We made way for firemen running by. Slowed down by their thick suits and heavy boots, they looked like children trying to run up snowdrifts. They shouted at us to move back and away from the building.
When we were finally allowed back in, my mother went directly into my room and kissed the pictures of Jesus and Mary. Our apartment, on the left side of the building, had survived intact, but everything was ruined by a burnt smell that would never come out. We left everything behind once again, just like we did when we left Korea. A newspaper reporter took pictures of us as we carried out the few things we couldn’t part with.
For three weeks, we lived in a motel paid for by the Red Cross. Then a local bank read about the fire in the newspaper and about me being top of the class at St. John’s, and offered generous terms on a mortgage if we found a house. And even referred us to a Realtor who could help us.
These kind strangers helped us find our first house in America. A yellow house with a red porch and matching shed. On a street named after a college, with enough space between houses so that nothing private, embarrassing, or tragic could be heard. Our neighbors mowed their lawns every Saturday and hung American flags even when it wasn’t the Fourth of July. Small children chased each other on front lawns while their parents washed their cars in the driveway. They waved when we passed but we would never know each other.
Seoul
What Sung remembered most about that first day of the war was the rain. It was June 1950, monsoon season. For two days there had been just the steady but muffled sound of rain as it beat down on the straw roof, creating a growing pit of mud filled with tadpoles in front of his house. Later, he would say he also felt the reverberations of the long line of T-34 tanks and open-backed trucks carrying the KPA, the Korean People’s Army, on the road to Seoul. And that he even saw the glint of Soviet-made planes as they flew overhead. What he really felt was a rumbling in his stomach that was equal parts fear and excitement.
Boys, including Min, Sung’s older brother, told of how they ran from their town of Kumchon, north of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, to the hills overlooking the road to Kaesong and Seoul. They described the long, gleaming guns on the tanks pointing straight ahead, the line of trucks marching like determined ants with no beginning and no end. The trucks were filled with silent men. “There were thousands,” breathed one boy. He wascuffed on the head by an older boy, who said, “Tens of thousands.” Much later, Sung would learn the true number was ninety thousand.
Twelve-year-old Sung carefully watched his mother, father, and older brother to see how he should feel about what was happening. He knew his mother and father didn’t like the Communists, though they never said so aloud. But they whispered at night about moving south—it was still possible before the war started—but how could they leave Sung’s halmani behind? Her body was so bent by a life of unrelieved work they could not see how she would survive walking up and down hills for days. What would she do if Sung were not there every night to pound on her legs while she sighed, Ah, Ah? And what would they do for work when they went south? His father’s family had farmed the same plot of land for generations. They earned enough for Min to attend secondary school in Kumchon, and soon Sung would join him there. Jungho, a sickly seven-year-old brother, and Jisu, his five-year-old sister, would remain in their small family village with his parents.
Min came home the day after the war started to let his family know about this turn of events. His mouth was set in a grim line. “We should go south,” he said to his father.
“And what about your grandmother?”
“I’ll carry her on my back.”
Unexpectedly, his father didn’t scoff but considered it. “We could take turns,” he said thoughtfully.
Sung heard this conversation from around the corner of the house, his heart leaping at the thought of going all the way to Seoul.
“But let’s not rush,” his father said. “Let’s wait to see what happens.”
Sung was only seven when the Japanese Imperial Army was summarily defeated after the world war, so it made little difference in his life. The only Japanese he had ever seen inperson was Ikebana, a short, skinny man who clattered in twice a year with household goods hanging off his A-frame. He sold aluminum pots and pans, sewing needles and safety pins, scissors, rubber shoes, and skinny silver spoons that cleaned out one’s ears. Sung didn’t know the Japanese in Seoul had hung their heads in shame listening to Emperor Hirohito announce their defeat, and how they had fled en masse to Japan just days later. He knew only that his village celebrated by throwing an impromptu party and cursing the Japanese openly for the first time since 1910, when Japan had colonized Korea.
Sung’s family was surprised to find that they were on the northern side of the line dividing Korea. They were happy the Japanese were gone but wary of the Communists. They just wanted to be left alone. What did it matter who controlled the government? Communism. Democracy. Really, who cared? What they wanted was so simple: to be able to eat and breathe freely, work their small li of land, have children and grandchildren, live and die facing the same sunset they had watched all their lives.
The changes came slowly over the next five years and were
