The Story of a Boy Favored by Providence

About the Author

The author obtained his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1975 in sociology and is the author of 15 books of social criticism. One of his earlier books, The Dead End, appeared in TIME magazine in 1980 which called it important and brilliant for prophesying America’s consumer individualism as its eventual national death wish. After teaching sociology for the last 25 years at the U.S. military bases around the world, he retired from the University of Maryland in 2019 and is currently living in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

Dedication

To:

Terry and Jonathan,

From the heart to the heart, may it go much further!

Copyright Information ©

Jon Huer (2021)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.

Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

Ordering Information

Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Huer, Jon

The Story of a Boy Favored by Providence

ISBN 9781647506643 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781647506650 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021911077

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302

New York, NY 10005

USA

[email protected]

+1 (646) 5125767

About the Book

Why I am Writing My

Childhood Story

By convention, memoirs are written for one of two reasons. One is that a person of recognized importance, having partaken in an important historical event, tells the story that is of public significance in recordkeeping. Winston Churchill’s biography or stories of survival in the Holocaust belongs in this category, where the narrator is subsumed in the grandeur of the event itself.

The second reason for the genre of personal memoirs is in the public merits of the event, which arouses enough public curiosity or interest, such as being victims of extraordinary crimes or having been a well-known celebrity. But such memoirs are without the significance of historical dramas like Churchill’s WWII or the Holocaust. The readers are interested in the details of how such events took place or personalities existed.

Often, the two categories overlap in reality, as many events are seemingly historical, such as the U.S. presidencies, which combine the larger dimensions of global power and personal gossip. On the other hand, many memoirs of no particular historical significance, such as crime stories or celebrity bios, often claim some larger importance under a ‘role model’ or partisan-ideological rubric. As our cultural understanding of what is historical, public interest, or private curiosity becomes increasingly harder to tell, these two reasons for writing memoirs overlap constantly.

My reason for writing this partial memoir is neither. Primarily, I am writing the story of my childhood for my son Jonathan who has never heard it before. As a typical California-bred youth, all he knows is that his father was a professor of some renown, an author who wrote many books, and that one of the books appeared in TIME magazine which praised it as ‘important and often brilliant’ for prophesying America’s destiny as our ‘national death wish.’ He doesn’t know anything about his father’s youthful past, how he had survived the Korean War, how he had escaped from an orphanage when he was not even a teenager, how he had endured the life of a street urchin and laborer until he was nineteen, or how he became ‘the most insightful of humanists’ writing in America today’ in spite of it all.

My wife, Terry, who has a theater background, thinks my stories are just too interesting not to tell others. I agree with her. Maybe it’s worth retelling to a wider audience. What significance one may derive—biographical, moral, or historical—is up to the reader. There is nothing in the magnitude of WWII or the Holocaust in my story. But if there is any merit in simply surviving the hand that you are dealt in life with much of your own innate idealism and humanity intact, then it is an epic story of survival and worth retelling in itself.

That’s why I am writing the story of my childhood.

Jon Huer

Professor Emeritus (meaning ‘retired professor’)

University of Maryland University College

I. In the Beginning

My story begins at the height of World War II, in what is now South Korea, then, for some odd reason, called ‘The Land of the Morning Calm’ by the American missionaries. But the better part of the world was hardly calm, as it was fully engaged in bloodshed in Europe as well as in the Pacific. Hitler was fighting the Soviets in an all-out war on the eastern front. The Japanese were engaged in the Pacific war against the United States. Koreans themselves, ferociously opposed to Japanese rule, fought their colonizers in every possible way they could. Some of them drifted to the Soviet Union and later became Communists to rule the north. Others migrated to the United States, then-the-citadel of freedom and liberty, and became Liberals. A third group went to China, which was in the middle of a civil war between Communists and Liberals (or ‘Nationalists’), part of them later joining the North Korean Communists and part of them aligning themselves with the South Korean Liberals, depending on their individual fortunes. These Communists and Liberals, both quite new to the Koreans, determined the fate of the peninsula and its people for many decades to come. The Korean people, who had only known kings and feudal lords, and later modern colonial rulers, suddenly woke up one day and faced a new choice between two very alien ideas, Communism or Liberalism. Soviet Russia made the north a Communist nation, the ‘workers’ paradise;’ market-society Americans made the south a Liberal nation, as in ‘the world is your oyster.’ As the European world waged war with Hitler, and the Japanese with Americans, with the Korean peninsula’s fate hanging in the balance of the outcome, I was born.

At birth, I was given the name ‘Sei-Kan,’ meaning something like ‘a bright light,’ as all Korean babies were given Japanese names, a gift from the Japanese colonial rule in Korea. This Japanese rule, begun three decades earlier, would go on for three more years. Oblivious to the sound of groans and battle-cries elsewhere, I was born on a southernmost tropical island in South Korea called Jeju. The island is now a crowded tourist location, with hundreds of planes landing and departing every day. At the time I was born, only ships connected the paradise island and the mainland. My father, a tall, dashing tycoon of rice importation from the mainland, married my mother, second of the three daughters of a prominent family who owned one of the island’s major breweries.

The wedding, from what I was later told, was a major event and I was born in the following year. In spite of all the hoopla about this celebrated couple, the real picture was somewhat darker, not as festive and bright as the celebration would have indicated. My father, the son of a wealthy silk manufacturer, had married a sixteen-year-old farm girl when he was only twelve, as was the custom then, and had run away to Japan when he was eighteen. Once in a while, this wandering husband would come home to his wife and sire children, eventually resulting in two daughters and two sons. My father kept this all a secret from my mother and her family when he started courting her. But my mother also had a story she didn’t tell my father. Two years before she met my father, she had a son from her liaison with a married man. After a bitter custody fight over this son, perhaps with emphasis on ‘fight’ more than ‘custody,’ in a highly male-dominant society, she lost that son to his father. The celebrated union in paradise between a dashing rice merchant and the local beauty was already fraught with trouble. I was destined to inherit the full wrath of the sins of my father in my early life.

The baby who, three decades or so later, would be hailed as ‘the most insightful of humanists writing in America today’ and his analysis of America as the ‘best since De Tocqueville and James Bryce’ was born in Korea and speaking his first words in Japanese. From the anecdotal stories I heard years later, I was an exceedingly happy baby, talking incessantly and bubbly and adored by the adults around. But like most babies of my generation, my future was quite uncertain. Given the circumstances, that someday I would be somewhat famous in America as a professor-writer was neither foreshadowed nor likely. After all, for the moment, my present colonial master and the U.S., my future home for fame and greatness, were at war.

The earliest signs of my genius showed themselves in my prodigious talkativeness. I am not sure what other signs of genius a three-year-old baby can demonstrate other than his ability to talk and talk, and talk incessantly. (Three decades later, this talkative baby would find his calling in professional capacity as a professor at American universities.) Apparently, I was a popular baby and many relatives and friends practically fought to babysit me and play with me, enjoying their time with this adorable talking bird. A Japanese army general in command of the Japanese forces on the island and his wife were particularly fond of me, my mother told me years later, often feeding me and playing horsey with me on their laps. With the obvious signs of intelligence, even of genius, so apparent in this prodigiously talking baby, the goddess of fortune smiled on me favorably and assuredly. Japan was winning, the island was far away from the battlefront, and my father was prosperous.

When I was about three (I was later told), my parents, predominantly my father, decided to move to the large city of Gwangju, in the southern part of mainland Korea. It is likely that my mother by now knew about her husband’s original wife and children and, more importantly, had reconciled with that fact. My father had lied to her, of course, but under the customs of the day, such was not considered a cardinal sin. As a businessman, my father was a great salesman who talked the talk. Presenting himself as a loyal subject of the Japanese rulers, he then succeeded in garnering all the printing businesses of the Japanese colonial government. He owned a print-shop housed in a two-story brick building which ran three shifts. Men worked day and night printing all the official documents needed for its colonial governance and my father was one of the wealthiest men in the city. He was one of those rare Korean men who affected the Japanese-style fashion heavily accented with bourgeoisie Europe. He mostly wore a tall hat and black cape with an animal-fur collar. Often smoking a pipe and wearing round horn-rimmed glasses, he favored the appearance of a well-to-do gentleman of considerable influence and means. The effect was that he looked stern and authoritative and my earliest memory of him is that I was afraid of him. In fact, townspeople held him in awe and fear. He always traveled in black rickshaws, and whenever he got out of the rickshaw with a cane in his hand, the townspeople and children who had gathered around would instantly step back with great respect. But my father was also a good politician and tactician. He gave to the townspeople generously at festivals and holidays. Often, he invited them to our house for a huge feast.

In spite of his business prosperity and town popularity, the domestic scene at our household was not a happy one. (This I was told years later, of course.) There, in the large household, was a curious mix of family conviviality and tension. The conviviality was provided by the children, several of father’s original family, and now a new baby brother from the island. All of my father’s children, I and my half-siblings, were wonderful in abundant peace and security. They were all older than me, the two half-sisters almost a generation older because of my father’s early marriage. The tension existed largely between the two wives, my father’s legal wife with her children and my mother with her precocious three-year-old. (By then, I had become my father’s fifth child in the family register.) On the surface, peace and harmony prevailed in the house and the two wives lived together without outward trouble. Korea’s general culture which tolerated such things, and my father’s fearsome authority in the city and over the family, was too much power for the women to overcome. The two women avoided challenging his authority and kept quiet with their inner feelings about this arrangement. The legal wife, whom I called ‘Big Mother,’ recognizing her prior status, according to the rules and customs of the day, wielded the comfort and authority of being the matriarch; my mother, who was younger and prettier, enjoyed the substance of my father’s affection. The latter fact largely overcame the finer factual point that, after all, she was not my father’s legitimate wife. The print-shop was humming day and night, my father was rich and powerful, and the household kept its peace.

The two-story brick building, with our large family living upstairs and the print shop occupying downstairs, still had a space left unoccupied. My father decided to rent the space out to one of his older mahjong friends who opened a photography studio there, named ‘Choonwon,’ meaning ‘Spring Garden.’ My mother, who had much free time, went to the studio, often helping the photographer and learning some rudimentary skills as a photographer herself. Of course, I was, as a cute baby of three or so, the favorite subject of her camera and as a result, hundreds of pictures were taken of me by the doting photographer apprentice. Some of my early studio photos show a well-fed, bright child who, unlike most children in the poor, colonized country, wore fashionable and expensive clothes that were popular in metropolitan Tokyo. Except for the few that survived, most of my childhood photos were destroyed during the Korean War, as was the family that kept them for my mother. Of course, nobody could foresee that the ‘Spring Garden Studio,’ an unassuming small portrait studio in Gwuangju, would play a crucial role almost two decades later in the life of such a bubbly, bright baby when things got really desperate for him.

Beneath the harmonious and peaceful surface, however, the tension between the two strong-willed women (Korean women are nothing if they are not strong-willed.) was becoming palpable. Two events, one international and the other domestic, took place to break the routine surface harmony and peace. Internationally, World War II came to an end as Japan surrendered and withdrew from Korea. With that, my father’s prosperity, doing all the printing business for the ruling Japanese, came to an abrupt end. Domestically, my father, apparently not satisfied with the two wives, engaged another woman, still younger and prettier than my mother, as his concubine, a contract wife. My Big Mother, accustomed to her husband’s wayward behavior for many years, endured this new development in silent obstinacy. But my mother, who had grown up as one of the three rather well-bred, spirited girls on the island in a proud family, could not tolerate her husband’s new woman. In an ironic way, my father had left his first farm-girl of a wife for a younger and more attractive woman, i.e., my mother. But my father now preferred another woman who was much younger and more attractive than my mother. In the normal turn of life, my mother had it coming. But unlike my father’s old farm-girl of a wife who was largely silent, my mother was furious. In great anger and indignation, she stalked her husband to the concubine’s house unobserved and made a public scene. Thereafter, more scenes of public argument followed, and my parents’ union came to a breaking point. The concubine culture, a man taking a younger woman as a contract wife, assumes that his present wife accepts this arrangement, at least tacitly. When this silent agreement is not possible, something has to happen. Either the union breaks up, which is rare, or the husband gives up the new concubine partner, which is rarer. My mother was neither, and was in a rather tenuous position with her husband. Upset and sorrowful, she returned to the island several times