Tracking the Tiger: The Story of Harkjoon Paik

By Beverly Paik

Harkjoon Paik left his native Korea in the midst of war. His home destroyed and his educational opportunities lost, he left everything and everyone behind in search of a way to accomplish his life goals. He arrived in the United States as an ambitious and optimistic teenager, knowing no one and without resources.

Tracking the Tiger is the story of how he survived in the chaos of battle and immigration. He created a new life for himself, making his way with hard work, and went on to earn degrees from Stanford University and Stanford Law School. He began to practice law and, at the age of thirty-eight,became the first native-born Korean to sit on the Superior Court bench in not only California but also the United States.

Judge Paik finds joy in life wherever he goes. He has raised three children of great accomplishment, and he shares many lifelong friendships and some great adventures along the way.

His wife, Beverly Paik, tells the story of her husband's life and career in his voice. They met more than fifty years ago as students at Stanford University. When he granted her access to his diaries, she knew his was a story that needed to be shared with a much bigger audience.

This is their story, one of love and triumph over adversity--and of the undeniable power of hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462009893

Beverly Paik

Beverly Paik studied journalism and creative writing at Stanford University, also earning a Master’s degree in education. She lives in the Carmel Valley of California with her husband, a retired judge. They have three children and two grandchildren. This is her fourth book.

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Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One

Chapter One

Korea: Japan’s Colony

Chapter Two

The Thirty-Eighth Parallel

Chapter Three

June 25, 1950, War Begins

Chapter Four

My Home Is Bombed

Chapter Five

Living Under Communists

Chapter Six

Rescued By The Inchon Landing

Chapter Seven

Alone On The Road To Pusan

Chapter Eight

Escape To Cheju

Part Two

Chapter Nine

Arriving In Monterey

Chapter Ten

Lions’ Club Speech Contest

Chapter Eleven

My Next Step,

Stanford University

Chapter Twelve

Becoming An American Lawyer

Part Three

Chapter 13

Moving To Los Angeles

Chapter 14

Anti-Trust Cases

Chapter 15

Public Defender Discovers Me

Chapter 16

Leaving Los Angeles

Chapter 17

I’m Handed A Death Penalty Case

Chapter 18

Harkjoon Paik Is Coming Home!

Chapter 19

Fourteen California Oak Trees

PREFACE

This is the only country in the world which experiences constant and repeated rebirth. Other countries depend upon the multiplication of their own native people. This country is constantly drinking strength out of new sources by the voluntary association with it of great bodies of strong men and forward-looking women out of other lands. And so by the gift of free will of independent people it is being constantly renewed from generation to generation by the same process by which it was originally created.

—Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States

Among the few possessions Harkjoon Paik brought with him when he arrived in the United States from Korea were some notebooks. He was a boy of fifteen in search of the education his devastated country could not provide. These thin notebooks had stayed with him since he’d fled south from Seoul when the North Koreans and Chinese invaded his homeland.

These few precious pages contained the notes he jotted down each day, describing the horrors and the wonders of his life while he struggled to reach Pusan, the only safe place remaining in his country, where he hoped to locate and rejoin his family.

He did reunite with his parents and consequently made his way to the United States. As soon as he began his studies in an American high school and learned to use the English language, he translated the remembrances captured in these notebooks and filed away the translations. Immediate goals were more important: studying, working and preparing for a career. Discovered after the passage of many years, these notes became the foundation for this story I have written of his life, adventures and accomplishments.

This is a happy story, a story of success. This man might have been only one more person caught up in the deluge of refugees from war. Instead, he created a unique place for himself in this country of immigrants because he arrived armed with expectations imbued in him throughout his early years: strive to excel, not only for oneself but also for family and country. He could expect nothing that he did not earn through his own effort and diligence. Houseboy, newspaper carrier, gardener; he performed many labors on the way to his goal. At each stage in his life he found and utilized opportunities for broadening and strengthening knowledge and understanding until Harkjoon Paik became, ultimately, the arbiter of decisions affecting the lives of countless persons.

Carving out a role for himself in this nation that has been enriched by the abilities of newcomers, he progressed from student at Stanford University to the role of respected lawyer and judge in the country that had once given him refuge. In return he became determined to preserve the ideals of justice promised by the United States.

Along the way he has encountered persons of good will, men and women of varied ages and backgrounds, who became trusted friends sharing in the moments of good fortune and good times.

One journalist, Robert Jones, wrote of him: "He is a one-of-a-kind jurist and one of the most colorful figures in the history of Monterey County. Judge Paik makes legions of friends and a good number of enemies, too, with his outspokenness, his devotion to the American system of justice and his love of the common man and defiance of the seats of power."

Tracking the Tiger offers more than the history of one man’s career; this story will inspire young immigrants arriving in the United States today, leading them to their own discovery of the potential for their skills and talents in a nation that, in President Wilson’s words, drinks from the strength of new sources.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With appreciation for patient listening and helpful critiques, I thank my writing friends, Joan Condon, Natalya Dragunsky, Joyce and George Hahn, Evelyn Smart and Nick Souza.

INTRODUCTION

When I was a young boy my friends and I would go out in the hills hunting for tigers. That's what I tell everyone. No one believes me. I don't understand why. It's an established fact that there were once tigers in Korea. But without fail every person to whom I mention this childhood feat laughs at me.

Perhaps they think I couldn't have done it. Perhaps they don't understand. They may think that to hunt tigers you have to actually find tigers. I never say I found some tigers. Just that I was hunting for them. That's what you do in life if you really want to make something happen. You have to go hunting for it. You don't have to actually find it. The adventure comes from the hunting.

That's what this story is all about. The adventures I found while I was hunting. I still go hunting. You never can tell what you'll end up finding. The thought can keep you going, though, for all of your life.

Now that I've hung up my robe and stepped down from the bench after twenty-two years as a superior court judge in California and am finding time to think about it, I realize that I have had some pretty good adventures over the past years, even though I'm still on the lookout for that tiger. Some of my friends know something of those events and they often ask me to tell them more. What really happened and how I made it happen. Well, I'm not sure how much was my own doing. A lot of persons helped me along the way and I've had some pretty good luck as well.

PART ONE

A TIME TO GROW UP QUICKLY

CHAPTER ONE

KOREA: JAPAN’S COLONY

To begin, I'll have to take you back with me to the Korea of the 1930's.

Korea was quite a different place at that time. Some people, mostly those with education, did all right, even living under the Japanese who'd colonized the country in 1910 and since taken much of the farmland into their control. But there were many poor people who had a real struggle every day of their lives. Roads were few and mostly unpaved. Trains provided the most common way of travel, though even that was limited mostly to persons of the small upper class. The Japanese did supervise the building of a lot of train track while they were in my country. Most rail lines led straight to the seaports, making it easier for them to ship all our coal and rice and other useful products right across the East Sea to Japan. Seoul was just about the only place you'd find autos, trolley cars, electricity and other inventions of the Twentieth century. Most of the Korean people still lived out in the country as farmers, and they needed help. Especially, they needed medical care.

That's one of the reasons why my father chose to live in a small village south of Seoul. He always tried his best to help people. He thought that was the reason for being a doctor. This place where he brought our family to live was so far from everything that just to get to the nearest railroad stop we had to walk for a couple of hours on a path laid down by the wheels of wooden carts. Dusty in the dry season, muddy when it rained, frozen into ruts in the winter, this trail was the only way in or out any time of the year.

My family was already living there at the time of my birth but my mother had traveled north to visit her father so I was actually born in the part of Korea that now is part of another country. North Korea is mostly mountains, called the Diamond Mountains because of their beauty and configuration, but also could be called that for the wealth of minerals to be found within them. My mother's father was more fortunate than most of his countrymen. He owned a gold mine in one of those mountains.

My own memories, though, begin in that village, then called Tan Yang, where my father had his own small hospital, and my first memory is of freedom. As a boy I had from the start of my life a great sense of liberty to do just about whatever pleased me, and what’s more, without the restrictions that city life would have imposed.

My second memory is of warm sun on my shoulders, soft matted grasses beneath my bare toes and of trees on the hillsides with the wind ruffling their branches, playing the songs of nature as if strumming the strings of a haegeum. Perhaps that is why even today I still enjoy the solitude and beauty of nature and prefer to be out of doors and away from the noise, dust, commotion and smog of our modern cities whenever I can.

It was quite unusual for someone of my father's background to be living so far from Seoul. He was a physician and a scholar, a quiet man who enjoyed sitting alone, thinking and playing his okdaegeum, a kind of flute with a clear and beautiful tone, when his services were not required.

Tan Yang is in Cheung Chung, the only province, or nam do, with no seacoast. Some years earlier he'd come to this village and built a traditional home with a tiled roof of slate grey and curved eaves designed to bring good fortune. Several L-shaped wings extended from the center, with inner courtyards and a beautiful garden. Of course there were lots of maids to prepare the food and clean, and men to work in the garden. That's how life was in those days. His clinic was attached at one side of our home, in its own L. The villagers would bring the sick or injured person to him and stay in a small room of this clinic, caring for them while he performed his medicine. There were no other hospitals nearby and he came here to be useful but also to be safe, as safe as one could be in 1936 when our Japanese overlords strictly dominated every facet of our lives.

Korea had been Japan's colony since 1910. Thirty years. The early efforts of the independence movement, with which he'd been closely involved, had subsided as a result of repressive measures. Too many persons he'd known were now dead, in prison, or living in exile, and most of the others reconciled to life under this system as a condition not soon to be ended. Many, like my father, found ways to carry on private lives that would at least assure their survival and protect their families.

In this way he provided me with a near-idyllic childhood. Life was simple but I'd known no other so I was satisfied. Somewhat pampered and spoiled, as well, I have to add. I was the younger son. My brother was fourteen years older and away at school so I barely knew him. After that there were only girl babies until I arrived, and one more girl after me. I barely knew my sisters either because then the worlds of boys and girls were completely separated. We didn't even share mealtimes but dined in separate rooms.

Mine was a male world most of the time. Boys of the village were my playmates. Together we roamed the hills, hunting wild creatures, rabbits, birds, and the elusive tiger. Just over the next hill, beyond the next grove of trees, we expected to find that tiger. Meanwhile we'd build a campfire with twigs and roast the quarry we did capture. Even grasshoppers, taken from the rice fields, made delicious mouthfuls toasted over red coals.

The conditions of war with America intensified by the time I reached school age but didn't touch me. My only worry was how to find enough rag strips to make a soccer ball. We'd wind them tightly round and round until we produced a sphere large enough to kick around, for there was no metal, no rubber or other toys. There was peace in our small corner of the world, however.

My first grammar school was in the village. We were all taught in the Japanese language and never allowed to speak Korean. I did not use the Korean language until the war ended. I was in third grade by then. It wasn't hard for me to excel. Once we were given a storybook and by the next morning I'd memorized all of it. My classmates were impressed and chose me for their leader. We all had Japanese names at that time as we'd been forced to give up our Korean names shortly before the war with America began. I've forgotten mine now.

During my sixth year I caught malaria and was kept in bed for nearly a year, with my mother hovering always and caring for me herself. That was the one time she stayed close to home, seldom leaving my side.

My mother, ever restless, was unsuited for this quiet country life. She often found reasons to travel into Seoul, saying she must visit my sisters who lived at their school in the city. I remember going to the train stop to meet her. A long walk, it seemed to me then, lasting an hour or perhaps two. Time flows in a different dimension when you are a child.

She was sixteen when she married my father, and the mother of a son by seventeen. Though that sounds young today, it was not unusual for the time. She'd been a rebellious child, defying her father, running away to school in an era when education for girls took place only in the home. Putting her into marriage must have seemed to him the ultimate resort for controlling such an uncharacteristically strong young woman as she. There was no choice in the matter for her, of course. Marriages were arranged. My mother used her education, however, teaching children for a time while my parents lived in the country, and was able to add to my father's income. Although he was a gifted physician, he was not so clever at bill collecting and she managed to find a use for every hwan he earned.

My father was ten years older than her. This, also, was unusual, for the long time custom of our country was to affiance a young boy to an older girl, who would be brought into her husband's home to work for her mother-in-law for several years before the actual consummation of the marriage. This did not happen in my mother's situation because my father had been married before; his first wife died at a young age. His mother was no longer alive, so my mother did not confront a mother-in-law situation. Not only that, but he had taken advanced studies in western medicine as a young man. About that same time he became a protégé of Son Pyong Hi, the patriot who, as the third leader of the rebellious religious-political group called Ch'ondogyo, signed the Independence Manifesto, and was imprisoned by the Japanese overlords following the March 1, 1919, national demonstration for freedom. In fact, it was to the daughter of this man that he had once been married.

So in 1921 he married my mother. They were complete opposites in personality from the beginning, the perfect example of the yin and yang concept. In a Korean marriage of their time such a contrast made little difference because the greater portion of their lives was lived separately.

She savored all the nuances of life, always living with gusto. My mother enjoyed eating and socializing, shopping and dealing in business with her acquaintances. She was born to organize. The restrictions on behavior of women common to her time must have been a cross for her to bear but she was clever in circumventing the rules and determined in planning the lives of her children so they might advance as far as possible through the best education she could obtain for them. Education was always the key for her, all of her life. More than forty years later she was to have the immense gratification of seeing six of her American-born grandchildren earn admission to Harvard University.

My father, as her opposite, was inclined to withdraw from the world. Early in his life he had formed a philosophical outlook based on his belief in the religious precepts of Ch'ondogyo. It is difficult to describe in brief but this movement began in the late Nineteenth Century in Korea. Its social teachings are really more significant than its religious practices. These concepts were totally new and many were contrary to the Confucian order, which imposed a hierarchy of ruler over subject, father over son, man over woman, landowner over worker. That is why it became, in part, a political movement. It taught a belief in equality of all men. Women, also. God is within each person and heaven is here and now. Treat each person you meet as if he or she were God. It taught charity. Every day that I could remember, no matter how much or little we had to eat, my father always set aside a cup of rice to give to the poor.

This Ch'ondogyo, as I mentioned earlier, was instrumental in forming the independence movement against Japanese colonization of Korea, but it continued on after that and still has two or three million followers in the country. My father found most of his friends within this movement and in his later years became a high-ranking leader. When he died in his nineties, many busloads of Ch'ondogyo members followed his coffin to the countryside and then walked a long distance over the hills to be present at his burial site, a place he had chosen on a high hill.

When I was a child I had no understanding of this part of his life. I probably never knew him very well. Our lives, most