That Young Man
He was happy in an unhappy nation in an unhappy time. He lived to fight.
By Tori Otten
He is perfect. That’s what everyone says when I show them this picture. He is young, and beautiful and at his physical peak. He can also be vicious. “I beat up so many guys,” he would later tell me. “Maybe one, two a day.”
“Has that photo always been there?” I asked my aunt one day when I was visiting.
“Oh, yes,” she replied.
I’d visited my Aunt Ock Nam’s apartment before. She and my uncle lived on the outskirts of Vienna but kept an apartment in town. I was studying abroad, and visiting for fall break. Ock Nam went into the kitchen to grab a few things, and I walked into the living room. A black and white photograph, hanging in the corner, caught my eye.
I had been in this apartment many times before, but I never remembered seeing this photo. From behind the glass, a young Asian man stared back at me. He was more ripped and defined than I thought a human being could be.
“I never remember seeing it before,” I said.
“Well,” she replied, “it’s always been there.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“That’s Grandpa,” she said.
“That’s Grandpa?” I asked, picturing the small, increasingly frail old man I’d always known.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s when he was about your age. He wanted to be a boxer.”
This photo is an ice sculpture. Inevitably, it will melt.
Japan invaded Korea in 1910, when the north and south were still a unified nation. For centuries before then, Korea had been the Hermit Kingdom. Isolated from the rest of the world, the country promoted its own culture, its own language, and its own accomplishments. Korea enjoyed peace and stability for over 200 years. Korea had often referred to itself as “a shrimp among whales” — a small country subject to the whims and conflicts of the powers around it — Japan and China. When the Japanese arrived, Korea didn’t stand a chance.
The Japanese ruled Korea for 30 brutal years. Korea no longer existed. Hangul, Korea’s alphabet, was banned. Children spoke Japanese in school and went by Japanese names. Scholars were publicly humiliated for their Korean traditions, and people were made to worship at Shinto shrines. Anything made of metal, such as hairpins, jewelry, or even fancy chopsticks and plates, had to be given to the military to be melted down and made into weapons. People were forced to provide resources for the soldiers, and young women were shipped to the front lines to serve as prostitutes for the Japanese soldiers.
My grandfather grew up in this world.
He was born in 1938 in Munsan, a village in the middle of the country on the south bank of the Imjin River. When he was two years old, his mother died. He never found out why. But he does remember, as a young boy, running around his home asking where his mother was. No one would tell him.
His father eventually remarried, but the new wife, my mother told me, didn’t want my grandfather. She refused to feed him and his older brother, even though the family had enough money to take care of everyone. My grandfather would go to his uncle’s house to get fed, and he ended up living with his grandparents.
And then, one day, Korea woke up to find the Japanese gone.
As World War II drew to a close, the Allies agreed to support Korean independence but ended up splitting the country in half. The Americans controlled the south. In the north, the Soviets installed a puppet regime. With the Japanese gone, Korea descended into five years of political turmoil. The two Koreas were recognized as separate nations, and the U.S. withdrew from Korea by 1949.
War broke out almost immediately. Where South Korea had no military, North Korea had spent the previous five years undergoing extensive military development. The South was unprepared in 1950 when the North crossed the 38th Parallel, quickly taking Seoul, the southern capitol, and obliterating the South Korean armed forces.
My grandfather was 12.
The war dragged on with attack followed by counterattack, culminating in a stalemate in 1953. The 38th Parallel became the border between the two Koreas. Military forces on both sides pulled back 1.2 miles from the Parallel, creating the De-Militarized Zone. No peace treaty was signed. The two countries would remain technically at war.
It was around this time that my grandfather started getting into fights. The decades of occupation and tenuous peace and all-out war had left Korea devastated. People were starving to death. Mothers would abandon their infants by the side of the road, unable to care for them.
“That’s war,” my grandfather told me. “You’ve got no country. Your country has to be strong. You have to be strong.”
He started running errands for the American military. And he started getting into fights almost every day. If he didn’t fight, he wouldn’t eat.
“There were gangsters all over the place,” he said. “Sometimes they beat me up. Sometimes I beat them up. If you wanted something, you had to fight and take it.”
The American soldiers introduced him to boxing. Seeing the fights sparked something in him — he knew what he wanted to become. When I asked him why he wanted to be a boxer, he gave me an unsatisfying answer. “I wanted to stand out,” he said. “When you’re from a foreign country, you have to have something special.”
But boxing isn’t special. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You hit and you kick and you fight until someone starts to bleed.
I could not reconcile that concept with the quiet, mild-mannered man I had always known as my grandfather. Why would he want to fight?
My grandfather is not a talkative man, and getting him to speak of the past, and especially motives for his behavior, is impossible.
So to understand why he might have found a certain pleasure in fighting, I sought out boxers, who might be able to explain my grandfather to me.
I went to Gleason’s, a legendary fight gym in Brooklyn. I began by showing the fighters and their trainers the photo. They were impressed. They wanted to know how he did in the ring. I told them that his career was limited mostly to street fighting.
Why, I asked, does anyone fight? Most of their answers were, like my grandfather’s, anodyne, safe. But Eric Kelly, a national champion as an amateur, who later fought professionally and who now trains fighters, told me something illuminating.
“I fight because I’m violent,” he said. “The fight is in me. I’m dangerous.” He moved to Brooklyn in the 80s to live with his dad, and he got in fights every day at school or in his neighborhood. His dad sent him to the boxing gym. Eric stopped fighting only because he got so badly injured during a fight that he lost muscle control in half of his face.
“Everyone in here is crazy,” he said. “Why else would you want to hit somebody in the face and get hit in the face back?”
The Koreans have a word to describe an emotion that they feel is theirs alone: Han. It translates roughly as unresolvable bitterness. My grandfather came of age without a country, without a family, and without prospects. He was hungry and he was angry and he liked to hit people.
But for reasons he does not explain, he did not see a future in the ring. Instead, even while working for the American military, he stayed in school. Still, when he was 19, just finishing up high school, he and a friend got ahold of a camera. My grandfather, young and chiseled and glorious, posed for a few photos.
“That picture of me, all naked on top?” he said when I asked him about the photo. He laughed. “It was just for fun.” That was 1956.
My grandfather went on to get a degree in engineering. Two years later, when he was 21, he married my grandmother. They had four daughters, and he continued to work for the American military. He could make money and also have access to the military PX (the army’s version of WalMart).
“We always had strawberry jam,” my mother told me. “And a TV. Sometimes we didn’t even have electricity, but we had a TV.”
In 1963, Park Chung-Hee seized power of South Korea in a military coup. In 1971, my grandparents moved their family to the United States and resettled in northern Virginia. They lived with distant cousins for a little while, while my grandfather worked to save up enough money to get their own home. The only work he could find was in construction.
At the second construction company where he worked, the owner took a liking to him and offered to mentor his rise in the company. But my grandfather instead asked if his boss would help him start his own company. The boss agreed.
My grandfather worked 18-hour days. He rarely saw his daughters, but still he quizzed them on multiplication tables every morning. When my aunt Christi was in fourth grade, she got in trouble at school for punching a girl who had been bullying her.
“I was just doing what Grandpa always said,” Christi told me. “It’s better to hit first than to be hit.”
My grandfather had succeeded in all ways but one: his marriage fell apart.
My grandfather always told his children that the one thing he could never forgive was someone leaving his wife. So when he and my grandmother started to have trouble, he insisted on staying. It did not last. In 1994, my aunt Ock Nam was preparing to move to Vienna with her husband. My grandparents were living separately. In the basement of my grandmother’s house, Ock Nam found the photograph of my grandfather as a young man and took it with her. Two years later, my grandmother asked for a divorce.
Ock Nam was always the closest to my grandfather. She went to college at Virginia Tech, just a few hours away from home. She came home almost every weekend. She lives in Vienna, but she spends every free vacation trip she has coming back home, where she insists that she, her husband, and their daughter stay at my grandma’s house, sleeping in the same bedroom she slept in while growing up.
My grandfather was her ideal man. When he agreed to leave, he wasn’t just leaving the family, or her mother. He left her.
“She couldn’t forgive her human father,” my mom told me. “She only remembers her perfect father.”
The walls of my aunt’s apartment are covered with photos — full color shots of the sisters with their boyfriends (now husbands), pictures of my grandma, new glossy photos of the kids. They’re all clustered together, without boundaries and almost uncomfortably close, just like the relationships within my family.
The photo of my grandfather hangs alone, in a corner, obscured by a lamp.
My grandfather is 79. He never remarried. He and my grandmother don’t speak with each other unless they have to.
He doesn’t remember the first person he beat up. He doesn’t remember how many fights he got into. He says he got married in part because it forced him to get a job and kept him out of jail.
He loves his grandchildren, and we love him back, but we don’t see him that often. He’s still always working. He doesn’t talk about himself. He asks how I’m doing, what I’m doing, if I’m making friends and getting good grades. He wants to know if I’m happy.
I am not much older than he is in that picture, where he was captured in a rare moment of joy.
But that was after everything that came before, and before everything that came after.
