiskers stretch back to adorn the nape of its neck. Its face seems to look ahead, its two eyes bulging out, looking down a thousand, ten thousand li into the distance.

China astonished the world in 1976 by discovering the terracotta army of Qin Shi Huang, and in 1986, by excavating bronze and gold sculptures of the Shu kingdom near Chengdu in Sichuan Province, it produced the astonishment of having to rethink and rewrite East Asian and world cultural history. Among the bronze relics displayed at the Sanxingdui Museum there is a bronze mask in the shape of a human face with far-seeing eyes. Its date of manufacture is said to be 5,000 years ago.

In 1982, dozens of jade objects, including jade earrings, were excavated at Xinglongwa village in Chifeng in the Liao River region; they were determined to be relics from 8,200 years ago and were introduced as the Xinglongwa culture. They are said to be similar to the jade objects excavated from the shell mound at Munam-ri in Goseong County, Gangwon Province, Korea, and to be of the quality of the jade deposited in the Xiuyan area along the Yalu River. The excavations around the Liao River are gathered together as the world-renowned Hongshan culture (BC 4500–BC 3000), which represents the Liao River civilization. Archaeologists of China's Northeast Project claim that the jade blue-dragon carvings of the Hongshan culture preceded the Yellow River civilization by 1,000 years and that its stepped stone pyramids preceded Egypt's by 2,000 years.

In yin-yang and the Five Elements, the blue dragon symbolizes the sea in the east, and it is also a name for our people, connected with the Dongyi. The forms of the Sanxingdui relics are connected with relics excavated from the Egyptian pyramids, also showing trade relations between the Shu kingdom and Southwest Asia. According to Chinese archaeological research, between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago this was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Shu (蜀), and its civilization developed brilliantly for 2,000 years. The Sanxingdui civilization is said to have suddenly vanished about 3,000 years ago. The Shu kingdom was originally located in the Shang and Liao River regions, but around the time the Shang fell, its metal culture seems to have moved to present-day Sanxingdui. The dragon is the only imaginary animal among the twelve earthly branches (十二支), and it first shows its form in the relics of the Xinglongwa culture of the Liao River region, 8,200 years ago.

I imagine whether this small, far-seeing jade blue-dragon carving might be a relic of the Sanxingdui culture of 5,000 years ago. If it is a genuine relic that was looted and drifted to America, it seems to be a unique archaeological artifact not to be seen even in mainland China. Through this writing and these photographs, it is made known to the world for the first time.

The photos: the far-seeing blue dragon from my collection, and the far-seeing bronze mask at the Sanxingdui Museum

The Wisdom of Our Ancestors

As human intelligence developed in primitive times, people came to recognize a thing only when there was another thing to compare and contrast it with. Because there was woman, man was recognized; because there was night, day was known. Thus people came to see that all things have two sides. Our forebears divided the things of the world into yin and yang, always seeing them as relative concepts: earth and sky, moon and sun, sea and land, inside and outside, water and fire, mind and body. They realized the truth that all things seen in the universe, contrasting and harmonizing with their counterparts, proceed in balance.

This yin-yang thought saw the physiological functions within the human body, too, as a small universe, and became the foundation of Oriental medicine for health care and the treatment of disease. One is healthy when physiological balance is maintained—joy and sorrow, courage and fear in the mind; warmth and cold, moisture and dryness, food and excretions in the body. It explained that when balance is lost, one falls ill.

As our ancestors' knowledge developed further, the thought of the Five Elements (五行思想), like the five fingers, appeared. They divided the seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter into the spaces of east, south, west and north, and came to think of the earth as square and the sky as round. At the same time as they understood the decimal system of the ten fingers, they understood the hexagon and the octagon, and divided six to make the sixty-four hexagrams. Our Korean national flag, the Taegukgi, is drawn with a circle of rotating yin and yang at the center and, at its four corners, four of the eight trigrams, chosen for their meaning. It shows the symbol of an ancient religious philosophy in our culture. The I Ching, a scripture of Taoism, divided nature into sixty-four hexagrams and recited poems singing of the things of the universe. It is said that Confucius, 600 years before Jesus was born, loved to read the Analects and the I Ching in his youth.

The Five Elements thought of the East divided the environment of life into five elements: water, fire, wood, metal and earth; the colors of visible things into blue, red, white, black and yellow; and the living things of the world into five—fish, birds, four-legged beasts, crawling creatures, and people who stand on two feet. The Blue Dragon, Red Phoenix, White Tiger and Black Tortoise of the Goguryeo tombs, with the Yellow Emperor positioned at the center, symbolized these five kinds of life. Our forebears, skilled at painting for tens of thousands of years, already understood the three primary colors and light and shade.

The Five Elements thought was linked to Oriental medicine, designating the five viscera (五臟) as the liver (肝), heart (心), spleen (脾), lungs (肺) and kidneys (腎); the five sense organs as the eyes, tongue, mouth, nose and ears; the five bodily tissues as the muscles, vessels, flesh, skin and bones; and the five secretions as sweat, nasal mucus, tears, urine and stool. Along with the five emotions of the mind (五志)—anger, joy, worry, sorrow and fear—it explained the functioning of human life, which achieves balance through organic circulation and harmony in chains of mutual relationships.

They divided each of the four directions of the sky into seven, dividing the universe into twenty-eight parts. In the universe, the path of the sun, the ecliptic, and the path of the moon cross twelve times a year, determining the twelve months, and the twelve symbolic animals of the earthly branches, beginning with Rat, Ox, Tiger and Rabbit, were devised. Because they believed there was a dragon palace in the sea, the story of Sim Cheong was handed down to us. In the heavenly palace in the sky, the Pole Star, whose position is always fixed, was served as king, and the Big Dipper and the surrounding stars attended the throne. The Painting of the Five Peaks behind the royal throne in the palace depicts the sun and moon and five mountain peaks. Yin-yang and the Five Elements symbolize the universe, meaning that the king on earth governs the universe and at the same time that the universe upholds the king.

Yin and yang plus the Five Elements make the number seven, which symbolizes the universe. In our national founding myth in the Samguk Yusa, too, when the bear and the tiger came to the mountain spirit and asked to become human, he ordered them to live in a cave for three times seven days, eating garlic and mugwort. The bear, obeying the words, endured twenty-one days, became a human, and became the mother of Dangun, the founding ancestor of our nation. In Buddhism, too, after Shakyamuni's nirvana, the forty-ninth-day rite is held after seven periods of seven days. The number seven appears as many as 430 times in the Bible. On Chilseok, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, the Herdsman, who drives his ox to plow the fields, and the Weaver Girl, who works the loom to weave cloth, meet at the Milky Way.

Many tales and myths arose from watching the movement of the stars in the sky. The myths and tales that began in the East were probably transmitted along the Silk Road of the Asian merchants to the Europeans, who appeared tens of thousands of years later after the Ice Age had passed, and were carried on into the myths of Greece. As India's historical records show, Greek kings came to the Indus River, shaved their heads and became Buddhist monks, and learned and took back the culture of the East, and one can see that the culture of Europe began from this. I think so all the more because one can see the characteristics of South Indian wood carving in Greek stone sculpture, and the timber architectural style of East Asia in the early stone architecture of Greece. In the history of world human lineages, the East Asian culture and civilization begun by the people who arrived on the Korean Peninsula 50,000 years ago and then advanced into the North American continent and the interior of Asia shows itself to be 15,000 years ahead of any other people in the world. Might the origin of religion and philosophy be hidden in the wisdom of our ancestors?

The five planets that accompany the earth in the solar system are called by the names of the Five Elements—Mars (fire), Mercury (water), Jupiter (wood), Venus (metal) and Saturn (earth)—and the names of the seven days of the week, too, are the seven names of yin-yang and the Five Elements: sun, moon, fire, water, wood, metal and earth days, used by all humankind in the world. Seeing that the philosophy and science of yin-yang and the Five Elements, as in the Four Guardian Deities painted in the Goguryeo tombs, appear all over the world, it is not hard to imagine that our forebears began the world's culture and civilization—metal tools, dolmens, pyramids and more—and passed them on to other parts of the world.

Children who grew up loved within the home, on becoming adults, sought the parents of the world. They came to know that nature is a great family in which all living things on the earth depend on one another and live together, and seeking the parental love of nature, they found religion. They made scriptures to set standards for life and came to know the order of nature through the power of knowledge. As time passed, modern humanity, having won the struggle for survival, thinks of itself as the master ruling over all the lives in nature, saying "Man is the lord of all creation" or "Man is the Creator's masterpiece," and is remaking nature into humanity's own household environment.

In such a situation, the understanding of the thought of yin-yang and the Five Elements—seeking again the wisdom of our ancestors, by which all lives on this earth live in harmony, maintaining balance—is all the more urgent. The reality now is that humanity is invading the living spaces of other life on earth and becoming the chief culprit destroying nature on the limited surface of the earth. Might not a movement to recover the origins of religion and science, explained by our ancestors' yin-yang and the Five Elements, and to bring nature and humanity into balance, become the future that saves humanity and the earth? Such efforts might also become the beginning of bringing peace to the world.

My Journey to America (25)

Silk Wings

Wings fly on without end. A worm hatched from an egg on a leaf builds a house and falls asleep, then becomes a butterfly, spreads its wings and flies away. Birds come out of eggs and fly away; and people, who walked on the ground and then ran, made wheels and rolled, and then made wings and one day came to soar above the wind.

When the silkworm larva, freshly hatched from its egg, eats mulberry leaves and grows, it becomes a pupa that builds a house of silk thread, and when it flies from the cocoon as a silk moth, male and female seek each other, lay eggs and die. In a lifetime of about forty days, it leaves silk cloth to humankind and departs. Just as an Alaskan rainbow trout swims against the current of the river and, on reaching the upper stream, lays its eggs and ends its life leaving its own body as food for its young. People too, when they became adults, built houses, had children, brought home food and lived, and when the children grew up, gave up their places and departed—so they say a life of thirty or forty years was ordinary.

Archaeologists say that traces of cooking rice and making cloth from silkworm cocoons in Southeast Asia go back more than 7,000 years, and that the opening of the Silk Road and the carrying of silk through Mesopotamia to Egypt go back more than 3,000 years. Some say Greece and Rome fell through the luxury of costly silk cloth, and some say they fell through the invasion of the Huns, who rode along the Silk Road. Turks sometimes say that because they are descendants of the Huns, they are brothers of Goguryeo.

With all this, hasn't the time come when the claim that our ancestors, who raised dolmens, began the building of stone tombs in Egypt is worth believing? It also makes sense that the Mongols conquered the Asian continent and Europe in one stroke along the Silk Road, ruled for two hundred years, and woke the people of Europe from the dark sleep of the Middle Ages, and modern history began. The iron culture of horses galloping across the plains of Manchuria and iron smelted over coal fires ruled the world, until bullets proved stronger than arrows, airplanes flew over tanks, and at last even the atomic bomb was made.

But they say that when a kite has lived thirty years, it makes a nest on a rock, pecks and breaks its worn beak, and when a new beak grows, first pulls out its old talons, then plucks out its worn wing feathers one by one, and gaining new wings, lives forty more years. People too, with the development of medicine, have come to look toward an age of a hundred years. Is the earth, trampled by human footprints and fouled by pollution, becoming an abandoned star?

From the day the Wright brothers, who repaired and sold bicycles in Ohio, made wings and flew over a sandy beach, airplane wings have filled the paths of the sky. Are people's wings, over the Silk Road once crossed on horseback from Asia to Europe, now swimming like rainbow trout against the current of time, back to the upper reaches of history? Fire-breathing wings have reached the moon and even arrived at the planet Mars. As the world history of the Silk Road rides on silk wings, like male and female silk moths seeking each other, we humans are flying off somewhere in search of a new nest. Silk wings with computer hearts beating are flying high, high, soaring into the endless sky.

The greatest undertaking of my life is to do something that will be of help to the people living on this earth now. First, I want to make known the knowledge of East Asian history within world history. Second, I want to help modern humanity escape from thinking that, with minds that confuse science and religion, torments neighbors and does harm to life. Third, I want to talk about the future of modern humanity. Having set these purposes for my life, there was something I wanted to do when I retired. Its title is A Common Sense of Human Civilization.

To introduce the preface: while studying the cultural history of world architecture, there came a moment when I gained what was, for me, a great realization. It is the phenomenon of evolution, a property common to all the cultures that exist on the earth.

Looking at life through genes, there has been from the beginning a chemical substance with the ability to replicate itself, which we call DNA. It is the ability of genetic material to keep replicating similar material. That ability created life, and so the living things of today were made. It seems to have made bacteria, then frogs, then monkeys, then people, continuing to replicate until now. So life, and the culture that life manages, have their limits, but they also have permanence. Never once broken, they have continued on until now.

When we examine the many cultures that exist in today's global village, they all have a single ancestor. We are now all connected. We do not exist alone; if we trace back, I and other lives and their cultures all came from one household. Life branched out into many lines from a single one at the beginning. The culture that life manages also has a oneness. This is one of the greatest lessons Charles Darwin taught us.

It is modern common sense to understand that before the stone architecture of the Mediterranean there was timber architecture and cave carving, and that before stone pyramids there were earth pyramids (mounds) and dolmen temples made of small stones hauled into place. That the kings of Greece came to China and India, shaved their heads and became monks, and took back Asian religion and culture, so that the religion and culture of the Mediterranean flourished, is in the historical records of China and India, but European scholars do not raise it, out of concern for the pride of the white race.

The destruction of the earth's environment that we humans are now committing is the destruction of life, and in the end the beginning of killing our own family. How indeed was such a right handed down to us? When you think about it, humans are the very youngest in our family of life. Seeing humanity as a single life, I wonder how old it is and how much time it has left. And I wonder how the end of the youngest life on earth will come. And I want to talk about what contribution the East Asian people, the earliest people to appear in the history of human lineages, made to the development of human culture and civilization while their descendants continued on to the North and South American continents and advanced inland to Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Eastern Europe.

In this book I have tried to put the stories of an architect, what he has seen and felt all this time. Because this book is not a history book but a personal essay, I have not cited the sources of information, and most of the photographs and pictures were also taken from well-known ones posted on Google. I ask your understanding that, with the intention of bringing hidden facts to light and showing them to the world, I accept the risk of raising suspicions of partial plagiarism.

In the autumn of 1978, while I was designing the national hospital of Guatemala, I visited the ruins of the Tikal culture on the Yucatán Peninsula in Central America. It felt like finding, on the other side of the globe, something resembling the Chinese characters (漢字) of East Asia. For the thirty-five years since then, while studying the cultural history of East Asia, I have come to compare it with world history and to think about humanity's past and future.

My graduation thesis at university, a report on the characteristics of Korean traditional architecture, led me to work alongside the master carpenter at the restoration site of Seoul's Namdaemun (Sungnyemun), National Treasure No. 1 of the Republic of Korea. Then, on February 10, 2008, Sungnyemun burned. Because I helped the Sungnyemun restoration project by mobilizing my personal records, Sungnyemun became both the first and the last project of my architectural life. From the time I was young, giving special lectures on East Asian architecture at Seoul National University and Yonsei University as a Ministry of Education cultural-heritage specialist for architecture, my interest in history began to ripen.

Today, among intellectuals in many countries, the work of seeking "roots" is actively under way. "New genetic evidence reveals clues to the first human journeys," which began in 2008, provided groundbreaking information to our knowledge of genetic lineage, and as it was widely publicized by National Geographic, new views on the DNA of the world's peoples began. Recently, as the economies of Korea and China in East Asia have developed at astonishing speed, archaeological excavations and discoveries have also made continuous progress. We have moved beyond a theoretical form of history that relied only on records and come to have a broad range of knowledge including genetic genealogy and archaeology. Because the world history published until now has been based on deficient knowledge of Eastern history, I keenly felt the need to find a new common sense based on new knowledge.

I began to look with interest at the area around the Korean Peninsula in East Asia, where the Great Wall, the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal and the Silk Road begin. Beginning with the start of metal culture through the discovery of coal in the Neolithic, I saw East Asian timber architecture in the style of Greek stone architecture, and here in East Asia I could see the process by which the pyramids of Africa and Mexico were born and grew. I saw that the city plan of Mohenjo-daro has much in common with East Asian city planning, and that the site plans of the world's palaces and temples were formed here in East Asia.

That population could keep growing steadily in Southeast Asia, where modern humans who left Africa first began settled life, is thanks to the natural environment of Southeast Asia, which provided a nursery for humanity with abundant food and a warm climate. Because the rivers flowing down from the highlands of Everest, the roof of the world, into the Indian and Pacific Oceans prepared a home for modern humanity, it was not hard to imagine that the mysteries of nature spread out between China with its 1.5 billion people and India with its 1.2 billion hold the roots of human culture and civilization.

It seems that East Asia is where modern humans, who migrated along the coast from Africa toward the east where the sun rises, on reaching East Asia first confronted the winter climate, the season of death, evolved from a wild life to an artificial one, and at last adapted to an inland life that overcame nature. From the discipline and capacity to overcome nature, the religion, art and science of modern humanity arose. The formation of culture and civilization seems to have begun here. Penetrating inland, they pioneered what is now the Silk Road and reached the Mediterranean region and Eastern Europe, and continuing along the coastal road they had already walked from Africa to East Asia, they followed the Pacific coast and advanced into the North and South American continents.

The modern history of modern humanity began when Genghis Khan of East Asia conquered Europe and passed East Asian culture on to Europe. In modern history, Europeans equipped with guns and cannons seized the territory of Asians who shot bows, and the British Empire made its appearance. The United States, a new nation founded by Europeans on the continent of the Asians, went through two world wars and has led in political and economic influence. Because humanity is still uncivilized, it could not prevent the massacre of six million Jews, and it cannot stop religious wars, so killing continues. Even now we cannot save the 20 million people of North Korea in East Asia from the dictatorship of the Kim family.

It is the immaturity of modern humanity that confuses creationism and evolution and commits massacres for the sake of its own religion. The confusion of spirituality, emotion and intellect that we now suffer is humanity's immature form, and it cannot escape from the worldwide conflicts that come from religion. Humanity's population explosion continues and nature is seriously polluted, and it is predicted that within the next fifty years 50 percent of the life now living alongside humanity will disappear.

In talking about history, is it not modern common sense to look back on the past and consider where humanity has come to now and where it is going? I saw in a mother's body the secret from the process by which humanity came into being up to today. Seeing the process by which a baby grows within the secret well hidden in the mother's womb, I could see the evolutionary process of humanity. I came to compare the history of humanity with the lifetime of a single person and to see what age we are at and what the world of the future will look like, and I want to share this with readers.

In the conclusion of this book, one comes to understand that the number 7, which appears some 400 times in the Bible, came from the heavenly religion of the East Asian Neolithic, which believed in a heavenly palace that upheld the Pole Star: beginning with the Big Dipper, it was the number combining yin-yang and the Five Elements, the number that completes heaven and earth as sun, moon, fire, water, wood, metal and earth. It says that it is modern common sense to understand that before the stone architecture of the Mediterranean there was timber architecture and cave carving, and that before stone pyramids there were earth pyramids (mounds) and dolmen temples made of small stones hauled into place.

When one sees that the beginnings and relics of timber architecture and cave carving are in Southeast Asia, and that earth pyramids and dolmen temples are in East Asia around the Korean Peninsula, their origin becomes clear. That the kings of Greece came to China and India, shaved their heads and became monks, and took back Asian religion and culture, so that the religion and culture of the Mediterranean flourished—when one looks at the historical records of China and India, one comes to understand that the Mediterranean culture of Southwest Asia is a descendant of Southeast Asia. Just like the political manipulation that tries to hide the fact that Japan's culture was transferred from the Korean Peninsula, the illusion, born of the idea of white superiority, that Mediterranean culture came before Southeast Asian culture must now stop.

Understanding that the Atlantis spoken of by the Greek philosopher Plato was in fact East Asia, we can look down upon the future from a modern history in which the culture and civilization of humanity that began in East Asia moved westward, circled the globe once, and returns again to East Asia. Before long, a more mature humanity will see an age of good family life, beginning to raise its children, the space people.

In the content of the book there are parts quoting others' writing without permission, and many parts and photographs taken from Google. My impatient desire to achieve my purpose in a short time seems to have been a little excessive, but I can only hope for your understanding and forgiveness. To summarize the content, it is divided broadly into three chapters: it tells the universal story of modern humanity, shows the history of East Asia, and then speaks of the future of humanity, as follows.

Chapter 1: The Culture and Civilization of Modern Humanity

According to genetic genome research reports, modern humans began in Africa around 10,000 years ago and reached Southeast Asia around 50,000 years ago. Archaeological excavation data support this. They show that humans reached the North American continent 40,000 years ago. Modern humans seem first to have confronted the winter season around the Korean Peninsula, overcoming nature around 50,000 years ago and beginning to grow accustomed to inland life in the Manchurian region. (M130 & M174) It shows that modern humans, migrating to Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Eastern Europe, had dispersed across Eurasia by around 35,000 years ago.

I want to trace what contribution the Stone Age culture of East Asia made—raising dolmens and pyramids, accumulating astronomical knowledge, and developing religion—while the earliest lineage of modern humans to appear went from Africa to East Asia and their descendants advanced into the North and South American continents and inland in Asia to Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet and Eastern Europe.

In 1982, dozens of jade objects, including jade earrings, were excavated at Xinglongwa village in Chifeng; they were determined to be relics from around 6,200 BC and were introduced as the Xinglongwa culture, and they are the same as those excavated from the shell mound at Munam-ri in Goseong County, Gangwon Province, Korea. They are said to be of the quality of the jade deposited in the Xiuyan area along the Yalu River. The Xinghai culture, Fuhe culture and Zhaobaogou culture excavated around the Liao River are gathered together as the world-renowned Hongshan culture (BC 4500–BC 3000), which represents the Liao River civilization. The characteristics of the Hongshan culture include a refined pottery culture; carving with metal tools the jade brought from Baekdusan; breaking huge rocks with metal tools into the needed sizes and shapes, hauling them long distances, and building stepped stone-mound pyramids; and making small, delicate stone coffins in which the dead were laid to rest. The jade carvings of the Hongshan culture preceded the Yellow River civilization by 1,000 years, and its stepped stone pyramids preceded Egypt's by 2,000 years.

The nomadic Huns (Xiongnu), to escape natural disasters, probably began a great migration through southern Siberia along the steppes of Central Asia, moving north along the steppes and then westward. I have not been able to confirm the grounds for the claim, in the American-made Attila, The King of the Barbarians, that the great migration of the Huns (Xiongnu) set out from the Korean Peninsula, but it is sufficient for understanding and conjecture. In the documentary tracing the Huns, Secrets of History, produced by German broadcasting, Dr. Berinto and Dr. Schmidt base their historical evidence that the Korean people and the Huns are directly related on bronze cauldron relics unearthed in the Gaya region at the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula and the bronze cauldrons of the Huns (Xiongnu) excavated in the regions through which the Huns (Xiongnu) passed as they moved west.

As shown in the table of contents: East Asia's position in genetic genealogy, the beginning of culture and civilization, the common features between the customs of the native peoples of the Americas and East Asian customs, the development of language, the development of writing, the ancestors of Goguryeo and the ancestors of Baekje on the Korean Peninsula, East Asian city planning, carts drawn by oxen and horses, the shape of the sapsal dog and the shape of the lion, from the struggle for survival to culture and civilization,

Chapter 2: The Culture and Civilization of East Asia

The dolmen culture of the Korean Peninsula in the Neolithic combined with the mound culture and began the building of stepped pyramids in Manchuria, which makes it reasonable to imagine that it transmitted pyramid building to Central America and as far as the Nile valley in Southwest Asia. The flow of human culture is the result of maintaining continuity like the life of living things; it does not appear through local mutations.

It seems that the seafaring farming peoples who worshipped the sun god told the time by looking at the position of shadows by day and at the position of the Big Dipper around the Pole Star by night. People of old thought that just as there is a royal palace on earth, there is a dragon palace beneath the sea and a heavenly palace in the sky, so in the heavenly palace the Pole Star was the king and the Big Dipper his seven ministers. They began to think of the number "7" as the most sacred number. In the heavenly religion of East Asia, the meaning of "7" begins to be applied in many ways. The Seven Stars rite, Seven Stars rocks, Seven Stars banners-----

The transcontinental road on which Genghis Khan galloped with his cavalry was the great road his ancestors the Huns had already opened when they destroyed Rome, so he could easily accomplish the great undertaking of seizing Southwest Asia and Eastern Europe in five years. Ögedei Khan, who inherited his father's undertaking and returned to Europe, attacked in 1230 southern Europe between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, the stronghold of the white peoples, and from 1236 plundered the whole of Eastern Europe thoroughly for six years. At the same time he attacked Tibet, Vietnam and East India. The modern history of the world begins from this time.

Genghis Khan woke the Western European peoples from the dark Middle Ages, and Europeans began to learn the culture, civilization and knowledge of East Asians and to advance into the world. Through the First and Second World Wars, the nations of the world drew closer and the earth kept shrinking. Humanity's violence robs natural animals of their living spaces, and the earth's pollution is growing rapidly.

Looking at the content shown in the table of contents: dolmen culture, the evolution and distribution of pyramids, China's Northeast Project, the development of pottery and metal tools, yin-yang and the Five Elements and the "7" days, East Asian Oriental medicine and yin-yang and the Five Elements, Oriental medicine and yin-yang, Oriental medicine and the Five Elements, the Five Elements and the organs of the body, the Five Elements classification of the body, the Five Elements and the properties of things, yin-yang and the Five Elements and natural health, acupuncture, the rise and distribution of religions, the story of the Huns, the grottoes of East Asia, the Great Wall and the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal, the Silk Road, Shanxi Province where many beauties are born, East Asian science and inventions, and Genghis Khan's conquest of Europe.

Chapter 3: The Future of Humanity on This Earth

The world's religions, beginning with the Taoism of East Asia and reaching the Protestantism of Western Europe, took 2,000 years for the wave of East Asian culture to reach Western Europe. The Protestantism of Western Europe was transmitted to America, from which today's conflict between Christianity and Islam continues, and Korea is now outpacing America in Protestant missions.

The secret of human birth, kept in the mother's womb, is the answer to understanding humanity's past on the earth. A single egg receives a sperm that has come after defeating hundreds of millions of competitors, becomes a compound cell, and from the form of a microorganism becomes the shape of a small worm. It becomes the shape of a fish, the shape of a reptile with a tail and four legs, and then the shape of a baby, swimming immersed in bodily fluid, until it comes out of the mother's body, breathes air for the first time and cries out. It twists and moves its body, crawls on four limbs, and at last stands on two feet and walks. This was the form of humanity in the past. This is the theory of evolution, it is science, and it is modern common sense.

At such a point, coming to see human history with new eyes and thinking of humanity's future is an effort to find the inevitable path. The method is to think of the history of humanity by comparing it to the lifetime of a single person. Since humanity was born on the earth, it has grown relying on God and clinging to nature and religion as to its parents, and now it shows the form of rebelling against its parents, crying "God is dead." The phenomena of the modern world are the emotional changes experienced in the adolescence of humanity's growth, and the rapid growth of the world's population is a phenomenon showing the physical growth of adolescence.

The modern world is coming to show the form of a grown human adult. The possibility that, with advances in blood research and in vitro pregnancy technology, new space people will be conceived and brought forth as modified humans shows the reproductive capacity of a mature adolescence. Entering the twenty-first century, human life will enter a family life of bearing and raising space people, and it seems this will bring the happiest period of human life on earth.

Looking at the content in the table of contents: human history and the age of humanity, the world of things that have life, the world of things that have feeling, the world of things that think, three languages, the confusion of reason, emotion and spirituality experienced in adolescence, comparing the history of humanity to the lifetime of a single person, the modern and future world, and then the book closes with its conclusion. I have regarded this book as the mission of my life, born in this age, and have poured my heart and soul into it for the past several years. When it comes out as an e-book and in print, I earnestly hope many will read it.

I intend to end my life story, Fifty Years of the American Dream, here. The content that has been read in the alumni magazine so far, and the content of the historical essay book introduced here, can be seen on the yongwanchoi.com website. I am truly and deeply grateful to the alumni, families and friends who have shared this journey up to here, and to the officers, editorial writers and managing editor Lee Ki-jun, who have run the Seoul National University Alumni Association of America magazine. I will strive to go on sharing friendship with my fellow alumni through poems, essays, editorials and more.