|
Chang was as American as anyone I've ever known even though he was a full-blooded Korean. It was obvious from his face that he was Asian but if you heard him without seeing him you would be convinced that he was of American heritage.
His English was impeccable. For several months he and I taught English as a second language at the Andover Korean Church. He was more than my equal.
And though he was married to a Korean woman by the time we met him and he was thoroughly at home with the Korean culture, he was even more at home with the American culture. To me he seemed like any other American friend albeit one who was just as comfortable in an Asian, not just Korean, setting.
How had he become so Americanized?
He talked often about his parents even though he had only been with them for the first five years or so of his life. His overriding desire in life was to be reunited with them; a seemingly impossible dream.
Apparently he was born into a well-to-do family and was an only child at the time of the separation. He described his home in Seoul. As I remember, both of his parents worked and he was taken care of by a nanny. He would go out to the markets with the nanny when she went food shopping for the family.
I estimate that Chang was in his early 30s when I met him in 1986. After graduating from a college in the southern U.S., he came to Massachusetts and married an American woman. They had a son who was around 10 or 11 when I met Chang. I believe that he was born a few years after the Korean War ended on July 27th, 1953.
I'm told that Seoul in 1953 is nothing like Seoul today. It was still suffering from the ravages of the war. But, no doubt, the markets were crowded with always rushing Korean people. My observation is that Koreans know only one speed: fast.
At some point in the shopping trip with his nanny, the two of them became separated. Chang frantically searched for her but never saw her again. He was unable to tell the authorities his address and he was placed somewhere; maybe in an orphanage. He was very unhappy there and before long he ran away. He was now on his own. He wandered onto a military base and was essentially adopted by American soldiers who saw to it that he had food and clothes. And it was there that he began to learn English.
He told me about one period in which he lived in a chicken coop.
He had not yet started to school when he was separated from his parents and, though he could understand and speak Korean, he never learned to read or write Korean. When he met with Soon E in Seoul in 1990, she wrote a letter to me in Korean. When Chang returned I sat with him and Myong in their kitchen. Myong would read a sentence from the letter in Korean. Chang would translate the sentence to me in English. I have often wondered why he never learned to read and write in Korean. He was brilliant and could have certainly done so.
At some point the American soldiers connected Chang with an American religious group who eventually sent him to school in America: high school in Andover, MA and later college in the south. |
