There were so many mountains to cross. So many rivers to ford. So many dangers to face. (Metaphors, of course, about a child’s feelings. Her aloneness, her lostness, her beginning in America the beautiful, rainbow-arced land of spacious skies, and people walking away from - distances widening slowly, then more surely - chasms, gorges, opening into deserts, wastelands.) The metaphors end. I am that child grown.

I am an adult. I am an American. I do not look American. I have strange eyes. Or rather the eyelids are different. Hooded, almost reptilian, hence odd looking. And the color of my face is wrong. At school there was a box to mark: White, Brown, Yellow, Black and Red. Teacher tells me to mark the Yellow. The others mark White. No one marks Black or Red. There is no Negro or Indian student. I am the one different. But ...

I can vote. I am American. I am 21 years old. And do not vote. I do not feel American. When I do cast a vote I am 28 years of age, living in an American household. Here I am the cook, maid, driver, and jack-of-all-trades (and master of none). My employer is American. Her ancestors came to America as immigrants, like my parents. She is third generation born. She married wealth and is listed in the social register Blue Book. The Great Depression ruins the country’s wealth. She blames "That Terrible Man in the White House" who betrayed their Class. The Republican candidate will restore the country to normalcy, to real Americans. There’s a rabble growing out there on the streets. (Strikes, she means. Sometimes we talk one-to-one like this. She is a Stanford graduate from long ago when higher education for women was usually frowned upon. I admire her and listen.) She tells me it is sensible for me to vote Republican. I do. My vote, I know, will make no difference. Whether Class Wins Out or That Terrible Man in the White House Continues to Betray ...


Because the conflict in Europe is joined by the United States. It is a terrible war. The conflagration spreading, millions will die before it is over. My brothers become soldiers, and perhaps for the first time they are told they are American. For them to mark the box for Race (color), "White." Americans are fighting the Japanese, and our soldiers are not to be mistaken for the enemy. My employer’s son is made a captain and assigned to oversee the production of military supplies manufactured by a huge munitions plant in the Midwest. The war over, he returns home to find the family wealth restored, and he is a millionaire. His mother’s divorce settlement is paid, and she too is wealthy. America is the stuff dreams are made of. Somewhere, I know is my dream waiting to be fulfilled. I leave my employer to do my share in the war effort.

My father is ahead of me. He is 70. He is doing, of all things, vacuuming Main Street movie houses after the last midnight showing, earning money to buy U.S. War Bonds. I ask did he feel more American although denied citizenship, or what. He says no, he is buying ammunition for his sons to defend themselves with. Another way to look at war. It is original. My contribution is small. It is editing the English page of The New Korea. The few qualified writers have left to do their share in the war effort too. They translate for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and OWI (Office of War Information) in the Korean language, also Japanese or Chinese. I move out of the kitchen into the parlor. My former employer invites me to lunch. She has moved into an elegant new apartment on Beverly Boulevard, near the Los Angeles Country Club. The housekeeper has taken the day off, to attend church. It is Sunday. So we serve ourselve from a buffet, sitting down to a tasty lunch, happy we are not churchgoers today. She asks about the newspaper, what it is I do, since she knows I do not read, write, or speak Korean. That is a problem I do not fail to wonder about and never resolve for myself. Cousin JK Dunn who has placed me in the editorial position tells me to 1) Do your best 2) Cautions "A slip of the lip sinks ships" 3) Write and fill the weekly columns.

I am overpaid, I tell my hostess, for what I give in return. Koreans do not like the limelight, their friends will criticize them. So news is hard to report. She understands, she is the vice president of a national organization and shies away from publicity. I cover one item of near-significance. The Catholic Bishop of China is in the country from Chungking (the government’s temporary capital). The UKC office made great effort to get an interview for our paper here; he is touring America. The other Korean paper, Independence, is covering the story too. The Independence is said to be communist-oriented. The term might have been used to denigrate the Koreans supporting the paper. The group broke away from Korean National Association, and walked out of a meeting. Koreans don’t cooperate, I tell my hostess. She knows about cooperation. Americans know Roberts Rules of Order and work for consensus. But, I tell her, it is the Chinese bishop who doesn’t cooperate. He is two hours late, greets us long enough to tell he has no time for an interview, he is on his way to an important meeting. I write up the interview as it happened: it is not newsworthy. Also I do not report about the haraboji who came into the office. His name is Huck Yoon. My brothers often mentioned his name so I am glad to see him. Says he brightly, sounding off my brothers names: "You have five brothers! Lots of insurance! They killed in war, you rich!" That is Korean frankness. They speak their minds. They are greedy, too, even if it’s only for me.

One of my hostess’s friends was Charlene. She often came to dinner and we became friends. So her name comes up when I think of my employer. Charlene was a student of the Bible. That statement takes explaining. Unless a person is entering the ministry or connected with a religious order he or she is not studying in the religious sense. But Southern California, in its early years of real estate development, was also the center for religious and spiritual seekers. It also attracted crackpots ridiculed in the movies and articles of Los Angeles. There were serious seekers. One was Krishnamurti brought as a young person by his sponsor and devotee to Ojai. She claimed he was the Second Coming of Christ. He denied the role but remained and was a well-known spiritual adviser in Ojai. Ellen Sanford White, founder of the Seventh-day Adventist church, was another who came to California and settled in the San Gabriel Valley. Aimee Semple MacPherson founded her church in Los Angeles and probably was the most famous evangelist, attracting worshipers for her "good works", feeding, clothing, and sheltering the Great Depression homeless. So, with this background in mind, it is no surprise Charlene was studying the Bible.

Of her early life, she said, it was haphazardly managed. Her father died when she was a baby. Her mother was mentally ill and lived in their home, nurses attending her. Governesses were her school teachers and the kitchen was the classroom. It was the cheeriest place in the house. There was no entertaining. However, Charlene’s name was in the social register Blue Book and was invited everywhere. She was a member of the wild crowd that partied at the downtown Alexandria Hotel. Soon she was the leader. It was an absinthe-drinking lost generation, getting high on the prohibited French liqueur, disapproved as decadent. She was briefly engaged, breaking off with the young man before he was brokenhearted. He sailed away for the South Seas and became famous. He wrote bestsellers. She was off on her own. Her mother died. Her grandfather, who founded the family fortune in the dry goods business, retired, built the Christian Church on Pico Boulevard (today it serves a Black congregation), and preached Sundays until his death. Charlene was left the texts of his sermons, notes, and his Bible. With this legacy, she retired into her life work. Of her then, my hostess said, "She was a lonely figure." Charlene said she had never been better occupied, she was never lonely. She did not become a churchgoing Christian. Nor did she affiliate with any particular doctrine. The Bible was the guide to learning what she did not know. One time she was blocked. I believe it was a philosophical question that no philosopher had puzzled out. She turned to the philosophy department at UCLA, whose dean was a Dr. Boodine. He was soon to retire and welcomed the question. They met and he approved the work she was doing. Until he died, he freely advised her. Was her seeking successful? I think so. I use the Serenity Prayer for measurement. She puts the prayer in action. Accepting what she could not change and changing what she could (of her life). Most of us never learn it is our self only we can change. Nothing more.

* * *

My brothers come home from war. Working is no longer a chore after soldiering for four years. They take the civil service exams and pass and join another kind of army. Army of government workers and it is their stamp of approval they are American. I am heartened. I have so long wanted to be really American. The Korean paper, because it was in English, almost said I was an American. Since I can type I take the test for clerk-typist, at the lowest grade level. I pass the two tests, barely, typing and the intelligence. The examiners ask a few questions on the oral, about my work record and the reason I want to work for the city. Then one pops up with, "Why aren’t you married by now?" I am 38. The others scramble to look at my application, then at me. Comes the stereotypical question from a stereotypical American. I am not American. I am different, even odd: an old maid. But I am not a stereotype and one day I know I will be what I want to be: A Real American! (Here I will let you know what I did become: a human being and almost a would-be-professional writer! and that’s much better, I tell you smugly today, having reached the age of wisdom, knowing that I know nothing.)


Happily, Hazel Kim, who is now Mrs. "Yobo" Younghee Kim, comes home from the war too. She wrote for the Honolulu Advertiser and was night editor for United Press. Right after Pearl Harbor there was a shortage of readers in the censorship bureau and she was drafted. The only interesting thing that happened there, she said, was sitting next to Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, clipping words from people’s mail. She went back to the newspaper work, and when her husband was released from the army, they came to Los Angeles. Here, she said, they planned to make a home and have a family. Yobo died before the baby was born. He was diagnosed cancer and died four months later. Mother and baby moved in with her parents.

Hazel and Yobo had made poor business investments. One was in a plastic peashooter factory. Children were clamoring for peashooters. There was a government ban on the production when children were swallowing the plastic pellet that lodged in their lungs.

Kathy, the baby’s name, had the luck of being spoiled by grandparents, and did not have to learn to read, write or speak Korean, Hazel, who I thought typically American, could do all three. Then, she was clever and intelligent and learned everything with no difficulty. Only one thing. The home was in the USC neighborhood, and fast growing into a Black community. Suddenly Hazel, who had not recognized race as a factor of Los Angeles life, was aware her daughter had Black playmates, preferred them to the few Koreans living there, and spent more time with the next door Black family than at home. Her mother said not to worry, time would take care of the situation. Children grew into teenagers and adults and made up their own minds. Hazel did not listen and packed herself and Kathy to Honolulu, where Yobo’s family lived comfortably from an income managing a store. She was welcomed by his family, reminded that Korean families were the center of their social structure. From the person I had considered so American, I watched her grow more and more into the Korean family - her parents’ friends, her brothers and sister, the many nieces and nephews whom Kathy did not prefer to her neighbors who were closer.

Hazel did not write her book, as she planned. Kathy went on to the university, graduated summa cum laude, and suffered a breakdown. I kept in touch with Hazel and Kathy, until Hazel’s death. I cannot feel she died, she was such an alive person. Kathy, when I last talked with her, said she had washed and ironed her mother’s clothes, ready for her to put on when she returned. I understood what Kathy meant. Hazel is not dead, she lives in Kathy’s heart. Love never dies in the heart.

Somewhere in this span of time with Hazel in Honolulu, and I here in Los Angeles, getting to be American got lost between the cracks in my life. Strangely, the seeking for Americanism came full circle. It was a search for my self, and I was always what I was meant to be. Exactly.

War’s end also brought Pat Dunn back into my life. She finished high school a month after her father’s death (Jacob Dunn). She was given a scholarship to Mills College in California. When she went over to Mills to inquire about the scholarship, she was told it was available to her, but for the first year she must live on campus in dormitories. The cost was 2500 dollars. Her father’s death in the military transport was in question regarding insurance payment. Pat told her mother the rule about campus living and the cost. Would she pay or lend the money? Her mother’s answer was typical of Mary, "Girl, I work for my money. You do the same." In a resume required later for college entrance, Pat wrote she decided to take more ballet lessons and went to the San Francisco Opera ballet classes and worked at Gumps. She came to Los Angeles and studied dancing with Eugene Loring, and joined Jack Cole’s dancers, one of whom was Gwen Verdon. Pat was a serious dancer, unlike the dilettantism that affected the family generally. In 1953 she appeared in the first showing of "Kismet" at the Biltmore Theater. Hazel, my sister Elizabeth, and I sat in choice orchestra seats, our attention riveted on young Pat and her success. What an achievement! She had made it. Not only as a dancer but she was American to the core of her being. She never understood my question, "Do you feel American?" She married an American. He was a lawyer. A successful one, too. Pat retired after years with Jerome Robbins ballet and followed her heart’s desire. To get an education. A Ph.D. preferably. She almost made the doctorate. She died before she completed writing her dissertation, but had passed her orals. I thought of her as the first American our family had produced. It took time (she died 1990) from the first immigrants who came in 1904. She was born in 1929. Pat was the best - she had a sense of humor. She had heart, she helped many of us who would not make it otherwise.

* * *

I need to conclude this sketch with the Fair Employment Practice Act. It was not practiced much until the racial question loomed large after the war. It had not come to my attention and I did not know it existed. In 1953 a former student from my high school days phoned to ask if I would be interested in a job where he worked. He did not have to sell me. I knew where he worked, what the pay was, including benefits like health insurance, pension at retirement, etc. The company was anti-union so the pay was better than the current wage scheme. And I was getting older with little chance of Prince Charming riding up on his steed. The interview with the supervisor went well. He actually welcomed me, saying after his sales talk (as if I had need of one), "There are only two tests ahead of you. Physical and intelligence. You will pass both. You have only to breathe and be warm, like the army test. The intelligence test, no sweat. You show intelligence applying. See you Monday morning."

That Monday morning was like starting first day at school. It was heavenly. It was divine. I’d never again have to come down to earth to live. In fact I am an American. Everybody in the department are white folks - I am the one who is different but no one notices. They are polite. My friend, of course, paved the way and he seems very proud. I do him proud, he says. What more can I ask of Life?

The answer comes. I learn in time it is the Fair Employment Practice Act that has found me the job. The white workers did not want Blacks or people like that. My friend tells he has a Korean friend who might do. The white workers say I will do. So I am hired. I am only a little hurt. Repetition has enured me. Then I marry one of the workers. He is an American and I do not wish to marry him, I want independence. The ancient Greeks said, "Whom the gods destroy, they first drive mad." That’s the only reason for the marriage. So I lost being American, and shrunk smaller and smaller, like in Alice’s adventures by Lewis Carroll, I use metaphors and fairy tales to describe the indescribable. A whimsical lawyer explained it this way of the marriage. "You’re a couple of scorpions in a tight-squeeze bottle and can’t get at each other to sting." Maybe we merit each other. Karmically speaking.

One thing we had in common, our parents were immigrants. His from Europe, mine from Korea.