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December 10th, 2007 will be the 18th anniversary of the time Ed and I have been together. People often ask how we met. There are a fair number of people who know parts of the story. I have told some of the Korean friends I have made here and a few of my friends in Korea. In the beginning, Ed told a few of his close friends. And there were a lot of rumors and speculation on the part of people Ed knew before we were together and of local Korean people. But it’s not something that can be explained in a few sentences. So when someone not familiar with our story asks, it’s always easier to say something like “that’s a long story” or “it’s very complicated” and go on to something else.
Recently, my friend Myong ask me how I was able to come to America in the winter of 1990 and move into Ed's condo the first night I was here; staying in his guest bedroom.
Myong,"How did you do it? You met him the first time In 1987 in Korea. You only saw him 3 or 4 times for a few hours and had to communicate through a translator. When you came here in 1990, the two of you had only exchanged a couple of letters through an intermediary. Ed still couldn't speak Korean and you couldn't speak English. Your culture was different. Your food was different. Ed had eight years of college and you hadn't even gone to high school. He was a computer software expert and you were a seamstress. What made you think that could work?"
I leave it to Ed to tell the very complicated story of how we met.
It was a beautiful summer day in North Carolina, Monday, July 23rd, 2007. I had talked Soon E into a trip to North Carolina during the first week of her vacation. I had spent a good part of the last nine months researching my family tree and I wanted to meet some of my newly discovered relatives and explore some of the family cemeteries my research had turned up.
That morning, we drove from about 25 miles north of our motel in Benson, North Carolina to Fayetteville to spend the late morning and afternoon with Ruth and Dennis Creech. Over the past few months Ruth and I had exchanged many lively e-mails about genealogy in general and her research on the Massengills in particular. She had become my genealogy mentor. Early on we found that her husband, Dennis, and I were fourth cousins once removed.
Over lunch in a Chinese restaurant, either Ruth or Dennis asked how we met. I was tempted to give my usual response, “it’s a long story” and say a few innocuous things like: “When we were first together Soon E didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Korean. We had to communicate using dictionaries.”
But because I felt so close to Ruth, I decided I should try to tell Ruth and Dennis a little bit about how we came to be together. Soon after I started, I realized that it was going to be very difficult. Although it’s been more than 21 years since we saw each other for the first time, some of the things that Soon E had to go through before she came to be together are so painful to imagine that I can’t even think, much less talk, about them about it without having my voice choke in anguish. I somehow managed to get through some of the main threads of the story but it really exacted a toll. I knew then that it was time to write down how it happened.
We left Donna's house in Andover, Massachusetts about 6:00 am. Donna’s father drove us to Logan Airport in Boston. In order to get a non-stop flight to Seoul, Korea, we needed to fly to La Guardia in New York and take a cab to Kennedy. It was sometime around noon January 28th, 1987 when the 15-hour flight took off from Kennedy. Since we had made the trip before, about nine months earlier, we had a good idea what to expect.
This time, as last time, it was exciting to be making the trip but it was a different kind of excitement. In the spring of 1986, we went to Korea as part of a five-week Asian trip of which two weeks would be spent in Korea. We wanted to do a lot of sight-seeing in Korea, to meet my son and daughter-in-law who were in Korea as part of my son’s military assignment to practice his Korean, and to contact some Korean adoption agencies to see if they could help us adopt a Korean child. Donna and I didn’t meet two key Korean requirements for adoption: 1. Be married at least five years at the time of the adoption and 2. Both be younger than 50. I was already 49. So we were going to need special help to even be considered.
But now, having succeeded in our adoption quest, we would be meeting and bringing back three Korean sisters to join our family in Andover. I remember Donna asking, somewhere in the air between the west coast and Alaska, “Are you sure you’re going to help me with the girls?” I promised that no matter what it took I would.
We were quite tired when the plane finally landed in Seoul. It was around 4:00 in the afternoon of January 29th, Seoul time. That meant it was about 3:00 AM back in Andover: close to 21 hours since we had left.
After deplaning at Kimpo Airport, about 30 minutes outside of Seoul, we spent a short time clearing customs. After all our bags had been examined, we found a couple of luggage carts and headed for the waiting area. The excitement grew as we got closer to seeing in person the three girls we had heretofore seen only in a few snapshots. My video camera was my neck ready to get pictures of the girls as soon as they appeared.
Shortly after we came out of customs, I looked up and saw, in the distance, Father Ben. Beside him were the three girls, two women, and a couple. I knew that Father Ben, the girls, and a Korean couple (relatives of Mr. Kim at the Andover Church) would be there to meet us. But I had no idea who the other two women were.
Suddenly the girls ran toward us. The first one to reach me called out “daddy, daddy” and jumped into my arms.
The reality started to sink in.
Chang and I had become very close in the four years we had known each other.
In October of 1990, Chang was excited as he told me about his upcoming trip to Korea. He hoped that this would be his chance to find the parents from whom he was accidentally separated when he was six years old. The woman who cared for him had taken him with her to a crowded market in Seoul. They became separated and he never saw her or his parents again.
He became a street child and eventually was "adopted" by American soldiers, in effect, a mascot. Eventually a religious group helped him come to America to study. He graduated from high school and then college and worked for many years in social services in Boston. He was also very active in the Asian-American community in New England.
Chang spoke fluent Korean though he could neither read nor write Korean. He married an American woman and they had a son. After their divorce he married a Korean woman and they had two beautiful daughters.
But Chang would never be able to rest until he found his parents. On this trip he was going to do some television and newspaper interviews with hope that his parents might see the story and recognize him.
We came back from our first trip to Korea in 1986 feeling very confident that we would be able to adopt from Korea. Father Ben, an American priest who ran an orphanage in Inchon for Amerasian children, had promised to help us and he was obviously a man who knew how to get things done even when the means were outside normal channels.
While we were waiting for Father Ben to find a child or children for us, we decided to learn everything we could about Korean culture. There was a Korean Methodist Church in Andover and I saw a newspaper article about the new pastor who wanted to bring together the Anglo and Korean cultures. I talked with him and he invited Donna and me to attend a service. The service was in Korean but he translated the main points of his sermon into English. The hymns were all familiar Protestant hymns and the hymnal included both Korean and English lyrics for most of the hymns.
After the service, Rev. Kim introduced us to a Korean couple who spoke both English and Korean. Their names were Chang and Myong. We immediately became friends and began to spend significant time together. We fell in love with their well-mannered and charming daughters and they with us.
We would certainly be prepared when Father Ben found our children.
In February of 1990, I moved from Blueberry Hill in Andover to a new two-bedroom condo about 2 miles away. After three years of being with the girls every day I was suddenly in the position of sharing them. They split their time with Donna and me. And the divorce and custody battles were just beginning to make their way through the court system.
Melissa hated being with me whereas Mimi and Ashley seemed quite happy when it was time to come to the condo. And Ashley was always sad when she had to leave.
As I struggled to adjust to my new status as a single parent and the knowledge that I'd never again be with my daughters every day, I continued to spend time with Chang and Myong.
I thought about Mrs. Im, the girls' natural mother. On January 30th, 1986 she was left alone to try to take care of their three young daughters after her husband, Hakkun, died from injuries in a bicycle accident. On September 19th, 1985 Hakkun tried to ride a bicycle home after a day of drinking. He was hit by a car and never regained consciousness. (See Living Hakkun's Dream.)
They had no money when Hakkun died. He had not worked for several years and the girls' mother struggled every day to put food on the table. The insurance settlement of a few thousand dollars wouldn't go far. And she couldn't both work and take care of her daughters. And, to make matters more hopeless, her daughters were Amerasians: part Korean, part American. They would have to grow up in poverty in a country where they were generally unwelcome.
Father Ben and Hakkun's Amerasian friends urged her to give the girls up for adoption in the United States. There they could have the good life in their father's country that he had always dreamed of.
To be continued |
