The Hot Dog Story

Among the events there were also trades, buying and selling cattle, pigs, furniture, old cars, and so on. The two young men happened to see a big sign that said Hotdog. They saw people standing in a long line in front of it, waiting to buy food. Imagining a piping-hot bowl of bosintang [Korean dog-meat soup], they hurried over and stood in line. At last their turn came. Before the tall man in front of them had even stepped away, they ordered a big piece and paid.
The man taking the order put a sausage warmed on the grill into a bun, spread yellow mustard on it, wrapped it neatly in paper, and handed it over the shoulder of the man in front. The hungry young men swallowed, carefully opened the paper, and, looking bitterly disappointed, muttered that they had never once eaten this part of a dog.

Scholars who study animals explain that dogs began living with people fifty thousand years ago, when nomads in East Asia began raising wolves at home. In the aristocratic society of East Asia, stories of pet dogs have been handed down since long ago, in records that introduce the Sapsal dog. The Book of Documents of the Zhou dynasty says that when Zhou destroyed the Shang, it received dogs as gifts from the surrounding tribes, just as it received horses. The dog name balbari is also an old Korean word. In the East, the custom of raising and eating dogs and pigs has continued for a long time, while in the West people have lived with dogs and cats as pets, like family, and so do not eat them.

Food culture, too, changes slowly. The food Americans enjoy most is steak, grilled from raw beef, but recently, as it has become known that animal fat contributes greatly to heart attacks, beef consumption has been falling. Until a few years ago Americans thought of Japanese restaurants that served raw fish as places for barbarians, but in search of healthy food they have learned clumsy chopsticks and have come to seek out Korean health food as well. Now Korean society, too, is taking more to keeping pets, and as other good foods are introduced, fewer people are looking for dog meat, which is welcome news.

As for studying in America, my brother, two years older than I and a graduate of medical school, came first; the following year my sister, who had majored in nursing, came; and then in 1966 I came. In the homeland remained my mother, my two younger brothers, and my younger sister. My brother married a European-American woman student he had met while in his doctoral program, and my sister married a civil engineering student who had taught her to swim while she exercised at the university pool. I put off marriage, planning to marry a Korean wife who had studied in America after I finished graduate school, and now and then practiced dating American women students. As for my parents, under Japanese rule my father, the eldest son of my grandfather, who ran a department store in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province, and a graduate of Mokpo Commercial School, and my mother, who had lived on Jeju Island and graduated from Gwangju Girls' High School, made a home through an arranged marriage.

Our Family's Desperate Escape from Manchuria after Liberation

At the time of liberation, our family was living in the city of Fushun in Manchuria, where my father's job had taken us. At that time the Fushun open-pit coal mine was the largest coal producer in the world. From August 15, 1945, Soviet troops moved south through our town day and night. They looked like very poor, uneducated soldiers. One day they came to our house and took away my father, who worked for a Japanese financial company, to somewhere unknown. At the age of seven I felt my mother's fear along with her. With four children, my brother nine, me, my sister four, and the youngest daughter one year old, she waited to return to our homeland, Korea. With the help of a Chinese man, my father came home a few days later, but he set a place to meet my mother and soon left the house. From that day on, my mother took everything in the house to the market, sold it, and bought gold rings, gold necklaces, and gold bracelets.

A few days after our family left Fushun in Manchuria, we met my father again in a village near the Yalu River. We stayed in Dandong, across from Sinuiju, and looked for a ferryboat to cross the river. Because Soviet troops had sealed the border, a boatman who knew the waterway could be found only by paying a great deal. Early at dawn the boatman woke us and hurried us onto the boat. My brother and I wore coats with the gold sewn inside to hide it, my father carried the bags on his back, my mother carried the baby on hers, and we all lay face down on the bottom of the little ferryboat with a tarpaulin spread over us.

Crossing the Yalu River

There was only the sound of the oar at the stern stirring the water. Perhaps two hours had passed on the misty surface of the Yalu when suddenly, in the distance, the rat-a-tat of Soviet submachine guns began, and now and then the crack of a rifle rang out. My brother and I looked out through a thin gap in the tarpaulin, but it was pitch dark and thick with fog, and we could not see ahead. The sound of bullets passing overhead grew closer and louder. Sometimes we could hear bullets splash as they fell into the water. My father had wrapped the heads of his one-year-old daughter and my mother in a quilt and lay face down, praying.

The gunfire gradually quieted, and around daybreak we set foot on North Korean soil. Riding sometimes on an oxcart and sometimes in a vehicle, our family reached Pyongyang two days later. The plaza in front of Pyongyang railway station looked wide and desolate. Our family rested at a nearby inn. During the few days we stayed, my father looked into trains heading toward Gaeseong, while we brothers and my sister watched a soccer match between Soviet troops and the People's Army on a school playground. Young men behind us pushed forward, and my sister fell forward and cried. From somewhere a Soviet military policeman ran up and slapped a young North Korean man across the face. At the moment a blue-eyed foreigner slapped a young man of our own people, I felt a pain in my young heart.

The Refugee Train

The train left Pyongyang station and moved slowly south; there was no room to stand inside, people hung from its sides and rode on its roof, and the whole body of the train was wrapped in people. Fortunately we sat on seats inside, but people sat on the floor and lay on the luggage racks, and the hot smell of sweat was stifling. After a while, a few seats away, we heard a woman's wrenching sobs, and something wrapped in a white cloth was thrown out the window. A passerby told us that it was a dead baby: a young mother had been weeping for days holding her dead baby, and the people beside her, unable to bear watching any longer, had taken it from her and thrown it out the window. The train simply ran on along the tracks without a word.

As we neared the 38th parallel, we walked and walked along country roads for days. Finally, on a mountain path closely guarded by the People's Army, we were taken by the People's Army soldiers. My father kept quiet with his four children, and my mother took hold of the officer who seemed to be in charge and negotiated. She seemed to slip a gold ring off her finger and give it to him. The officer led us down into a valley, and across the valley, in the distance, we could see South Korean soldiers in green uniforms and American soldiers. The officer waved as if to say farewell and disappeared somewhere. Holding on to one another, we carefully crossed the valley. As if they had been waiting, American military police searched us and immediately sprayed DDT disinfectant powder all over us, inside and out.

Across the 38th Parallel into the Arms of South Korea

Turned white like snowmen, we just blinked our black eyes, and for the first time I could see smiles on my mother's and father's faces. It was the first time I saw my parents' smiles of relief, after they had risked their lives to escape Manchuria across the Soviet lines and escape North Korea across the 38th parallel guarded by the North Korean People's Army. We met my grandfather, who was waiting in Seoul, and a few days later arrived in Suncheon, South Jeolla Province. My two-year-old youngest sister, thirsty and malnourished through those two months, breathed her last and passed away as soon as we reached our hometown.

My childhood through the Korean War, graduating from college at the time of the April 19 Student Revolution, the May 16 military coup, Korea as the poorest country in the world, the Sungnyemun restoration project and my work as a cultural-heritage specialist, and my life as a student in Minnesota: some twenty stormy years passed. After liberation my father worked in accounting positions, but he disliked a society where accounting was full of corruption, so he switched to serving as a public servant in education, and there he spent the rest of his life.

Studying Abroad, I Could Not Be at My Father's Deathbed

My father, left paralyzed on one side by a stroke before I came to study abroad, passed away while we were studying in America. We could not afford the airfare, so my father's funeral was left to my mother and my younger siblings.

Life in American university dormitories changed to coed housing from the 1970s, when we graduated. It began at the most conservative of them, the University of Michigan, and many American university dormitories became the coed dorms students liked. In the four years I lived in the dormitory, I was never brave enough to bring a woman to my room. But college life, going out with American women on weekends, was both busy and fun. While we went to the movies or to parks to talk, English became easier and I grew used to American private-life culture. Since I had had no girlfriend until I was nearly thirty, it was from then on that I began to learn how men and women differ. For the women students I met, going together to nightspots to drink and dance was quite ordinary.

Bernadine

Among them, Bernadine, who was twenty-four, was eager about our relationship. She lived with her mother and was working on a bachelor's degree in languages. She wanted to learn Korean from me. She liked to wear black, which set off her white skin, and she was athletic, so our interests matched. She drove a black car fast and was so active that she was a great contrast to Korean women students. She said that in high school she had already fallen in love with a boy and married him, divorced after two childless years of marriage, and then come back to college to finish her bachelor's degree. She understood men's hearts well and was quick to understand. She smoked and offered me cigarettes too, but after I refused she never offered again. She always asked my permission before she smoked.

She loved to have fun, so we often drank together and went on weekends to nightspots with go-go dancing. When we danced with our bodies pressed together, my face turned red, and she teased me that a man could be so shy. Once, tired of darning holes in my socks in the dormitory, I gave her two pairs of old socks and asked her to mend them. The next day she brought them back, saying she had mended them with her mother. She told me she had asked her mother what she thought about marrying the Korean student she was seeing. As if it were good news, she told me her mother had said it would be fine to marry once she finished college. She said her father had divorced her mother and lived with another woman, and that she was the offspring of a wealthy family and he paid her tuition. A few days later she went to see her father and talked with him about me. With seeming disappointment she told me that her father was firmly opposed to the marriage, saying that a man of twenty-nine like me must already have a wife and children in Korea. Since I had never once thought of having an American wife, from then on we gradually drifted apart. It was the first time I learned that a man goes out with a woman because it is fun, while a woman goes out with a man in order to marry him.

My Student Days at the College of Engineering in Taereung

Since the Seoul National University College of Engineering campus was in Taereung, around the time I graduated I boarded in a village near the school. Between the school and the village was a public cemetery, and the road going around the outside of the cemetery was quite long. After staying up all night to finish design assignments, I chose the shortcut across the cemetery on my way home at dawn. At first my hair stood on end and I was afraid, but after a few days I grew used to it, enjoyed the silence, and even found a spot beside a grave to rest. One dawn, when the moonlight was bright, I heard a baby crying nearby. When I went closer, the place where the sound came from moved too. Suddenly I was frightened, but when I saw a fox running away in the moonlight, I was relieved and went home.

At the boardinghouse there was a kitchen girl who brought me my meal tray every day. One dawn she was waiting for me at the entrance to the cemetery path. She told me there was a rumor going around the neighborhood that the boarder at this house robbed graves at night, and that she had come to see me because she did not want to believe it. I admired her courage and was grateful. The next day I came home early in the evening and fell asleep. When I woke at dawn, I saw the girl lying naked beside me. I was flustered, but I held her quietly, promised absolute secrecy, and sent her back. A few months later the girl left, and the landlady explained it to me. The girl had wanted to get married, and the landlady had given her permission to try it that way. Even now I sometimes think of that girl and of Bernadine.

Sukja, a Woman of Outstanding Beauty

As I was finishing my bachelor's program in architecture in Minnesota, only my history thesis remained. I left the dormitory and moved into a room near my workplace in the suburbs of the city of St. Paul. Since my employer had obtained permanent residency for me, I intended to gain several years of practical experience and then return to Korea. With the money I had saved, I also bought a new Oldsmobile. They say that when a bachelor gets a car, girlfriends follow. I wondered who would like an old bachelor past thirty, but I was asked by the wife of the president of the local Korean association to meet her younger sister at the airport and bring her home, as she was coming to America. She had received permanent residency in Korea and was immigrating to live with her older sister. Sukja had lost her parents early and had not properly finished school, but she was a woman of outstanding beauty. From her figure to her hands, she was the most beautiful of all the Korean women I had seen. The two of us tried for several years to grow close, but there were gaps in many ways; we were a pair who would not have understood it even if it had been put into our hands, and in the end we parted.

On the second floor of the small house where I rented a room lived two American women students. Both had boyfriends, and on weekends I often saw them party all night and stay over. One day a hospital ambulance pulled up in front of our house with its siren wailing and carried away one of the women, who was bleeding heavily. She recovered and came back a few days later, but the other woman confided in me. She said that after trying to abort with a wire coat hanger, the bleeding became severe and she had called an ambulance. It was, she said, a method of abortion common among women students at the time, attempted at the risk of never being able to become pregnant again.

Meeting My Present Partner

Around the time I finished my master's degree and passed the architect's licensing exam, I finally found my partner, like this. I met her at a gathering of Koreans while I was working in Columbus, Ohio. Since I love sports, I enjoyed golf, skiing, and tennis, and she had the same interests. We came to know each other playing sports together. When we met again at a year-end Christmas dance, I asked her to dance the tango, which I love. She told me to wait a moment and disappeared somewhere. I thought she must not know how to dance and waited, but she reappeared from somewhere with a rose in her mouth, looking bewitching. We danced like Don José and Carmen, and the audience broke into wild applause.

After that we got engaged and sometimes traveled together on weekends. A few months later we went on a trip to New York and were walking together along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. She said she panicked when I suddenly disappeared from sight. A moment later she found me helping a poor old man who was passing by. After we married she told me that in that moment she could see my good character and made up her mind that it would be all right to marry me. My wife came to America in 1967, the year after I came, to study medicine, and became a doctor, and after finishing graduate school I soon became an American architect.

We Have One Son and Three Daughters

We have one son and three daughters, and the children have all finished college. Since anyone born in America is an American citizen, along with my growing children I too finally became an American citi
zen.

I kept working at the Ellerbe architectural office, where I had worked while in graduate school. Bent over a drafting board drawing plans was the hard labor of architectural design. Since there was no help from computers as there is now, drafting every day in pencil or ink bent my fingers and weakened my eyes. At the office the white people's territorial pecking order was tremendous. It seemed all the unpleasant jobs were pushed onto me. But that tendency is the same among white people too. It is also the pecking order of the old hands that newcomers have to endure. I could not follow the jokes they chuckled over and traded among themselves, and since I could not laugh along, I was frustrated at not being able to communicate. People seemed to look at me with sympathetic eyes, and I felt sorry for myself for not understanding their jokes in their own dialect.