Hopes and concerns for S.Korea
When I think of Park Geun-hye, the newly elected first female president of South Korea, I think of the cherry blossom, a delicate flower that withstands frosty wind and ice all winter long, blooming at the first sign of spring.
In spite of North Korea’s threats and bluffs, she promises financial aid to its starving people and hopes to open dialogue.
Before I left Korea in 1964, Geun-hye was a 13-year-old student at Sacré-Coeur Middle School. Her father, then-President Park Chung-hee, and her mother were Buddhists. Ten years later, while living here in Kansas City, I read the shocking news that the first lady had been assassinated by a Japanese-born Korean Communist during the 29th anniversary celebration of Korea’s liberation from Japan, and that Geun-hye, who had been studying at Grenoble University in France was expected to return to Korea to assist her grieving father and siblings.
For the following five years, she played the role of first lady, until her father, too, was assassinated in 1979.
A quarter century later, I read about Geun-hye again. A man with criminal records had struck her with a utility knife during a political campaign, causing a deep facial wound that required 60 stitches. Still, she bounced back.
Although her father was responsible for 200 deaths and was seriously disliked for his iron-handed rulings that often ignored human rights in favor of economic development, I consider him a hero. The five-volume biography “Spit on My Grave” depicts late President Park as a visionary who refused to hand over the country to civilian leaders he distrusted and eventually built a solid foundation for the country that it stands today.
His major accomplishments include demanding that every citizen — even school kids — give their labor and talents for modernization of Korea, building a financial foothold and a strong alliance with the United States by deploying troops to the Vietnam War and launching the “revisit Korea” program to help former military personnel see how much progress South Korea has made.
Veteran Gene Tinberg, a member of the Korean War Veterans Association in Overland Park, regrets that he and his wife had brought the plane tickets to Korea last year but had to cancel the trip due to an unexpected health problem.
I asked him how he feels about the developing tension on the peninsula under the leadership of the first female president in Korea’s history.
“She’ll do very well,” he said without hesitation. “I read every article about her and her father, the late President Park…North Korea is simply bluffing. They have nothing to lose by blabbering and verbally attacking the South, but they don’t gain anything, either. If they do something to South Korea today, we’ll not just sit and watch!”
Understanding that “we” means the United States army, I thanked him for his opinion. I had believed in Americans as a child, and I do now, too.
“Are you coming to our Pancake Breakfast on April 6th, at the VFW in Lenexa?” he asked.
Though unspoken, I know he and most of the Korean War veterans have strong attachments to my native land, which holds so many memories of their youth, and they hope the best for the new president.
A father's tribute to his father's service
To Overland Park resident Tom Adams, Veterans Day has been all about sharing his memory of his father, Connie Adams (1919-1969), who served in two wars--World War II and the Korean War--with his son Tyler. Like Tom Brokaw, NBC anchorman and author of The Greatest Generation, who closely captured the footsteps of his father and other American servicemen in Europe and in the Pacific during World War II, Adams also covered short and long distances to catch a glimpse of his father, whom he lost at the tender age of sixteen.
In 1998, three years after the Korean War Memorial in Washington D.C. was built, Adams and his then 18 year-old-son made a big trip together to see it. “Tyler had a great impression about the monument,” Tom remembers. “It was a foggy day, and it seemed as though the sculptures of soldiers in raincoats were walking toward us, giving us an illusion that we were actually seeing them in Korea six decades ago. We then visited Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Seeing rows and rows of white headstones stretching in all directions, each with the name of the man buried under written on, was something to remember! You can’t help but to realize that real men, like my Dad, went to war thousands of miles away and came back--some alive and some dead--and all ended up here, in this sacred ground.”
Tom’s father isn’t among those buried at Arlington National Cemetery; he’s buried at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the world renowned academy that produced countless men of the “greatest generation,” including General Douglas MacArthur.
Connie Adams entered the army at Fort Meyer Military in Arlington, Virginia, and fought with the 30th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry-Division near the town of Colmar on Vosges Mountain range, not far from the French-German border. In November, 1944, he became the recipient of two medals--Purple Heart and Bronze Star Medal--one for the leg injury he received during combat and the other for his valor. When he arrived in Korea six years later in early July, 1950, as the 1st Sergeant in the First Cavalry Division, he was married to Tom’s mom, Jeanne Bartole Elliott, who had been a switchboard operator at the White House but was now employed by the Occupation Army in Tokyo, in the same capacity, under General MacArthur.
About that time 62 years ago, South Korea’s fate was that of a candle-flame in a torrential storm. Days earlier, 95,000 North Korean troops had launched a surprise attack across the 38th Parallel, and refugees carrying boxes, bundles, and small children on their backs were milling into the port city of Pusan, my hometown. All school buildings were confiscated by the government or the military without advance notice, and our motherland’s future seemed hopeless even to me, then a nine-year-old.
The First Cavalry was a “group of fearless, invincible brutes,” Author Colonel Red Reeder describes in his book Medal of Honor Heroes. “Although the 1st Cavalry was stretched thin--7000 riflemen holding a front of nearly 60 miles¬¬--it readied itself to battle the oncoming Communists.”
Sergeant Adams’ First Cavalry Division was among 140,000 UN troops who built a sturdy defense line called Pusan Perimeter along the southeast flank of the Korean Peninsula, bordering the towns of Taegu and Masan, and the Nakdong River. From this defense line, UN troops would plan a surprise amphibian landing known as Inchon Landing, succeed it two months later, on September 15th, turning the tide of the war.
By the time Tom Adams was born in June, 1952, in Aberdeen, Maryland, the war situation had changed. Instead of fighting against the North Koreans, the American troops were now fighting against the Chinese soldiers, who had stepped into the war-theater in late October the previous year. The Russian leader Joseph Stalin had died a year before, and General MacArthur had long been removed from his position as the Supreme Commander of the Far East and was writing his memoir “I Reminisce,” while living in New York with his wife and son.
After the war ended with the armistice in July, 1953, the senior Adams continued to serve his country as the 1st sergeant. In 1961, he retired from the army but worked at the athletic department at West Point a few more years, coaching and training cadets. In June 1969, a massive heart attack claimed his life at age 50.
Even today, the sounds of bugle playing Tabs bring Tom the memories of his father’s final days. “Dad said something I can never forget; that serving one’s nation as a soldier is the noblest profession of all professions. He had much physical discomfort...but he never complained. He was proud of what he and other Americans have done for other countries.”
The senior Adams had been glad that he heard General McArthur’s Farewell Speech at West Point on May 12th 1962, in which the general acknowledged and honored the sacrifices of all American servicemen:
I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory.
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Korea holds a bit of Black History
In February each year, we hear about men who changed the old “whites-only America” to the “all-color America” we live in today.
Black History Month began in 1926 when a black historian named Carter G. Woodson designated the second week of February as “Negro History Week.” He chose that week because it marked the birthdays of President Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, a former slave who marched on the front line of the abolition of slavery. Half a century later, in the bicentennial year of 1976, the observance was expanded to Black History Month. President Gerald Ford urged Americans to “seize the opportunity to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is probably one of the most powerful black leaders who awakened the conscience of America in racial issues, but long before him, growing up in Korea, I became acquainted with Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Might Korea’s long slavery to Imperial Japan from 1905 to 1945 have helped me understand Uncle Tom’s sorrow-filled life? It’s possible.
Shortly afterwards, the North Korean Communists invaded South Korea with Russian tanks, and we actually saw many black soldiers along with white soldiers who came to defend us. Korea had been so isolated from the rest of the world for so long that people treated all foreigners with suspicion and distrust, but their attitude toward black soldiers was worse. When a native woman was raped by a white soldier, the media ignored it because we were on the receiving end of America’s generosity. But when the rapist was a black soldier, it was a big deal; we read and heard about the news. More black infants born to the native women showed up in orphanages than white ones.
In late July 1950, a U.S. battalion combat team, including the 24th Infantry Regiment, which was made up entirely of black soldiers, recaptured the enemy-occupied town of Yechon and made big news both in Korea and in the States. It was one of the most successful offensive operations, and it allowed the U.N. Forces time to build a strong defense line called Pusan Perimeter along Nakdong River. A year later, in October 1951, the 24th Infantry Regiment was disbanded, ending long segregation in the U.S. military. Over the following two years, until the truce of 1953, hundreds of black soldiers held command positions in the infantry as well as in air units. This historic event happened in Korea.
Now, without a physical wall between white and black soldiers, mistrust settled in. White officers spread rumors that blacks would abandon any injured white officer on the battleground in cold blood, therefore shouldn’t be trusted. A black chaplain was accused of dampening black soldiers’ combat spirit by asking why men of color were forced to fight for white America. A black officer of a white unit was reassigned before combat because his subordinates didn’t respect him.
Still, many black officers proved their bravery through their exemplary conduct. Nearly 10 percent of the 54,000 fallen Americans were believed to be African Americans, though casualty records did not differentiate men’s race.
In spite of the fact that African-American soldiers did not receive the public recognition they deserved from their countrymen, we South Koreans are thankful to all Americans who delivered us freedom from the Communists. Since 1975, the South Korean government has been inviting their old heroes — of any race — to revisit the new Korea as guests of honor, paying all expenses, including the costs of lodging, meals, bus tours and entertainment, except half of their airfare. Since 2010, the program got even better. Now veterans’ spouses and companions get a 30 percent discount on their airfare, in addition to free stay.
Those who have participated in The Korean War Veterans Revisit program have expressed their awe at the new Korea and the warm hospitality they received. One veteran said to me, “We were treated like kings. Wherever we went, we were lavished with feasts and were showered with thanks. It was touching.”
I foresee that a few years down the road, we will see a segment of the Korean War on TV during Black History Month.
Dedicated Teachers are True Blessing
The Kansas City Star
During his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama spoke eloquently about national issues, including education.
While I have doubts about his call to all states to keep students in school until they graduate high school or turn 18, I agree with him that dedicated teachers deserve recognition.
Adolescents have ability to choose what they want to learn, when to learn and what they want to do with their lives. The assumption of Obama — a graduate of Harvard Law School and Columbia University — that all dropouts are potential government headaches who must be kept inside a school fence is not surprising. At the same time, Mao Zedong’s anti-education policy during his 27 years of ruling China, which created millions of illiterates, isn’t surprising, either, because he was a peasant’s son who hated the old feudal China that had been ruled by “stinking” intellectuals.
Education is a privilege, but too much of it can cause social problems. The South Korean government is suffering migraine headaches these days because too many citizens have college degrees and too few jobs are available for them.
South Korea might be the only country whose college graduates work as ticket masters at train stations, mail deliverers, low-level office clerks and common laborers. If President Obama understands the degree of frustration these Korean college graduates endure daily as they work at low-paying jobs that require only high school education, he’d not make such an unpractical demand on American youngsters. Learning takes the will of learners. What American youngsters need are reasons to learn.
But dedicated teachers are the salt of the earth.
Stella Jocoby taught English in public schools for nearly four decades until her retirement in the early 1980s, and a decade later she began teaching South Korean immigrants. This year, at age 100, she has six students and teaches five days a week. She gave up driving and uses a walker to get around, but she does everything I do daily; she reads, cooks and takes care of her apartment, beside teaching.
There is more; she writes her memoir these days. “For my family only,” she insisted while she and I had lunch together a week ago.
“A hundred years is a long time,” she said with a twinkle in her eyes. “I want my family to know who I was when I’m gone.”
Her memory is quite vivid. She talked fondly of her childhood in a four-room house in Moberly, Mo., and her high school years during the Great Depression.
It was her high school principal, Mr. Meredith, who encouraged her to go to the University of Missouri and get a teaching degree rather than going to the junior college in Moberly. At a time when teaching wasn’t a well-regarded profession for men, and women believed that their mission was keeping their homes in order, her decision to pursue a teaching career surprised her peers as well as her family. She not only holds a B.A. in English education but an M.A. as well.
“When I interviewed for my first teaching job, they asked me whether I plan to marry soon, and if so, would I start a family right away? You see, back in those days, teaching was considered as a vocation similar to that of a Catholic priest. I was fully aware of what I was getting into.”
I shared with her my memories. I grew up with a proverb: “A student must never step on his teacher’s shadow.” Influenced by Confucianism, the Korean culture demanded that kids display respect toward their teachers by bowing, at school or on the street. Some teachers overused their power and punished kids for just about everything they did by slashing thin bamboo sticks on their hands.
“On second thought,” I said, “American kids today have too much freedom and not enough respect for their teachers.”
“There must be a medium,” said Jacoby. “Most of my Korean students are adults who appreciate learning their second language. Their greatest asset is the will to learn.”
One of her Korean students told me that her teacher has a genuine passion to teach her and other Koreans she knew.
Before we parted, I said to Jacoby, “I want to be like you when I’m 100 years old.”
“You will be,” she said, without hesitation. “And I might be still around.”
If she is, I know she’ll be still teaching.
Birth of Choice: My U.S. Citizenship
This month, March, 2012, the Year of the Dragon, holds a magic card for me. My 40th birthday as a U.S. citizen is approaching, the Korean War Veterans Association is hosting its ninth annual pancake breakfast and my third novel, “The Northern Wind: Forced Journey to North Korea” will hit the market.
That solemn day, on March 30, 1972, as I held the Certificate of the U.S. Citizen in my hand, tears came to my eyes. It was not because I had flunked the first oral test by giving a wrong name for the Kansas State senator and had to retake it, but because in six years I had aged and withered. When I came to Kansas City as a newcomer in the cello section of the late Philharmonic in 1966, my sole purpose in life was “practice, practice, and practice,” but now my main focus was changing diapers, doing laundry and providing meals for five people — my three toddlers, including twins, a husband and myself — and two cats. This was the day I understood the immense power time plays in our lives.
Talking about the power of time…
When I was born in Korea seven decades ago, I didn’t know anything: I didn’t know our country was Japan’s colony, didn’t know I was about to be given a Japanese name, Sadako Omura, and didn’t know that nine months later Japan would attack Pearl Harbor and ignite the flame of massive destruction. Three decades later in the Jackson County Courthouse, I knew exactly what was happening. In fact, this time, my birth was my choice.
I had been dreaming of this day since I was nine, during the war known as The Forgotten War. We fourth graders were studying on a mountain slope without a roof over our heads and the American fighter planes with silvery wings in the air lured us to America. Over a decade and two music degrees later, I landed in Kansas City Municipal Airport, from Paris, with my cello and a suitcase.
Then I was a U.S. citizen. What would be the best way to celebrate one’s 40th birthday as a U.S. citizen?
I will join the pancake breakfast table at the VFW in Lenexa, 9550 Pflumm, on the 31st, hosted by the Korean War Veterans Association of Overland Park. (They will be there from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m.) Once upon a time, these gray-haired gentlemen played the role of supermen for us Korean kids, but now they and I are in the same School of Aging. Furthermore, their beloved country in whose honor they defended my helpless homeland in the Far East six decades ago has become my own beloved motherland. The power of time!
The association has been hosting a yearly fundraising pancake breakfast since 2004 to raise money for the construction of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, which was completed and dedicated in September 2006, much sooner than anyone had anticipated. As the response to the community’s warm and generous support, the group continues to raise money to help veteran-related benevolent organizations.
Last May, after the deadly tornado hit Joplin and other Midwestern towns, the association donated $500 for the renovation of a War Veterans Memorial in the small town of Reading, Kan., near Topeka. In addition to giving a yearly scholarship to a Navy ROTC student at the University of Kansas, members also donate money to a group that helps prepare U.S. troops leaving for Afghanistan, another that assists families of wounded soldiers adjust to new life with “disabilities” and still another, a ladies group, making quilts for patients in veterans hospitals.
On Dec. 4, at their annual Christmas party at the Sheraton Hotel in Overland Park, the association was at the receiving end of appreciation — from the South Korean government. In the presence of more than 100 guests, including local South Koreans, Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Chicago Jin Hyun Lee presented the Ambassador for Peace Medal to each of 43 members and shook their hands. Two days later, representatives of the Department of Defense 60th Anniversary of the Korean War Commemoration Committee presented the veterans with certificates of appreciation signed by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. They also held a brief wreath-laying ceremony at the Korean War Memorial in Overland Park before the granite wall bearing 415 names of fallen sons of Kansas.
The association has lost more than a dozen members since the dedication of the memorial in 2006, but its team spirit is vibrant than ever.
No one can live forever, according to the rules of Mother Nature. We will all depart someday — those who saved and those who are saved — but the Memorial will remain, with the inscription on the granite wall that reads FREEDOM IS NOT FREE!
Power, delusion, and Kim Jong-il
Kim Jong-Il died on Dec. 17, another triumph of the Year of the Rabbit! Kim had been suffering from pancreatic cancer for a few years, so no one was surprised about the news.
He inherited the Hermit Kingdom as it is today from his powerful father, Kim Il-Sung, who, with the help of Russians, established the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in 1948 and ruled it until his death in 1994. More than 500 statues of Kim Il-Sung stand throughout the nation and his name appears on many important buildings — Kim Il-Sung University, on the Arc de Triumph of Pyongyang built to honor and glorify Kim Il-Sung’s resistance against Japanese rulers of Korea and on Kim Il-Sung lapel pins, which every citizen must wear on national holidays, including the two Kims’ birthdays. I won’t be surprised at all if Kim Jong-Il’s name appears on women’s cosmetic jars, wine bottles and caviar containers, because he had been a womanizer, heavy wine drinker and caviar lover.
There are two theories surrounding Kim Jong-Il’s birth year. Soviet records show that he was born in the village of Vyatskoye, near Khabarovsk, on Feb. 16, 1941, where his father commanded the 1st Battalion of the Soviet 88th Brigade. But his official biography indicates that he was born in the following year, on the Korean side of the Korean-Russian border, on the same date. I vote for the Soviet record. The senior Kim had fled to Russia in the early days of Japanese occupation of Korea (1905-1945), along with other Korean activists, and joined the Russian army. While there, he met his first wife, a member of the Young Communist League of Korea. It’s possible that Jong-Il was born before the couple was legally married, and when they returned to their homeland a year later, they had a formal wedding and registered their son at the same time. This means that Kim Jong-Il was 70 years old when he died, not 69.
Like his father, Kim Jong-Il was worshipped as a deity by the North Koreans, who called the senior Kim Great Leader and the son Dear Leader. In April 2003, Dear Leader boasted for the first time that North Korea possessed nuclear weapons. Reports in April 2009 confirmed Dear Leader’s statement that North Korea indeed had become a full-fledged nuclear power. And on May 25, 2009, North Korea conducted its second nuclear test, making the rest of the world, especially its southern neighbors, fearful of what Dear Leader might do next. The world then regarded him as a child playing with a loaded rifle.
Dear Leader’s sushi-chef, a Japanese man, however, revealed another side of Kim Jong-Il: Dear Leader dearly loved the taste of caviar from Iran and Uzbekistan, pork from Denmark, Chinese grapes and Thai mangos and papayas. Dear Leader also loved to squander on his clothes, too, although he wasn’t material for a beauty pageant. He wore suits custom-tailored out of cashmere and silk blends produced by Scabal of London that costs $300 a yard (four yards were all he needed), favored shoes made by the Italian cobbler Moreschi and rode only Mercedes-Benz limousines. And he had a dozen luxurious mansions across the nation, while some of his people were homeless and starving. Why not? Wasn’t he the king of his own realm whose subjects could squeeze tears on demand and dance like puppets tied to strings to please their deity?
Yet Dear Leader didn’t choose his own time or place to die, nor could he prolong a single day of his dear life. He perished like a gypsy, on a moving train, away from his luxurious home in Pyongyang and the women he adored.
Dear fellow Americans, it’s time to count your blessings. You don’t have to bow down before your beloved president, nor wear Barack Obama lapel pins on his birthday! And your children don’t have to learn about Obama’s younger days as a civil rights attorney or an Illinois senator, or sing Dear Father Obama hymns at school!
God bless America!
The Year of the Dragon is almost here. In Asian mythology, a dragon represents wisdom and longevity and is benevolent to humans.
Happy Year of the Dragon for everyone!
Gratitudes as Rabbit Year Hops away
It’s that time of the year again, when a year ends and another year approaches.
It seems only a month ago I wrote about the Year of the Tiger moving away and the Rabbit Year hopping into our lives, but now we’re about to say farewell to our beloved Year of the Rabbit. I don’t know if I’ll be here when the next Year of the Rabbit returns in 2023, so let me say a few words about 2011. It was definitely smoother than the previous year, the year Haiti lost 250,000 lives to the earthquake and the oil spill off the Gulf Coast devastated wildlife. The tsunami in Japan took 80,000 lives — still horrifying, but far smaller than the Haiti earthquake’s death toll. A positive thought here.
Our host Rabbit has been busy, delivering peace to us humans. Thanks to him, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak stepped down and his people are mending pieces together to build a new country. And who do you think led the U.S. troops to find Osama bin Laden? Who knows mountain valleys and hills better than the Rabbit?
Looking back, I believe the Rabbit helped me grow and be enriched inwardly during 2011. In January, I began my volunteer job at a local hospital with a title “Waiting Room Attendant.” My sole responsibility is to make waiting time fun for children. I walk in with a shoulder bag bulging with toys and a smile on my face. “I have some toys here,” I announce. “Do you want to check them out?” For some children, that’s enough, but for shy ones, I use my tactics according to Master Confucius’ proverb, Seeing once is better than hearing a hundred times.
I spill the toys onto the table. The wooden building blocks, coloring papers, magic markers, memory games, Mr. Potato Heads and puzzles all speak to children in their unique ways, and the six chairs around the table fill quickly. Sometimes, I need to borrow two more chairs to accommodate my eager clients.
Children love to teach you what they know. This is where I learned about Jenga, a mental and physical game in which the players build a tall, unstable structure with unevenly cut, yet equal sized wooden blocks. Each player removes one block from the structure at a time, taking turns, until it collapses. The blocks make a huge clatter, making the children laugh each time.
Children share their life stories with me. One Chinese girl, about 10 years old, told me about the orphanage she used to live in until she was adopted by an American couple two years earlier. This happened when I told her about my trip to China, in Shangzi province, the previous year. “We had no toys or hot water,” she said. “And there were too many kids! Ten babies slept in one bed. I’ll never go back as long as I live!”
Another child, a boy 8 or 9 years old, decided to check me out, like a detective. “Why are you here?” he asked me inquisitively. “You don’t live here, do you?” I told him the truth. “I’m here to play with children. Do you know that I have four grandchildren, but I only see them three or four times a year? If you think that’s enough, you don’t know anything about how grandparents feel about their grandkids not living nearby. You feel lonesome as you get older.”
He was sympathetic. He asked me how old my grandkids were and where they lived. I told him, adding that three of them used to live in Kansas City but their parents took with them when they moved to Cleveland, without my permission. “I used to spend much time with them at Leawood Park, fishing or catching frogs and crawdads at the creek. Once, my grandson, then 5 years old, picked up a small snake and it bit his finger, and we rode an ambulance to an emergency room. He loves to talk about it, but to me it was the most horryfying day of my life.” I realized that I had a room full of sympathetic audience. One grandma clicked her tongue and said, “Poor Grandma. Was he OK?”
“He was very lucky,” I told her. “His attacker was just a little garter snake. But boy, was I scared!”
“I don’t blame you,” she said.
Once in a while I get a huge reward for just being there. One Hispanic boy, about 4 years old, didn’t utter a sound while he and I worked on coloring papers. When he was finished, I said, “That’s the most beautiful fish I ever saw.” He acknowledged my compliment by looking at me but didn’t say a word. He colored two more sheets, each time surprising me with bright color combinations and clean detail. When his name was called, the boy unexpectly came over and threw his arms around me.
A child’s genuine appreciation and love touch you deeper than a hundred words.
Good News from Voice of America
Living in Korea as a college student in the early 1960s, I enjoyed listening to “Voice of America” every Sunday morning through our Zenith radio.
Back then, the reporter was always a man who’d begin, “Good Morning, Korean citizens, I’m so-and-so from Voice of America in Washington, D.C. The weather this morning here is sunny with a mild breeze.” And then he’d talk about the pianist Dong-Il Han or violinist Kyung-Hwa Chung or other outstanding Koreans who were making the news in America at the time. It expanded our imaginations about America.
A half century later, I learned that the Voice of America had broadcast all over the Pacific — including my homeland — news of the “Benefit Concerts for the Blue Hills Neighborhood: In Honor of Black Korean War Veterans” that my friend professor Un Chong Christopher and I recently organized and performed in.
This boosted our egos, but the credit should go to Lewis Diuguid for a column on the concerts in The Star. VOA reporter Yanghee Jang read it in Washington, and called Diuguid for more information. I was one of a few who were interviewed for her report.
I was on Cloud Nine for a day or two; I even expected calls from my brothers and sisters in Korea, but they never came. Still, there was something grand about having been in the media for a worthwhile cause.
In her report, Jang depicted me as someone working in the predominantly African-American Blue Hills neighborhood through HOPE Committee, a volunteer group housed in St. Therese Little Flower church. However, the pastor at St. Therese, Father Ernie Davis, best described the reason we Koreans were honoring African-American soldiers of a long-ago-war during Black History Month. “There was not a single organization that ever did anything to honor the black soldiers who fought in every American war,” Davis said through VOA’s online channel. “But I’m truly glad that the local Koreans are remembering them for delivering freedom to their country six decades ago, alongside the white American troops, and planning the concerts in their honor.”
The concerts raised more than $5,000 for Blue Hills Neighborhood, but that’s not the best part of it. It was a fruitful community effort that connected the neighborhood with the local Korean community in the spirit of thanking Americans during the month designated to remember and honor black history.
Considering that this is the beginning of my seventh Chinese zodiac cycle, all signs of my future look good. I might be stretching if I say that life begins at the seventh cycle, but I feel that at least we should reverse Confucian theory that the young must learn from elders to say instead that the old shall be humble before the young masters and learn from them.
My piano trio buddies, Professor Christopher and Christian Fatu, treated this retired cellist kindly, never shaking their heads or pinching their eyebrows while we rehearsed the Mendelssohn Piano Trio in D Minor. I left the competitive world of music 16 years ago when I retired from the Kansas City Symphony, only playing occasionally here and there, while writing became my main focus. In reality, however, the musician in me has not died: she is still vibrantly alive. To prove this, I should talk about a small conversation I had at the reception following the concert at Cure of Ars.
A white-haired lady cautiously asked me, “How can your fingers still move so fast? I used to play the piano but I quit long time ago because of arthritis.”
I gave her a piece of advice: “I sprinkle WD-40 on my hands every morning to lubricate my rusted bones and joints. It surely helps.”
She laughed: “I’ll try anything. What can I possibly lose?”
I am grateful to all those who made the concerts successful in all aspects — spiritually, musically and financially.
The joys of being old and loved
My American-born daughter took me to my homeland of Korea as my belated 70th birthday present, and we spent one week there earlier this month.
Once upon a time, she was my infant, perfectly content in my arms (except you-know-when). She was born in the year when Neil Armstrong left the first human footprints on the moon, the reason she is adventurous. Back then, mothering was simple and easy, without emails or phone messages to worry about. I was the only world my daughter knew. But four decades later, among other things she does, she is a working mom balancing her professional career as a violinist in a prestigious American symphony orchestra and as a mother of my 8-year-old grandson, Oliver.
When I met her at the international terminal in Chicago airport, I realized that our roles have changed. She seemed to think that I was one who needed her care, not the other way around. She insisted on carrying my shoulder bag, although she had her own, and when I lagged behind her in the crowded corridor, she waited for me, like I used to for her when she was a child. And when I caught up with her she’d ask, “Are you all right, Mom?”
Before approaching the security area, she took my passport and boarding pass so that I won’t lose them. She assisted me, too, making sure that I took off my shoes and jacket and placed them in the provided plastic tub to be scanned.
The walkway seemed longer than I remembered. When I slowed my pace, she again asked, “Are you all right? We can rest a while if you want to.”
It was kind of her to make sure that her elderly mother wouldn’t follow a wrong crowd and board a plane heading for Africa or Afghanistan. At the same time, I was well aware that she was concerned about my age and declining stamina. Thank God she didn’t ask, “Do you need a wheelchair, Mom?” If she had, I’d have exploded like a firecracker on July 4th. The day I’ll need a wheelchair will surely come, sooner than I want, but I’d rather not worry about it yet.
But when we landed in Seoul after 14 hours, I regained my authority as her mom because she can’t speak Korean. She can understand a few words here and there, but not a long dialogue.
I liked being her mom again. I loved her dependency on me. I translated every sign on the street to English and decided where we’d eat, what to eat and where to visit. Yet, I recognized my Korean inferiority complex against my American daughter. When she seemed to be impressed by the skyscrapers towering over us or the statues of the famous emperor and admiral of the earlier Yi Dynasty along the boulevard, I was proud of my country’s past and present. But when I saw trash in the alley, I steered her away from it. After all, Korea is my homeland and she was a guest.
When we got together with my siblings, she was my proud child I kept bragging about. Was she an angel in her teenage years? Let me put it this way: In my 45 years in the United States, I got only one call from the police at night, and it happened to be the night she had gone to a concert in Bonner Spring without telling me about it. It was long after midnight when an officer called and reported that the junk car her friend was driving had broken down on Interstate 70 near The Paseo, and that she would get home soon.
I still thank God for the Kansas City Police Department for saving my daughter and her friend from all possible danger that night. I’m sure I gave her some pain and anguish of being my daughter, but I can’t remember them now. Memory loss is a blessing sometimes.
Our trip together was a time of healing and renewal. Sadly, though, my childhood hometown of Busan was so developed that I couldn’t find my home with its red brick fence and curvy ancient tile roof, but only endless apartment complexes. Gone, too, is the peaceful beach with golden sand speckled with jewel-like seashells where we turned brown like well-roasted Peking ducks every summer. The modernization of your country isn’t necessarily a positive thing for you.
On the return flight, while watching my daughter sleep in the next seat, I had an urge to lean over and kiss her on the cheek like I used to. But I was afraid I’d wake her up. More than that, she’d surely scold me for it. So, I only whispered, “Thanks for the memorable trip!”
Todays musicians stand on the Philharmonics' shoulders
On Sept. 23, the retired musicians of the Kansas City Symphony were invited to the dress rehearsal of its first subscription concert of 2011, which coincided with the opening concert in the newly built Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
Helzberg Hall, the new home of the Symphony, has 1,600 seats but looks smaller, perhaps due to the lofty ceiling, and the stage takes up about one-third of the entire space. The presence of the giant pipe organ looking down at the stage and the audience seems a bit overpowering, but the tiered seats surrounding the stage provide a cozy feeling. In this hall, no one needs binoculars to watch 80 musicians performing and the conductor on the podium dancing with his baton.
The rehearsal began with Maestro Michael Stern’s greetings to everyone — the musicians on the stage and about 60 spectators, some with cameras, in the audience. He acknowledged the presence of retirees and said that without each musician’s long years of dedicated service, the Symphony would not have come this far. He thanked the contributors for making the dream come true.
With the conductor’s cue, a rapid drumroll resounded and then the national anthem exploded in the hall. Everyone stood up, including all the musicians, except the cello section.
O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming…
My mind rushed back to late 1966. It was at the Philharmonic’s first concert of that season at the Music Hall — my very first concert with an American orchestra — and we were playing this solemn music under the baton of Maestro Hans Schwieger, a German conductor who led the orchestra for a quarter of a century until 1973. There was an air of festivity and excitement as a few cadets from the military stood rigidly on the edge of the stage, and the hall was full of people in their finest evening dresses — long skirts, jewelry and bow ties.
That year, the season began in early December instead of October. For more than two months, we musicians had been on strike. We attended countless meetings and held picket signs on the streets of downtown that read, “Support the Local Symphony!” We were glad to be on the stage.
Forty-five years later, as a retiree, I stand in the new concert hall with gleaming hardwood floor and an expensive acoustic system and sing the anthem with surging emotions with my old colleagues. How fast those years have gone by! How much faster will my remaining years go? I thought of those who are no longer with us. They’d have been glad to share this moment with their new colleagues in this new, beautiful hall.
The Symphony’s website only mentions the “dissolution of the Kansas City Philharmonic in 1982,” but the old Philharmonic enriched the lives of many in Kansas City for 49 years. It was born in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression — the same year the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opened to the public — under the leadership of American-born Maestro Karl Krueger.
Until its demise in 1982, many world-renowned concert artists performed with us: Marian Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, Henryk Szeryng, David Oistrak, Nathan Milstein, Leonard Rose, Aram Khachaturian and Isaac Stern, the father of Maestro Michael Stern. A handful of Philharmonic musicians are still playing with the Symphony today.
Pianist Emanuel Ax, the featured soloist of the Sept. 23 concert, also had performed with the Philharmonic as a young man and has been the Symphony’s guest artist many times since. Today, he, too, looks seasoned with frost on his head but still plays Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with passion, the way the composer himself would have played.
In this new hall, the past, present and future of the Kansas City Symphony come together in the presence of young and old musicians, contributors and music lovers.
I treasure the time the Philharmonic performed at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1976 during Maurice Peress’ leadership, six years before the Philharmonic died and then resurrected with a new name — the Symphony. (The repertoire was the overture of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, Duke Ellington’s Medley in A, and Shostakovitch’s Symphony No. 4.) We received standing ovations from the finicky New Yorkers.
And I will treasure this moment, too, listening to this rehearsal with my old colleagues, in this new hall.
Long live the Symphony! Long live Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts!
Still called to the Dream
As joyful events bring people close together, grief also draws families, friends and neighbors to one another.
At 3 p.m. Aug. 24, the parish hall at St. Therese Little Flower Catholic Church in Kansas City bustled with nearly 200 mourners arriving from Samir Clark’s memorial service at Zion Grove Missionary Baptist Church. A week earlier, the 19-year-old college student’s life was shortened by a bullet as he and his cousin responded to a woman’s cry to help hide her kids from a gunman. Samir’s mother, grandmother, aunt and uncle are members of St. Therese Little Flower, the reason the church hosted the luncheon to comfort the grieving families and friends.
Samir was Kansas City’s 70th homicide this year, one of several on the east side of the town within weeks. Kansas City’s 63rd homicide of 2011 occurred on Aug. 3 across the street from the church. A year earlier, two men exchanged shots in broad daylight a few yards away from the church; one of them died.
The news saddened me because in late 1960s, I was a young mom raising my firstborn near Swope Park. My family album is full of photos of my younger self with my infant daughter, who’s now 42. Also, the Landing at 63rd Street and Troost Avenue had been a convenient neighborhood shopping center with Macy’s Department Store, Woolworth, restaurants and the brightly colored Noah’s Ark fountain in the open court, which attracted children of all ages.
The atmosphere at the luncheon for Samir was memorable, although the heat was oppressive in the hall, which didn’t have central air conditioning, A few white ladies ushered black guests to tables and served them drinks, too. The pastor, a white priest, was busily moving about, greeting guests with handshakes or hugs, making sure fans were working properly and delivering paper fans to the guests when the heat was unbearable. A few black children and white children in their Sunday best were chasing one another, giggling as well. Black guests and white guests were sharing the same tables, talking about the young man they had loved dearly.
Countless hugs were exchanged between black and white mourners. Tears of grief and sorrow were shed from blue, green and brown eyes. Words of condolence were expressed over and over by everyone.
I couldn’t help but think of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had changed the world with his “I have a dream” speech nearly a half century earlier:
I have a dream; that one day the sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners will be together at the table of brotherhood…; I have a dream; that one day little black boys and little black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.… We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites only…”
Kansas City has come a long way since King spoke those powerful words. Nowhere in Kansas City do we see a sign that reads, “Whites only.” Like in this parish hall, white and black people are together at the table of brotherhood at the roadside café or even at McDonald’s. Children of white, black, yellow and copper skin play innocently together at public parks.
But why isn’t the world better? Everyone in that parish hall seemed to be asking that: Why so many senseless killings? How long must we live in fear? Who will be next?
A black lady in her mid-50s who sat next to me blamed parents of teens for the ongoing crimes in the area. She said, “People don’t care about their kids anymore... Kids can do whatever they want... See that lady over there? She was a schoolteacher but she quit because kids don’t respect anyone.”
I see another side of the coin. The parents might not have learned to respect themselves or others when they were kids, perhaps due to bitterness and hatred that had been passed on from earlier generations. Also, once a child reaches puberty, he or she looks for higher authority than that of their parents.
This is when a man like King can step into their lives and lift their spirits with his powerful lines, “We must conduct our struggle on the higher plane of dignity and discipline…We must not abuse the freedom… Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights…Now is the time!”
The Rev. Martin Luther King has not died, not really. He’s still calling Americans — young and old, white and black, rich and poor — from the recently installed Stone of Hope in Washington D.C., to march with him to the Promised Land.
Students follow path to excellence
On Aug. 11, 2011, I attended a reception at the Truman Library honoring two local students — Riya Mehta of Pembroke High School and Sophia Mauro of Barstow School — who finished in the top five at the 2011 National History Day Competition in June.
According to a news report, about 700,000 students and 40,000 teachers from all 50 states participated in History Day programs, and only about 2,000 winners were selected to compete at the national level.
Sophia won fifth prize for her one-person play, “The Integration of Kansas City’s Black and White Hospitals.”
Speaking in the voices of several white doctors involved in decision making at the time, Sophia took the audience with her to 1957 in Kansas City, when the city operated two public hospitals, General Hospital No. 1 for whites and General Hospital No. 2 for African-Americans, and walked with them until the two hospitals merged into No-Color Hospital in 1962.
Sophia engaged her audience with confidence, knowledge of her topic, and most importantly, deep compassion for those mistreated by whites due to their skin color at the time white doctors dominated the medical field.
Riya won third place with her presentation “The Forgotten War: A Diplomatic Failure.”
As a Korean who lived through the war as a child, I was intrigued by her choice of topic and her understanding of the Korean War — how and when the country was divided, why four million lives from both sides were lost during a 3-year-long war that didn’t melt down the Iron Wall called the 38th Parallel, and how the war ended with the truce signed by only Americans and Chinese, without the Korean leaders’ signatures.
Riya ended her performance with North Korea’s brutal attack of the South on Nov. 23, 2010, emphasizing that the two Koreas are still enemies.
Coming home, I made a few notes in my head. Students like Riya and Sophia will someday make their own history in America, but I won’t be there to tell people that I watched their performances at the Truman Library one August evening in 2011 or to personally congratulate them. But by sharing my memories of the time I was their age, maybe I can tell them how fortunate they are compared to the youngsters of the Third World in the earlier generation.
During the fall semester in 1953, shortly after the war ended on July 27, all school kids were put to physical labor under the motto “The future of Korea is in your hands!” One of the projects we middle school kids participated in was planting trees on our bold mountains that had been robbed of mature trees during the 35 years of Japan’s colonial rule — 1910 to 1945. Our tyrants shamelessly chopped down trees from our mountains and hillsides and shipped them to Japan or Manchuria or the Pacific to build battle ships, Zero Fighters, and kamikaze planes.
We planted for weeks that fall and in spring, we went back to the hillsides to plant more, until our hands blistered and our backs ached. Then came another project, more difficult than planting trees.
In 1954, our school was still occupied by the South Korean army that had used our three-story stone building as a make-shift hospital during the war, but they graciously let us use their crudely built army huts in the school property as classrooms. Still, we needed a place large enough for weekly assembly of 500 students.
Most seventh graders were assigned to carry dirt from the mountains to our campus, each 10 trips a day, while older students worked with volunteers and parents, mixing concrete, nailing and even installing roof tiles. I remember how laborious it was to carry buckets filled with dirt all day! But our teachers, who didn’t do any labor except marking the charts they were holding, constantly reminded us that our sweat and blisters would become the solid foundation on which our country would stand someday.
That “someday” came sooner than we had thought. Men and women of my generation are the ones who helped our ailing motherland get on her feet and walk on the path of steady progress, and today, South Korea boasts her status as the United States’ seventh-largest trading partner and the 15th-largest economy in the world.
While I am proud of Riya and Sophia, I respect their teachers, who showed them the path to excellence.
A crawdad bridge between generations
Grandmothering today’s American kids is not a small task, but when the grandma was made in Korea in an earlier century, the task is doubly difficult.
The generation gap is one thing, but when the cultural gap between the grandma and the kids is as wide as the Pacific Ocean, one has to look at both sides with a fair mind.
My grandmothering techniques and insights came from my own grandmother, who lived with our family a few months a year. As a Confucian scholar’s daughter, she ruled us with her quiet certitude, besides being a loyal mediator between our dictator parents and us the “oppressed.”
In her gentle-yet-firm manner, she always pictured our parents as ideal adults with sublime intentions for their offspring, often using the ancient proverb, “Saplings need good hands to be pruned and trimmed.” But when we got out of her hands, she would say, “A stubborn young donkey grows horns on its butt.” None of us wanted to see horns coming out of the wrong ends, so we behaved.
More than six decades later, I find myself clueless sometimes on how to be a grandma to my carefree American-born grandkids — two boys and two girls — whose fathers are American. I sometimes wish I could lecture them on the proper demeanor of the young before elders or use the proverbs I grew up with, but how could I? I only see them when their parents are present.
This is the reason my husband and I take a short vacation with them each year, without their parents, in a cabin in northern Ohio amid thick pines, to reform them under the Confucian codes. But they don’t let me. In fact, they try to reform me into an American grandma, by correcting my accented English and lecturing, too.
“Grandma, you called ‘kayak’ kayaky,” Oliver, 8, said and laughed.
“It’s not ‘forgettable,’ Grandma,” Emma, 10, said. “It’s ‘forgetful!”
Alex, 14, who, as a young boy, used to correct practically everything I said, doesn’t do it anymore; he only gives me a certain look, which tells me, “Come on, Grandma! You can do better than that!”
For this year’s three-day vacation, I showed up with a bicycle helmet, besides boxes of food, goodies and toys. The previous time, a sneaker flew in my direction while I tried to settle an argument between two sisters. Luckily, it didn’t hit me. Who was the thrower of the shoe? I’d rather not say in an attempt to protect her reputation. What’s important here is the fact that I wasn’t going to let anything land on my head. The thrower thought my precaution silly. She said, “You worry too much, Grandma. Seriously!”
Maybe I worry too much. Nothing flew in my direction this time. God bless America!
Whether this grandma can speak proper English or not, one thing my American grandkids mutually agreed among themselves was the solemn fact that their Korean grandma can catch crawdads as well as they or even better. The shallow end of the Grand River in the Hidden Valley Park near our cabin was heavily congregated with crawdads in all sizes. We spent a whole afternoon at the stream with a single goal — to catch. According to Oliver, who knows much about living creatures on this planet, crawdads could move forward or backward, very quickly. With this in mind, I mastered my catching skill in no time, and by the end of the day I claimed one third of more than 40 critters in our bucket as my prisoners.
American kids are humanitarians. Korean kids would have taken their catch home to show off, but my grandkids kindly released them back to the river, saying, “Goodbye, guys. We’ll be back!”
Good times always fly too fast, true? Before we parted, Sarah, 7, said to my husband and me, “You’re the only grandparents I know who can put up with wild kids. None of my friends’ grandparents do any fun things with them, like you do with us.” Knowing Sarah, who loves to argue with me and challenge my Korean Grandmotherly authority, I took her words as a compliment.
No matter what I say to them, they’ll always be Americans, and no matter how many times they correct me, this grandma will never speak perfect English as long as she lives. But I know they will remember how courageously their Korean grandma caught crawdads in that stream on one July afternoon this year.
Hidden Danger in Water
Summer heat draws families to public swimming pools or lakes or the ocean for a cool dip and fun.
In intense heat, bluish water under the hot sun is ever so alluring. But sometimes water demands a high price.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 3,500 Americans drown each year. Twenty-five percent of them are children under 14, and in most cases the tragedy happens while their parents or other adults are near. Adult negligence is a common factor in drownings in this age group, and the danger is everywhere: It can be your own backyard pool or a crowded public pool.
Parents should never forget the fact that it takes only 3 to 5 minutes for a child to die when the oxygen supply is cut off from the brain.
While I was in the seventh grade, in Korea, I narrowly escaped a fatal accident at the beach. It was in August 1953, the fateful year when the war ended with the armistice.
All summer long, school kids in all levels had been demonstrating against the ceasefire agreement the world leaders were negotiating at the 38th Parallel, sometimes at the town square or in front of the U.S. Army base, marching and shouting, “We want reunification!” or “We’ll fight until the last man!” But the war ended anyway, and we had to catch up with the business of living again.
Our parents arranged a big farewell picnic for our relatives returning to their original homes in Seoul, and a dozen adults and more than 20 kids gathered at the beach on a Sunday, under a colorful canopy.
It was a windy day, which wasn’t unusual for this part of the Pacific coast.
After lunch, my father entertained my uncles under one side of the canopy, offering beer and rice wine, and my mother was on another side with my aunts, who were all excited about returning to their homes in the capital.
The kids scattered. While older boys played soccer and older girls dug clams, a cousin who was my age and I played with a beach ball in the shallow water. within minutes, the wind snatched our ball and took it to a deeper part of the ocean.
We had nothing else to do, so we began to ride waves from where water reached our waists. When waves were coming toward the beach, we jumped in head first, and the force of water pushed us back to the shallow area. It was lots of fun. We did this again and again, moving deeper and deeper, trusting that the waves would bring us back to where we were.
I should have never trusted the ocean. After a few more fun rides, I stood up to catch my breath, but my feet couldn’t touch the ocean floor. I panicked. My cousin was only a few feet away, but I couldn’t get to her. I screamed but no sound came out of me. The next moment, I caught a glimpse of my cousin running toward the sand strip and thought she had abandoned me.
All I could see was the water churning and whirling before my eyes, and I didn’t know which side was the sky and which the sea floor. I heard no human voices, only the shouts of ocean. Where is everyone? Why aren’t they coming to get me? Another wave forced me to perform somersaults and I was scared and lightheaded.
Worst of all, I couldn’t breathe! I’m dying here, all alone! I’m only 12… A crushing pain blossomed in my chest. God, help me! I’ll do anything!
Suddenly, I felt a hand on my arm and then saw a face zooming in. It was my 17-year-old Second Brother. I must have clung to him desperately, because he yelled, “Let go of me! Let go…” Now, we were both sinking.
I don’t know how long we were in that locked position, my brother trying to free himself from my embrace and me clinging to him. But I do remember a man lifting me onto a rubber tube. The next thing I knew, I was riding toward the beach.
My mother rushed to me, crying, “It was my fault! It was my fault!” The rest of my memory of the day is in fragments. Everyone, including total strangers, asked, “Are you all right, child?” Some hands pumped my stomach, hurting me. My father thanked my cousin again and again for saving me by alerting others where I was.
After that day, my parents never invited another family for a picnic at the beach. Many times, my mother said to me, “If I lost you that day, I would never forgive myself.”
Retired musician Therese Park has written two novels.
Stephen Foster, Beautiful Dreamer
While visiting my daughter’s family in Pittsburgh, Pa., in June, I became reacquainted with Stephen Foster and his songs that have enriched people’s lives for more than 150 years.
In 20 of his 37 years on earth, he wrote 286 songs that are still sung today. “My Old Kentucky Home” is the Kentucky state song. Today, parks, schools and streets nationwide bear his name or the title of his songs.
Pittsburgh is proud of her native genius. Stephen Foster Center stands on Main Street downtown, a few blocks from the Foster family home. And the Stephen Foster Memorial is on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. The Lawrenceville Historical Society hosts an annual music festival to honor America’s most revered songwriter at the Allegheny Cemetery, where Foster is buried.
My 7-year-old grandson Oliver and I invited ourselves to the Stephen Foster Center on a warm summer day. It had been a public school once, but today it serves as a day care center and a senior citizen center operated by the Catholic Youth Association of Pittsburgh Diocese.
When we got there, the front lawn was full of kids from 4 to 10 years old enjoying their lunch break — some chasing one another, some going up and down the climbing wall, and a few clumsily playing baseball. Oliver joined them, and soon they played together as if they had been friends all their lives. Sitting on a bench, I wondered if these children knew who Stephen Foster was. What would they tell their own kids about this place when they were older?
Stephen Foster’s melodies are warm and fluid and his lyrics powerful, the reason they were well-loved for such a long time. “Old Black Joe,” for instance, depicts the heartbreaking lives of slaves on a plantation.
Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away, Gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.”
Why do I weep when my heart should feel no pain?Why do I sigh when my friends come not again? Grieving for them now departed long ago?I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.”
The first time I heard this song was in 1957 at Marian Anderson’s first and last solo recital in Seoul, Korea. Then a teenager, I was overwhelmed by her expressive, compassionate voice and musicality, which made “Old Black Joe” come alive as a real plantation worker in Mississippi.
My favorite, however, is “Beautiful Dreamer,” Foster’s last song, which he wrote in 1863, months before his death.
He lived in Pittsburgh most of his life until he moved to New York in 1860 with his wife and daughter. He died four years later, alone, a broken man suffering from alcoholism and loneliness. He had only 35 cents at the time of his death.
“Beautiful Dreamer” speaks to me in a way other songs can’t because I sense his desperate attempt to escape from his devastating sickness and hopelessness between the lines.
Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee; Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day, Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away! Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song, List while I woo thee with soft melody; Gone are the cares of life’s busy throng, Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea Mermaids are chanting the wild lorelie; Over the streamlet vapors are borne, Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn. Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart, E’en as the morn on the streamlet and sea; Then will all clouds of sorrow depart, Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Stephen Foster’s message is, no matter how cruelly life treats us, we must look forward to a better day and dream beautiful dreams until our last breath.
Blest are average people
After reading “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” in The Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua earlier this year, I asked myself these questions:
Did I know what was best for my three American-born daughters and ignore their desires? Did I think they owed me everything, including their successes and happiness, because I’ve done so much for them? Did I punish them for not obeying me? With “No” to all three questions, I was relieved.
According to the UC Berkeley news magazine “Hard Boiled,” Asian-American women have the highest suicide rate among 15- to 24-year-olds in the United States, and every year nearly 1,100 of the same women’s group nationwide commit suicide due to the pressures from home and academic demands.
I find the article by Chua (who also wrote the book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) embarrassing, not only that she considered Korean mothers to be like herself but also that she spelled out her “recipe” for making stereotypically successful kids. Her two daughters were not allowed to attend slumber parties or get any grade less than “As” or choose their own extracurricular activities or learn to play any instrument but violin or piano. When her demands were not met, her daughters were verbally abused and lost their meals or toys or their future birthday presents.
When I became an American citizen four decades ago, I solemnly swore before an American judge that I will absolutely renounce and abjure all allegiance to any foreign state (including my native country); that I will support the laws of the United States of America; that I will perform work of national importance. My duties included raising my children as American citizens, not Korean citizens. Had I wanted to raise my daughters the way I was raised in Korea, why would I have come to the United States?
My daughters helped me to be a better American citizen. They corrected my accented English, my bad grammar, and let me look over their shoulders while they did their English assignments so that I could improve my second language. They also set their boundary against their Korean mother.
“Mom, we’re tired of eating steamed rice and stinky soybean paste stew almost every day,” they often complained. “Why can’t we have hamburgers and French fries for dinner like normal American kids?”
Granted! I made hamburgers and French fries or hotdogs and Tater Tots for dinner, and they were blissfully happy. But their father grumbled, “Since when did you think I liked American junk food?” It was my turn to say that we were not in Korea and that we should at least try to eat like normal American folks once in a while.
I, too, encouraged each of my daughters to play a musical instrument, but I never forced them the way Chua forced her daughters. Still, my first-born became a professional violinist who’s now a member of a prestigious American symphony orchestra. Did I fail as a mother because only one daughter chose her career in music instead of all three?
My mother, too, demanded that her seven kids get “As” in every subject and lectured us not to “shame” her. The only child who met her demand was my eldest brother. He was extremely bright, as bright as 200-watt light bulb, which made the rest of us look dim.
Next to him, I was only about 40 watts bright. The day I had to deliver my report card, I purposely took a longer way home, hoping someone would snatch my book bag with my report card in it and vanish. But it never happened. In my sixth year in elementary school, my dimness worsened. I had three “Bs” on my report card one day, and I tore it up.
“You’re an average kid,” Mom declared when she found out what I had done with my report card. “You might as well know that the life of an average woman in this society is an endless thicket of thorn bushes. You will have to swallow many tears.”
It was a turning point of my life. Without mom’s tight grip on me, I began to breathe.
Average kids have time to dream big dreams and learn from their own mistakes, while “stereotypical successful kids” are too busy following rules.
Average men made the world we live in today. Ludwig Van Beethoven was an average boy whose abusive, alcoholic father forced him to play piano like Mozart. By resisting his tyrant, he found his creative force within. Albert Einstein, too, was an average child who didn’t begin to speak until he was 3 years old, and as a teenager, he failed entry exams to the Swiss National Polytechnic.
Each child is born with gifts, and parents’ duty is to nurture them with love and tenderness.
The Privilege of Giving
The merciless summer heat that has ruined cornfields and prairie grassland across the Midwest this year has also melted ice on the Arctic Ocean, the news reports.
This worries scientists as well as experts on children. If the earth keeps warming up as it has for the last few decades, how long will it take for the North Pole to melt down and vanish? The story of Santa Claus — the jovial man who lives at the North Pole and brings presents to children everywhere on Christmas Eve — has enriched lives with the message of hope, magic and love for more than a century. Will global warming eventually change Christmas stories? Where will Santa’s home be 20 years from now? For today’s young readers, Santa landing in a spaceship would be very cool. Just a thought.
For some children, however, Santa doesn’t necessarily live at the North Pole, wear a red suit, laugh “Ho, ho, ho!” or arrive on a sled pulled by reindeer. Ask the children who live in the Eastside of Kansas City. They’ll tell you who Santa is.
For three decades, members of St. Therese Little Flower Church at 58th and Euclid — many of them Johnson County residents — have been playing Santa’s role for as many as 300 families who live near the church. The recipients include single women raising children, widowed senior citizens and families of policemen and soldiers with injuries that prevent them from working, to mention only a few examples.
But this year, the number of the families will be reduced, according to the program director, B.J. Atkinson.
At an Aug. 19 meeting in the church rectory about this year’s Christmas Basket program, B.J. thanked a dozen attendees for their on-going support.
“Unfortunately, this year we can only serve about 200 families,” she said.
She informed attendees that one of the most generous benefactors — someone known as “The Turkey man” — had died, and that small business owners who had donated money and gift items for years had closed their doors due to the poor economy. “I don’t know which families I should eliminate from my list.”
Even for 200 families, the group needs to raise funds as they do every year. The group voted to hold a bake sale on Oct. 21 and an arts and craft sale on Oct. 28.
Since 1995, B.J. has served as the director of the emergency assistance program, which includes distributing food and other essentials to those who need help. The program helps with unpaid utility bills as well.
One of the volunteers, Johnson County resident Judy Rieck, who has donated time and gift items for 10 years, described the basket-giving ceremony that takes place a couple of weeks prior to Christmas.
“There’s a festivity in the Parish Hall with brightly lit Christmas trees — one loaded with toys and the other hand-knit wool hats — and shrieks of children,” Rieck said. “Though we call it ‘Christmas baskets’ they are actually grocery carts full of gift items — a turkey, fresh vegetables, fruit, toiletries, canned goods, toys, underwear and more. We volunteers try to look our best in colorful Christmas outfits and do everything to make our clients’ holiday as special as possible, from packing and filling the carts to pushing the carts to their vehicles and unloading them. The joy of giving makes me go back each year.”
Six decades ago, as a 9-year-old in war-devastated Korea, I was on the receiving end of Christmas presents that had come from America. In fact, the Christmas Eve in 1950 was the first time I saw a live Santa.
The previous month, the Chinese army had entered into the war theater and every day we heard the news of retreating U.N. forces in freezing weather. But that evening, I was filled with joy and excitement as I watched a hefty American in a red Santa’s suit standing at the altar, babbling in English. With help of our pastor, who spoke some English, the Santa said that he’d have come in his reindeer-drawn sled but they were afraid of the Communists, leaving him with no choice but drive a military Jeep all the way from the North Pole! Then laughing ho, ho, ho, he motioned all children to the front.
How thrilled we were when he gave each of us a bulging red stocking! Mine was filled with a box of crayons, pencils, candy canes, colorful marbles, gloves and socks. Our country had been so impoverished during the four decades of Japanese control of Korea that ended in 1945, but with war going on at the time, our country was too poor to produce anything decent, including pencils and crayons.
Six decades later, I appreciate what I had received from Americans as a child, but I appreciate more for the fact that I can now give.
Albert Schweitzer said, “You must give some time to your fellow man. Even if it’s a little thing, do something…for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.”
Miracles of Fatima goes beyond borders
Pilgrims are everywhere here on the square of the Basilica of Our Lady: some are walking on their knees on the 820-foot-long marble prayer path, rolling rosary beads in their hands, and some are kneeling at the glass-walled Chapel of Apparition where the Blessed Virgin appeared to three shepherd children in 1917.
Inside the 213-foot-tall basilica, six Masses are celebrated daily, and in the Pope Paul VI Pastoral Center on the opposite side of the square, confessions are heard from 9 to 5, seven days a week, in seven different languages. This is a spiritual sanctuary where troubled hearts and souls seek peace and solace.
Not many Americans had heard of Fatima, a small town in central Portugal, until the Blessed Virgin appeared six times on a pasture known as Cova da Iria, on the 13th day of the month beginning in May 1917.
At the sixth and the final apparition on October 13, about 70,000 people watched what is known as the Miracle of the Sun.
The Lisbon daily, O Dia, reported the unbelievable event: “...the silver sun, enveloped in the same gauzy purple light was seen to whirl and turn in the circle of broken clouds...The light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral, and spread itself over the people who knelt with outstretched hands...”
Similar reports were published in every major newspaper around the world, along with the Lady’s prediction and messages to the world, including Russia’s abandonment of the Christian faith and embrace of Communist totalitarianism.
I didn’t come here as a pilgrim, yet I feel deeply connected to this place. Fatima and her mysteries were introduced to Koreans by Americans sometime after World War II ended, and our country, which had been a colony of Japan for 40 years, was placed under U.S. trusteeship.
To those who’ve never experienced the fear of the world falling on top of their heads, the word “miracle” doesn’t mean much. But for the “forsaken” people, like we were in June 1950 before the Red Army’s Russian tanks and ammunition, the thought of miracle is the only escape from the fear of evil.
Our church conducted countless prayer services in which we always recited the rosary, and even when the war situation worsened and our church served as a refugee center, we clung to Our Lady of Fatima. Sunday services were conducted outside the church, under the canopy of tree branches, and the congregation knelt on bare dirt or grass.
During weekdays, our devotion to Our Lady continued at home. After the evening prayer, our mother led a full round of the rosary.
Then a 9-year-old, I thought reciting the rosary was long and boring. I often fell asleep before it ended. Our father was worse. When Mom took out her rosary, he headed for the door, saying, “Good night, everyone. I have something important to do.”
Mother asked, “What’s more important than praying for your country at such a time?”
“That’s for me to decide,” he said, before slipping out the door.
I wished I could do the same. But it was unthinkable at the time, for a girl at that age.
Six decades later, I believe that the Lady of Fatima answered our innocent prayers by sending American troops to expel the Reds. Otherwise, how could that poor, helpless country have survived before the well-equipped and well-trained North Koreans? My belief is confirmed by such names as Samsung or Hyundai, in large print, glaring at me from this Portuguese landscape; that my country’s survival wasn’t a mere coincidence but one of the miracles of Our Lady of Fatima.
Prayer comes easily here, on this sacred ground, where the voices reciting the rosary are as sweet as that of angels. I ask Our Lady to convert the North Koreans and consecrate them to her immaculate heart so that we can achieve global peace someday. I pray, too, that those suffering from incurable diseases shall be healed and lead healthy lives. But for me, I ask for my peaceful ending, whenever it will be.
Conversation with Confucius
Since the 31-foot-tall statue of Confucius (Kong Fuzi, in Chinese) was installed in Beijing’s Tianenman Square in January, I’ve been eager to share what I learned about the ancient philosopher in 2006 as a tourist in Qufu, his hometown in Shangdong province.
In 1994, Qufu became one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites and every year tourists flock to the area of 4,000 acres packed with temples, ponds, pagodas, stone sculptures and cemeteries. With 450 rooms, the temple complex is the second-largest in China, after the Forbidden City. But during Confucius’ time, it was a humble three-room home.
Confucianism and Christianity met one another in the 16th century. Father Mateo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit, entered Beijing in 1582 when the country’s fence against westerners was high and sturdy. Until his death in 1610, Father Ricci lived as a Chinese scholar.
Ricci was the first person to Latinize Kong Fuzi to Confucius, but his most important contribution to the world was his book “The True Doctrine of God.” Through this book, Catholicism trickled to my homeland of Korea and other Asian countries.
Personally, I didn’t like Confucius’ principles while I was in Korea and I still don’t. In his mind, the world was made only for men; women played an insignificant role, like dirt beneath a structure. His philosophy on harmonious society was conceived while he was enjoying nature, particularly the trees surrounding his home.
He saw that each tree had four parts — roots, a trunk, branches and leaves. The thicker the roots, the sturdier the trunk, and the health of the roots determined the health of the branches and leaves. He developed this logic: Women were the roots of society and must be unseen, with duties to support their husbands and produce heirs; the lowly and middle-class people were to support the ruling class — intellectuals, the wealthy and politicians.
In Qufu, while following the tour guide and reading about the sage, I had an urge to talk to Confucius face to face. The world has changed over and over thousands of times since his death in 478 B.C, and I wanted to know why his teachings were still controlling Asian women’s lives today. I imagined I boldly invited him to a bench where I sat under a gingko tree.
Up close, the eyes of the 2,563-year-old sage glowed like onyx. I began cautiously, “Master Kong, please forgive me for saying this, but you never said anything positive about women. I am particularly disturbed about: ‘Smart women talk about Superior Man.’ Are you saying that, to be smart, we should always admire Superior Man?”
He sat quietly, so I went on: “Men and women are created equally by the hands of God, Master Kong. That means you and I are equal, except that you were born 2,491 years before I was.”
“A good point,” he said, turning toward me. “In my time on earth, China was divided into thousands of tribes, always fighting among themselves, killing and drawing blood. Women played no parts in serving the tribal government.
“Men’s physical strength was most valued, like in the wild. Men had tremendous responsibilities as providers and protectors, while women’s jobs were taking care of children and putting food before their men. Can you get the picture?”
“Sort of… Let me ask you this: If you were alive today, would you teach differently than you did in 500 BC?”
“Hmmm…I don’t know how to answer that. To tell you the truth, I’m not interested in coming back to life today. The world is too noisy and people are doing too much. Look at all these people coming here by the thousands and dropping candy wrappers, stepping on my flowers and writing graffiti on my walls. Why are they here, leaving their children with someone else?”
He shook his head gravely. “I don’t know what I can teach these men and women…”
Our conversation was interrupted by the loud honk of tour buses, and he rose. “Never mind what I said about ‘Smart women.’ Time changes, and so do people. Who can teach forever? I lived in my time as best as I knew how and you do the same, all right?”
“I often think about that conversation five years ago, under that ginkgo tree in Qufu, wishing that we had more time to talk.
Second Thought About Aging
I’m not a psychic but I predict that this year, the Year of Rabbit, will treat me more kindly than last year, the Year of the Tiger, the bloodthirsty creature.
In fact, I made a list under “What I am grateful for” and posted it on the refrigerator. One item reads, “I am a U.S. citizen with a clean record.” There’s nothing funny about this. I’ve lived here 45 years, three months and two weeks, but I’ve never been arrested for anything — no drug dealing, no DUI, no bank robbery. What’s more, since I had lunch with my friend Stella a few days ago, my preoccupation about aging vanished.
At 99, Stella still drives, still lives in her apartment in Overland Park where she has since 1992, and still teaches English — not to American students in a public school, but to immigrants struggling to grasp the language of their adopted country. I met her in the fall of 2007. She had invited me to meet her South Korean pupils, who regularly gathered at the clubhouse of the apartment complex every Saturday morning to practice English with one another.
Stella might have thought that I could give her students some insightful advice on learning English as second language, but we Koreans ended up talking excessively in our native tongue. We even had Stella say some words in Korean for us.
Stella had not changed much since, except that she has fallen recently and began to use a walker, which she hopes to rid of soon. What’s the secret that gives her the strength and mental alertness to teach at 99? She’ll tell you it’s in her genes. “Many people in our family lived long, healthy lives.”
Of course, there are other reasons for her remarkable ability at her age.
The Chinese philosopher Confucius said, “Find a job you love, then you don’t have to ‘work’ a single day of your life.” This was true with Stella. Thirty-four years of teaching in public schools wasn’t enough for her. After retirement three decades ago, she met a shy young Korean woman at the breakfast table in the dining hall and discovered that she could barely speak English and was pregnant with her first child while her husband was in Korea.
Stella volunteered to teach her English but did other chores for her, too, making her phone calls for her and checking on her. After the baby was born, Stella was more involved. Among other things, she called her student’s doctors for instructions on breastfeeding and general child care. Word spread fast in the Korean community and soon she began teaching more Koreans.
Stella was ahead of her time in all aspects of life. Having graduated high school in Moberly, Mo., during the Great Depression, she went to college with a $500 scholarship from a Christian organization. Back in those days, when not many women sought higher education, going to college marked her as different among her peers. But having been chosen to receive a sizable scholarship was like going to the moon in a spaceship.
Stella holds bachelor’s degrees in English and French and a master’s in education, both from the University of Missouri in Columbia.
Was being single her choice?
Yes and no. “Back in those days, the schools didn’t want a new teacher to get married and then quickly start a family,” she explained. “At the interview, they asked me whether I’d get married soon and if so, would I start a family right away? I said no, and I never regretted it. Having a family was never my priority, but teaching was. I really enjoyed teaching and I still do.”
Her dedication and love of teaching touched her students. One of her Korean students told me that Stella never charged her a penny for tutoring. “On holidays, I had to beg her to accept my gift of appreciation. She’s generous with her time, some days spending two hours with me, but when it comes to teaching, she’s very strict.”
Were all of her Korean students diligent about learning English? No, according to Stella. “One teenage boy was determined to teach me poker instead of learning from me. But most of them were serious learners.”
Of Stella’s former students, two are successful businesswomen, one is a professor of architecture in Korea, and others are homemakers, some here in the United States and some in Korea. A few of them still get in touch with her.
Today, Stella has only two Korean students and two Hispanic students but the number will grow this year. After all, she’s only 99.
“Besides your remarkable genes, what’s the secret for your longevity and good mind?” I asked.
She became pensive for a brief moment. “If there should be a reason beside the natural cause, it must be my Christian faith. I rarely become panicky about anything, knowing that God has plans for us.”
Who’s afraid of aging? Certainly not Stella.
Evolving from nothing into a tough cookie
Thirty-nine years ago on March 30, I became a U.S. citizen. In the spirit of sharing my good fortune, I wish to say a few words about immigrants in general.
Every immigrant you see in your neighborhood came to America in search of freedom and opportunities. In fact, America has become what she is today by the sweat and blisters of immigrants. Like exotic trees planted in unfriendly foreign soil, every immigrant adapts to the harsh foreign climate and grows and toughens while she clings onto her origins.
Today I can solemnly declare that I am a tough cookie made in Korea. But when I arrived in Kansas City in the fall of 1966 as a young musician, I was a Korean nothing. I was 25 but was a child in a real world. Having lived 23 years under my parents’ protective wings in Korea and then two years in a girl’s dormitory in Paris operated by French nuns, where three daily meals were provided along with rigid Catholic doctrine, I didn’t even know how to cook for myself. Campbell’s soup had no taste, and every time I tried to make crescents with Pillsbury dough, black smoke filled my studio apartment on 11th Street downtown.
It was a time when most Americans didn’t know anything about Korea except what they knew about the Korean War, during which 54,000 Americans were killed. When someone said that her son or brother had died in Korea during the war, all I could say was, “I’m sorry,” and bow. My motherland then was the poorest of poor, a nation whose per capita income was only 60 American dollars.
My poor English was another problem. You can’t feel good about yourself when you can’t communicate with anyone. Even dogs gave me an inferiority complex by barking at me in English, “Arf, arf, arf,” instead of “Mong, mong, mong!” like dumb Korean dogs.
The only comforting fact was that I belonged to an American symphony orchestra, but there was no promise. Upon my arrival, I learned in dismay that my employer had closed its doors due to financial problems and that its 80 musicians were on strike. Though I couldn’t understand what was being discussed, I showed up whenever the musicians rallied on the streets of downtown, handing out fliers and holding a picket sign that read “Support your Local Symphony!”
When the Philharmonic reopened its doors in late fall and we began rehearsing, I stopped bowing to Americans. I didn’t have to anymore. I was somebody now, somebody who made $160 dollars a week. At a time when a chocolate bar cost only 10 cents, my weekly salary was a lot of money. Even after paying $65 weekly rent, I had plenty to spurge on myself.
An unexpected event showed me another face of America. A neighbor, a man who lived directly above me in the same apartment building, was fatally shot in broad daylight. The murderer was a woman, which shocked me even more. For the first time, I wrote home that America isn’t a safe place to live after all.
My second residence was a dingy studio apartment near the Country Club Plaza that was infested with roaches. It turned out, however, the roaches were not as big a problem as my neighbors. Whenever I practiced, they threw pennies at my door, startling me. I kept practicing harder and longer to see if they’d throw more pennies, and they did. I collected them all in a pickle jar, in case we would go on strike again.
One morning, two handsome policemen showed up at my door, each with a pistol on their belt. This was my first encounter with American policemen, so I greeted them politely. “How do you do, gentlemen? What can I do for you?” By the quick way they spoke while pointing toward the ceiling, I gathered that the woman above me had complained about my practicing.
I had met her once. She had come to complain about my practicing, but not understanding her speedy words, I had shut the door in her face. Since that day, she and I had been communicating in a musical way. Whenever I practiced, she’d hit the heating pipe that connected her room to mine, and I had responded by raising the volume of my playing.
But this morning, in the presence of the two American policemen, all I could say was, “Very sorry” and bow.
With time, Americans began to show warmth toward me, particularly when Korean cars, computers and cameras showed up in the market. Today I am delighted whenever someone says that he or she drives a Hyundai or Kia or owns Samsung computer or camera. And I enjoy telling them that South Korea today is America’s seventh-largest trading partner or the sixth-largest exporter in the world. When you live in a foreign country as long as I have, you become a patriot of your own.
Behind a tough cookie, there is the culture that nourished her soul, and in my case there are two — American and Korean.
My Feathered Friends
My three birds teach me about human nature. Or should I call it animal nature?
Like us, they have unique personalities and annoying habits. One thing they can’t stand is boredom. They each have a dozen toys, but they get tired of them quickly and squawk until I replace them with new ones. When they see one taking a bath, they all follow suit. Their eating habits differ from one another: one eats all the time, one only plays with bird seed, and the other is finicky, throwing much on the floor, eating only what he likes.
Our 18-year-old Goffin cockatoo named Woody, a handsome white bird with salmon-colored cheeks, is the size of a pigeon. We don’t know much about him because he came from a homeless shelter two summers earlier. Compared with his noisy neighbors — two Quakers named George and Katie — Woody is a thinker. He can be loud when he wants to be. Mostly he enjoys quiet time alone, sitting on the curtain rod that no longer holds curtains. He looks out the window, probably wondering why he isn’t out there with other birds, gliding in the vast blue.
Sometimes, it seems that he misses his original home in the Indonesian jungle, where he might have been captured and smuggled out of the country. Or is he worried that his kind is rapidly vanishing from the face of the earth at the hands of illegal traffickers? Sometimes, his crest up, he strolls about the roof of his cage, and then, without a warning, he turns into a clown: He plays peek-a-boo with himself, dropping his head to his feet and then suddenly straightening up, making his crest sway, and squawking, too.
The Quakers, all green, are four years old and are the size of a blue jay, with rounder middle sections and shorter tails. They can talk and understand English like a-three-year old child. When they hear my footsteps in the morning in the kitchen, adjacent to their room, they say, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” and I reply, “I’m fine. How about you?” They reply, “Come here! Come here!” So I go in.
While they each report the events of the night, I do my daily routine, changing their bath water and filling their food bowl. At the most unexpected moment, they’ll bite my hand. Before I can scold them, they say, “Don’t bite! Don’t bite!”
I never bite them. Where would I, even if I wanted to? The head? The middle section? The wiry feet? It’s not a good feeling when you’re nipped at by your pets, but it’s not the time to go for “eye for an eye” and “tooth for a tooth.” Rather, you must try hard to look at the situation from their point of view. They see you as their possible predator that might eat them alive.
One thing to remember is that birds can express feelings of gratitude, like humans. Once, Katie escaped the cage. As I attempted to get her back to the cage, yelling and waving, she slipped into the kitchen. She flew to the ceiling and landed on the edge of the skylight, about 15 feet above the floor.
“Peep, peep, peep,” she cried, as if asking me for help. In attempt to bring her down I moved her food bowl onto the counter, so that she could see it. When that didn’t work, I brought the music box and turned it on. Although she didn’t bob her head as she usually does at the sound of the familiar tunes, she sat quietly as if meditating. The power of music therapy!
Two hours passed, and nothing changed. Birds can die of dehydration…. Should I call 911? Call the fire department?
I launched a rescue mission myself. I brought a 6-foot ladder from the basement and climbed on. Katie understood what I was attempting to do and tried to meet me half way, but seeing that she could not reach me, she flew back up, crying. I grabbed a broomstick and lifted it to her. She didn’t land on the broom. Time was ticking away.
What am I doing here in midair, holding a broomstick? Had my grandkids been here, they might have said, “Grandma, Halloween has long passed. Come on down!”
I began to swing the stick, back and forth, and she got the message. She flew down like a rock, landing clumsily on the floor.
Our reunion was heartfelt. While I was holding her, she didn’t bite. Burying her tiny head in my hand, she wailed like a child who had been lost and found, Waaaa, waaa, waaa…
At that moment, I believed that we humans and birds are connected somehow, if not through our primal ancestor, whoever that might be, then some other way. Otherwise, how could Katie show her appreciation by not biting me?
Messages of Hope amid Tragedy
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Day on Monday found America grief-stricken by the recent shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six people.
King has been America’s social conscience since 1955, when he heard news of police brutality against a black seamstress who was ticketed for not giving up her seat to a white male on a bus. King was only 26. Until his assassination in 1968, King led America toward a sunny path where everyone will be equal regardless of their skin color, sex or age. America will always remember Martin Luther King, the way people of India will remember Mahatma Gandhi.
A week earlier, on Jan. 11, a mammoth statue of Confucius was moved into Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where Mao Zedong’s giant portrait still hangs and his body rests in a mausoleum. From an Asian point of view, the Chinese government bringing the 2,500-year-old sage and his teachings back to life is a powerful gesture of “Let’s forgive and forget, and move on.”
But how does Chairman Mao feel about Confucius invading his space and facing him from the east side of the square? As a peasant’s son, Mao profoundly disliked anything that reminded him of feudal China, which was built upon Confucian ideals of man’s virtues, including his duties to his family, to society, to his elders and to the emperor, who was considered to be the son of Heaven.
During the Cultural Revolution, which began in May 1966 and continued until his death in September 1976, Chairman Mao methodically eliminated intellectuals, religious leaders, wealthy landlords, anyone who didn’t agree with his revolutionary ideas. Books on Confucian teachings and Buddhism were burned, ancient artworks revealing traditional Chinese cultural values were ripped, and professors, religious leaders and landlords were dragged to public squares, condemned and executed by Red Guards who mindlessly followed Mao’s instructions.
How could Confucius tolerate the sight of Mao, who condemned his teachings and was responsible for more than 50 million deaths during his 27 years of ruling China?
While I lived in China last spring for a month, at the International Ceramic Institute in Jingdezhen, known as a Porcelain City, I was surprised to learn that Chinese folks still worshipped Chairman Mao in spite of his inhuman treatment of his people. His portraits were posted on every wall of the institute, with his slogans printed on them.
Every Chinese person I talked to said that Mao was a great leader who made “a few mistakes” during his time, as if they were taught to say it. I wondered whether their attitudes toward their late leader was due to the long period of living in a communist state where individual thoughts and feelings were sacrificed under the logo of a sickle and a hammer — a sickle representing farm workers and a hammer the industrial laborers.
One day I met a young Chinese art student named Zhu who happened to join our table, which was designated for foreigners. Someone asked “Why are portraits of Mao still hanging on every wall after his death 30-some years ago?”
He answered in his halting English: “We Chinese don’t see things black and white like Americans do in the issue of justice. We believe that what was right yesterday could be wrong today, and what’s great today can be foolish tomorrow. Men are basically the same: We all make mistakes one time or another.”
What he was saying was, no matter how many leaders we condemn for their wrongdoings, the cycle of evil deeds will continue as long as humans exist on earth and that the only way we can move onto the future is by forgiving those who wronged us and forgetting the past.
I hope Confucius’ teachings of virtues, harmony and kindness, and King’s message of the promised land will reverberate throughout the world over and over until the injured and violated will be healed and those with evil intentions will see the light of life.
Being Grateful is the key to happiness
The Year of the Tiger is marching away, roaring powerfully.
Tigers have never been kind to humans, and this year was no exception. The beast’s teeth marks were evident throughout the year: the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook Haiti in January, destroying thousands of buildings and 200,000 human lives; suicide bombings in Pakistan and Afghanistan killed Americans; the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused monstrous destruction to wildlife and human civilization that still makes the news. And on Nov. 23, North Korea brutally attacked the South.
As odd as it might seem, I am sad to see the Year of the Tiger go. Not that I am particularly fond of the beast or its personality shown on people born in the Tiger Year, but I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see the next Year of the Tiger, which will be 2022. Besides, after this year, I am no longer 60-something. Why should I be excited about turning 70?
Ten years ago, turning 60 was tough. That horrible day in February, I was in solitude, my bedroom curtains closed, the phone unhooked. According to Emperor Huang Ti, who invented the Chinese zodiac 2,500 years ago, a human life span is only five cycles of 12 years, each year represented by one of the 12 assigned animals. This is the reason Asians make a big deal about one’s 60th birthday, celebrating for days. In other words, your 60th birthday is supposed to be your final day on earth, and “Happy 60th birthday!” means, “Happy departure, dear!”
How can I be 70 and look at my reflection in the mirror without crying? I can’t run away from this harsh reality, nor can I forget about it. Something must be done, so I prayed desperately on my knees. But the almighty wasn’t sympathetic. “I’ve given you a good life,” he said. “What’s this nonsense?”
I am a firm believer of “do it yourself.” I drove to a library and looked for a book on how to overcome aging blues, but no one had written such a book. While browsing, the title “Magnificent Mind at Any Age” by Daniel Amen caught my attention, so I checked it out.
The book taught me a lot about the human brain — young and old, normal and abnormal. It detailed how one’s behavior, nutrition and lifestyle shapes and changes the brain cells, beside offering me wisdom on how to cope with everyday aging symptoms such as memory problems, anxiety and depression, and how to prevent certain brain diseases common to old people.
The logic is simple: without a healthy brain, one cannot live a healthy life. Though I disagree with the author’s theory that one’s spiritual experience is not the phenomenon of the Holy Spirit or God himself but a simple function of the brain, the book was worth reading.
The jewel of the book in my opinion is this: one’s sense of gratitude toward a super power or someone or something produces a healthy hormone in the brain.
Don’t we all have something to be grateful for about who we are and what we do? I am no exception. In fact, I should be grateful for my approaching birthday, because some folks, including my parents, haven’t been lucky enough to see their 70th birthdays.
The Year of the Rabbit is about to step into our lives. Rabbits have been kind to humans ever since the dawn of civilization, appearing in many children’s story books as quiet heroes and friends.
May 2011 be as gentle and peaceful as our host for all of us.
Love can be unspoken
Americans love to use the word “love”, like salt they use in every food item. “I love to dance; I love this music; I love that restaurant; I love that color, I love you to death…"
“Jesus loves you whether you like it or not,” a preacher screeched on the radio as I drove to the neighborhood grocery store the other day. “That’s the truth, folks! Trust in the Lord!”
I changed the channel.
A singer hollered with a strum of a guitar. “Babe…I can’t help loving you.”
I killed the radio.
In front of the Sun Fresh Market, a woman in her 40s was talking to a teenage boy through her open car window. “Love you, honey!” she swooned. “I’ll pick you up at nine, okay? Don’t work too hard, hon.”
Love, love, love, love… Don’t they get tired of saying it?
While growing up in Korea, I never heard my parents pronouncing the word “sarang (love)” to us kids. Due to the Chinese Confucian influence in earlier centuries, most Korean parents never said anything to their children that would make them feel good about themselves or proud of their achievements, but demended obediance and elder respect. Though my parents never expressed their love toward us in words, we nevertheless felt loved and protected.
The first time I felt such love was when I was in the third grade. It was a bad day for me. A boy much bigger than me had knocked me down on the school playground for no reason, fracturing my right leg. Since there were no doctors or a clinic nearby, I was taken to a Bone Setter a few blocks away, but instead of making the pain go away, the old man made my condition worse by stretching the injured leg and administering acupressure. I blacked out, and my mother was called in. With her insistence, we waited for my father to come and take us to a hospital with his company car.
My father had had a few drinks with his business partners and was in a jovial mood when he showed up with his chauffer. In the car, my mother chewed on him while I moaned and cried. “How can you show up like this when our little one is in so much pain? You don’t even show any air of sympathy. What kind of father are you?”
He laughed. “Oh, I feel plenty for my little girl, trust me. I'll pray for her, if that'd make you feel better.” He recited aloud, “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...”
“Stop that! You can at least ask her how she’s feeling. She waited for you more than six hours in that condition. But look at you!”
My tears rolled down freely on my face but I didn’t feel as much pain as I had earlier. My parents whom I had considered “heartless dictators” were arguing about me, their No.5 child. How many times had I thought I was merely one of the heads they had to count at the meal time? But that wasn’t true. I was their little one and they were worried about me.
I stayed home two months until my leg healed, during which time everyone treated me like a princess――bringing meals on a tray, buying me gifts, and asking, “How are you feeling?” The day I had to go back to school I cried until my eyes were puffy, but my mother kicked me out of the door mercilessly. “See you later!” was all she said.
All through my adolescent years, I dealt with my parents’ harsh words and rigid expressions, but I was privileged to know that their hearts were warm like the radiator in the dead of winter. Without their “no-nonsense” parenting, I wouldn’t have known the value of “tough love.”
Now that I am a mother and a grandmother of my American born daughters and grandchildren, I can positively say that “Love you, love you, love you” sound as meaningless as the endless drone of cicadas in a summer night.
December is here, and it will be Christmas before we know it. The Holiday season is when the value of “love” is calculated into dollar signs. But let us remember that the true expression of love has nothing to do with the amount of money we spend or the volume of the torn gift wrapping that will fill our trashcan when the good time is over.
The Front is Never quiet in Diabetes War
The number of Americans living with diabetes is steadily growing in the United States.
The American Diabetes Association’s 2009 report shows that 23.6 million people (or 7.8 percent of the population) have diabetes, and 12 million of them are 60 or older. The association predicts that in 2030, the number of Americans with diagnosed diabetes will reach 30 million.
As an insulin-dependant diabetic for more than a quarter of a century, I take my battle with my silent foe as seriously as a soldier in Afghanistan. Every morning, I swallow a handful of pills and inject myself with two kinds of insulin, one long-acting and the other for immediate response. All through the day, I negotiate with myself what to eat, what not to eat, how much to eat, how much to exercise and so forth.
Mild memory loss is common for diabetics, so I write notes such as “Don’t forget the appointment with Dr. XYZ at 1 p.m.,” “Call so-and-so,” “Defrost chicken at 3 p.m.” and post them on the refrigerator. Still, I forget to inject insulin or take pills or call someone or show up at the doctor’s office.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s famous line, “In war, there’s no substitute for victory” isn’t only for soldiers but also for all in combat with life-threatening diseases. But like anything else, true victory is not easy for me because my enemies are numerous, clever and alluring. At a restaurant, for instance, strawberry cheesecake would jump out of the menu and make me dizzy with desire.
“Our strawberry cheesecake is a prize winner,” the waitress says, fueling my temptation. “Our chocolate mousse is delicious, too.”
My only defense is my determination to stay healthy. “No thanks!” I say and smile. If I give in, my enemy would conquer me in no time and declare victory at my expense. “I’m not a dessert eater.”
“Good for you,” the waitress says as she walks away.
Negative thoughts are also my enemy. Without any advance notice, they sneak into my brain and whisper, “You’re getting old fast, sweetie, tss, tss, tss. You lived longer than your mother did. How tired you must be. Why don’t you watch TV instead of going for a walk?”
Studies show that a high level of sugar in the blood stream can increase one’s risk of developing blood clots, which reduce or obstruct the oxygen supply to the heart or to the brain. For instance, cardiac arrest occurs when the passages in your arteries and veins narrow due to a long buildup of impurity and fat in the blood vessels, and the delivery of oxygen to the heart is delayed or failed. This can cause heart attack.
Stroke is not any kinder to diabetics than heart problems. Hemorrhage stroke happens when a weakened blood vessel ruptures suddenly and brain cells starve or die. Ischemic stroke takes place when a blood clot blocks the blood flow, causing the brain to suffer lack of oxygen.
Stress and tension are sworn enemies to diabetics, but by learning to relax and to meditate, patients can defeat the enemies and protect themselves from heart failure as well as stroke.
The front is never quiet for those battling diabetes. Unlike a real war, however, the hero or heroine in this war never leaves the battleground until he or she goes to the grave.
No one gives you a medal of courage or a certificate honoring your efforts, either, no matter how defiantly you fight in this never-ending war. But remember, your reward is grand and quite satisfying.
Friendship of Saviors and Saved
On Sunday September 16th at 3:pm, the Leawood United Methodist Church on 95th Street was packed with 300 people, mostly Koreans, who came to hear the 30-member Korean Choir of Greater Kansas City. The honored guests for the occasion were two dozen gray-haired members of the Korean War Veterans Association in Overland Park, Kansas, in their uniforms. The two groups, the Koreans and the veterans, are not strangers to one another. Visit The Korean War Memorial at 119th and Lowell, Overland Park, and you will get a glimpse of their fruitful teamwork in making the Monument a reality--on the granite walls, on the benches, and on the paving stones, combined with a generous help from corporations, individuals, and even from the U.S. government! And this Sunday afternoon, six years after the Memorial was dedicated and 59 years after the armistice was signed, they gathered to reaffirm the ever thickening friendship between the “saviors” and the “saved”.
I particularly appreciated the occasion because, the previous week, while talking to my sister in Korea on the phone, I was labeled as “a pro-American.” This happened when she told me about the weakening trust of the Korean public toward the Americans, who, after the Vietnam War four decades ago, had supposedly buried a large quantity of hazardous chemicals in the Korean soil, including Agent Orange, and I wasn’t too sympathetic. “How can you complain anything about Americans who saved us from the communists?”
She fired at me, nailing each word, “You’re a pro-American, like most Koreans living in the U.S. are. But don’t forget where you originated. If I were you, I’d find some articles about it and study! You’ll think differently about the country you live in now!”
Since then, we have not spoken. A Cold War between two sisters! But I did read some articles about the issue. It all began with ex-servicemen revealing their “sins” of burying unidentified, stinky barrels and cans at Camp Carroll near the city of Daegu, where they had been stationed.
While I was worried that the harmful chemicals could have leaked into reservoirs, endagering human lives, I decided that it was not worse than the Suncheon Tunnel Massacred or Nogunri Incident, in which American troops exterminated hundreds of refugees to block the communists in civilian clothes sneaking into the South. While sharing my thoughts with other Koreans on this issue, I realized that I wasn’t the only Pro-American in Kansas City.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Jung Young-ho, the elder of the Korean Presbyterian Church, who had served as the President of the Korean Society. “But it doesn’t shake my loyalty toward those who bled and died to save us from the communists. What they taught us is Love your neighbors at all cost! To live by their examples, our church community in Kansas City, Kansas, has been helping our American neighbors; for instance, we have been picking up trash along I-35 (between Metcalf Avenue and Lamar) for more than 10 years as the participant of the “Adopt-A-Highway” Program. We also have been giving Christmas presents to families in our church-neighborhood.”
“Americans and South Korean troops fought in Vietnam side by side,” said Sunhi Cohen, a midlle aged lady. “They shared almost everything-- warehouses, weapons, and even military rations... I don't think burying some unused chemicals in Korea seems evil!”
While listening to the well-prepared choir music including “Gloria” by W.A. Mozart and the works by Korean and American composers under the baton of Miss Bo-young Lee, I was revisited by a long forgotten memory.
It was the day the first group of American troops landed in our port city of Busan early July, 1950. The main street was boiling over with anticipation of thousands, including school children, who were patiently waiting to greet them, each with an American flag. Then, we saw them! In the haze of heat and dust, a long line of covered military trucks appeared, and we began to shout “Victory, U.S.A.! Victory U.S.A!” waiving the American flags. As they passed, the soldiers in the back of the trucks waved back, as if saying, “Friends, we’re here for you!” Ten days earlier, on a Sunday, 95,000 North Koreans had attacked across the 38th parallel with Russian tanks, and everyday the radio reported gloomy news. But now we were hopeful.
How could I not be pro-American after witnessing such a powerful moment as a child?
The concert ended with the choir President, Ahn Sung Ho’s short speech thanking the presence of everyone, particularly the veterans, before presenting a $1,000 check to the President of the Korean War Veterans’ Association, Tom Stevens. Stevens expressed his sincere appreciation for the generous contribution and the sharing of the exceptional talents. “We’ll use the money wisely, for academic or humanitarian purposes.”
Coming home, I thanked for my countrymen’s enduring gratitude toward our old heroes. A famous line by Marcus Tullius Cicero came to my mind: Gratitude is not only the greatest of all virtues but the parent of all others.
Blessings amid the Korean War
Sixty years have passed since North Korea launched a surprise attack on its other half and shook the nation with sheer terror.
During the three-year-long war, more than three million people were killed, including 54,000 Americans. Ten times as many people lost their homes. Many books have been written about the evil of the war and the destruction it caused in a faceless country in the Far East six decades ago.
But looking back, I, a Korean-American, am compelled to realize that the almighty might have had a special plan for some people, including our family.
About this time of year in 1950, Pusan, my hometown off the Pacific coast, had turned into a boiling pot as the South Korean government moved in and promoted the area to the temporary capital of South Korea. All school buildings were confiscated by the government or the military. Our elementary school moved to a mountain slope where no roof protected us from rain or the merciless sun, while the military turned our three-story school building into a makeshift hospital.
So many refugees were pouring into the port city that the government ordered all homeowners to make room for refugees in their homes in the spirit of sharing the national tragedy equally. Our parents accepted two families, three adults and two children, and they moved into our large traditional Korean home surrounded by a brick wall. But some nights, strangers invited themselves into our courtyard rather than sleeping on the street. Fights broke out among them, and our shoes, clothes from the clothesline and any edible things from the kitchen were stolen.
The Pusan Catholic dioceses cried, too, asking churchgoers to please help shelter homeless religious men and women. Our parents, devout Catholics, decided to help the diocese, probably to secure their tickets to heaven later on, rather than tolerating thieves and trouble makers. They might also have thought that their four boys and three girls would be safer with religious folks instead of the war-battered refugees. The refugees were quickly replaced by two priests and six nuns in civilian clothes.
At age 9, I had no clue that a simple home could turn into the temple of Jesus, but that was exactly what was happening.
Workers came in and pounded nails into the walls of the front room, making it into a chapel with a wooden crucifix. Furniture from Father’s office was transported to the storage room, which turned into a rectory after new straw mats were laid onto the floor. The sisters settled into Father’s office that was now empty except for a stack of sleeping mats my mother had provided for them.
Then came what I’d call spiritual shock.
We kids were ordered to attend one of the Masses celebrated by the two priests every morning before going to school. We had thought walking 40 minutes to the mountain school was an ordeal, without mentioning the condition of the school on bare dirt. But now, we had to sit through a Mass celebrated in Latin first. But at the time democracy was not yet introduced to us, all we could was obey our dictators.
Confessing sins every week was worst of all that I endured as a child.
Once the priest lectured me to tell Jesus only what I’ve sinned, instead of telling the sins of my numerous siblings.
How could I have sinned without them? They made my life absolutely miserable.
Sometimes, feeling pressured, I made up sins, but the priest always knew what I was fabricating. He’d chuckle and say, “No, you didn’t steal money from your teacher!” or “You couldn’t have kicked the neighbor’s dog that’s bigger than you!” Our mother, who had an extraordinary ability to hear every little noise in the house, must have heard my confession, because she said that not telling the truth to Jesus was sin itself.
But as the story goes, God must have known what he was doing.
While we girls sang hymns with the sisters at Sunday masses, my three brothers served as altar boys, jabbering in Latin, ringing bells at the right time, pouring the blood of Christ into the chalice, and sometimes finishing the leftover wine from the chalice when the service ended.
Two Christmases and two Easter Sunday Masses were celebrated in our home church, and some neighbors joined us instead of walking to the parish church two miles away.
A decade later, my eldest brother took the vow of priesthood and the three girls, including myself, became professional musicians.
For many years afterwards, our mother took pride in telling people that, in the midst of the devastating war, God blessed us abundantly, turning our home into his temple.
I still wonder about it.
Ready to Greet Eternal Spring
In his poem The Preludes, Victor Hugo expresses his sense of nostalgia about his youth as an old man as well as his anticipation of approaching death.
Winter is on my head but eternal spring is in my heart
I breathe… the fragrance of lilacs, violets, and roses as twenty years ago
The nearer I approach to the end the plainer I hear
The symphonies of the world that invite me.
For those who have no clue what “winter” means also don’t understand the “eternal spring” the French thinker, essayist, and novelist talks about. Eternal spring has something to do with the fragrance of the flowers in one’s memory, and a time when everything looked green and promising. Eternal spring for Hugo was a time for longing and reflection.
I too think about the spring time of my life.
After my retirement from the Kansas City Symphony in the late 1990’s where I had played cello for 30 years, I thought I was done with music and stumbled into many hobbies, including pottery. Though I’ve enjoyed working with clay and I received a few ribbons from local art show organizers over the years and a talent scholarship from a community college, my heart wasn’t with clay. There was something missing. Was it because my sense of nostalgia for my days as a musician has its grip on me? After all, music was my first love.
Wouldn’t a retired soldier have the same sense of duty to his country as he did as a young soldier? Wouldn’t a sailor hear the ocean waves calling him back even after he had settled on land? An old musician wanting to play music again is the sign that eternal spring is in his/her heart.
The difficult passages you’ve practiced over and over until your fingertips hurt would suddenly wake you in the middle of the night, demanding to know whether you can still play them. When you hear a familiar melody on the radio while driving, you’d see the green Bohemian hills or the sparkling Rhine River or the thick Vienna woods that had inspired the composer to write, through your windshield, instead of the flat Kansas landscape.
I missed playing cello and missed listening to the works of great composers echo through the walls of the concert halls we had performed.
Today, I took my cello from the closet where it had been collecting dust since 1997, changed the strings, and made some adjustment, and we were reunited, the cello and me. After a few hours of playing scales, etudes, arpeggios, I decided that I can still play. My fingers are still limber and responsive to the music’s demand. They might not quite make 70 MPH on the fingerboard the way they used to years ago but 55 MPH is no problem. The fact that I will be playing with a community orchestra, not a professional one this time, wouldn’t bother me because, while playing, I will be able to get a glimpse of the composer’s world at the time he wrote the music, and maybe even hear his message of hope, love, and yearning for peace through the notes and rests.
A few years of playing music will enrich my remaining years here on earth, and as I get older, I am sure I’ll hear the symphonies of the world that is waiting for me. But for now, all I want to dwell on is the fact that my “end” wouldn’t be here soon and that my eternal spring fills me with a sense of wellbeing.
Mystery of the Mind
A few days ago at dinner time my husband and I shared a tense moment when a bottle of Clorox laundry bleach showed up in our refrigerator. How did it get there? It was mind boggling.
“What is this doing in the refrigerator?” he asked.
“How do I know?” I said.
“You mean, you didn’t put it there?”
“Me? Why would I leave bleach in the refrigerator?”
“If you didn’t, then who?” he said, accusingly. “I never touch bleach, as you know. Besides you and I, who else lives here except three birds?”
He presented a valid point here, but it proved nothing because I swore I didn’t put the bleach in the refrigerator. “Don’t look at me like that!”
“Tell me, then,” he said, sounding like a detective. “Have you used bleach today?”
I did, in the kitchen sink, to remove ugly food stains out of my sweatshirt. But if I admitted it, he’d get a wrong idea. I know this much; here in the U.S. one is not guilty until proven so by the court. But lately strange things had shown up in the refrigerator, once a pair of scissors in the fruit compartment and another time a bottle of liquid soap next to Arthur Bryant’s Barbeque Sauce.
“Let’s not argue about something we can’t prove,” I suggested. “Thank God, it was only bleach.”
He stopped interrogating me, but his expression told me he was worried whether or not he might end up eating bleached food some day.
Forgetfulness comes with aging, like one’s hair turning white and skin gathering wrinkles and dark spots. It’s designed by the creator, believe it or not. Otherwise, who wants to be forgetful? Medical scientists call forgetfulness “dementia” or “Alzheimer’s disease” and look at the patients through microscopic lenses.
My longtime friend Norma lives in a nursing home in South Kansas City and has been diagnosed with dementia. She has lost her short term memory, as well as her physical mobility, and is confined to wheelchairs. She cannot remember how many grandchildren she has or how old her youngest granddaughter has turned this year, but she remembers every detail of events that happened 20 or more years ago.
I had known her in the late 1980s while I played cello with the Kansas City Symphony, and more than 20 years later, she introduces me to her neighbors in the nursing home, saying, “This is my friend Therese. She plays (present tense) cello with the Kansas City Symphony.” She then says to me, “Let’s go for lunch, soon. We have much catching up to do.”
Interestingly enough, her favorite topic these days has been preparing a meal for a big gathering, in which I am her partner, not her guest. “Come to my place at six tonight,” she orders me. “No, actually, five will be better, so we can make a list of things we need at the grocery store.”
Her manner is so sincere that I can’t tell her the truth; that she no longer owns her own place or that she is in no condition to make dinner for anyone, not even for herself. So I say, “I am busy tonight, but we can talk about it another time. How about we do something together now? Do you want to go to the gift shop downstairs and look around?”
She agrees. So I wheel her to the elevator and go to the gift shop downstairs. We look around. But coming out of the gift shop, she gets nervous, even worried. “Do you know how to get back to my place?”
“Of course,” I say. “We’re in the same building as earlier, only one floor down.”
“No,” she says, “This is not where I live. We have to go back to my place.”
Should I insist that she is confused and that she has a medical condition called “dementia?” I have no guts to do so. If I did, I would be no better than my husband who accused me of leaving Clorox in the refrigerator, which I had no memory of. So I tell her, “Do you remember taking the elevator when we got here? Let’s do that first and see where we are. When we get out of the elevator you will remember, I promise.”
She takes my suggestions willingly because I am from her long-term memory, during which time she had control over her life as a mother, wife, homemaker and an active member of a church. She is glad when things look familiar and familiar voices surround her.
Over the decades, she has lost so much: her husband, her home of many years, her physical strength, her ability to walk, and worst of all, her sound judgment. How much more can one lose?
An hour or two we spend together each day gives Norma a bit of the freedom she used to have, but what I gain from her are practical lessons of aging and what can be expected when I am in her shoes.
An old dog can learn a new trick
The old saying “An old dog cannot learn a new trick” is such a demeaning statement for older folks like me. Even a child would know that it wasn’t meant for dogs since dogs can’t understand human words. Call me “Senior Citizen” or “Cranky Old Lady” but never underestimate my ability to learn “new tricks.”
I never brag, thanks to my Korean upbringing: however, to prove my point, I might have to do so slightly, so please understand.
I have been taking pottery classes at a local community college for some time, and last May, a distinguished art collector from a well known museum purchased four of my works. Until then, pottery was strictly for fun, sometimes to remedy the boredom that comes with aging, but not any more. Now I am looking forward to my new life as a ceramic artist. (Oops, am I bragging too much here?)
Come spring, I will be in China, learning from the Chinese masters. After the news of my small fortune, I applied for a residency at Sanboa International Ceramic Institute in Jingdezhen City, and they invited me. For this trip, I am learning Chinese now. Ni hao ma? Wo hen hao, xiexie!
So look me in the eyes and say those unkind words and see if I don't growl at you. True, I will never learn to ride a motorcycle and zoom around the town or fly an airplane and go around the globe, but do I care?
Jingdezhen of the Jiaanxi province is a seaport known as the "Porcelain Capital" for 1700 years, because the area is rich with kaolin and feldspar, the essential ingredients for porcelain. For centries European merchants frequented the harbour in search of what they called “white gold,” but the locals never revealed the secret of porcelain making. Then in 1712, the recipe was revealed, not by a scientist or a potter, but by a Jesuit missionary priest.
Pere Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles was a Frenchman teaching the Gospel in the area during emperor Kangxi’s ruling, and with the help of his “converts” working in a porcelain factory, he discovered the secret recipe many Europeans had been searching for. In his letters to his superior of the Company of Jesus, he passed this treasure in great detail, along with the description of the town and his daily life as a missionary. After the close of Kangxi’s reign, the Roman Catholic missionaries were forced to leave China and no more firsthand descriptions of Jingdezhen or porcelain production were recorded. Thus, besides being the first documents about porcelain production, Pere d'Entrecolles' lengthy letters serve as his autobiography as well.
Jingdezhen has not changed much since Pere d'Entrecolles' time, I learned by reading. Next spring, in Jingdezhen, I will be using China's famous "white gold" and learn the ancient techniques of pottery. I will be also visiting some of 3000 kilns spread throughout the city, breathing the same smoke filled air as Pere d’Entrecolles might have 300 years ago. Most importantly though, I will learn the wisdom of getting old with dignity and share with the people of this young country called America upon my return.
American Troops Heading home
During his recent State of the Union Address President Obama declared that all of the U.S. combat troops will be out of Iraq by the end of this
August. "We will support ...and will continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But...this war is ending,
and all of our troops are coming home," he said.
While the audience cheered, I, a Korean-American, wondered whether the late President Truman had made the same promise to the Americans troops
fighting in Korea nearly six decades ago.
The day the U.S. troops left our town of Pusan in early fall of 1953, I watched a long line of American military trucks passing us with a
mixture of feelings. Then a seventh grader, I was sad and scared at the same time; sad because we kids had been demonstrating against all Americans in
our country and now they were leaving; scared because we did not know when North Koreans would launch another "surprise attack" on us.
A large crowd had gathered in the town's square for the occasion, and there was a sense of festivity. A band was playing the American anthem over and over, and American and Korean flags were flapping
from the tall flagpoles, side by side. Several airplanes were cruising overhead, each dragging a long tail of white foam, like on a national
Unlike the day American soldiers had entered our town three years earlier, we school kids were not mobilized to salute the departing soldiers. All summer long we had been demonstrating in front of the U.S. army base on the outskirts of the town or on the street, shouting, "Move out Americans! We'll fight until the last man! We want reunification!"
Grownups--religious groups, teachers, labors' unions, and even women's organizations-did, too, marching, carrying placards, and shouting simmilar slogans.
Our 78 year old president, Syngman Rhee, had engineered all anti-American demonstrations nationwide to stop the cease fire negotiations
between the American and Chinese leaders. Life Magazine's June 22, 1953 issue reads, "After about 35 months of bloodshed and 23 months of haggling,
the combatants of Korea at last achieved every essential of a truce, except the agreement of one supremely stubborn old man. South Korea's 78-year-old
President Syngman Rhee cried that truce between the UN and the Communists means death to his country and threatened to fight on alone to expel the
Chinese Reds, and take the entire Korea. "If you have to leave us, we're sorry to see you go," he said. Meanwhile, the United Nations gravely faced
the fact that, if Rhee's threats were carried out, he might very well wreck the truce beyond repair."
Despite our protest, the truce was signed by American and Chinese leaders on July 27th, and now, we were waving at the U.S. troops for the last time. I didn't know what to think or feel. I wished I could shout my apologies for demonstrating.
The soldiers waving to us from the trucks were those who handed us kids a Hershey bar or a pack of Juicy Fruits whenever we bowed to them. Some even took photos of us. They were the ones who built a sturdy metal bridge over the creek, after the log bridge had floated away during the flood. Some of them might have seen us from the airplanes as we studied on
the mountain, on bare dirt, like a herd of mountain goats, after our school had been confiscated by the South Korean army to use it as a makeshift
hospital. Some of them had attended the mass at our parish church on Sundays, their military boots still on, dropping clods of dirt on the wooden
floor. And one or two might have served as Santa Claus on Christmas eve, wearing red suit and laughing Ho, ho, ho.
Looking back now as an American citizen, American troops' contributions to my motherland was unmeasurable. At the time when despair
was inevitable, they gave us kids hope and the sweet taste of life, and most importantly, broadened our view of life. The "kids" in that turbulent era grew up and rebuilt South Korea on a sturdy foundation.
And some decades later, some kids who lived through the war in the mideast will remember the American troops' sacrifices in his or her country as I do now.
Friendship Makes Anyplace Home/ Jingdezhen, China
It’s very quiet here, at Sanbao International Ceramic Institute, at seven in the morning.
In this 300-year-old building situated in the outskirts of Jingdezhen, a town known as the Porcelain City, I hear ancient China breathing through those crumbling brick walls, through the woodwork that had long lost its glow, and through the squeaky floor under my feet that groans every time I walk on it.
Mao Zedong’s solemn portraits hanging on the walls makes me uneasy. Three decades had passed since his death, but his presence is vibrantly alive here, like in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I wonder whether the folks in this place also participated in the Cultural Revolution in the late 60s, in which anything that reminded Mao of feudal China was smashed — landowners, Buddhist temples and monks, books on Confucius and his teachings, palaces, mansions — and he built a communists state, where everyone was equally common and poor before his nonnegotiable leadership.
I arrived here a few days ago as a resident artist to learn the ancient Chinese methods of pottery-making and to work with other foreign artists, but at the moment, I am the only “foreign artist” here. I was informed that they’d join me later. Two Chinese students from Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute are working with me on a daily basis.
This place could have belonged to a storybook once upon a time. Surrounded by tall, fog-capped mountains, no 21st century civilization had touched yet, except occasional motorcyclists speedaways with a spray of dust and a loud boom. I like it so much that I dread the day I will have to pack and head home.
Through the large picture windows before my work area in the studio stands a majestic green mountain whose peak is sliced off by the straight roof line of the building I am in, and on the back is a terraced patio tiled with broken, mismatching ceramic pieces and a basin collecting crystal clear water from a brook that runs through the property. From this basin, we fetch water to work, and when we’re done working, we wash hands, tools and the muddy apron for the next day. The gurgling water and the scenery remind me of Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony.
Two dozen employees, all Chinese, treat me well. In fact, I am a bit of celebrity here. Everyone wants to talk to me, jabbering in Chinese. When I understand what they say they cheer me, saying “Hen Hao!” But when I don’t understand, they write the characters on a piece of paper for me. I had taken a Chinese language class at a local college, but talking comes slower than reading. Still, my ability to utter a few Chinese sentences pays off in a big way. It seems also that the people have warmed to me because I am eager to learn their language. My maiden name, Suh, originated in China, and I told them so in my halting Chinese.
I came here to learn arts and craft of ancient Chinese pottery, but what I’ve gained from these folks is rather profound. Now I realize that wherever you go on this earth, you will always find something familiar and someone who opens his or her arms to you as a gesture of warmth and friendship because, after all, this planet is the home for all humans to find comfort and share with one another.
Eight thousand miles away from my home in Kansas, I am definitely comfortable.
Nation Embraces Old and New/ Jingdezhen, China
China has 5,000 years of written history, yet she is adapting to the 21st century lifestyle, which at quick glance looks much like what I see in America today. Would I be stretching it if I say this ancient country has a young heart?
The old China and young China equally present here in Jingdezhen.
I often see from the window of the ceramic studio here at Sanbao a procession of three men hauling a large porcelain jar, as tall as me, on an old, rickety, two-wheeled wagon — one man pulling at the front and two pushing from the back. The brush maker wakes me up every morning with tapping noises as he pounds bamboo with a hammer until it turns into fine fiber like human hair. At the creek, someone is always doing laundry, beating garments with a wooden bat. In the field, men and water buffalos are partners, tilling and plowing together, ignoring the fact that machines are doing most of the farm work in other places.
But when you cross the city limit of Jingdezhen five miles away, you’re in young China. The streets are noisy with persistently honking car horns, roadside vendors shouting their specials, and Chinese pop songs blaring from speakers. Every gift store you walk in is a mini Wal-Mart that sells jeans with holes, T-shirts with images of American entertainers or pop singers, stuffed bear Winnie the Poohs and a collection of kids’ accessories printed with Dora’s face printed on. You can’t find anything that gives you the flavor of old China except ceramic items.
As a Korean-American senior citizen living here for a limited time, I notice something else — the large placards with the names of Korean companies such as Hyundai or Samsung or Kia hung in the air, welcoming you, flapping in the wind. You’d never guess what it feels like seeing the names of your homeland companies from this side of the globe until you actually see them.
For centuries, China has been known as Great China and resided over other Asian countries with shown power and supremacy over the rest of Asia. During the Ching Dynasty, Seoul had four gates to receive foreign guests, and one of them, East Gate, served strictly for cultural exchange purpose between China and Korea. Through this gate, Chinese delegates entered to visit and council the Korean monarchy, and the Korean envoy left for China to pay respect to the Emperor, often bringing the gift of ginseng, slaves and gold with them.
Today, the Koreans are supplying new blood in China’s economy, as 25,000 Korean companies are manufacturing anything from giant size ships to zippers. With this in mind, the general impression I get from the locals toward me is warmth and even admiration. One taxi driver said to me when he heard that I was a Korean, “We like Koreans!”
A young country living in her ancient body is my impression of today’s China, and I know she will still grow and change with time. But a human life is deadly limited. Each day we live is an irreversible journey to the end without another chance. How unfair it is that we humans aren’t given the same privilege as a country.
As my last day here is fast approaching, many thoughts linger in my head. What will China be like 10 years from now? When I return, will I still see those brush makers tapping away all day, separating the grains of bamboo tips, and buffalos and men working together in the fields? Wait, 10 years? Where will I be 10 years from now?
I’ll give some serious thought to this when I get home.
Asians View of Life after Death
Asians' view of life after death
While reading about a regiment of life―size ancient Chinese terra cotta soldiers and chariots excavated from the massive grave of Emperor Qin Shi Huang (221―206 B.C.) that are now on a tour of the United States, I was reminded of how ancient Asians viewed life after death. These clay figures are only a fraction of the 7,000 terra cotta soldiers, 400 horses, and chariots, most of which are still buried in an area of 22 square miles in remote Lintong County, Shaangxi Province.
Even before Buddhism spread in Asia, people believed that life continued after death, and some even romanticized death as a passage to an eternal life, richer and more fulfilling than life on earth, waiting for them on the other side of this planet. Obviously, Emperor Qin Shi Huang was no exception. As a warmonger who unified all states in the vast land and became the first Emperor of Imperial China which lasted until the communists took over, Emperor Qin perceived himself as the undying chief commander of his devoted army, and took them with him to his grave, this time, made of clay, in a battle formation.
On a smaller scale, common folks like my parents tended toward romantic feelings about life beyond death. While I was still in Korea in the early 1960's, they heard the news that the Seoul Catholic Diocese had just opened the first Catholic Cemetery on a scenic mountain village some 20 miles north of the city and were elated. The next day, my father took a day off from work and left home early to investigate the place, with a box lunch Mother had packed for him. Returning that evening, he broke the news that he purchased the best spot available.
"You'll like it," he said to Mother at the dinner table, acting as though he was a new owner of a vacation home in Hawaii. "Our plot sits on a terraced slope that gives a distant view of the Han River and overlooks a peaceful green valley. It's an ideal spot for a family picnic, too." They were only in their early fifties.
Back then, as a young adult itching to leave home and explore the modernized world out there I didn't share their excitement about finding their eternal rest place. I even thought they were silly. Why did it matter whether they would lie among Catholics or Buddhists or Hindus after they were gone? How could they appreciate the surrounding scenery when they couldn't see it?
On my first trip back home in the summer of 1978, I finally understood their wishes. Their joint grave, which they had chosen with care and loving intentions, had become a gathering place for their children and grandchildren. One of my four brothers who had been living in San Francisco for some time returned home at the same time as I did, and with other siblings and their children living in Seoul, a dozen of us gathered at our parents' grave. After a humble ceremony of prayer and silent dialogues between them and us the living, we had a picnic, just as our parents had wished that we would.
One's grave isn't just a mound of dirt that keeps the remains in place, but rather, it is a place for the living, to renew themselves and to reflect on the past, present, and future. Emperor Qin's terracotta soldiers on tour of the United States will do no less for the American viewers: They will learn much about Emperor Qin, his leadership, his ambition, and what China was like 2300 years ago but also think about his/ her journey of life after death.
Workloads of Working Mothers
Workloads of a Working Mom
Since 1970's, the number of working moms have multiplied in the United States, statistics show. Though women still make significantly less than men in the same fields, the number of women seeking fulfillment in life besides being a mom and homemakers will steadily grow.
"Motherly duties" is such a simple, vague term compared to the wide variety of tasks a young mother has to accomplish daily. After a full day at work, she's a chauffeur taking her kids to library or birthday parties or a piano lesson or baseball practice. She is also a nurse tending her little "patients" with a fever or a tummy ache; a judge settling arguments between siblings and pronouncing "timeout!"; a tutor nagging about homework or poor report cards. Most of all, she's a healer who dries tears and soothes pain with a warm hug and kiss.
At work, she wants to do more than her share so that her "motherly duties" wouldn't dent her professionalism.
I've been there. In early 1970's, I was a cellist with the late Kansas City Philharmonic and a mother of three young daughters, all under four. Often, I wondered why God didn't grant me two pairs of strong arms and weight lifting abilities, so that I could carry my twins, hold hands with my three―year―old, and carry a diaper bag at the same time.
Mornings were difficult. With three small children, a hundred things can go wrong, even if you line up their clothes, socks, and shoes and are ready to go the previous night. One baby can have a fever, the other diarrhea, and your three year old might cry because she wasn't in the mood to be dragged out of the house and dropped off at her preschool.
On a good day when all goes smoothly, you drop off your three―year―old at preschool and the twins at the babysitter, but you're not free. On the way to the Music Hall for a rehearsal you hear their cries echo through your head. If you didn't forget the sheet music you had checked out to practice, you're lucky. If you wore decent clothes without milk and baby food stains all over, congratulate yourself. Forgot to feed yourself breakfast? Oh well, missing one meal wouldn't kill you.
When the rehearsal ends and you pick up your little ones, one from preschool, two from the babysitter, you're as happy as a hen sitting on her eggs. But this is the time you worry about laundry, grocery shopping, doctor's appointments, and what to feed them for dinner. No matter how hard you worked that day or how many miles you drove, as you sit on the stage at the Music Hall, in your long black, behind your cello, there's always the nagging voice that says that you have not done enough.
Even after nearly four decades since those nearly impossible days, I still have recurring, stress―related dreams.
I speed on the freeway like a gust of wind for the eight o'clock concert, but as soon as I enter the Music Halll, the concert has begun without me. I tiptoe to the backstage, hoping I might be able to sneak onto the stage when the conductor wasn't looking, without disturbing my colleagues. But when I open my cello case at my usual spot it's empty! No cello means no playing! Calm down, I tell myself. This isn't the end of the world. The personnel manager shows up from nowhere and clicks his tongue. "Late again," he says. "The fine for a tardy is 5% of your weekly salary. It's in the contract!"
When I wake up I'm grateful for the fact that my children are now adults raising their own.
It is a known fact today that happy hens lay healthy eggs and happy cows produce more nutritious milk than unhappy ones. Working mothers' emotional state directly affects that of their young children. Employers and managers, don't be hard on the moms under your wings.
Hearing Aids Bring Happiness
I finally got my hearing aids. Why am I bragging about it, you say?
It was a difficult decision to make, but like anything else in life, once the decision was made and the purchase transaction was complete and I brought them home, I was glad. Technically speaking, my husband owns them: It was his idea and he paid for them, but he rather keeps them in my ears, not in his. He bought them because I’ve been annoying him whenever we watched TV together by asking, “What did he say?” or “Why is that guy beating that other guy?” or “What’s funny?” and he had enough of it. With the hearing aids in my ears, he's definitely happier.
During the first week with hearing aids on, I was miserable. I felt as though I was being punished for something I didn’t do. Everything was too loud. I didn’t know that something as insignificant as water running from the faucet could sound like Niagara Falls. Even the grocery sacks rustled like trees in a torrential wind. With one squeal, my Quaker parrot sent me to the other end of the house.
On my next visit to the audiologist I complained about the loudness, and he adjusted the volume, plugging me into a machine, which was connected to his computer. I felt as though I were a rat going through an experimental test, but as a result, the noise is subdued. Still, when a truck passes my open window I feel as though I am in a war zone. Why do I deserve this?
I came up with a clever idea. By not wearing the hearing aids I am embracing Nature’s ultimate wisdom bestowed to older folks, in addition, I will get a taste of what the immortal composer Ludwig Van Beethoven might have suffered during nearly three decades of his 57 years.
Even after his death 182 years ago, Beethoven’s jewel like music is still performed all over the world. But what the great composer impresses me the most is the fact that he produced his most praised work―the Choral symphony, his fifth piano concerto known as Emperor, his numerous string quartets, and his grandioso Missa Solemnis―while he was stone deaf.
Beethoven was a genuis, you say?
A German philosopher wrote. “Genius is the ability to reduce the complicated to the simple.” Growing up in the poor area of Bonn (Germany), Beethoven was an under priviliged, average child, whose alcoholic father often beat him for not practicing piano, and whose mother was always ill from tuberculosis. “Help yourself,” was his boyhood motto, which he carried with him through all the “complicated” tasks he had to tackle. He only had three years of schooling, yet he was the first composer who integrated the grand literary work of Goethe, Dante, and Schiller with his music.
I made a new resolution: Without the booming noises in my ears, I shall be more productive whatever I do in my old age. I should even write another book. Why not?
Most importantly, we are a happy family again; my husband can watch TV without my interruptions, I am happy that my quaker parrot and water from the faucet quieted down significantly, and I can “help myself.”
What about my hearing aids, you ask? They’re well and safe in their sturdy case
Questions linger after teen's slaying of mother
Are the prosecutors treating the American born defendant and her slain Chinese mother fairly and justly? What if some of accusations against the slain victims are false? Who can speak for one in eternal rest when the laws are made strictly for the living?
On March 6, Blue Valley North High School student Esmie Tseng pleaded guilty to killing her 55-year-old mother, Shu Yi Zhang, seven months earlier with a kitchen knife.
Prosecutors had sought to try Esmie as an adult with charges of first-degree murder. Johnson County District Attorney Paul Morrison said then: “This defendant knew what she was doing. She had her wits about her at the time she committed this crime.”
But seven months later, the table was turned. Morrison now thought the slain mother was “unfair and cruel” to the defendant, implying that Esmie was a victim of abuse. Taking her “home life” into account, he dropped the charge to voluntary manslaughter in adult court.
“Attorneys for both sides recommended that Esmie serve eight years and four months in prison,” The Star reported. Sentencing is May 3.
Unfortunately, neither investigators nor the general public will ever know what had been going on at Tseng’s household before Shu Yi Zhang’s brutal death on Aug. 19. The defendant’s father has kept a stony silence about the mother-daughter relationship that led to the matricide.
I, an Asian, have nagging questions: Are the prosecutors treating the American-born defendant and her slain Chinese mother fairly and justly? What if some of the accusations against the victim are false? Who can speak for one in eternal rest when the laws are made strictly for the living?
I can’t help but wonder whether the prosecutor’s generosity in allowing Esmie to plead guilty and reducing her prison time has to do with the fact that she was an American-born honor-roll student and had an army of American supporters — teachers, parents and legal experts.
According to The New York Times, 9,700 prisoners are serving life sentences today for crimes they committed before turning 18, and the number of teenage felons is steadily increasing nationwide. Mother-killing is a grave crime in any culture, no matter who committed it. Should a girl who stabbed her mother to death walk out of the prison after serving only eight years and four months?
Zhang might have shared a common quality with many other Asian mothers by attempting to protect her daughter from the social ills that American youngsters are exposed to today — sex, drugs and alcohol, crime, fantasy for glamour and lust. I, too, set strict rules for my girls, often eavesdropping on their phone conversations and demanding to know who they were talking to and why. Am I lucky to be alive?
While reading the “Kansas City Chinese,” the community online journal, I glimpsed the shock and pain that community members had suffered over Zhang’s sudden death. One member considered the tragedy a wake-up call.
“If this could happen (to Zhang), anything can,” she said.
Zhang’s friends remember her as a “very well-educated lady who could talk about anything ... (a) responsible and conscientious worker.”
Esmie posted her journal on her two online blogs, expressing her frustrations toward her Chinese parents. One of the messages reads: “We were always on the (expletive) road in the stupid van with that damn tourist group my mom chose. All Orientals, speaking AT me because they know I only understand the minimal jist [sic]. ... I’m not who I’m ‘supposed’ to be, and I’m happy about that, but they’re going to (expletive) it up.”
Her words are blatantly disrespectful to her parents, their friends and their Chinese “roots.” If this were her everyday language, it would have been a nightmare for her Chinese mother, who came from a culture where youngsters respected adults, to deal with her.
Why didn’t Esmie’s teachers and counselors help her understand that, by honoring her cultural heritage, she would gain knowledge of herself and her parents, and further appreciate her life here in the United States? Understanding of our parents and their legacies reflects not only on our lives but our children’s lives, and the cycle of give-and-take continues, linking one generation to another.
The wake-up call isn’t only for Chinese parents but all parents of American teenagers.
We Drank Nothing But Tea
Coca-cola was introduced to our family in July, 1951, during the Korean War. It was a gift from two American soldiers, total strangers we met at the beach. In spite of their kindness, we didn’t fall in love with the American drink. In fact, I still don’t touch it, although I am an American citizen now.
That year in July, truce-talks between the United Nations and the Chinese began. The intense fighting we'd suffered through the preceeding year had finally subsided, giving some anxious refugees time to leave our town of Pusan, to check on their homes and missing families. The beaches, once closed and opened, it was time to enjoy life again.
One Sunday afternoon we were among Korean families enjoying the cool ocean breeze on a sandy beach.
Nearby, army tents were flapping in the wind as dozens of American soldiers swam, played volleyball, and sunbathed.
While our family was eating lunch, we had visitors. Two American soldiers, each with a six-pack of Coca-cola bottles, greeted our father in English.
Father was baffled. “Are they trying to sell the drink?” he asked my eldest brother, a high school student, who was learning English at school.
“No," my brother answered. “They're giving it to us for free," he said.
Father smiled. He took the six packs from the soldiers and said “Tank you!” the only English he knew.
“Enjoy! Enjoy,” the soldiers seemed to say, smiling, as they left.
My brother opened a bottle. Brown bubbles crawled up.
Father looked worried. “Is it safe to drink?”
“Of course it is,” my brother said. “Americans drink it all the time.
My brother lifted the bottle to his mouth with a certain air of pride and began drinking it.
I watched him with envy. In our family, we never drank anything but Barley Tea.
Something went wrong: my brother began to spit up the brown, bubbly liquid, hiccupping. The liquid dribbled from his mouth and nose.
“Are you all right? You look sick,” Mother said.
My brother wiped his mouth and grinned awkwardly. “It’s pretty good, really! It pricked my throat like hell, but I’ll drink it again.”
Ludwig Van Beethoven, the Immortal Composer
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a prolific composer who wrote 34 piano sonatas, nine symphonies and countless vocal, piano, and chamber ensemble works, only to mention a few. His greatest accomplishment, however, was liberating music from a cloistered form set by earlier composers such as Hayden, Handel, and Mozart, and expanding it to give dimension, color, and depth. He also integrated the grand literary work of Goethe, Dante, and Schiller with his composition, and enlarged the size of the orchestra by doubling certain instruments, and moved the theme melodies from violins, flutes, oboes to lower voices--violas, cellos, and bassons. In short, Beethoven lifted music from the pleasure of “hearing” to the expression of hearts and souls.
Most of Beethoven’s music begins with a simple theme, which branches out in the middle, and then reaches a powerful climax before ending with the basic theme, like a giant pine that expands in the middle but tapers toward a single stem at the top. His Fifth Symphony is such an example. It begins with four simple notes, which symbolize one’s fate knocking on the door, but develops into vibrant, colorful phrases and rhythms that intertwine and weave a large-scale tapestry of sound.
To understand Beethoven’s grand work of art, one must understand the young Ludwig’s graceless childhood, which contributed to his intense will to rise above himself and others. Growing up in a poor area of Bonn in Germany, one of his mottos was, “Help thyself.” Although he played with marbles and practiced archery like any boy his age would have at the time, his early days were marked with pain, distrust of the world, and craving for something better, something sweeter than what his family could offer him.
Ludwig’s first music teacher was his alcoholic father, Johann van Beethoven, a tenor, who forced the boy to practice piano and violin for hours every day. While the small boy pounded on the keyboard or sawed on the strings, his father would stand behind him, pouring a stench of alcohol about him.
“What’s all this nonsense,” the father would yell, stomping his foot, startling the boy. “Play according to the notes, or I’ll smack your ear!”
Such unpleasant lessons encouraged Ludwig to hide in the attic, away from his father and away from the piano and violin. There, in the attic, he saw the purplish Segovian hills and villages perched on the horizon far beyond the Rhine River and daydreamed of the place he had not seen before. He imagined the Spanish castles and kings he had read about, too, which always accompanied the lively tunes that sprang effortlessly in his ear. He couldn’t understand why he had to obey the written music that lacked imagination and weren’t as sweet as the melodies he heard in his own ears. He couldn’t understand why his father wouldn’t allow him to make his own music and to have fun with it, too. Still, Ludwig advanced quickly in both piano and violin playing.
At eleven, he took a job as a cembalo (a keyboard instrument) player in the town orchestra to earn a few coins. Here, he learned so much about symphonic music, which he would explore later, but also witnessed the musicians who couldn’t play their parts. The more he saw weak personalities, the more he told himself, “Help thyself!”
At the age thirteen, Ludwig became a distinguished court organist earning as much as his father was. By now, his mother was ill with tuberculosis and the family couldn’t survive on his father’s income alone.
Three years later, he went to Vienna to play for Master Wolfgang Mozart, then 32. Mozart was impressed with Ludwig’s brilliant piano playing as well as his improvisational skills. Afterwards, Mozart told other musicians, “Watch out for that chap! Someday he will make the world talk about him.” Mozart accepted Ludwig as his pupil.
Vienna fascinated the boy from Bonn. The ancient city had everything for him--the calm Danube River, the opera house with grand marble staircase, many concert halls, the cathedral with a tall steeple, and the city walls built to resist the Turkish invaders of earlier centuries...
But Ludwig couldn’t stay in Vienna very long, for his mother, Maria Magdalena, was dying. He barely made it in time to see her for the last time. His grief of losing his beloved mother who had shown him much affection as a small boy was so deep that it took a long time for him to compose again.
In 1798, back in Vienna, at age 28, Ludwig Beethoven was reaching his height as a passionate pianist and composer, who had produced three piano trios, three violin sonatas, and one of most brilliant sonatas of all, the Pathetic Sonata Opus 13.
Another tragedy awaited him that year. One spring morning he discovered that he couldn’t hear anything. Years later, he told his pianist-friend Charles Neate what happened that day. He was at his desk, as usual, writing his Oratorio when he heard a loud door-knock. Irritated that the visitor might be the tenor who had been asking him to change his part, he sprang up from the table under such ”rage” that he fell on the floor. When he rose he found himself deaf.
Beethoven’s letter to his long-time friend Carl Amenda reveals his anguish at losing his hearing:
“How I wish you were with me, my friend. Your Beethoven lives very unhappily, in constant conflict with... his creator. Often, I have cursed Him for making his creature suffer the most terrible chances... What a sorrowful life I must now live, avoiding all that is dear and precious to me. Oh, how happy would I be, if my hearing were completely restored!”
Among many theories regarding his deafness, Dr. Franz Wegler, Beethoven’s long time friend and physician, contends that Beethoven had a severe attack of typhus, the infectious disease transmitted by body insects such as lice, which he may have had at adolescence. Unlike common belief that such loss would deteriorate one’s spirit and debilitate him from all creative work, music scholars believe that Beethoven’s work benefited, rather than suffered from his hearing loss. It forced him to stop playing piano, which devastated the brilliant pianist, and robbed him of the pleasure of listening to his performances and all sounds around him, but it never limited the composer from creating and dictating music ringing freely in his inner ear. Here, in the depth of his agony, Beethoven made peace with God to free him and all mankind from suffering.
Beethoven spent many hours walking in the woods of Vienna intoxicated by the beauty of nature, which the great Artist Himself created. Beethoven wrote:
Every tree seems to speak of Thee.
Almighty, I’m happy.
Blessed in the woods...
Every tree has a voice through Thee.
On the height is peace--
Peace to serve Thee.
In his Pastoral Symphony, Beethoven paints the beauty of nature with descriptive melodies and lively rhythms. As you listen to it, you could almost see the short, broad-shouldered Beethoven with dark, curly hair walking in the woods of Vienna in the warm sunlight, humming or singing loudly, his hands beating time; he would occasionally look up to watch birds chattering from the acacia branches and the sky beyond, and then very quickly, he would produce a notebook from his pocket and scribble.
He died on March 26, 1827, in his apartment in Schwarzspanierhouse in Vienna. He had returned from his brother’s home in Gneixendorf in freezing weather and contracted pneumonia. The cause of death was cirrhosis of liver. His last moments suggest that he triumphed over all his physical limitations and delivered himself to the divine world. Robert Haven Schhauffler, the author of “Beethoven,” describes:
Late on the afternoon of March 26, 1827, there was a flash of lightening and a sharp peal of thunder. The unconscious Master raised himself...as if answering the thunder. He clenched and lifted his right hand, remained in that posture for several seconds, and fell back.
Duty, Honor, Memorial
Duty, Honor, and Memorial
The Korean War isn’t “forgotten” after all, the members of the Korean War Veterans Association-Kansas Chapter say. The construction of the KWV Memorial will begin in September or October 2005, not in 2006 or 2007 as they had originally planned, association Commander John Gay said.
Thirteen months ago, in June 2004, the KWVA-Kansas Chapter only had $20,000 in the bank. “We have a lot of work to do,” Veteran Jack Krumme, then the commander, had said to nearly 150 veterans and their families and supporters at a fundraising luncheon hosted by a South Korean women’s organization.
In December the same year the Bush administration awarded them with $371,250 for the memorial, which was proposed by Congressman Dennis Moore and Senator Sam Brownback.
“We were very surprised,” Veteran Clyde Koch, one of the members of the Memorial Committee, remembers. “When we began the campaign two years ago, we didn’t know where to begin. We haven’t done anything like this before. This grant is like a wild dream coming true.” Koch was with the “Charlie Battery” (1st Battalion, 11th Marines, 1st Marine Division) during Inchon Landing in September 1950.
The age of the KWVA-Kansas Chapter is only five-years old. The National KWVA in Washington, D.C. officially recognized them as one of its branches in June 2000, and the KWVA-Kansas Chapter 1-181 held their first meeting at American Legion Hall, 75th & Lowell, Overland Park in March that year. The idea of constructing a memorial in Overland Park was initiated by two veterans--Jack Krumme and John Williams (passed away since) but it was common desire of all. After brainstorming and investigating, they sought legal help.
“We were helped considerably by Mr. Byron Louden, a lawyer and former Overland Park City Councilman,” Veteran Tom Stevens (Vice President of KWVA), says.. “He donated all his services.” On June 9th, 2000, the City Council of Overland Park unanimously approved the construction of the Korean War.
The site dedication ceremony took place two months later, on August 23, at the corner of 119th and Lowell, with Senator Brownback’s keynote address. Congressman Dennis Moore, County Commission Chairperson, Annabeth Surbaugh, Mayor Ed Eilert, and many other local dignitaries were among the guests. The National KWVA Chairman, Harley Coon, gave a heartfelt talk about his experience as a Korean War POW, a compelling testimony of the Communists brutality against humanity.
After the ceremony, General Robert Shirkey, a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, gave a check for $500 to Veteran Stevens as “seed money.”
The fund raising campaign followed. The Memorial Committee developed strategies, made brochures and flyers, and letterheads. Sixty-plus KWVA members contacted numerous organizations and individuals, distributing the campaign materials. Sleeves rolled up, they made pancakes and fried eggs and served them, too. They held garage sales and hosted golf tournaments as well. Their dedication and enthusiasm toward the memorial moved strangers, their golf buddies, and people of all color and all areas of life.
Donations poured in.
The local South Koreans didn’t “forget” who liberated them from the Communists. Nor did they forget how poor and helpless their homeland had been when the Russian tanks mowed down on a Sunday morning in June 1950. The Korean-American Ladies Foundation of Overland Park raised more than $10,000 for the veterans and the Korean-American Society of Greater Kansas City $20,000. Nancy Accord, the leader of the Korean-American Ladies Foundation, addressed at one of the luncheons honoring the veterans: “We can never thank you enough. We’re honored to do whatever we can...for your memorial”
More than a hundred organizations and countless individuals sent contributions. Last May, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation awarded the KWVA with a “Leadership Gift” of $50,000 in commemoration of Memorial Day 2005. The Overland Park Art’s Commission chaired by Wendall Anschuts, the former anchorman of KCMO (now KCTV5), pledged $50,000 for the memorial.
Anschutz says, “...somehow history overlooked the Korean War Veterans' sacrifices.... The memorial will be a magnificent addition to many beautification projects we are working on, as well as a lasting reminder of those who gave...everything while we went about our privileged daily lives. No one makes a greater contribution to our society than those who put their lives on the front line.”
Veteran George Moods, who served in South Korea between 1952-1954, is proud of what he did a half century ago. “We worked very hard,” he says with confidence. “Our 79th Army Engineering Battalion built water-purifying plants, army headquarters, and highways and bridges.... South Korea has changed so much since. I feel good knowing that we helped them.”
The ages of the Korean War veterans range between 71-78. Most of them were only seventeen or eighteen when they arrived in Korea to control a “police action.” Before they could figure out what the “police action” was all about, thousands died or were injured or captured.
The North Korean Communists under Kim Il-sung had been secretively preparing war against their “other half” since the beginning of 1949, transporting modern Russian tanks and training the troops along the 38th Parallel, while the South Koreans’ hands were tied under the stern American military advisers. Whenever the CIC (Korean CIA) reported them the North Korean’s suspicious activities along the 38th Parallel, they ignored it. The North Korea’s “surprise attack” across the 38th Parallel the following year was a sheer terror for everyone.
After three years of bloody battle, the 38th parallel didn’t shift and the map of Asia remained the same. As the world leaders tried to end the war, anti-American demonstration erupted throughout South Korea. School children, labor unions, church organizations, women’s group--all poured out to the streets, shouting, “We’ll fight on. Move out Americans! We want reunification!”
Life Magazine printed on June 22, 1953 under the caption "One Old Man Against the Truce." It reads: “South Korea's 78-year-old President Syngman Rhee cried that truce between the UN and the Communists 'means death' to his country and threatened to fight on alone to expel the Chinese Reds and take the entire Korea. ‘If you have to leave us, we're sorry to see you go!’ he said.’”
American soldiers came home without banners of glory and honor. With another war erupting in Vietnam a few years later, the Korean War and those who fought in that war faded from people’s memory.
But it’s history now. Finally, the Korean War veterans’ sacrifices in South Korea will be engraved in granites and bricks. Their photos, diaries, letters will be displayed, too. The area residents, including children, can learn why the Korean War happened, who fought in it, and what the world learned from it.
Today, many American sons and daughters are fighting in Iraq. What message could be more comforting for those young Americans (and their families) than the fact that their country will “remember” their sacrifices?
The KWVA-Kansas Chapter 1-181’s Mission Statement reads: We pay tribute to those who gave their lives, were wounded, and were prisoners of war or missing in action. This (memorial) is for them....
Marian Anderson: The Goodwill Ambassador
At a post office one day, I saw stamps with Marian Anderson’s portrait printed on them and told the clerk I wanted ten of them. As she handed them to me, I told her that I had heard Anderson sing in Korea when I was in high school.
“I didn’t know she went there,” said the clerk.
I told her it was a part of Anderson’s ten-week concert tour of the South Pacific and Asia in 1957, and that two years earlier, the State Department in Washington had awarded her with the position “Good Will Ambassador,” a prestigious honor any American could dream of. “I am one of the lucky ones who heard her live performance,” I bragged.
“Wait a minute,” the clerk said. “I thought Marian Anderson was an actress, not a singer.”
I couldn’t believe how ignorant she was. I almost said, “Do you consider yourself an American, not knowing who Marian Anderson was?” But fortunately my gentler side (if applicable) took over the situation. “Maybe we are not talking about the same Marian Anderson,” I said, and quickly left the post office.
If the clerk had listened, I would have told her more about Anderson, especially the way her fellow Americans treated her due to her non-white skin, and what powerful message she delivered to her fellow African-Americans of today, with her magnificent voice and elegant stage manners.
That summer evening in 1957, our family sat on the balcony of Ehwa University’s auditorium/gymnasium in Seoul, anxiously waiting for Anderson’s recital to begin. After the Korean War had ended with the Truce in July 1953, our country’s door was wide open, and world-level engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and experts in all areas of life poured into our war-wrecked country--some to help rebuild it and some to seek fortune.
Musicians, artists and entertainers came too. As horrifying as it was, the Korean War introduced us to the rest of the world, and now we were indulging in a healthy diet of cultural nourishment from all over the world.
As a sophomore in high school, I had just started playing cello, and my anticipation of hearing Anderson’s recital was beyond words. This was the singer the grand conductor Arturo Toscanini complimented by saying, “The world can hear such a voice only once in a hundred years.” How could one not be excited?
Ehwa University auditorium wasn’t built for music performances. The hardwood floor squeaked whenever someone walked on it, and the stage was poorly lit. The black velvet curtains on both sides of the stage weren’t the best things in music halls, but we didn’t know it back then. This auditorium was the only building in Seoul spacious enough to accommodate a thousand music lovers, and we proudly called it “The Korean Carnegie Hall.”
The hall lights suddenly dimmed, and tall black lady in a long, snow-white dress appeared on the stage. The applause shook the hall. She reminded me of a black swan with gleaming white feathers.
The program began in a hushed silence. As Anderson’s rich velvety voice echoed through the auditorium, I was led into her music world. While she sang Schubert’s Ave Maria, I wanted to rush to our church and kneel and pray; while she sang the Negro Spirituals, I was one of the cotton-pickers in southern America. At some point of the evening, I felt as though it was I who was singing my heart’s content, telling of my sorrow, my faith in God, and my longing for peace and freedom. It was something I had never felt before.
When the recital ended with three curtain calls, I wanted to be a musician. What would be more rewarding than being able to express my deeper feelings through cello, like Anderson could with her voice?
Ten years later, I joined the Kansas City Philharmonic (now the Symphony), after two degrees from two music schools--one from Seoul, Korea, and another from Paris, France.
One day, during an out of town concert, I overheard the conversation that Marian Anderson had been the featured soloist with the Philharmonic a year before. It wasn’t a happy story at all. While the local newspapers raved about Anderson’s luscious voice and outstanding accomplishments, all hotel owners in downtown Kansas City refused to give the black singer a room. Anderson had no choice but get a room in all black area, miles from the Music Hall!
It was the first lesson that taught me about racial discrimination the white Americans inflicted on their black neighbors. I revisited the summer night in 1957 many times, while practicing cello or walking or riding a metro. How wonderful it would have been, had I joined the Philharmonic a year earlier and met her in person? I would have mustered some courage to go up to her on the back stage and introduced myself, saying I had heard her in Seoul. I am sure Anderson would have been glad to learn that her music so inspired a teenage girl on the other side of the globe that she eventually found her way to the United States.
A Late Bloomer's Resolution
I am a late bloomer in the school of aging. Looking back, it’s no surprise, because I was never an advanced reader and wasn’t good at math. I still don’t like math that much. My accumulating age makes my head spin.
However, I am quick to notice my friends’ deepening wrinkles and graying hair and their dentures. Once I called a cashier “Old lady” and was embarrassed when she turned out to be four years younger than me. I would have been furious if anyone called me that.
But recently my age and the business of “aging” suddenly caught up with me, like unpaid bills, and I had to balance my life account.
It all happened about a month ago when I walked into a patient’s room in a local hospital as a Korean-English translator. The speech pathologist met me in the hallway and explained that the patient had a stroke three days earlier and that he lost ability to communicate in English, along with his short-term memories. She said that the kind of stroke the patient suffered wouldn’t affect his ability to speak his native language and the events that happened in his childhood.
In the room, I recognized him: He has lived in the Kansas City area as long as I have and spoke near perfect English whenever I heard him talk. But now, his watery eyes wandering about the ceiling, he didn’t seem to be aware of his condition or why people were encircling him.
Our session began with the doctor’s questions, which I asked him in Korean. “Mr. Kim (not real name), do you see your daughter in the room?”
The patient’s head turned slowly toward the young woman standing in the corner with puffy eyes, and he stared.
“What’s her name?”
His lips trembling, he pronounced a Korean name.
“Do you remember what happened to you three days ago?”
He didn’t reply. Closing his eyes, he was silent for a long moment. Then, while we were watching, he drifted to sleep.
Or, did he pretend that he was asleep, so that he didn’t have to face the reality? I had no clue. Our session had to end.
On the way out, I picked up a couple of brochures on stroke from the nurses’ station and read them, standing in the hallway.
Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the US. Brain cells depend on blood to supply oxygen and nutrients, and when the supply is cut off or drastically reduced, cells begin to starve or die suddenly. The degree of damage depends on the location in the brain and the length of time blood flow is obstructed or reduced. About 70% of stroke patients recover and lead a near normal life, but the rest suffer permanent damage, including partial paralysis, speech impediment, and cognitive deficits.
One kind is a hemorrhagic stroke, in which the blood vessels break. This is usually associated with hypertension or high blood pressure, and learning to relax or avoid a stressful situation might help in reducing the chance to be attacked. The second type is an ischemic stroke. This happens when a small blood clot block the flow in the blood vessels. The brain is most vulnerable to such chaos, because it cannot survive without a timely supply of oxygen. To prevent this type of stroke, one must exercise, stay away from saturated fats, and restrain from smoking.
Driving home with newly gained knowledge, I was as determined as a soldier heading to the battlefield. I can’t lose my second language at any price, because I worked so hard to learn it. It would be a nightmare if the clock suddenly turns backwards and I find myself waking up in a hospital room surrounded by people babbling something I don’t understand. It would be sad, too, if all my short-term memories are wiped from my brain, like a computer file that vanishes with an accidental click of a mouse, and I can’t recognize my loved ones or remember their names.
I resolved to defend my second language and all my fun memories of my loved ones with all my might. I will walk daily, eat sensibly, and enjoy the sunsets every evening.
His Majesty, the Bird
Once I had compassion for all caged birds. I even considered their owners a heartless bunch. But since I became a bird owner myself last fall, I see things differently. Now I am more compassionate toward bird owners than those noisy, obnoxious critters who have nothing but bundles of feathers.
My eight-month-old parrot’s name is Sparky but I call him His Majesty, because he considers me his subject rather than his owner. His wings are clipped, but he has freedom. His cage is open 24 hours a day, and there’s no curfew. He can stride in and out of his “castle” whenever he feels like it. He squeals powerfully, too. “Pirrrrit, pirrrrit, pirrrrit” until my ears hurt, ordering me to bring his food and water, change his cage, and demanding treats, which he feels he deserves. Unlike ordinary birds, His Majesty isn’t satisfied with the store-bought feed but likes cheeriors, crackers, grapes, and mango, anything that people eat as though he had been a human in his previous life.
He has some annoying habits: He doesn’t like to use his own feet when he wants to walk around the house but prefers riding on my shoulder. I didn’t mind it at first, but after his claws dug into my skin and stained my new blouse with you-know-what, I don’t let him anymore. He likes to chew on things, too, my fingers or watchband or necklace, anything he could lay his beak on.
One thing His Majesty can’t stand is boredom. He likes to play with things that are thought-provoking and entertaining. Two or three times a week, I buy him a new toy. He particularly loved a palm-size electronic keyboard I had bought for him at Wal-Mart, but he broke it. He played it over and over, making interesting melodies--biting all eight keys and poking the gaps between them. No musical instrument can stand such abuse, and sure enough, in less than a week, the keyboard gave out its last sound.
His Majesty screeched so much afterwards that I made another trip to Wal-Mart and bought him a toy cellular-phone that rings and chirps like a real one. His Majesty was enthralled with it, turning it on and off, on and off, for hours, but I could tell that he didn’t like it as much as he did the keyboard, for its mechanism was too simple to operate. He tossed into his water bowl on the same day I brought it home.
From his caretaker’s point of view, Majesty is a messy eater. You’d be amazed how fast he can shuck a sunflower seed without even using your claws. Shelling a peanut is no problem, either. Holding it with one foot (or hand), he bites the shell off piece by piece until the floor is covered with bits of peanut shell.
By contrast, he is a neat housekeeper. He has a playhouse on top of his cage, in which he plays hide-and-seek alone. Anything I put into it, toy or food, he throws out. Keep it neat and clean, is his order.
When he has nothing else to do, he watches TV. One day I found him watching a circus, hanging upside down from his wire-cage door and swinging back and forth, imitating the performers on the screen. He likes nature shows, too, especially the ones about birds. Chattering and babbling, he tries to communicate with his kind on the screen.
Sometimes I wish he wouldn’t squeal so much and make less mess, but he challenges me to think and see the world from a bird point of view. I think I’ll keep His Majesty.
Bird Nest Soup, Anyone?
Longevity and good health is a common desire for all, especially among the older generation. But what do you do to stay young and healthy? Are you spending money on exercise machines, health club memberships, and workout-videos? Have you thought about drinking a potion made of deer and elk antlers and bird-nest soup, like many Asians do?
Though unknown to most Americans, traditional Chinese medical doctors have been using bird-nests for centuries to treat respiratory ailments such as asthma and bronchitis, to rejuvenate skin, and to boost energy for both young and old. Bird nests have been a most “wanted” gift for centuries among older the generation in Asia.
The birds known as chimney swifts here in North America have famous cousins known as swiftlets in the southeastern Asian countries. They live in deep caves or under the roofs of coves along the seashores of Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, Burma, Malaysia, and the Philippines and their nests have been well-loved by Chinese for 1,500 years. They measure about the size of common sparrows, except they have shorter bills, a slender body, and longer tails. They could fly about 80-100 mph, much faster than most average birds, and have a wide wingspan close to that of pigeons. They build nests with their glue-like saliva and cement them on cave walls or inside a tunnel, far away from their predators.
Bird nests are a multi-million dollar industry in Asia. Indonesia alone ships 80-100 tons of nests to Hong Kong, while Malaysia exports only ten tons of what they consider the “finest” on the market. Interestingly enough, the bird's nest industry is never threatened by a global economic crisis. In fact, during the past 30 years, the price of bird nest has sky rocketed. In 1975 a kilogram was sold for $10.00 in Hong Kong, but in 1995, it was $400.00, and then in 2002, it was $1,600. This is a huge profit for southeastern countries that depend on foreign exchange.
The Hong-Kong Chinese eat more than 100 tons of bird-nests each year, nearly 60% of the world’s supply. The Chinese communities in North America consume 30 plus tons, but the Mainland Chinese buy only 10 tons, 10% of what Hong Kong Chinese consume. [During Mao Ze-Dong’s regime between 1949-1976, bird-nest soup was considered a “luxury” and law prohibited buying and selling of nests. It was the dark era when living in an elegant home was considered “bourgeois mentality” and government allowed looters to burn and destroy countless homes.]
Today, a bowl of bird-nest soup in a Hong Kong restaurant sells for $60.00 or more. Most of the common nest soup is made with chicken bullion, but with a bit more money, one can get a fancier kind of soup known as “Phoenix Swallowing the Swallow,” clear consommé extracted from a chicken impregnated with bird nests and served in a porcelain pot.
There are three kinds of bird nests— white, orange-yellow, and black. “White Nests” are more expensive, purer in quality, and have higher nutritional value than the other two kinds, which contain color pigments from the iron oxide of cave-walls and are believed to give an impure taste.
According to Yun-Cheung Kong, professor of biochemistry in the Chinese University in Hong-Kong, the trade of swiftlets’ nests began in China during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.) Some time during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), an admiral named Cheng He introduced foreign nests to the Imperial court of China. He traveled throughout Southeast Asia one year and brought back samples of many different kinds of nests and presented them to the Imperial Court. Dr. Kong believes that the supply in China had been exhausted before foreign nests were imported. In the late 17th century, four million nests (125,000 pounds) passed through the port of Batavia, now Jakarta.
Nest-harvesting isn’t an easy job for anyone. It takes skills and experience. During the peak season between February and May each year, they clamber up trellises of bamboo and vines at sunrise, only descending at sundown. To keep their hands firmly on the trellises or bamboo scaffoldings, some times as high as 200-300 feet from the cave floor, they balance torchlight between their teeth to look for what they call “White Gold.” Their only tool is the three-pronged instrument called rada, which they believe that gods of the cave approved of and anointed. No harvesters would attempt to touch nests without rada.
One harvester can collect as many as 50 or 60 nests a day. Sometimes, like mountain climbers, the harvesters hammer metal poles into rocks and boulders to attach themselves to the cave walls. Many have died when a rotted bamboo pole or a boulder gave in under their weight, but such accidents never discouraged the surviving harvesters.
There are taboos among the nest-gatherers: One must not make noises when he is on the job, for noises disturb the cave-spirits and they would punish him; he should never sit on the knot of lianas where the scaffolding is secured, for it is a sacred spot held together by the gods; uttering such words as “blood” or “falling” or “death” or “fear” is the same as cursing the cave-spirits.
Swiftlets lose their homes three times a season. When their first nests are stolen, they rebuild them quickly on the same spots, only to lose them again even before they can produce their eggs. But when the third nests are built, most harvesters wait until the young birds are raised and gone, but some ruthless ones destroy them anyway, spilling eggs and sending the fledglings to the floor.
Many scientists, including Dr. Kong, are worried about rapidly disappearing swiftlets. The walls in some caves are completely abandoned; only the rotted bamboo scaffoldings remind nest-harvesters of what they have destroyed. But such reminder doesn’t stop the harvesters from following the birds to their new homes, for “White Gold” is too precious for them.
As Zoologist Kang Nee of the National University of Singapore believes, the harvest cycles of swiftlets’ nests must coordinate with the birds breeding patterns before they become extinct. Until this is done, the number of swiftlets will rapidly shrink while the price of nests will keep soaring.
For the sake of swiftlets, I hope the general American public wouldn’t discover Bird-nest Soup at any time soon.
Inchon Landing Remembered
Historians acknowledge that the United Nations Forces’ landing at Inchon Harbor on September 15, 1950, was one of the most successful operations in modern military history. Twenty-five thousand tons of supplies, 6600 vehicles, 260 vessels, and 74,000 men were mobilized to capture the enemy-occupied harbor.
Then a nine-year-old growing up in a war-torn country, I thought General MacArthur was God’s angel who turned a losing battle into a winning one overnight, with a simple stroke of a magic baton. But recently I met an Overland Park (Kansas) resident, and my perception of the Inchon Landing and the most admired general or all American generals changed. Although it was MacArthur who engineered and executed the massive plan with precision, men like Corporal Clyde Koch stepped into enemy territory, sweated, bled, and even died in order to retake the harbor.
Veteran Koch claims that he was only a small cog in a big war-machine. But for “a small cog,” he showed much pride as he began to talk about that September day fifty-four years ago.
Then 20, Koch watched a barrage of fire on the distant shore from a landing-ship-tank (LST). “This is for real,” he said to himself. He was nervous, but not that much, he says. He had been a Marine for three years. After six months training on Guam Island he served in the US garrison troops in Tsing-Tao, a large beer-producing port city in the northern province of Shantung, China. [After World War II ended the US troops were in China, mainly to support the Chinese government and to disarm the Japanese troops who had occupied China since 1937. During the following years, while Chian Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang and Mao Ze-Dong’s Communists fought bloody murder, the US troops remained in China, this time, to discourage communism from spreading. With Mao’s Communists taking over throughout Mainland China in 1949, all US troops returned to the United States.]
Koch’s unit, Charlie Battery, (1st Battalion, 11th Marines, 1st Marine Division) had been aboard a landing-ship-tank (LST) since they had left Pusan on September 7th, and everyone was anxious for landing. The sea had been so choppy that motion sickness was a common ailment among the Marines. As morning wore on, enemy resistance seemed weakening, and finally, in mid-afternoon, orders came to abandon the LST and board a smaller landing craft loaded with 105mm howitzers.
As the boat carried them to the shore during the high tide, Koch was surprised to discover that the communists were nowhere to be found.
"The Navy pilots have done a wonderful job of clearing the shore with their bombardment,” Koch says. “It was an easy landing for us.”
The beach was littered with dead bodies, driftwood, and abandoned military equipment. In one area, behind a blood smeared chain-link fence, about 60 young North Korean prisoners, barely 16 or 17 years of age, sat in a group, stark naked, except loin cloths, hands bound behind them. It bothered Koch that one’s victory meant another’s defeat. But he had no time to be sentimental about it: his artillery unit was ready to move again.
While air-fighters dropped bombs and napalm onto the town of Inchon, and the Infantry marched toward the capital, Charlie Battery crossed the Han River on pontoon boats to secure the area for the advancing troops. They blasted enemy equipment and its defenders along the shoreline. By the evening of the third day, they were at the edge of Kimpo airfield on the outskirts of Seoul, and within hours, the 6,000-foot runway was captured. The UN suffered fewer than 300 casualties, but the enemy lost ten times more.
On September 25th, Seoul was officially liberated from the enemy, although it took another three days for the UN troops to drive the fanatical North Koreans out of the area. On September 28th, General MacArthur escorted South Korea’s 74-year-old president, Syng-man Rhee, back to his presidential seat at the partially damaged National Assembly Hall.
Surrounded by smartly dressed U.S. soldiers imported from the Occupation Force in Japan for the occasion, General MacArthur solemnly declared the city liberated in God’s name, before leading the teary audience into the Lord’s prayer.
The old Korean president couldn't hide his overwhelming emotion as he expressed his “undying gratitude” to MacArthur and the American military for restoring the capital’s lost dignity. Afterwards, from the front lawn of the presidential mansion, the general and the president watched South Korea’s military band parading triumphantly through the ruined streets.
Koch wasn’t at the ceremony but he heard about it. He was with his fellow marines on Inchon Beach, waiting for orders to embark on a new sea-journey to Wonsan, one of the major harbors in North Korea. A month later, he and his unit would march to the Chosin Reservoir, where the Chinese Volunteer Corp ambushed them mercilessly. On December 2nd that year, Koch was wounded severely when an enemy bullet entered into his abdomen and lodged in his hip, which he would carry with him for years afterwards. After a lengthy treatment and recuperation, first in Yakasuka Japan and then in Hawaii, he was discharged from the Marine Corps on August 18th 1951.
Today, Inchon is a vibrant harbor boasting a giant bronze statue of General MacArthur overlooking the beaches and its modern international airport where tourists pour in every year from all over the world to get a glimpse of a historical harbor. Four years ago, Veteran Koch was one of them.
“It was great going back,” he says with a smile.
Although the Korean War was known as the Forgotten War and the American soldiers didn’t return with glory and shining images as victors at the war’s end, to Inchon and to those who lived through a long period of fear and destruction, it was unforgettable.
A Lost Friend
Wilbert (Shorty) Estabrook, now 73, lived 37 months in a prison along the scenic Yalu River during the Korean War. Over all, the most devastating facts about his captivity, including the 110-mile long “Death March” in 30 degree below freezing temperature on a snow-covered mountain road, was losing his buddy, Jack Samms. To Shorty, every soldier left beside the road during the march is Jack. His poem says it all.
I lost my friend along the way
To this place I recall now
I didn’t want to lose him
But I did and don’t know how.
I remember the way he looked at me
As I laid him down to rest
He said to me, “I can’t go on Old Pal,
You’ve seen my very best.
So leave me now and go your way
And when your journey ends
Remember me beside this road
Your buddy, your friend.”
Shorty met Jack at the prisoners’ camp in Pyongyang. They both had been captured in mid-July, 1950, near Taejon--a town 70 miles south of Seoul--a few days apart from one another. They had been beaten at the time of capture, too, and lost their army boots, watches, rings, and wallets to the enemy soldiers. Jack was a “country boy” from Ashland Kentucky, and Shorty was from a potato farm near Oakland, Maine. They both had been in Japan for nearly two years in the U.S. Occupation Army, doing easy duties, before they arrived in Korea, and knew nothing about killing people with real rifles.
Life took a quick turn for them, and now they were prisoners in a school building on the outskirts of Pyongyang, where 735 soldiers and 79 civilians consisting of Catholic religious leaders, diplomats, engineers, businessmen, and families with children all lived in the same building. The communists fed them thin cabbage soup and millet, maize, and a very small amount of rice mixed together. Everyone was hungry even right after a meal, but Jack craved sweets. He’d say, "If I were back in Japan now I would go to the snack bar and get me 2 chocolate Eclaires with the cream on the top and some ice cream to boot.” In Shorty’s account, you could almost taste the Eclaire melting in your mouth just by listening to him. Jack also talked about his home in Kentucky with longing, including his mother’s cooking, until everyone was “crazy with homesickness.”
The injured prisoners suffered the most. Without medical doctors or supplies, their wounds became infected in the sweltering heat and attracted maggots and flies. The un-wounded soldiers helped them walk, but the severely wounded ones had to be carried on makeshift stretchers.
On the train to Pyongyang, the guards wearing red stars on their uniforms had been brutal. Like many other prisoners, Shorty had received a heavy blow on the back of his head, which fractured his skull and knocked him unconscious. Even after a half century, Shorty says, it still gives him a severe migraine headache from time to time. For this wound, he received a Purple Heart Medal at the war’s end.
Through the windows of the school building in Pyongyang, Shorty and Jack watched the U.S. planes dropping bombs nearby. They hoped that their American colleagues would soon find and liberate them from the enemy, but at the same time, they knew what those bombs could do to them.
On September 5th, they boarded a train again, not knowing their destination. They traveled at night to avoid the American bombers, and during the day, the prisoners were forced to leave the train and hide in wooded areas on a hillside until dark, while the severely wounded soldiers remained in the cars.
A week later they arrived in the frontier town Manpo-jin along the Yalu River. An old Japanese army barracks became their home for the following six weeks, where they cooked their own food with the grain, vegetables, and occasional meat provided for them. While here, the guards weren’t as brutal as before. Compared to what they had been accustomed to, their stay in Manpo was most endurable.
But in early October, they were on the move again. By now the UN troops had a successful amphibious landing on Inchon, a port city near the 38th parallel on the west coast, trapping the enemy between two UN Forces-—one group pushing up from the Nakdong river area and the other pressing down from the newly captured Inchon and other cities. The South Korean army and the UN troops had already crossed the 38th parallel weeks earlier and were advancing farther north, and the communists were frantic about hiding the prisoners. After moving twice more, each time farther away from the approaching UN troops, on the last day of October, a new People’s army major took over.
The Lieutenant was tall for a Korean, and with a Genghis-Kahn frown, he displayed much cruelty. “The Tiger” became his nickname. During a nine-day “Death March” along a 110-mile snow-covered mountain terrain, the Tiger destroyed 98 lives, including two elderly women--a Catholic nun and the wife of a Russian diplomat--for not walking fast enough for him. The prisoners who couldn’t walk any more would drop on the side of the road, and with The Tiger’s instructions, the guards would shoot them and shove the lifeless bodies over the hill.
Shorty and Jack both survived the Death March, but another surprise awaited, which separated them permanently. One bitterly cold evening in mid-November, the prisoners were on foot again. Shivering and skidding on the snow-covered path, they reached a cluster of low buildings huddling together near the road. The guards packed them in, but the buildings were too small for all 700 soldiers. Shorty was shoved into one of the rooms with a hundred or more, squeezed like bean sprouts in a pan, but the guards kept pushing more men into the room. Seeing Jack still standing outside, Shorty and others tried to pull him in, but Jack couldn’t fit in the already packed room.
Swearing something in Korean, one of the guards began hitting Jack with his rifle-butt, and when Jack screamed, he pulled him outside, knocked him onto the ground, and pounded his head repeatedly. As Jack lay motionless, the guard walked away as if he had destroyed a fly. Three other prisoners died that night by the blows of the rifles.
“There was nothing we could do, except cry,” Shorty says. “We all knew what could happen to us if we tried to help our friends.”
Shorty lived in captivity another 33 months, during which time he witnessed 485 soldiers and 45 civilians deteriorating and dying, including elderly Catholic bishops, priests, and nuns. Most of them perished from complications of exhaustion, pneumonia, and dysentery, due to the Death March. In an effort to save the remaining sick and wounded, Shorty helped establish a “Hospital” where he and others cleaned the patients, killed lice for them, kept the place warm, and cooked and fed them, too, whatever was necessary to make them comfortable. Of all Shorty cared for, only one survived and is still living.
Shorty was recognized for his selfless service toward his “Brothers” and received a Bronze Star Medal at the war’s end. When asked how he made it through such a long and horrid ordeal that claimed so many lives, Shorty ponders a moment and replies, “That question will haunt me until I lay in my grave.”
[Wilbert “Shorty” Estabrook is the founder and the leader of the Tiger Survivors. www.tigersurvivors.org]
The Art of Growing Old
A 17-century Korean scholar Wu Tahk wrote a shijo (ancient Korean poetry) about old age.
A stick in one hand, a branch in another
I guarded my youth with all my might
Alas, white hair ambushed me overnight.
In this day and age who's worried about one's white hair, one might say. True, with a few drops of hair coloring solution, white vanishes and you can be blond or brunette or platinum silver or ink black in a matter of minutes. Still, Mr. Wu's words comfort me: like him, I dislike getting old.
While my birthday was approaching a few weeks earlier, I was in a worst mood I had ever been in my life. I didn't want to be a year older. I finally was comfortable with my 60+ years, and without an advance notice, it was time to add another number to it. I toyed with the idea of slipping out of my nest and vanishing (temporarily), but where could I go? Even if I could find a place to hide away from the world, I would still get older. There was no escape: it was foolish to even imagine that I could hide from aging, like a child might from his or her dictator parent.
Still, on the morning of my birthday, I was determined not to surrender to my new age. But I knew better than looking for a stick or a branch to beat away my invisible foe, so I turned my phone off, removed the calendar, my family picture, and the mirror, and anything that would hint my new age from the walls. Sitting on my bed surrounded by bare walls, I was finally safe.
While pondering on the good days and bad days of my past, I remembered that I never enjoyed my age even when I was in the first grade. Growing up in a large family in Korea, surrounded by four brothers and three sisters, I was always too young for the fun things that my older siblings enjoyed and too old for the goodies and toys my two younger brothers were occasionally showered with. I often complained to God, "Why didn't you at least make me the youngest child in the family, if you couldn't make me a boy?" God never responded to me. How could he, when he himself was a man?
How did Mother felt about getting old? All the years I was under her care, she often used the word woonmyong, fate, in her every day vocabulary. To her, it was my fate that I was born a girl surrounded by my brothers and sisters. It was my fate, too, that I was a middle child and couldn't be the center of attention. Even when I broke my leg in my third year in elementary school, she thought it was my woonmyong that caused it. I remember arguing with her that an older boy yanked me down from the gym set, only to scare me a little, that it was all his fault that I broke my leg.
Mother wouldn't hear of it. "What's the difference?" she said. "Would you feel better if it was a girl who did it? Your pain doesn't care who caused it. You just have to deal with it.”
In my second year of middle school I had another incident with Mother. That morning, our PE teacher, who was also in charge of the students' manners and conduct, clipped one end of my hair with a pair of scissors, because that side slightly touched the collar of my school uniform. Many girls had been the victims of his brutal act, but it was first time for me and I was crying when I tried to tell her what had happened.
She listened without a word. Then, searching her skirt pocket, she handed me a bill. “It's time for a haircut,” she said. “If I were you, I won't say anything to anyone about what happened. You should have noticed how long your hair was when you combed it this morning.”
Here again, I defended myself. “Mine wasn't long at all, Mother. My collar stood up more than others' because you used too much starch on it. It was so unfair, the way he came over, pulled me out of the line, and clipped it, for everyone to see.”
“You don't need to say another word about it,” she said. “Go and get a haircut.”
It took me more that fifty years to realize that her word woonmyong implied "make peace with yourself" or “go with the flow.” I haven't changed much over the years: I still tend to argue whenever I can.
I remembered Victor Hugo's poem titled “The Preludes,” which I had read long ago, without knowing I would some day be old. I found it and read it.
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring's in my heart.
I breathe… the fragrance of the lilacs, violets, and roses, as at twenty years ago.
The nearer I approach to the end, the plainer I hear
The immortal symphonies of the world that invite me.
Each word grasped me with new meaning. Afterwards, I didn't feel bad about my new age at all. Actually, this was close to what my mother always believed. She could easily have said, “Go with the flow of life and feel the eternal spring in your heart. Or, “Make peace with yourself, before you try to smell roses, lilacs, violets.”
We could feel sorry for all the problems we are dealing with today--drugs, terrorism, anthrax, war in Iraq, the upcoming election. Or we could accept the solemn fact that we are alive today and go with the rhythm of time, reminding ourselves that life on earth had never been perfect for any living beings.
That night I had a dialogue with the unknown:
When you knock my door, Death
I'll be awake.
When you extend your hand toward me,
I'll shake it warmly.
When you whisper, "Shall we go?"
I'll say, "I've been waiting."
Religion, aging and redemption
One who’s about to complete her six Chinese zodiac cycles has much to think about.
Growing up in Korea in a Catholic family, I developed a sense of God at an early age that came with a sense of wellbeing, a feeling a little calf might have while roaming on green pastures. I believed everything my Sunday school taught me — that we were God’s special children, that the Catholic church was the only temple Jesus Himself built upon the rock named Peter, and that only baptized Catholics are entitled to enter heaven because other church founders had offended God by breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church, therefore their followers don’t qualify.
My maternal grandmother, a devout Buddhist, came to live with us when she became a widow. And this altered my view of religion and God somewhat. Every morning, I was awakened by her voice reciting Buddhist mantras and the scent of burning incense squeezing through the rice-paper screen door that divided her room from mine. I was filled with a sense of tranquility and peace. Her voice was soft music that floated me like a stream carrying a bird feather.
But my mother didn’t like Buddhist mantras resounding in a Catholic home. She had been born in a Buddhist family but after she married my father, she became Catholic; she was never shy about expressing her Christian view on life and death. “Mother, it’s about time you learn about Christ. Life doesn’t go on forever.”
“There’s only one God who oversees the whole universe,” Grandmother would say. “Your Jesus and my Lord Buddha were sent by the same god.”
“That’s impossible,” my mother argued. “God only had one son and that’s Jesus who came to the world to free us from our sins. Unless you convert, Mother, you have no chance of redemption. Jesus said, ‘Whoever is not with me is against me!’ ”
Grandmother took it calmly. “Our divine Teacher never said such a thing. He only taught his followers to meditate so that they can achieve harmony and peace within themselves and with others, so that they too will be enlightened like Himself some day. Besides, Buddha came to this world 500 years before your Jesus did.”
That ended the conversation. How could my mother have argued further when she realized that Buddha was Jesus’ senior by 500 years? After all, she lived in society that considered elder respect the virtue of all virtues.
Grandmother died two years later, without converting to Catholicism. For the following years my mother regretted that she not only never helped her to convert, but had not even had her receive the “Anointing of the Dead.” But knowing Grandmother, I know she was happy going as she had. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she went to heaven.
Time moved on, and I’m now my grandmother’s age when she passed. (This is scary.) But one thing I know is that God had found a place in heaven for my grandmother — the heaven that doesn’t discriminate against non-Catholics. That said, I hope I will end up somewhere above, too, someplace whose gatekeeper isn’t too picky about my minor imperfections that had offended some people.
Time is ticking away. While my hair turned from black to gray and wrinkles gathered on my face without my permission, the world has turned over many times. Back when I was in Korea, Mass was celebrated in Latin, but some time later the liturgical text was translated into the people’s native language. While the Catholic Church is still unyielding on such issues as birth control, female ordination to priesthood, gay marriage and divorce-annulment-remarriage, other Christian churches have taken liberal steps and now some churches have women and gay bishops.
December already! We are now at the tail end of the Year of the Dragon. Like any other year, 2012 saw disasters, both natural and human-caused: earthquakes, oil spills, war and gun violence. Hurricane Sandy is still making the news because of the vicious claw marks she left on the East Coast. What will the New Year, the Year of the Snake, bring us?
I can’t think about the Snake Year yet. I pray that the Almighty would take time in cranking up the time-machine between now and February 2013, my birth month and birth year, and give me courage to face reality. Completing one’s sixth Chinese zodiac cycle isn’t a small feat for anyone. This is why I lose sleep these days.
Read more here: http://joco913.com/news/therese-park-religion-aging-and-redemption/#storylink=cpy
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