June 25: The Tragedy of Brothers Killing Brothers

South Korean army troops were stationed at the elementary school, and on Mudeungsan communist partisans who had failed to retreat were living in hiding. A dawn when I woke to the din of gunfire, the blast and flash of grenades, the fierce cries of killing, the last screams of lives ending: the hell I saw outside the window was more than a twelve-year-old could bear without tears. In the morning, along the road, the soldiers' bodies were cleared away, and ten prisoners, bound with rope, were led to the foot of Mudeungsan. The military police handed the prisoners shovels and made them dig a pit in the ground, and one by one their lives vanished in the smoke from the tips of the flaming rifles. The military police covered with earth the bodies that had fallen where they had dug their own graves, and left. A little later, people who seemed to be family and comrades came, weeping aloud, and carried the bodies they found in the earth off on their backs to somewhere unknown.

To my daughter, who had come with her father across the sea, the peaceful village, the beautiful mountain, the playground where I had run and played, her father's beloved hometown, all looked warm and welcoming. I did not want to leave the painful wounds hidden in my heart in my daughter's beautiful memories. Without her knowing, I closed my eyes alone and bowed my head for a moment of silent prayer for the souls of the many who had died innocent during the war.

Towering Mudeungsan, remembering by itself the long, long history of Baekje that we do not know; the liberation when the whole nation rejoiced waving the Taegukgi; the bitter Korean War in which one people fought and killed one another; Honam, cut off from the Gyeongbu Line, all silently held in its heart... like the unchanging hearts of parents, then as now, it embraced us tenderly.

The Secret of Immigrant Life in America

There is a secret I tell neighbors who want to go into business during their immigrant life. In America, when dealing with American customers, if you show your pride as a Korean with humility, their interest grows all the greater. When I first went to Birmingham, Alabama, there were separate elevators for white people and for Black people. When a white man I met in the elevator asked me what I did, and I answered with a smile that I was a Korean American architect, he and I became friends. Even a white man who looks down on people of color will, it seems, if you win the contest of wills with a smile, become a friend who needs you as much as you need him. Running my own business as an architect, I always lived holding five areas in my five fingers.

First

First is people, second is money, third is the quality of the product, fourth is marketing, and fifth is planning. First, relationships with people: this means trying to stay on good terms with everyone from family to neighbors, friends, and even strangers, and in business, managing relationships with employees, clients, and consumers. You must build relationships where you work together as a team. Just as a household needs a doctor, a professional practice works together with a lawyer, an accountant, and a bank. All communication is done in writing, and every agreement follows legal responsibility and order, so the American Institute of Architects has prepared model forms for every contract. But before these social relationships, it seems even more vital to maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect in human relationships.

Second

Second, money. In a capitalist society, managing money seems as important as managing people. You must have money to exist, and you must have money to function fully. Every day we hear of families breaking apart, companies collapsing, and rich men becoming beggars because of money. They say that if you earn more than you spend you become rich, and if you earn less you become a beggar. In my case, when I was worried about college tuition and came to Seoul intending to enter the Korea Military Academy, my uncle, who was director of an army hospital at the front, came to see me and said, "Yong Wan, in the Republic of Korea, prison and army life cost more than school, so you go to college." He encouraged me to apply for the university entrance exams, and that is how I came to study architecture at the College of Engineering, as I remember it.

It is said, "In modern society, if you work to earn money, you become a slave to money; but if you find work that society needs and serve, money comes looking for you." My uncle, my brother, and my wife were doctors and my sister was a nurse, and I had many connections to the medical field around me, so I chose architecture specializing in medicine. I made an effort to lead in designing specialized areas of hospitals in large American cities, such as emergency rooms, operating rooms, X-ray, pathology laboratories, emergency patient rooms, and examination rooms, to gain knowledge and build experience. Because I tried to find and fill a role society needed, the money followed.

Third

Third is the quality of the product or the professional service. Since architecture is my field, my product is good architectural design. When I graduated from a four-year architecture program in Korea, my knowledge of structural engineering was strong, but my artistic design was weak. American five-year architecture schools focused on creative art, so before entering graduate school I devoted a year to creative art. That year was the year I learned the most in my whole life in architecture. In life drawing class, a young professional model, without a thread covering her body, would strike a pretty pose and change it every fifteen minutes, and the students would produce a fifteen-minute sketch. Of the four drawn in an hour, we submitted one to the professor. I was so entranced by a nude as beautiful as a heavenly woman, the first I had seen in my life, that in the first class I could not draw a single proper sketch. I had begun studying art for the first time only after coming to America. In architecture, if a work feels good, functions conveniently, and is economical in construction and operating costs, it is a successful work.

Fourth

Fourth, marketing is the lifeline of a product or a professional business. You must get information ahead of your competitors, find new clients, and keep your ties with clients strong. If you submit a design proposal on time, the owner selects a few firms out of dozens of architectural firms and requests interviews. You have forty-five minutes to present the firm's capabilities and explain how you would like to design the given project, and then fifteen minutes to answer questions. After that, the building owner checks the actual track records of the firms that applied and announces the final selection two or three weeks later.
Preparing the materials for the interview and practicing the presentation must be repeated several times in front of a mirror, the way a pastor prepares a sermon, so that you give a flawless presentation. The experience of acting in Yu Chi-jin's play Wonsullang in high school seems to have been a great help to me, because I had to be able to get a natural laugh and, at ease, earnestly connect with them on the answers to the most important points. If an English-speaking American practiced two or three times, I, speaking Korean-style English, had to practice five to ten times. You must keep making the firm known to the community and protect the firm's unshakable reputation within it. Diligently opening up new territory is marketing.

Fifth

Fifth, planning is foresight that works together with time. There is a time for everything. If you catch the right time, things proceed smoothly; if you miss it, everything comes to nothing. So you must plan and prepare well in advance and wait for the right time. Since everything has an order, preparing that order in advance is also a benefit of planning. This way of thinking about these five things, people, money, quality, connections, and timing, seems to have carried over into my private life too, keeping me always busy without a moment's rest. Later, when I retired to rest, I became so much busier that it was as if an idle man might die of overwork, and that too must have been because of lifelong habits steeped in these five things.

I'll Go to the Olympics and Win a Gold Medal

My brother became a doctor in America, but he chose the path of biochemical research and even worked at a research institute that had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Looking back on our childhood, I thought that I had grown up at a disadvantage for being born the second son. My parents' first baby was a daughter, the next was a son, and then I was born. Later there were eight children in all, but the eldest daughter died of tuberculous arthritis before liberation, and the fifth, a daughter, died just after liberation, when our family had finished its desperate two-month escape from Manchuria to North Korea and from North Korea to South Korea. The two sons and one daughter born after that were so much younger than I that I seem to have helped my mother by looking after and raising my younger siblings. Feeding them milk and washing diapers were my job. Since my father and mother were each the eldest son and eldest daughter, the greatest hopes and attention seem to have been focused on the future of their eldest son. And so I always grew up in my brother's shadow, wearing his hand-me-downs. My brother was good at his studies, and I liked playing with other children.

In 1945, the year of liberation, I was eight years old. I am a child of liberation who learned Japanese speech and writing from age seven, and then, after liberation, learned our own language and Hangeul for the first time, starting in the first grade of elementary school. Seoseok Elementary School in Gwangju, looking out toward Mudeungsan, is the nest where we brothers and sisters grew up. When I was in sixth grade, a sports day hosted by the Chamber of Commerce, where my father worked, was held there. At the age of thirteen, I entered the 26-mile marathon run by the adults. My father followed behind me on his bicycle, and when I came back to the school grounds, thirty minutes had already passed since all the adults had returned. I still vividly remember the loudspeaker announcing that a future Sohn Kee-chung had appeared. It was here, in my elementary school days, that I would make my parents laugh by declaring that my brother, being good at his studies, would win the Nobel Prize, and I would win an Olympic gold medal in sports.