ROOTLESS:: A chronicle of my life journey

By Kyu Chul Kim

This book is an intimate account of an ordinary individual’s extraordinary life journey that transcends both cultural and social boundaries. ­ The author was born and lived in Korea during his formative years, and has been living in the United States for the following 50 years. ­ is individual’s unique story of his environmen

• Language: English
• Publisher: URLink Print & Media, LLC
• Release date: Mar 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781643672359

Kyu Chul Kim

¬ The author is an accomplished scientist and science educator. He has co-authored and published some six dozen scientific and technical articles in various journals nation-wide during his professional career. ¬ e author worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a group leader and also as chief scientist in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Nuclear Materials Technology Division. He developed and worked as the principle editor for the Los Alamos science periodical "Actinide Research Quarterly" in which he occasionally contributed editorials for some 10 years before his retirement.

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Rootless

Copyright © 2019 by Kyu Chull Kim. All rights reserved.

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Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64367-234-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-236-6 (Hardback)

ISBN 978-1-64367-235-9 (Digital)

Biography

05.02.19

To Joan

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgement

Short Childhood Years

The War Came to Our Home Town

Life under the Invading Army Occupation

About my Parents

My School Years

Crossing the Pacific Ocean

My First Year in the USA

First Industrial Experience in Rolling Meadows

Back to Graduate School in Kansas

Los Alamos Years

- One Laboratory Town

- My work

- My Last Acts at the Laboratory

Our Family Life

On the North/South divided Korea

My Retirement Years

Notable Fellow Travelers on My Life’s Journey

Thoughts on Wealth and Happiness

Epilogue

Preface

The first question in my mind for a number of years was why I would even consider writing a biography of my own life journey. Throughout my life I have led a stealth life of my own unnoticed by most and why do I not leave it that way to the end? After a while, though, I felt that not leaving any record of my private journey was not consistent with my belief and sense of responsibility to my ancestral roots, my parents for the most part, and the culture and the society in which I was born and grew up. However incidental it may have appeared, I was not thrown into this world without some prior causes.

The second question was then what was so special about my own personal journey to warrant my writing about it? I answered this self-imposed question in my mind in the following way: I have lived in two different cultures and on two different continents. Individually taken, each part of my life in these two phases has nothing special or unique in it. However, in my person I was able to see and understand the events, worldly different cultures, the different ways of life, and the different fabrics of social life, that cross the national and continental boundaries in a better light than most who have not had the opportunity. I felt that this was a unique opportunity presented to me from the early days of my life. I wanted to share with others my personal experiences in a world that is getting ever smaller and closer as time passes.

Finally, I wanted to leave something to my two daughters that would lead them to a starting point in the event they ever wanted to find out their own roots. There is no doubt that my two daughters born of an American mother and a Korean father have had their share of a confused state of mind ever since they became aware of their own surroundings. In the end one hopes that our children will cherish the heritage that they inherited from their parents, and that the amalgamation of the two cultures within themselves will help them lead a richer life nurtured from both cultures.

I was born in Korea, the youngest of the six children to parents whose tradition was deeply rooted in the ancient Korean culture. When I was seven years old, the Korean War broke out and within a one-month period, the town in the southern end of the Korean peninsula where I was growing up was run over by the North Korean army. The town was occupied by the invading army for a few months, until the Allied forces reclaimed most of the territory which is now called South Korea.

In the end the Korean War claimed a million or more human lives on both sides. Ironically the original issues of disputes have remained unsettled to this day after some 60 years. The war shattered my parents’ and our sibling’s otherwise quiet rural life in such a destructive way that the old way of our life could never be rebuilt.

While there have been countless stories told and various versions of the war histories written, all wars should be viewed locally to truly understand their impact on humans and their societies. The human impact of any war is generally lost as we are removed further from the war zone. As many as the number of human casualties sadly show, those who are direct witnesses of a war frequently do not survive to tell their stories. The idea that mere survival in a war situation conjures up a stark new meaning has not been lost to me ever since the Korean War. I am not writing to tell another war story, the memory of which has been lost to many a long time ago. I am here to tell a chronicle of my life’s journey that includes the Korean War period which altered so many people’s lives. The war not only changed my life profoundly, but also quite ironically set me free and opened an entirely new world which I would not have known existed.

Immediately after my college years I boarded a trans-Pacific jet plane for the first time on one bitingly cold winter day in January 1965 and came to the United States of America. During the first year while I attended the graduate school at the Fort Hays Kansas State College, I met Joan, my wife of the following 46 years as of this writing. Our two daughters were born two years apart when we were living in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. For the three years period between 1967 and 1970 I worked in the petrochemical industry as a research scientist. After three years of my industrial work, my family went back to Kansas in order to continue my graduate study. With my family responsibilities with two very young children, there was no time to waste and after three and a half years of intense graduate work, I finished my Ph.D. program at Kansas State University. After that, my family lived briefly in Lafayette, Indiana, while I was doing my postdoctoral research at the Purdue University. From there I had the fortune to continue my scientific career at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for nearly 30 years.

These were truly eventful years of my and my family members’ lives. Each year seemed to present new challenges in life and I had to learn how to adapt to my newly found environment. But, in sum, it was an epoch journey for me, and through each passage of the different phases of my journey I have learned something new that has helped me to advance to the next stage of my journey. Throughout these years I have remained as a lifetime student of all things around me, and have found no dull moment in pursuing new knowledge and beauty in our world.

It was some 16 years elapsed while I was working at Los Alamos that I visited Korea for the first time since I had left the country on that cold winter day in 1965. Many things in Korea and the United States have changed over the years. I too have changed through these years. As I reflect, the atomic bombs that were developed in Los Alamos helped end World War II. Simultaneously, World War II also helped end the 36 years of the dreadful Japanese occupation of Korea. Within a few years span the Korean War broke out. Reflecting upon my journey years later, it appeared to me that I was rushed to prepare myself and to be at the birthplace of the atomic age.

Once in a while I think about these worldly events and ponder how odd and strange that I had lived through these tumultuous events and came to live in such an entirely different, yet connected in a mysterious way, world. The Japanese unconditional surrendering occasion was such a momentous event in Korea that even as a tiny baby my very first memory was a radio sound of someone’s crying voice. Later I was able to connect my memory to the Japanese emperor’s crying announcement of the surrender and everyone’s excitement around me. As a scientist working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, our nation’s premier defense research and science facility, I had occasions to visit Korea and Japan and provided lectures on various scientific topics. On these occasions, I always felt overwhelmed with memories of my personal journey between the two continents.

Presently, I live in Los Alamos with Joan, my wife of 46 years as of this writing. Together, we have travelled on our life journey and carved our unique path which meanders through five different states in this country. During this period our two daughters, unbeknownst to them at first when they were very young, travelled with us every step of the way, sometimes reversing the path I took alone before their time. From Los Alamos our two daughters ventured out to the world on their own as talented individuals in their own chosen fields. Someday, I hope, they will be motivated to write their own stories.

Almost in all instances, each of our daughters in their own way embodies the same aspirations I had in my youthful years. Here, in one sense, I am documenting my journey to help them see one half side of their roots in a country far removed from their own. At the same time I fulfill my dream of writing my own story although it may be a mere echo of my own lonely voice in the vast sea of worldly events.

The main part of my autobiography was published 1n 2012. After several years, six year to be exact, I felt a need for revising and including some additional details before they fade away from my memory forever. An autobiography is intrinsically subjective and, when the individual’s memories of various events in one’s past over several decades are recalled, it is important to recognize that events and specific memories also can be inevitably selective. They are never meant to be complete or all-inclusive or objective in true sense of the word. I also found out another publishing company that would work with me to meet my personal requirements in publishing the revised book with the same title. In this revised volume, nothing has been omitted or changed except some necessary corrections from the original text and only some additional information and several new images have been added. My original objective of recording my personal life journey in this book remains true to this day.

Acknowledgement

In the spirit of do-it-yourself, this writing of my autobiography follows a self-motivated publishing path. As such, I have received valuable help from my wife Joan and daughter Janice. Their careful reading and editing of all aspects of the book is much appreciated.

Short Childhood Years

When I was a little boy growing up in a small rural town in the southern part of the Korean peninsula, my parents had a fairly large orchard consisting of a few hundreds of mature apple and pear trees, a few dozen peach trees, grape vines, and a large garden area for all kinds of vegetables. My memory goes back just a few years before the Korean War. I learned later that our family had moved to this town from a nearby port city where I was born when I was not quite four years old. From the beginning of the Korean War to the time of signing the truce our family endured the entire war in this town.

At an early age before our family moved to this town I remember an occasion, standing next to my brother in the restroom of a school building and repeating with him bad Japanese, vicious Japanese. I cannot find the right translation of these words, but the description is generally correct. This was right after the ending of the Japanese occupation of Korea. For the first time in 36 years, Koreans were expressing their pent up feelings freely. Then, without my recollection of the transition, I found myself living in the new place in the suburb of Jin-Ju city. Just as Korean society was emerging from its long colonial occupation by the Japanese, Korea was plunged into the most devastating war that the country had ever experienced before in its entire history.

It’s hard to imagine now, but up until the war the Korean society, particularly in the rural area where we