Studying in America as I Lived It (1)

Yong Wan Choi

On May 28, 1966, I boarded a Pan American Airlines jet bound for America. Gimpo Airport at that time looked like the two-story building of a small country school, as modest as if a runway had been laid across its playground. It was a time when you could still see airplanes started by turning the propeller by hand, the way a car engine that won't start is cranked by someone with an iron rod.

Farewell at the Airport

Climbing the boarding stairs for the first time in my life, holding down my fluttering heart, I felt like a country bumpkin going to Seoul, setting foot in a world of mystery. I fastened my belt in my assigned seat, and at the roar of the runway as we raced forward, shaking off the past, I felt that I was at last parting from the land where I had lived until then; at the farewell of family and friends waving behind me, tears welled in my eyes. As I set off, promising to return when my studies were finished, thoughts of the days gone by and the days to come rushed in all at once.

The Fortune-Teller's Prophecy

I had put off studying abroad for a year to stay beside my mother, whose future looked bleak because of my father's stroke, but at my family's urging I finally came to leave. The day before, my mother took me to see the famous fortune-teller Baek Un-hak. When we opened the door and sat down on cushions in his ondol room and my mother told him my name and date of birth, he said at once, "Going to America is a good thing. If he stays here, he'll kill his younger brother." My mother and I were inwardly very startled. But from that moment I neither believed nor listened to the words of the prophet (?), and devoted myself only to preparing for the next day's departure.

After two years of measuring and drafting under the scorching sun at the Sungnyemun restoration site, I had become, at the tender age of twenty-five, a Ministry of Education cultural-heritage specialist, and while working on the repair of Jinnamgwan Hall in Yeosu I had many a tussle with newspaper reporters. My brother in America sent me a letter telling me not to study only Korea's antique architecture like a frog in a well, but to come to America and open my eyes to the wide world, so I shook off the objections of my seniors and friends and packed my bags, saying I would go study in America and come back.

The flight's itinerary stopped in Tokyo, Japan, then went by way of Hawaii and San Francisco to arrive at its destination, Minneapolis. The ticket cost $550.00, an enormous sum, but by great good fortune my brother, who had gone to study at the University of Minnesota two years before me, sent it, and I was able to travel in comfort. In my pocket, under the rules of Park Chung-hee's military government for travelers leaving the country, was a mere $50.00, and my only luggage was a single white bag that came with the airline ticket, dangling from my shoulder.

Tall Nancy in Tokyo

When I arrived in Tokyo, Tall Nancy, who was studying Japanese history in Kyoto, came to meet me. Nancy was an American student I had happened to meet when she came with a camera on a field trip to the Sungnyemun restoration site where I was working. Since her home was in Minneapolis and she was very interested in Korean history, I had shown her around Gyeongbokgung Palace and many other places in and around Seoul. It was a chance to become comfortable with English, so I jumped at it, and Nancy and I went to my family's home in my hometown of Gwangju, where she met my parents. I had covered all the expenses during our travels. She was thirty, two years older than I, and much taller, so when she slept at our house both her legs stuck out of the blankets, and from then on my mother and my younger siblings called her Tall Nancy.

When Nancy saw me at the airport, she said I smelled of sweat and took me to a public bath first; I was a little embarrassed but grateful. Ever since college I had relied only on a washbasin at my boardinghouse and, begrudging the money for a public bath, had made a habit of putting off bathing. Because of that my father used to tease me by calling me a "Chinese coolie." When I undressed and went into the bath, I was flustered to find men and women together. I learned that Japan was a place beyond the reach of the Confucian morality that separates boys and girls from the age of seven, and my face burned as I looked at the naked bodies of women I did not know. They seemed to be watching me closely, and I fidgeted and ran out.

Exploring the History of Kyoto and Nara

While Nancy showed me the Baekje-era buildings in Kyoto and Nara, we slept in the same room, but perhaps because we were absorbed in our travels, we had no time to think of each other as the opposite sex. She carried a camera and kept taking the photographs I wanted. The Ise Shrine at Nara is a sacred site of Japan where photography is forbidden, yet she hid the camera under her skirt and, avoiding the eyes of the people around her, painstakingly took pictures for me.

Japan is a country founded by the people of Baekje who were driven out by the forces of Silla and Tang in 676 AD, and it has preserved Baekje culture and buildings well to this day. On the Korean Peninsula, culture was altered under the influence of the Yuan dynasty during Goryeo, but Japan, thanks to the kamikaze (divine wind) that blew three times, escaped the Mongol invasion and so has preserved the culture of the Korean Peninsula's Three Kingdoms period well. I had the benefit of what I had studied while teaching at the Central Officials Training Institute.

The Japanese people I met were frugal and kind, so the memory of the Japanese as invaders seemed gradually to fade from my heart. Every time Nancy introduced me to them as a student going to study in America, I saw envy in their eyes and could tell that they were a humble people who looked up to America.

Evert in Hawaii

Hawaii was where planes crossing the Pacific stopped to refuel. Blue-eyed Mr. Evert was waiting at the airport. He too was a photographer for the American magazine Life who had visited the Sungnyemun construction site. His wife was the granddaughter of a native Hawaiian chief. He told me the history of Hawaii: when her grandfather was deciding which country Hawaii should belong to, it could have belonged to Japan, but it was a great blessing that he decided it should belong to the United States. We toured a native museum, and I also learned the history of how Koreans first settled in America sixty years earlier, working in the sugarcane fields.

During the one day after I first set foot in America, everything around me was strange. The hardest part of the English I spoke was telling yes from no, and from the smells of meat, bread, butter, and cheese I already missed kimchi. In the eyes of white people, who seemed to be meeting an Asian for the first time, I saw curiosity, but I also felt that they looked down on me. I could sense the tensions with Black people and other people of color. At the airport, looking for the toilet, I could not think of the English word and very nearly had an accident. Calculating exchange rates was always hard, and I had spent nearly all of my $50, so my pockets were almost empty.

Arriving at My Final Destination, Minneapolis

The plane went by way of San Francisco and Seattle and arrived in Minneapolis at four in the morning. My brother and Dr. Gault were waiting at the airport. Dr. Gault was associate dean of the medical school; he had met my brother when he came to Seoul National University as an exchange professor, and so had come to know our family. In a position overseeing UNESCO educational funding, he had helped Korea's public universities. Just as my brother and sister had done, I stayed at his home until school began in September and started my life in America.

Because America, as I had seen in the movies, was a society rich in goods and one that valued people, I even felt a wrenching sense of how poor was the homeland I had left behind, where people were cheap and goods were dear. Every time I sat down to good food, I often thought of my poor family left behind in Korea, and my heart ached. There were no walls between houses and no thieves, so people did not lock their doors at night. The family name comes after the given name, the order of the fingers when counting is reversed, children and women come before adults, and one by one I learned the things that were the reverse of the culture and customs of Korea in which I had grown up.

Since it was a mechanical life, beginning school and work at exactly eight in the morning and closing up at five, it seemed a bit stifling and cold, and I wondered whether these were people or machines. There was no trace at all of the romance of meeting colleagues on the way home from work for a first round and then a second at a bindaetteok [mung-bean pancake] house. The life of professionals here was a double life, completely divided into a daytime person and an evening person. I came to realize that it was a sound society, in which one fulfilled one's role in one's social position for eight hours a day, and for the sixteen hours of evening and night returned to the level ground of an ordinary citizen, doing household chores and enjoying time with one's family. Coming from my habit of knowing no Saturdays or Sundays and doing nothing but study and work twenty-four hours a day, I was bewildered by this suddenly transformed environment.

The University of Minnesota, Sister School of My Alma Mater, Seoul National University

Ever since our family moved to Manchuria with my father's job during World War II, my grandfather had taught us the habit of chanting Buddhist prayers and praying with palms joined, so even in high school, when I went to church with friends, I would chant a Buddhist prayer first thing on waking in the morning. As I adapted to American life, I learned the habit of going to church on Sundays. I came to understand that America is a nation founded on Christian ideals, and when I began dormitory life, I also began Bible study with friends.

Because the University of Minnesota had a sister relationship with my alma mater, Seoul National University, there were a great many Korean students. Students who had all been bright and top of their class in Korea came to America and lived crestfallen because of the language barrier. People differed in their ability to adapt to an unfamiliar environment. I often saw some students who seemed somehow not in their right mind, whose behavior became strange, and who got so worked up over small things that the people around them complained. Among students who had come with tuition from their parents in Korea and then failed their exams and flunked out, some even committed suicide, but the top students from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Seoul National University's College of Engineering ranked near the top in the graduate program of the University of Minnesota's Department of Chemical Engineering, one of the leading programs among American universities.

Korean students got together and organized a student association, helping one another and easing our homesickness for the homeland we had left far behind. If there had been instant ramen then, as there is now, how wonderful a spicy bowl would have been! The best we had was a Japanese couple who sold a few Asian food ingredients out of their garage. When Korean families who had already graduated, settled down, and had stable jobs threw parties for the single men and women, we got to eat Korean food for the first time in a long while, and that was the greatest joy. At such gatherings some couples caught each other's eye and were blessed with marriage.

Asking President Park Chung-hee for Help

Every April the two cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul held a festival. There was no Korean association to take part in the cultural festival, in which many nations participated, so the student association took the lead and we resolved to introduce Korean culture. First we sent a letter to President Park Chung-hee asking for help. Just barely, a few days before the festival, dozens of colored paper lanterns strung on electric wire and Taegukgi flags arrived, well packed with decorations. Women students and the wives of students wore hanbok, rode on the display float, lit the colored lanterns, and waved the Taegukgi; it was a successful event that made Korea's standing stand out. Afterward President Park Chung-hee sent a letter of appreciation to the student association president, Lee Hyeon-gu.

The Gears of Part-Time Work and Schoolwork

In those days foreign students were allowed to work, so I got up at dawn, worked at an architectural office from seven to eleven in the morning, and returned to the dormitory for lunch. From one in the afternoon I went to class, and when class ended I went straight to the architecture department's design studio and worked on design assignments late into the night; for two years my days turned like the gears of a machine. On weekends I also mowed lawns in the neighborhood and earned a few coins. I started at $1.25 an hour, but at that time 25 cents was enough to eat a full meal, so by scrimping and saving I could barely cover tuition and dormitory fees.

The First Time I Saw a Student Put His Arm on a Professor's Shoulder and Joke

My graduate advisor, Walter Vivrett, was kind to foreign students, but we were cautious and ill at ease with him. The Korean-style humility of not meeting a professor's eyes and looking only at his necktie did not work in America. If you did not meet someone's eyes and smile, you got only suspicious looks, as if you were guilty of something. I saw American students rest their elbows on the professor's shoulder and joke with him, but we could never imitate that. The professor seemed to like students who grew close to him, so I tried too, but I could never bring myself to act as brashly as the American students, and it seemed only to put me at a disadvantage.

Minnesota has the longest winters and the lowest winter temperatures in America. Having lived in northern Manchuria in China from age four to eight, I remember the winters of that time. I remember sledding from the top of the roof down into the yard when a snowstorm had buried one side of the house. I used to joke to friends from other states, "We have four seasons too: July, August, September, and winter." The summer is short, but with ten thousand lakes spread everywhere, swimming and fishing are easy to enjoy. There are so many mosquitoes that when friends from other states called to say they were coming, we joked that they should bring mosquito nets. St. Paul and Minneapolis are known as twin cities, eight miles apart in the basin of the Mississippi River.

The Only Growing Urban Region in the Northern United States

The two large cities together have every condition a young generation needs, so it is the only northern American metropolitan region that has kept up a trend of growth. Downtown, bridges connect every block indoors, making it a space where one can live the urban life of business and cultural activity in winter without going outside. I took the city bus to work in winter, but going outside on cold days carried the danger of frostbite on the nose, hands, and feet, and one slip could mean emergency treatment.

Comstock Hall, a dormitory at the University of Minnesota, was a six-story building where some 560 students lived. The fifth and sixth floors were assigned to graduate students, and all were given single rooms. Family visits were allowed on weekends, but it was an area women students could not enter. The greatest pleasure was gathering at mealtimes in the dormitory cafeteria to share news from home and share Korean food that had come by international mail. When someone brought red pepper powder and sprinkled it on the food, and the American students around us started sneezing and all fled or steered clear, we laughed. But from then on we became a little more careful.

Kimchi Jars Hung Outside the Windows

Dried squid and octopus were the height of the taste of home for us, eaten sparingly and treasured, but foreign students hated them, even comparing the smell to the foul odor of a woman's private parts. We shot back that the smell of their rotten cheese was worse. A postal carrier informed me that a package had come from Korea but seemed to be so badly rotten that he had thrown it in the trash. When I looked, it was kimchi and a few kinds of salted seafood, just barely wrapped. I carefully wrapped it up again and put it in the refrigerator. A few days later the cleaner cleared it all out, and it ended up in the trash again, a food subjected to humiliation. I rescued it, and this time hung it outside the window, its last place of quarantine. From then on, seen from outside the dormitory building, there were quite a few windows with kimchi jars hanging from them. It was somehow shameful and embarrassing, but cultural difference is a challenge with no solution.

America is the land of the automobile. A car is like a pair of shoes in American life. I desperately wanted shoes of my own, and I longed to escape the hardship of riding a bicycle to my job downtown, but saving for a car was terribly hard. One day, when I had nearly reached campus from downtown, police cars were blocking the road with red and blue lights flashing. The bodies of two students lay by the roadside, and a wrecked German Volkswagen lay tumbled over, broken in two.

It was a head-on collision between two cars. The Lincoln Continental a middle-aged woman was driving was unharmed, while the students' cheap, light car was badly smashed, so owning and driving a car became frightening, and I grew cautious. America's GM and Ford dominated the world's auto industry, and Detroit, Michigan, was at its height, boasting of being the kingdom of the auto industry. Honda motorcycles from Japan and the Volkswagen Beetle from Germany were the best fit for students.

Once a dormitory friend bought a Volkswagen Beetle, and nine of us got into the little four-seat car. Draped over knees and shoulders, lying stacked on top of one another, the nine of us rushed to Minneapolis International Airport. Because one man's toes stuck out the window, we drove carefully, worried a traffic officer would spot us. The place where we had first set foot here after leaving our homeland, the place from which, soaring into the sky, one went back to the homeland: unable to take our eyes off the tail of a plane lifting off the ground and folding up its wheels, as if flying to the homeland we pictured in our dreams, there were times we sang tearful songs and soothed our homesickness all night long.

Among my friends in architecture, one who was struggling through college washing dishes in a restaurant often dropped by the graduate design studio. As we talked, I found out that he was a friend who had played as an athlete for Korea University at Seoul Stadium. He was the one who had played rough against the Seoul National University College of Engineering players during a match, and on behalf of my teammates I had risked my life to throw a tackle at him. Remembering those days, the two of us grew close. One night, late, as we were talking in Korean in the design studio, some American students happened to come in, so we began speaking in English so that they too could understand what we were saying. They seemed to listen to us for a while, then tossed out a remark: "Your Korean sounds like English." That is when we realized that our English was, to them, an incomprehensible Korean-style English.

When a Korean came to America and looked around in every direction, there were only Americans who spoke only American and smoked only American cigarettes. The joy of sitting around the dormitory table as foreign students chattering in Korean was an oasis in a desolate foreign land. These were friends with whom we shared news from home and shared both happy news and sad. Korean and American politics were topics of endless debate, and debates between Christians and atheists even turned into shouting matches of fiery, vein-bulging speeches. We didn't know that what was ordinary conversation to us was very loud to foreigners, and chattered away, until later we learned it by watching Chinese people gather and chatter. A psychiatrist doing a doctoral program at a Korean university hospital was staying in the dormitory with us. He observed each of us closely and confided to me that more than half of the foreign students among us were losing their mental balance under stress.

Severe Mental Stress

The pride and self-respect of those who had been praised as bright and brilliant in the homeland had to suffer the ordeal of being treated as cripples here, unable to communicate and unaccustomed to a new environment. I remember how, when I entered the Nonsan Training Center for military training, a completely uneducated country youth was ostracized under the respectful (?) name of "adviser." You cannot know without going through it the feeling of being cut off from a position where you were applauded and respected by those around you and becoming an object of pitying sympathy. The fear of being thrown away like garbage and the looks of contempt drive a person mad. To the psychiatrist's eyes, the students who could not sleep, looked terribly tired, and had become high-strung were plain to see. We would often see students go home, and we even saw cases of suicide. Some of us deliberately gathered at night by the river with women students to chat and create times of laughter, which seemed to help.

Elected President of the Korean Student Association

I was elected president of the Korean student association, and as I spent time communicating with students going through hard times, I seemed to be getting an education in life myself. A few days after being elected, I was startled to see a North Korean newspaper printed in Pyongyang delivered to my mailbox. Since many foreign students had come from countries all over the world, there was no way to know who had connections with North Korea. Although it was a publication that came only once a month, the praise of Kim Il-sung grated on my eyes. When the university notified us of newly admitted students arriving from Korea, I also guided them from the airport to the school. I scraped together small change and got an old used Oldsmobile, and my friends teased me that, fortunately, it was a little classier than a jalopy. I had nearly finished my coursework, with only my thesis in architectural history remaining, so I wanted to gain design-office experience and grow familiar with American culture.

Taking Up Golf

There was a golf course on the University of Minnesota campus, and I was fascinated and could not contain my curiosity. Around the time I finished the coursework for my master's degree, I bought cheap used equipment, took instruction from a coach, and practiced indoors through the long winter. In the 1960s Korea had one golf course, for officers of the U.S. Eighth Army, and I had eyed it on my way past during my college days. It looked far too leisurely, a sport hard for us to understand. Two years after enrolling, I waited for the spring of 1968, slung my used clubs over my shoulder, and went to the golf course. With a fluttering heart I stopped at the clubhouse, showed my student ID, and asked how much it was. When they said $37.50, I was taken aback. As I was walking out, disappointed, someone called out behind me, "Per year." He laughed and I laughed, and from then on golf and I have been bound together in my life.

The four of us who started together then all became lifelong golfers, and one of them became the first Korean professional golfer to qualify as a senior professional. Competing with world-famous players, he set a new record in the history of Korean golf. That is Hyun Jun-sun, pro, now retired, coaching younger players and writing a serialized golf-tips column for the Korea Times in America. Golf has been with me my whole life; it was a tool of my business and became a sport my wife and I share. Walking together for four hours with my wife and friends, I have held on to its toilsome pleasure all my life.

A Lifetime Judo Instructor's Certificate

In the poor days I started playing soccer barefoot on the elementary school playground, kicking around a soft tennis ball. Just after liberation, rubber shoes were all there was in the homeland. I learned baseball from my father, basketball in middle school, judo in high school, and rugby in college, and I played on school teams, but our teams always came in last. Should I make the excuse that ours were schools that only studied, or the excuse that my parents thought studies were what mattered and did not seem to wish much for me to be an athlete? After coming to America, I stopped by the YMCA and showed them my judo technique, and they gave me a lifetime instructor's certificate and asked me to coach students, which made me swell with pride. I coached hard for a month, but the pay was about enough for bus fare, so I learned that America too has plenty of penny-pinchers.

It seemed remarkable to me that there was a football stadium with tens of thousands of seats on a university campus. College football is a sport that tens of thousands of spectators watch and cheer every year, and it is the most popular television program in winter. Games between players unusually large in build, strong, and quick in movement are a fierce spectacle, like the combat of gladiators before Emperor Nero in Roman times. The nature of the game, in which a single opportunity can decide the outcome, seemed unfair to our sensibilities, but it is a nail-biting game that keeps you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. Experienced coaches plan the strategy, and the players carry it out with their individual talent and strength. America is a land of opportunity, a society that gives everyone equal opportunity to succeed, and you can see that social experience in its sports as well.

Graduate Architectural Design Courses

Graduate architectural design courses were a striking contrast to education in Korea. One design assignment was given to five students, so, with my habit from Korea of earning my grades all on my own, I did not know what to do. Fortunately, each of the five students put good ideas and effort into his part, and we got a result far better than a failing grade. American students had grown up talking a great deal with their parents and siblings from childhood, while we had grown up quiet and silent before our elders, so they communicated their opinions smoothly, while for us, emotion came before speech.

American children learned drawing from a young age and were used to practicing team sports together, so they seemed more artistic than Asian students and good at teamwork. I saw that the atmosphere was very different: children who from an early age wanted to be locomotive engineers or dreamed of becoming firefighters, compared with the students of our country, who aspired to the one and only throne and dreamed of becoming president. We tended to be lone generals, so we were good at individual sports, while they seemed good at sports played together.

My Uncle's Pistol

In America, just as cars are common, every household keeps firearms. On farms in rural areas where animals often intrude, guns are a necessity. When I was in high school in Gwangju, during summer vacation I visited my uncle, who was director of the army hospital in Daejeon. My uncle's pistol fascinated me, so while he was at work I liked to fiddle with it, taking it apart and putting it back together. One day, just as I was about to put it back where my uncle had hidden it, the cleaning man came into the room. The moment he touched the gun, it went off with a "Bang!" Startled, I looked around to see whether I had been hit or the cleaning man had. Fortunately, the bullet went through the door and flew out into the street. I immediately ran out into the street barefoot. No one in the street was hurt either; the bullet had disappeared into an ice-pop machine at a shop across the street, leaving a small bullet hole. The machine was humming along just fine, so I couldn't say a word; I remember buying ice pops, bringing them back, sharing them with the cleaning man, and promising to keep it a secret.

The Tragedy of a Japanese Student

Gun accidents happen anywhere and at any time in America. A Japanese student, lost and wandering at night, saw a garage door open at some house and went into the dark garage to ask the way. Although the drunken homeowner shouted at him to stop and come no closer, the student, who could not speak English, kept approaching. The owner took the gun hanging on the wall and pulled the trigger at the frightening thing moving in the dark. The Japanese parents who had lost their son came to America and pressed charges against the killer. With a ruling of self-defense under American law, the parents went home empty-handed, and it is said that the number of Japanese students coming to America decreased after that.

People who own guns hang them over the fireplace with a feeling of security and proudly show them to friends. Even when a madman kills his neighbors with a gun, or gangs form and commit terrible crimes bringing in drugs, it is the American way of thinking that it is not the gun's fault. It is said that about thirty-three lives a day are sacrificed to guns. Just as when a person starts drinking, first the man drinks the liquor, then the liquor drinks the liquor, and if he drinks more the liquor drinks the man, so today the machines people made gave convenience, then machines came to make machines, and I wonder whether the time has now come when machines eat people.

In America, Thirty-Three People Die Every Day from Guns

If we look at the history of the gun in the world, it began with the firecrackers of East Asia when Genghis Khan of Mongolia conquered Europe in the eleventh century and founded the Mongol Empire, the largest in world history. The weapon Europeans feared most was the explosion of gunpowder inside bamboo, bursting with irresistible force, like splitting bamboo. The Europeans, who had trembled at the terror of explosions that went off with astonishing noise and burst into flame, invented the gun during the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, and soon made cannons. France's Napoleon, with guns and cannons at the fore, went on to conquer Europe and Africa.

After learning the East Asian compass and the navigational charts of the Ming dynasty, the nations of Europe set out by ship in search of new continents. They conquered Africa, India, and Southeast Asia and ruled them as colonies. The world that East Asians had dominated came under European domination with the Europeans' invention of the gun, and so began the modern history of today.

A History of Conquest That Began with the Gun

As acts of invasion began, driving out with guns and cannons the natives who resisted by shooting arrows, they drove out the natives of Asian Siberia, the Australian continent, and the North and South American continents, our blood kin, seized their land, and founded new countries. America had a modern history in which it brought Black slaves from Africa and the cowboy's pistol ruled society. In the First and Second World Wars it became the greatest power as the largest producer of weapons. America's National Rifle Association, an association of gun-owning citizens, boasts formidable political power in American society today.

Around the time I was finishing graduate school, I got a call from a friend. He had come far to America for the first time and wanted to see me. He said he was going home in a few days and asked to meet the next day. When I asked where he was, he said New York, and I was astonished. When I explained to him that the distance between Minneapolis and New York was like a friend in Seoul wanting to meet a friend in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, the next day, he was disappointed and went home after just a phone call. He seemed to have thought of it as a small country, like calling a friend in Daejeon after arriving in Seoul.

Around the time we graduated from the architecture department, Chairman Chung Ju-yung was founding Hyundai Construction and recruiting talent. Friends who were picked then had, some ten years later, often become executives of Korean construction companies and were working in construction abroad. Now and then friends who had gone into construction in the Middle East stopped in America to sign contracts with American construction companies. When we met and talked, there were many interesting stories.

The Days of the Middle East Construction Boom

When they bid on construction projects in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, they competed with American and European companies, and the bids of Korean companies were said to be in a far superior position. Korean workers were tough young men who had experienced the Vietnam War, and so, unlike foreign workers, they did not insist on conditions like an eight-hour workday, lodging with beds and refrigerators, or leave to go home; they were said to be loyal workers, working only for their country and their families. It was said to be the result of Korean companies beating experienced foreign companies with sharp minds and keen judgment, and failing and succeeding again and again in speculative ventures. One could say that Korea's globalization began with the Park Chung-hee government's participation in the Vietnam War, then the dispatch of miners and nurses to Germany, and then the construction industry in the Middle Eastern countries.

A Middle East Construction Anecdote

During Korea's sudden economic growth through participation in construction projects in many Middle Eastern countries, the anecdotes we heard from that process were endless. Among them is one you can't laugh at. A Korean businessman received a payment in dollar cash in London, England, and checked into a hotel in San Francisco. He tipped the bellhop and asked him to send up a woman. A little later a blonde woman came. He poured her a glass of whiskey and went into the shower, saying he would wash and come right out. While showering he suddenly worried about the bag of cash and opened the door to look, but the woman was nowhere to be seen. He hurriedly looked for the cash bag, but could not find it, so he immediately chased out into the hall. The door shut and locked behind him, and stark naked he rode the elevator down to the lobby and ran to find the bellhop. When they tried to seize the excited man shouting naked in clumsy English, he kicked someone in the face with a taekwondo kick. They told me the anecdote of how the police soon came running, threw an animal-catching net over him, and hauled him away.

A Friend from My Middle and High School Days in Korea

A friend with whom I had gone to middle and high school in Korea came to visit. We had parted around the time we went to college, and I was seeing him again after twenty-five years. My friend told me an old story I had long forgotten.
"Yong Wan, you go to college in Seoul. I'll stay here and take care of my mother."
My friend said this sadly, hanging from the chin-up bar, to me as I exercised beside him. I told him to tell his mother that if her son just went to college in Seoul for four years and came back, he would take even better care of her. My friend came down from the bar and said to me with an even gloomier face,
"I failed Korean literature."
The two of us were silent for a long while. Then I spoke again.
"Tomorrow let's go to the market and buy the teacher a present."
The next day the two of us wrapped a present the teacher would like, prettily, and took it to the teacher's house. I found Korean literature fun and studied it hard, and the teacher favored me, always publishing the poems I wrote in the school magazine.
When we arrived at the teacher's house, it gave the impression of an old village schoolroom where the Thousand Character Classic was taught. From the gate, the two of us went in with heads bowed, stood on the stepping stone in front of the main hall, and bowed our heads again in greeting. The teacher looked from one of us to the other and told us to come in. The two of us went up, gave him the present, and made a deep bow again. The teacher, sensing something unusual, asked why we had come.
"Sir, it seems my friend didn't study enough and got a failing grade. I'll take responsibility and see to it that, until the day we graduate, my friend studies again as much as I study myself."
The teacher, looking furious, shouted, "You crazy fools, get out at once," and the two of us backed out the gate. And we studied together and graduated together. Our homeroom teacher said that with his grades my friend could not apply to Seoul National University, but even then I persuaded the homeroom teacher that the newly established College of Dentistry did not have many applicants, and my friend applied to the College of Dentistry and was admitted. Then twenty-five years passed like a single moment. I had forgotten, but my friend had not, and he came to find me and tell me the story again; I was deeply moved and grateful.

My Friend's Good Fortune and Misfortune

The dental clinic my friend opened in our hometown of Gwangju was a great success. He was the very first Korean dentist to learn dental implant techniques, going to Chicago and Tokyo to study them. He joked that he had put in nearly all the gold teeth in Gwangju. Together we visited a friend who ran an orange grove in Orlando, Florida, played golf at Arnold Palmer's golf course, toured Disney World, and walked around together eating ice cream. And one day, a few months after he went back to Korea, I heard the news that my friend had early-stage liver cancer. I wrote him a letter begging him to quit drinking and smoking, be careful about what he ate, do light exercise every day, and change to a regular routine. My friend did as advised, and his health seemed to recover. But some time later I heard that he had started drinking and smoking again, and I was deeply disappointed. Soon afterward my friend was admitted to Samsung Medical Center in Seoul, and at the news that his condition was critical I wrote him a heartfelt letter.

--To my friend, who fights on without ceasing.--

There must be no words to say how hard it is. My heart, far away across the Pacific, can never leave your side these days. Whenever I recall our childhood, when we shared the lunches our mothers packed and walked the long way home from school together, the beautiful stories are endless. After I left the homeland, we lost touch for a long time, but the night we met again our friendship burned all the hotter, and the memory of talking all night long and filling in all the days we had left empty feels like yesterday. Ours has been a life that could not be more beautiful even if adorned with gold or silver.

As I wrote in last Christmas's card, I sometimes think you are a friend blessed with much good fortune. The hands of your wife, caring for you devotedly with her whole soul at your side; Samsung's medical team, the best in Korea, under the direction of our classmate who is the hospital director; the prayers of the citizens of Gwangju awaiting the recovery of so famous a dentist; your fellow Catholics who pray every day: not even any king of our country could have received such treatment when he was ill.

My friend, however hard it is, don't think of leaving. However good a heaven awaits us, let us live together in this world a little longer. Let us bury the pain with a smile and rise above fear with an easy heart. There can be no defeat before us, only the way of victory; that is how we have lived until now, when we were school athletes and when we pioneered our professions in our society, and that is how we will live from now on. We are eternal friends beyond death. The next time I write to you, I pray it will be to meet you again in good health, your treatment finished, recovered, and back home in our hometown.

I close this letter praying with tears to the holy heaven that created this world and governs us today.--

-From your friend Yong Wan, across the Pacific-

He Left This World Despite Our Earnest Prayers

Some time later my friend passed away, and I hurried on a Korean Air flight to make it in time for the funeral, but I barely arrived as the coffin was being lowered into the grave. I laid my hand on the coffin, called my friend's name again and again, said farewell in tears, and lowered the coffin. As the old saying goes, the giver forgets but the receiver does not; what I had done had vanished completely from my memory, but my friend called back those days, engraved our beautiful memories on my heart, and departed.

Fifty Years of the American Dream (2)

When I visited Florida, a little smaller than the Korean Peninsula, with my friend, there were many contrasts with Minnesota. Miami Airport was so crowded with foreigners from South America that you could confuse whether it was America or Mexico. He told me that in the 1980s, under Florida's economic development policy, the state offered incentives to attract elderly households within the United States who had saved retirement pensions, and populations from Central and South America with labor and productive capacity. But, my friend told me, the summer months of August and September are hot and humid and hard to bear. He said crickets and many other kinds of insects live alongside people. When we stopped at a McDonald's on some Atlantic beach, everyone, in the kitchen, at the register, even the people clearing tables, was elderly. I even had the frightening thought that this is how it would be if only long-lived people remained on the earth. How can Minnesota, where people live by overcoming the cold, and Florida, where people live by enduring the heat, be so different?

Yankees and Hillbillies

Just as North and South Korea differ even within Korea, which is smaller than California, it goes without saying for America with its vast land. Northerners are called Yankees and southerners are called hillbillies. Like the Korean War, here too they fought a war between North and South. Yankees are rational, social, and quick to act, but hillbillies are emotional, individual, and slow in thought and movement. Divided east and west, it is interesting that New York and Boston are European in style, while Los Angeles and San Francisco in the West are Asian or Mexican in style. Just as fifty-six ethnic groups live in China following their own cultures, in America people from every country in the world live together. The residents of New York in the East call California a zoo, and white supremacy shuns and looks down on people of color. But such old-fashioned tendencies are fading fast.

The Dog-Meat Culture of the Homeland

Around 1988, when the world Olympics were held in Korea and Japan, animal lovers in America and Europe tried to change the Korean custom of eating dog meat, but it did not seem to have much effect. Many other habits, however, such as spitting, lining up, and traffic order, showed good progress. It was when I had come to study at the University of Minnesota. A professor and his wife left their house and puppy in the care of two reliable-looking Korean students while they went on vacation. When they came home from vacation, the puppy was nowhere to be seen. The professor and his wife simply assumed the puppy had run away from home and not come back. A friend of the Korean students, who had eaten the puppy together with them, could not keep the secret and confided it to the president of the student association at his school. I heard that because of this the two students could not finish school and transferred far away to Texas, but in the end went home without graduating.

One wife, it is said, bought canned food with a picture of a dog on the label at the grocery store and cooked a spicy stew for her husband, who loved dog meat. Later she found out it was dog food, made by processing discarded food so it would not spoil and canning it. Too ashamed to tell anyone, he just suffered his heartburn alone.

One summer a few years ago, two young men who loved eating bosintang made from yellow dogs went traveling in America in the hot summer. Since America is a place where all the cultures of the world are gathered, they imagined there must be a dog-eating culture too. Then one day they heard that, as a custom of American farmers, a farmers' fair was held every year at the height of summer, around the end of August. For this festival, whole families gathered the livestock, fruit, and vegetables harvested on the farm over the year and went on an outing to the big city. It was a merry festival that lasted about two weeks, where people mingled with friends they met only at this time each year, traded stories of the year on the farm, and held all kinds of interesting events. Hearing this, the two young men went to the fairground (Fair Ground).