Meaningful Connections in My Long Journey between a Pine Grove of Songki-ri and the Bank of the Siuslaw River

By Song-nai Rhee

This is Song-nai Rhee's personal memoirs of an eighty-seven-year-long life between a pine grove of Songki-riin, Korea and the bank of the Siuslaw River on the West Coast, covering his early life during World War II; his existential crisis during the Korean War; his life transformation from Confucian to Christian; coming to America and Northwest Christian College; his formal education in America (resulting in two bachelors, four masters, and two PhD degrees); thirty-seven years of professional service at NCC (now Bushnell University) as a professor of history, Bible, and archaeology, as well as academic vice president/dean; and as a father, grandfather, and writer/publisher, retiring as a farmer/fisherman on the bank of the Siuslaw River. Most of all, this book is about the people, beginning with Bill Peterson in a war zone, who helped make all this and Rhee's life possible--the meaningful connections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jan 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666751666

Song-nai Rhee

Song-nai Rhee grew up in Korea during World War II and served as a translator for the US Army during the Korean War. He came to the US in 1955 for higher education, earning two bachelor’s degrees, four master’s degrees, and two PhDs. He became a professor, academic vice-president, and academic dean of Northwest Christian College (now Bushnell University) in Eugene, OR. His academic specialties include ancient Israel, the Near East, China, Korea, and Japan. He is the author of Beautiful as the Rainbow: Nashimoto Masako, a Japanese Princess against All Odds for Love, Life, and Happiness (2013) and Archaeology of Toraijin: Human, Technological, and Cultural Flow from the Korean Peninsula to the Japanese Archipelago, c. 800 BC—AD 600 (2021).

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Prologue

Silent Night, Dark Night

Bong-gu, my cousin, was blissfully happy to receive the news from Hana, his wife of sixteen months, that he had become the father of a beautiful baby boy.

It was December 1950. Korea was in the middle of a catastrophic war. In the frozen fields and snow-covered mountains in the north, Americans were dying daily by the hundreds, frozen or attacked by Chinese invaders. In the south, around Mt. Jiri, small mountain valleys had become killing fields as government troops were engaged, day and night, in a devastating cat and mouse game with the Communist guerillas.

The Valley of Shinyang-ri with Mt. Cheon-hwang in the background

The village of Shinyang-ri, where Bong-gu and I lived, was one of these perilous mountain valleys. Low-lying hills, extending southward and westward from the imposing Mt. Cheon-hwang, formed the vale with a river flowing in the middle and small plots of rice paddies around it. Deep inside the rugged Mt. Cheon-hwang, local Communists and remnants of the Sixth Division of the North Korean People’s Army had established a guerilla base camp, soon after General MacArthur’s successful Inchon landing had broken the back of North Korean invaders on September 15 and 16 three months before.

During the day, the Communist guerillas stayed in the mountain, because the government troops and the National Police patrolled the valley, but after darkness set in, the heavily armed guerillas would descend upon the villages to obtain rice, vegetable, blankets, clothes, and other necessities or to kill people suspected of being reactionary, disloyal. Before dawn, they would head back to their mountain hideout, soon followed by the government troops. Both sides had declared martial law in the Shinyang-ri Valley, forcing every villager to live in fear and uncertainty.

One day, a government solder from the Eleventh Division of the National Army walked into my house, holding a rifle in his hands. His face was full of rage, his eyes burning with fire. My mother and my siblings met him in fear and trembling. I just shot and killed a young man in the village nearby, he blurted. His brother was one of the guerillas in the mountain, he explained.

Three days later, in the darkness of night, I heard loud sounds of gunshots coming from an open field near my home. Someone has been killed tonight! I said to myself. How sad and how unfortunate. Unable to sleep all night, I kept wondering who might be the victim. The next morning, I went to the field whence the sound of gunshots had come. It was next to my family-owned field where we grew cotton and wheat. On the surface of the field, I saw pools of dark blood and smelled something nauseating. Someone had already moved the body or bodies during the night.

In mid-November, a fierce battle broke out in a broad daylight between a combat battalion of the Eleventh Division and the guerilla forces in the middle of the Shinyang-ri Valley. The battle, lasting several hours, left a dozen soldiers wounded and one soldier killed. The wounded soldiers were transported to an army hospital in Namwon City, but the dead soldier was buried on the bank of a river in front of my village as the government troops were retreating to the city for the night.

A week or two later, the dead soldier’s elder brother, also a soldier in the National Army, came to my village. Sad and distraught, he came from another province far away to reclaim his brother’s body. While being led to the riverbank, he began to cry and wail, calling his brother’s name endlessly. With the help of villagers, he exhumed his brother’s remains, still soaked in blood. He embraced his lifeless brother, mangled and blood soaked, tight to his chest, wailing without end. He then placed it on a woodpile for cremation. As the body gradually turned into ashes, he danced, crying and wailing, like a man in a trance. It appeared as if his soul was also being consumed in the fire.

Such was the world of the Shinyang-ri Valley, my world, in 1950 and 1951. My family and I were trapped in a killing field brought upon by deadly ideological and political conflicts between the right and the left, between democracy and dictatorship, and between capitalism and communism.

Bong-gu, twenty-two years old, was a member of the National Police, serving in Sunchang, about sixty miles away. He was with a combat police unit hunting the Communist guerillas in the Hoemunsan mountains. He had been away from his family for about three months.

Bong-gu was seven years older than I, but we were close. His mother was my father’s elder sister. Living nearby with each other, we remained close, visiting often, especially at family events and on holidays. Just a day or two before he left for Sunchang, he and I spent a day playing a chess game under an old pine tree in front of our village.

Clenching the letter in his hands, Bong-gu took a deep breath, grimacing. The smiling face of Hana and his newborn son sleeping in her gentle arms gave him both joy and pain. Oh! How I wish to see them and touch them! he cried.

Knowing too well about the dangers in the Shinyang-ri Valley, he tried desperately to shoo away the images of Hana and his son, but to no avail.

A week passed, and he decided to see Hana and his newborn son.

Traveling from his mountain post to the Shinyang-ri Valley was a challenge because it was wartime, and public transportation was scant. By the time he came within five miles of the Shinyang-ri Valley, walking and hitchhiking along the way, the sun was over the western horizon, and it was getting dark. He knew that the fear of death ruled the night in the valley.

He thought about spending the night at an inn in a nearby town, but his wish to see Hana and his son was more than he could bear.

I will guard every step I take, Bong-gu assured himself. Crawling from ditch to ditch, among trees and brushes, and hiding behind boulders along the way, he finally reached the back of his house. His hands, arms, and feet were covered with mud and bleeding. Gently he knocked on the rear entrance of the room where Hana was. Hana, it is me, Bong-gu whispered. Startled, Hana opened the door, allowing Bong-gu to slip in. Holding his tiny baby son in his arms, Bong-gu gazed at Hana lovingly. Thank you, Hana, he whispered. What a joy and what a blessing! He felt as if he were in heaven.

In the meantime, the Communist guerilla base, deep in Mt. Cheon-hwang, had learned through its local intelligence network that Bong-gu’s wife had given birth to a son. That damned policeman! they yelled, grinding their teeth. Surely, he will come to see his newborn son one of these days. He will walk into our trap, and we will get him, they swore to each other.

Every night, a half-dozen guerillas were watching Bong-gu’s house from afar, waiting for his arrival.

Bong-gu was still holding his baby son in his arms when someone knocked on the front door. As Bong-gu and Hana froze, heavily armed guerillas rushed in, kicking and breaking the door down. Instantly, they tied Bong-gu’s hands behind his back. At the same time, other armed guerillas stormed the rooms where Bong-gu’s father and his elder brother, Song-gu, were sleeping. They bound them also.

Yelling, You damned police dog and your family, we will give you a taste of hell! they dragged all three bound men out into the front yard, kicking them and whipping them with a rope, all in the face of their wife and children. Then, they dragged the three bound men to snow-covered Mt. Cheon-hwang, which was known to us as the merciless slaughterhouse where men denounced as reactionary and disloyal were tortured and stoned to death.

In the silence of the dark night, my aunt, an old woman in her sixties, stormed into our house, screaming, They took them! They took Bong-gu and Song-gu, and also their father!

Startled, my father, still half asleep, asked, Who took whom?

Suddenly, one single night, my aunt’s house became a house of mourning, three widows and children without a father.

My aunt cried and wept in loud lamentation for days and weeks. Overcome by grief, she became frenzied and delirious, roaming the fields, often naked, calling her sons’ names endlessly. Then, one cold freezing night, she passed away frozen, on a lonely road in the middle of frozen rice paddies, all alone.

That silent night and dark night, imprisoned in a terrifying and terrorized valley, at only fifteen, I was sinking into hopelessness. Thinking of the young man shot to death by a soldier in a neighboring village, the unknown dead in an open field, Bong-gu and Song-gu my cousins, and the soldier killed in a daylight battle, I was asking myself: Does human life have any meaning or purpose? Can humans live in peace, without killing each other? Will I be alive tonight, tomorrow? Is there any future for me?

1

Beginnings

An aged pine tree near Song’s birthplace

My Birth and My Name

I was born in 1935, in a small rice farming village of Songki-ri (松基里), meaning hamlet of pine groves, in Namwon County, in the southwestern part of Korea, 150 miles south of Seoul. I was the first of seven children of Byung-hong Rhee and Choon-kil Shin: Song-nai, Yeon-nai, Yeong-ja, Poong-nai, Chung-ja, Hyang-ja, and Pyung-nai (three sons and four daughters).

My father named me Song (松), meaning pine tree, not only because I was born in the hamlet of pine groves but also because in Asia the pine is a sacred tree, valued for its fragrance, its evergreen color, and its sturdiness. Nai (來) is my genealogical identity. All my brothers and paternal cousins, and in some cases my sisters, have it as part of their personal name. Because my family belonged to the Gwangju Rhee clan, my name is Rhee (李) Song Nai or Song Nai Rhee (李松來), as anglicized.

My Clan History: Triumphs and Tragedies of a Confucian Scholar/Official Class

In written records, my ancestry goes back to the early fourteenth century, to the time of Korea’s Goryo Kingdom (935–1392).¹ Following four hundred years of existence and some great cultural achievements such as the development of exquisitely beautiful Goryo celadon and the world’s earliest metal printing technology, the Goryo Kingdom began to wane in the early 1300s. Amidst social and political confusion, an evil and ambitious Buddhist priest named Shindon found his way into the royal court, assuming enormous power and committing all sorts of immoral and treacherous deeds. Deeply troubled and angry, Jip Rhee (pen name: Dunchon), my first known ancestor, began to publicly criticize the evil Buddhist priest-become de facto ruler of the kingdom. Swiftly, the public criticism incurred the wrath of Shindon, who ordered the arrest and extermination of Dunchon and his family.

Faced with grave crisis, Dunchon decided to flee with his father to a faraway place in Yeongcheon, about two hundred miles south of Kaeseong, the capital city of Goryo Kingdom. Extraordinarily filial (loyal and loving) to his father, Dunchon carried his aged and ailing father, Dang Rhee (1300–1369), on his back for the two hundred miles, desperately hoping to find a hiding place at the home of his most trusted friend, Choe Sagan, who had been a high official but had retreated to his hometown in the country because of the evil Shindon.

In the meantime, Shindon circulated throughout the kingdom a special edict ordering the arrest and execution of Dunchon at all cost, but Choe Sagan, Dunchon’s trusted friend, hid him and his father in a secret room in his house, not telling anyone in his family, including his wife. He was afraid that if Shindon’s soldiers and police came into his house because they knew that he was a close friend of Dunchon’s, and tortured his family members to confess and reveal the hiding, everyone would be killed. Choe Sagan secretly supplied daily food to Dunchon and his father. He told his maid that his appetite had suddenly increased twofold and asked for more food at every mealtime.

One day, curious of her master’s behavior, the maid followed Choe Sagan as he was stealthily taking food to the secret room. She suddenly realized what a terrible thing she had done. Afraid that she would be forced to talk and reveal the secret under torture by Shindon’s soldiers and police and thereby bring calamity to everyone involved, including Master Choe and his entire family, she voluntarily committed suicide so as to seal her mouth forever as an act of her impeccable loyalty to her master. This story of Choe Sagan and his maid has come down for centuries in the Rhee clan as an example of truly admirable virtues of trust and loyalty—two virtues carrying supreme value in the Rhee clan along with love within the family.

Three years later, in 1371, under the mounting criticism and pressure of the learned Confucian scholars, Shindon lost his power and was banished and executed, and many of the Confucian scholars who had been hiding returned to the capital and were given various honors. Dunchon also returned to the capital city and was offered a position in the government; however, being a scholar by nature, he soon resigned and retreated to Dunchon in Seongnam City, a town southeast of modern Seoul, where he spent his last days reading, writing, and fishing. He died peacefully in 1387, five years before Goryo Kingdom fell. His father had died during the hiding and was buried in Choe Sagan’s family cemetery in Youngcheon, near modern Taegu City. In 1935, the Rhee and the Choe clans cooperatively purchased the lands surrounding the tomb to establish a permanent sacred ground. It is marked with impressive memorial halls and giant memorial monuments of granite stone.

In 1392, Yi Seong-kye, a Goryo Kingdom general, carried out a coup d’état, with the support of Confucian scholars, against the inept and corrupt Goryo rulers and established a new kingdom (dynasty) called Choseon (the land of morning calm). It was during the Choseon Kingdom period (1392–1910) that my clan enjoyed its social, political, and scholarly prosperity and rose to great national prominence in Korea. Inasmuch as General Yi Seong-kye was successful in his coup d’état with the support of scholars of Confucian learning, he wished to establish his new kingdom on the philosophy and principles of Confucian scholarship. Consequently, my clan, with its strong Confucian scholarly roots, became highly valuable and active in the affairs of government and national education.

Coming first to national prominence was In-Son (1395–1463), of the third generation in my clan. Born in 1395, when the new kingdom was only three years old, In-Son mastered the Confucian learning, and in 1417 at the age of twenty-two, he passed the highest state examination. Soon he was appointed by the king as the governor of several provinces in the south, and a few years later as the prime minister, as well as the official in charge of training and educating the crown prince (the prince chosen to be the next king).

When In-Son died in 1463, he was buried on a magnificently beautiful and auspicious hillside in Yeoju near the South Han River, about thirty-five miles southeast of Seoul. In traditional Korea, and even today for most Koreans, locating and selecting a proper burial site for the deceased has been a matter of foremost importance. According to the philosophy of geomancy (study of natural configurations of potential grave sites), it has been believed for more than two thousand years that the future destiny of every family depends on the quality of the grave site selected. Bad sites would bring misfortunes while the good and auspicious sites would bring blessings and good fortunes upon the surviving family. So, In-Son’s family, after diligent search, found the beautiful hillside in Yeoju, considered by geomancers to be supremely auspicious, bringing prosperity and success for my clan for generations.

And indeed, in the period of about one hundred years (1447–1545), one Rhee clan member after another passed the highest state examinations and was appointed to various positions in the government. Two sons of In-Son became prime ministers and three sons became an attorney general and cabinet minister. Likewise, In-Son’s three nephews rose in ranks to cabinet ministers. Thus, the Choseon Kingdom was practically run by eight members of my clan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They lived in an area reserved for aristocracy and high officials next to the royal palace, and the area was named Palpan-dong, meaning the district of eight cabinet ministers. My clan became an object of awe and envy for many Korean families who yearned to have sons like those of my clan.

In-Son Rhee had five sons: Keuk-bae, Keuk-kam, Keuk-don, Keuk-kyu, and Keuk-kyun. They all passed the highest state examinations and were appointed to high offices: Keuk-bae as the prime minister; Keuk-kam as the attorney general of the Choseon Kingdom; Keuk-don as the head of the Supreme State Council; Keuk-kyu as the head of the Saganwon, which watched and critiqued kings’ conduct; and Keuk-kyun as the prime minister.

Keuk-kam had a son named Se-jwa. He also passed the highest state examination and was appointed as the head of Ijo, the department in charge of official appointments, royal awards, and state examinations. During his tenure as the head of Ijo department, Korea witnessed one of the darkest days under King Yeonsan, a ruthlessly evil and corrupt king often likened to the evil Nero of ancient Rome or Ivan the Terrible of Russia. Like them, he was a madman engaged in debauchery and murder. During his eleven-year reign (1495–1506), countless number of Confucian scholars and officials were put to death by his order at the slightest sign of disloyalty, often the product of his own paranoid imaginations.

The evil King Yeonsan became particularly obsessed with my clan because of the power, reputation, and respect it held throughout the Choseon Kingdom and especially in Seoul, the capital city. Out of his fear of my clan, he sought not only to destroy it but to exterminate the entire clan, and to that end the evil king was waiting for a right moment. That moment came when one day in 1503 Sejwa Rhee accidentally spilled the king’s wine on the king’s robe at a state banquet. King Yeonsan accused Sejwa Rhee of disloyalty and banished him from the government and the capital city to a faraway place. Then, considering the banishment too light a punishment, the king had him commit suicide by hanging.

Not satisfied with Sejwa’s death, and fearing the power of other surviving members of my clan, including Sejwa’s four sons, five uncles, and many cousins—all prominent scholars and officials—the evil king put them to death one by one. The evil king pursued the policy of search and destroy against all males in my clan above fifteen years old. Those under fifteen were banished to faraway places to live in complete isolation. As the result of the evil king’s murderous acts, my clan was practically wiped out by 1506. That was the darkest chapter in my clan’s history as it was in total ruin, reduced to a group of widows and little children, with no home or property.

Had it not been for a wise and brilliant woman, named Lady Shin, my clan would have disappeared early in the sixteenth century. Lady Shin had married Su-jeong, the youngest of Sejwa’s four sons, and together they had two sons, Yun-kyung and Jun-kyung. When Su-jeong was executed by the evil king in 1504, Lady Shin and her two young sons, six and eight years old, were banished to the Cheong Ju area in south-central Korea. During the exile, Lady Shin, herself a learned student of Confucian classics—a highly unusual feat in those days—taught the two little sons in Confucian classics as diligently as she could. A few months later, the two boys were separated from their mother to live in further isolation.

Then a year later, in 1506, a group of righteous scholar-officials in Seoul carried out a coup d’état against Yeonsan, the evil king, and restored all banished families to their former status. Despite the restoration, life was not easy for the surviving Rhee clan members, mostly widows and little children. Lady Shin therefore decided to take her two sons to her parents’ home in Seoul, and there had them educated under her father, Seung-yeon Shin, a highly learned Confucian scholar. There, the two boys, now eight and ten, immersed themselves in the study of Confucian classics. The following year, in 1507, Lord Shin was appointed as pan’gwan (inspector general) of Sangju, so the two boys and their mother moved to Sangju, where many renowned Confucian scholars lived. This gave them an opportunity to study under some of the Choseon Kingdom’s greatest scholars. As the years progressed, their learning advanced to higher levels, and in 1521, at the age of twenty-three, Jun-kyung passed his first state examination.

Passing the state examination granted Jun-kyung a privilege to study at the Choseon Kingdom’s highest educational institution, the Seong-Kyun-Kwan in Seoul. There he immersed himself in the advanced level of Confucian studies, and in 1531, at age thirty-three, he passed the highest state examination. Two years later, his older brother, Yun-kyung, also passed the highest state examination.

In 1531, Jun-kyung received his first official appointment in the government. In 1546, at forty-eight, he was appointed as the governor of Pyeong’an Provinces (all of northwest Korea). A year later, he was called back to Seoul by King Myeong-jong to assume the post of the Choseon Kingdom’s minister of defense. At the same time, his older brother became the king’s chief of staff. In 1552, at fifty-five, Jun-kyung was appointed as attorney general and was also honored as cheongbaekri, the official of utmost purity and righteousness.

In 1553, at fifty-five, Jun-kyung was reappointed as the minister of defense. In 1555, at fifty-seven, he served as the minister of industries and the minister of justice. He also served as the king’s special inspector general of the southwest region (Cheolla Province), as the region was being plagued by frequent raids of Japanese pirates. In May, he reorganized and commanded the government’s expeditionary troops from his headquarters at Naju, successfully routing several thousand Japanese pirates from the Yeong’am area on the southwest coast. His elder brother, Yun-kyung, also participated in the expedition, and in recognition of his valor in the defense of Yeong’am, his elder brother was later appointed as the governor of Cheolla Provinces (southwest Korea).

In 1560, at sixty-two, Jun-kyung became vice prime minister as well as the crown prince’s tutor. At the same time, his elder brother became the minister of defense as well as the minister of justice. In 1565, at sixty-seven, he became the prime minister of the Choseon Kingdom. In 1567, at sixty-nine, upon the death of King Myeong-jong, Jun-kyung helped the crown prince in ascending to the throne as King Seonjo. Two years later, in 1571, at age seventy-three, he resigned as the prime minister because of his ailing health. He devoted his remaining life to the reading of Confucian classics. Finally, on July 7, 1572, he passed away at the age of seventy-four. He is buried on a hillside in Buyong-ri in Yang Pyeong County, about ten miles east of Seoul City. Near his grave is a large and impressive granite monument on which is inscribed his entire life history.

In 1592, twenty years after his death, Japan invaded Korea with massive troops, burning, pillaging, and slaughtering people everywhere. One of the Japanese generals, Kato Kyomasa, remembering how Jun-kyung had routed Japanese invaders on the southern coast of Korea in 1555, about thirty-seven years earlier, decided to find and wreck Jun-kyung’s grave, so one morning he marched to the Yang Pyeong area with his troops in search of the grave, only to be lost in the thick fog and forced to retreat.

Jun-kyung had three sons, Ye-yeol, Seon-yeol, and Deok-yeol. I am descended from Deok-yeol (1534–1599), the third son. In 1569, Deok-yeol was called to become King Seonjo’s chief of staff, serving the king in this capacity during the devastating Japanese invasion of 1592–1597. As the firsthand observer of the life during the wartime, especially that of the king, he wrote his diaries in classical Chinese, only recently translated into vernacular Korean.

Another prominent clan member and contemporary of Deok-yeol was Deok-hyeong (better known by his pen name, Lord Haneum), Choseon Kingdom’s chief justice. At the height of the Japanese invasion, he proposed to the king to seek help from Ming China. Volunteering to go to China as the king’s special envoy, he traveled more than a thousand miles on a horseback through the land of dangerous Manchuria inhabited by lawless bandits and brigands, escorted by only a half-dozen soldiers. Upon arrival in China, Deok-hyeong succeeded in persuading the Ming Chinese government to dispatch its troops to Korea, and the Korean troops, with the assistance of the Chinese, were able to repel the Japanese from Pyeongyang, Seoul, and other cities. In 1599, at thirty-two, he became the deputy prime minister and four years later in 1603 the prime minister. He died at age fifty-three in 1614 while serving as the prime minister. He is buried on a hilltop in Yang Pyeong. He descended from Keuk-Kyun Rhee, the youngest son of Inson Rhee, who was the third generation of my lineage.

On several occasions, I have visited the tombs of Jip Rhee, Jun-kyung Rhee, Deok-yeol Rhee, and Deok-hyeong Rhee, to pay respect.

Deok-yeol became the father of Sa-heon (1580–1650), Sa-heon the father of Pil-hwa (1621–1698), Pil-hwa the father of Hyeong-jing (1648–1702), Hyeong-jing the father of Gu-man (1680–756), Gu-man the father of Yeon-weon (1713–1788), Yeon-won the father of Myeong-oh (1736–1793), Myeong-oh the father of Sang-rin (1789–1837), Sang-rin the father of Kee-mu (1826–1894), Kee-mu the father of In-hoe (1866–1937), In-hoe the father Byeong-hong (1898–1975), and Byeong-hong the father of Song-nai (1935–).

1

. The written records are updated every twenty-five years now in a published form. For a recent version, see Office of Genealogy of Lord Mun’gyeong Branch of the Gwangju Rhee Clan, Genealogy of Lord Mun’gyeong Branch of the Gwangju Rhee Clan [in Korean],

4

vols. (Seoul: Enkorean,

2015

).

2

My First Ten Years of Life

(

1935–1945

)

My Childhood at Songki-ri

In 1935, the year of my birth, Korea was part of the Japanese Empire. Japan had annexed Korea in 1910, and to enhance effective local administration of Korea, the Japanese government adopted a policy of appointing to local district administrators’ positions Korean men who were learned scholars and commanded high respect among the people. My father had been appointed to the office when he was thirty-five years old, in 1933.

Songdong District was comprised of about thirty farming villages and had a population of about twenty thousand. Along with the principal of an elementary school and the police chief, my father administered the Songdong District from his large office in an imposing official building, with a staff of about thirty clerks, inspectors, and other assistants. His office handled tax collection, family registries, military drafts, public works, flood control, distribution of fertilizer to farmers, license issuing, and many other tasks essential to the well-being of the people in the district, as with any county or city office in the United States.

I do not recall much about my life before I was about five. The very early things I remember, almost as if in the midst of a land of fog, is myself being carried on the back of my nanny and my parents speaking simple Korean words to me and my hearing Japanese words outside my home. We lived in a small country cottage on the highest point of a ridge surrounded by tall pine trees and about a hundred other homes below and all around. I remember thinking that my father was a very important person, because everybody bowed low before him.

My father, being the chief administrator of the Songdong District, meant that my family certainly belonged to the upper elite class. I learned many years later from my childhood friends that they looked upon our family as the very top of the social elites in the whole district with much wealth and power. My father’s position and authority may have given that impression, but in reality, we were not that extraordinary. As I learned later, my father was an impeccably honest and just man, living only on his monthly salary. With his salary my family lived comfortably, undoubtedly better than most other people who had nothing and went hungry three to four months every year. But essentially, my family lived a rather simple life in a countryside, in a humble house rented from a Mr. Lee-Seong-no.

We had some rice paddies to grow our own rice and vegetable fields to grow lettuce, cabbage, radish, green onion, potatoes, corn, red peppers, beans, peas, and even cotton. We used the harvests for our own family needs. We also grew barley and wheat. Wheat was ground into flour. Sometimes I followed my mother to the fields to play.

We had plenty of food, including meat and fish. I loved grilled sardines, herring, yellow corvina, hairtail fish, fish soup of cod or pollack, beef soup with thin slices of white radish. I also loved pancakes of green onions and zucchini as well as of sliced cod and beef. I loved especially noodles and dumpling (fat noodles). I loved tofu cooked in various ways, in plain soup or boiled with old kimchi and pieces of pork. I loved seaweed.

In 1935, much of Korea’s countryside did not have electricity or running water. Nor did it have any public transportation. Consequently, during the first thirteen years of my life, we used candlelight or a kerosene lamp to light our house during the nights, and each day we had to carry buckets of water uphill to our house from a community well located below the village. Without any wheeled transportation, we walked a lot, sometimes several miles each day.

As her firstborn son and a child born late in her life (at age twenty-eight) I was a jewel in the eyes of my mother. She loved me and treated me like a precious jewel. She was with me at all times. She made sure that I was always in a safe place, that I was warmly clothed, fed well, not sick. I remember basking in mom’s love, being a bit spoiled.

My father, on the other hand, was deeply involved in his official duties. I do not remember many interactions with him at home though he took me to some important public and clan events. But he was always very gentle with me, giving advice, like a concerned Confucian scholar-father, to be a good boy like a Yangban boy. Yangban was a distinct social class in traditional Korea as the nobility class or the learned/cultured aristocracy, to which the Gwangju Rhee clan had belonged since the thirteenth century. Occasionally, he took me to his large office to play, and I remember exploring various parts of the office building with curiosity and playing with people working there.

Things become more vivid in my memory by the time I was about five years old, when I was enrolled in the first grade of Songdong District Elementary School. As I learned later, the Japanese principal of Songdong Elementary School, working closely with my father as a member of the triumvirate of the district, had a special interest in me ever since I was born. He could not wait until I was six, the normal school-entering age. He persuaded my father to enroll me in the school anyway. That was in March 1941, and that was the beginning of my sixty-year academic life.

By then, Japanization of Korea had been going on for more than thirty years, and Koreans were forbidden to speak Korean or have Korean names. Japan was determined to extinguish everything Korean—Korean history, Korean culture, Korean language, and Korean names. So, in the first grade I remember being called Hiromura Shorai, not Song Nai Rhee. And at school, I was ordered to learn and speak Japanese. At home, I communicated with my parents in simple Korean, especially because my mom did not know any Japanese. But every day, I was growing up as a Japanese schoolboy, with Korea disappearing in the memory. And every bit of teaching at the school was designed to turn me and all other Korean students into loyal Japanese citizens.

(Hiromura replaced my Korean family [clan] name, Rhee, because the place where the Gwangju Rhee clan had first settled in the tenth century AD was a town called Gwangju, near present-day Seoul. In Japanese, Gwangju was pronounced as Hiromura. Shorai is the Japanese pronunciation of Song Nai.)

In first grade, I learned the Japanese alphabet and simple arithmetic. I learned painting and lots of Japanese children’s songs, which I no longer remember. I also remember learning simple paper crafts, including origami (paper folding) and kirikami (paper cutting), making all sorts of animals, birds, plants, flowers, houses, airplanes, etc.

In December 1941, toward the end of first grade, I remember there was something big happening in the country. There were gatherings of crowds with school children, and special speeches were made about a war in the Pacific. As time passed, a war atmosphere was becoming more and more apparent. School children were being taught war songs glorifying soldiers dying on battlefields on land and in the sea. As I later learned, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on America. As a gift to celebrate Japanese victory in the Pacific, the school gave each school child a rubber baseball, made of rubber from the Pacific islands.

At that point, at the age of six, my peaceful life of the first five years had effectively ended, and from then on, my life would enter a series of disruptions and crises, with despair and hope along the way, for a period of fourteen years, until I came to the United States in 1955.

Soon after Japan started the war with the US, the whole nation became involved in activities supporting the war. School children spent more time in the fields than in classrooms, producing materials needed in the war effort. As more and more young men and adults were sent to war, to factories, and to coal mines, school children were sent out to the fields to help farmers in the planting and harvesting of rice. In cold winter, we were ordered by the school to go into frozen cotton fields to dig out roots of the cotton plants, which would be used as fiber and soldiers’ uniforms. During the slack season, we were sent to the hills to pull out pine stumps with all their roots, which would be processed to produce pine oil, which would be further refined as fuel for airplanes, tanks, and army trucks. In summer, we were ordered to collect leaves, grasses, and other green vegetation to create piles and piles of compost to be used as fertilizer in the rice paddies. With these grinding physical activities, we essentially became forced laborers of a nation in war. It was like two days in class, four days in the fields.

Throughout my life there were three major interruptions in my educational life, and this was the first of the interruptions. The second interruption occurred at the end of the Japanese period, that is during the political and sociocultural transition from the Japanese to the Korean era, during which I had to learn a new alphabet, new language (Korean), and new ways of doing so many things. That was during 1945 to 1947, my last two and a half years of elementary school. The third interruption took place with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 during my freshman year of high school. Each disruption left a big gap in my learning, especially in math and science subjects, creating for me problems for years to come.

All the wartime activities notwithstanding, I was growing up like a typical boy of six, seven, eight, and nine.

On the whole, I was an active child. I rarely stayed at home. I was always out in the playing field in front of the village playing with other village boys of my age. In summer, we would play with tops, shuttlecocks, sticks, or marbles in the fields. They involved competitions. A shuttlecock was a quarter-sized coin wrapped with shredded paper. We would kick it in the air with the inside of our foot and keep kicking it until it fell to the ground. Whoever kicks continuously the greatest number of times wins. The sticks were about two inches round and eighteen inches long with a sharp end. One kid would throw the sharp end into soft ground. As the stick stood up straight, stuck in the ground, another kid would throw his stick next to it with the aim of toppling the latter. Then another boy would do the same. Four or five kids would keep throwing their sticks against each other until only one survived, which was the winner.

In the winter, we flew kites. That was a major fun thing to do. We either bought them or made them by ourselves. The kite flying often involved challenging one kite against another by rubbing against the other guy’s string. The rubbing would cause the weaker string to break. The kite with a broken string would fly away high in the sky. Some kids would follow it hoping to catch it when it landed, sometimes miles away. Sometimes, the kite fight resulted in a real fight between kite owners.

When it was too cold to go out, we would play hwato, a Korean card game, or yut, a game involving four small sticks, white color on one side and dark color on the other. Only the white side carries a value, and each white side carries one point. When all four sticks are thrown on the floor and only one white side appears, the thrower gets one point; if two whites, two points; if three whites, three points; etc. The dark side gets no point except when all four sticks land with the dark side on top, which earns five points. The objective of the yut game was to get to the end of a road with various junctions first. Moves along the road are determined by the point(s) each player gets by throwing the four sticks.

We also played jangki, which is very