EDITOR’S NOTE: In honor of Father’s Day, we’re posting some of our favorite stories about dads from the KoreAm archives. This piece was published in the June 2008 issue.
by PIERRE KIM
In some ways, my Korean-born father is quite an impressive man.
Born to a poor farming family who physically abused him, my father chose to run away as a teenager in order to further his education and avoid a life of rural poverty. Living on the streets of Seoul as a teenage street urchin, he spent several years of his youth begging for food and sleeping in abandoned fields. When the Korean War broke out, he was shanghaied into the U.S. Army and forced to fight on their behalf. When the war finally ended, the Army gave him a Silver Star and arranged a college scholarship for him in the middle of Iowa.
Arriving in the Midwest barely able to speak any English, my father quickly became the embodiment of the American Dream. Through hard work and enormous personal sacrifice, he ended up achieving a level of financial success he never dreamed possible.
When I tell people who know my father that story, they are often amazed at the struggles my father must have endured in order to achieve his current status. Looking at him now, they merely see a refined charming gentleman with all the trimmings of material success. Multiple residences. Private-school education for his children. Country club memberships. Luxury cars.
However, what people don’t see are the emotional scars caused by his Korean upbringing and his single-minded drive for success, scars that prevent him from being close to his children or developing any sort of meaningful relationship with them.
Like many Korean American men of his generation, my father is a damaged man. Not only did he come from a poverty-stricken wartime culture where one did not have luxuries of waxing philosophical on the meaning of life but also he was unduly influenced by the hard principles of Confucianism, a philosophy that did not focus on love or emotions but rather focused on respect, discipline and education.
I remember, many years ago, having a conversation with my mother about why so many Korean American women chose to marry outside their own race. My opinion was that if their fathers were the only representation of Korean men they knew, then why wouldn’t they marry non-Koreans.
Now, I realize that notion can be a controversial stereotype and I don’t want to make any broad generalizations here, but there seems to be an entire genera- tion of Korean men around my father’s age (born in the 1930’s) who are sexist, racist, emotionally-stunted and angry.
As the oldest son of one of those Korean men, I never understood why my father ever wanted to have children. He never seemed to take any particular interest in me unless it concerned academics. He never sat me down for any heart-to-heart talks. He never offered me any fatherly advice. He never went out of his way to spend any time with me. And when I’ve experienced tragedies in my life, he was never there for me. Also, to this day, he’s never even told me that he loves me.
And all those stories that I know about my father’s childhood? Never once has my father sat down to talk to me about what his life was like when he was younger. I pieced them together by hearing bits and pieces from different relatives.
When I was contemplating having children myself, I spoke to my therapist about how I was afraid that having a terrible role model for a parent would greatly impact the kind of job that I would do as a father. Thankfully, my therapist reassured me that, quite frequently, those who have the worst fathers often end up being some of the best. We discussed how I should take all the things that prevented me from having a close relationship with my own father and use them to understand exactly what kind of father I didn’t want to be.
Being a father is important to me. It’s the job I take most seriously in the world. I devote an enormous amount of time and energy trying to be the best father that I possibly can and I’m pretty sure the dividends are paying off with my daughter. She’s a beautifully well-adjusted kid who is kind, compassionate and honest.
Every day, I tell her how much I love her. Every day, I try to share stories of my life with her. And every day, I try to spend some quality time alone with her so that we can build our own relationship and she can see me not only as “dad” but as an individual.
We may not be able to entirely escape our past, but we certainly can learn from it.
