Letters to Gabriel

Chapter 1

The Year of the Rat, 1996

When I close my eyes and reflect upon the fading memories of my early years, I realize that life didn’t begin for me until a fateful Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1996, the Year of the Rat, when I saw my future wife, Joyce, for the first time. I had been invited to a small gathering of a dozen acquaintances at a friend’s house in Niles, Illinois, a bustling middle-class suburb northwest of Chicago. The door bell rang, and my life has never been the same. There she stood, a silent, smiling angel. Like a fawn prancing delicately through a dew-glazed forest, she passed without noticing me. Her hair carried a fresh scent of cherry blossoms that cast a spell on me. Time stood still for me, and I knew she was the woman of my dreams.

Growing up, the ebb and flow of tides in my life were difficult, so I didn’t learn to smile much as a kid. A part of me had died long ago, when my parents separated when I was five years old. So much has happened since my early childhood, I feel as though I’ve lived a thousand years. Here’s my story, the eventful life of an ordinary man, before and since the day the music entered my life.

The long and winding road of my life is like a fairytale. I was born on the cold night of October 18, 1965, an only son to struggling parents during bleak times in the postwar era of a divided Korea. I had an older sister from my mother’s previous marriage, but shortly after her birth my mother was widowed. Her second marriage wasn’t any more fortunate, due to my father’s combat injuries during the Korean War, which left him in chronic pain and short-tempered. I guess it was just their karma, as the elders would say back in those days. As a consequence, my sister and I became the casualties of their war. War is a wildly ugly thing, and it seems somebody always gets hurt. The two of us found sanctuary in a Buddhist temple nestled high above the pristine mountains. My sister took care of me tenderly, like a tiger protective of its cub, although she wasn’t much older than me. I suppose she felt sympathy for me, even at her young age.

A few years later, on August 15, 1973, my father came for me, and I grudgingly immigrated to America with him and my new stepmother. Tears filled my big, brown eyes as I, a little boy with fists clenched in anger, whispered good-bye to my mom. We landed at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, with the promise that I’d see my mother and sister again soon, but that didn’t happen. My father carried a single bag in his hand, wistful hope in his heart, and deep-rooted dreams. But that all came to a sudden end when his new wife abandoned us a week later.

Twenty-three long and painfully debilitating, silent years after the autumn of 1973—I didn’t speak to my father as a protest—the healing began. As an adult I understood why we came to the United States. My father simply wanted to escape and save me from economic strife and political turmoil, but I was too naïve to grasp such ideologies as martial law at the time.

The time as a new immigrant was a period of great hardship for my father, who once studied law and had been a handsome young army captain back home. In the United States, he struggled with the language barrier and experienced financial despair. He worked diligently as a custodian at a local Catholic school until he landed a better paying job with Schwinn Bicycle Company as a spokes assembler, all the while attending night school to learn English. My father always had a thing for education. While my grandfather was away looking for work to send money back home, Grandma once sold the family clock to pay my father’s tuition. In America, like a Western gun slinger, my father would strap on his oversized Sony cassette player, fully loaded with study tapes, and practice during his bus rides to work.

Meanwhile, I was an unattended latch-key kid, in those days before a regulated childcare system. In March 1975, when I was nine years old, I was molested in the Korean-American immigrant housing dormitory on 824 W. Armitage Street by a deceptively charming middle-aged predator I knew as Mr. Kwon, who engaged me through his photography. I kept that shameful secret for many years.

Later after toiling two years my father saved enough money to buy, an old navy blue four cylinder Opel station wagon Tinker Toy for $600, in the world ruled by Cadillacs and Mustang Convertibles. Since those long-gone days, I have grown closer to understanding and loving my once stern but increasingly frail father for the sacrifices he made for me, as I watched the past unwind from the flickering projector of his murky eyes. Through example, my father raised me to see and embrace social responsibilities. It is no surprise that I chose a civil service path. I received my formal training from the Chicago Police Academy in December 1990 and U.S. Department of Labor’s OSHA Training Institute in February 2001. I served as chairman of the Safety Committee with the Department of Aviation’s Safety and Security at O’Hare International Airport and resigned my position in January 2006.

I remember that magical Sunday afternoon at the party when I met Joyce as if it were yesterday, now forever tucked away in the safe haven of my heart. We all keep those memories we cherish and scrap others in a dusty corner of our minds.

I was sitting at the kitchen table with my chum Big Dan, sampling our hostess Erica’s hors d’oeuvres, discussing the all-important matter of which girls were beautiful. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the great pride and effort Erica went through in preparing the scrumptious morsels. She probably read those mouthwatering recipes in Good Housekeeping magazine. After all, that was a very important day for all of us. Despite everyone’s essentially coy denial, many of us first-generation Korean-American Baptists and Presbyterians preferred the gathering at Erica’s for meeting singles. It was just safer that way. There would be no, “He said, she said,” and everyone’s reputation would remain intact in our small community, where the gossip traveled faster than a fluttering hummingbird.

Erica majored in fashion design and seemed to have a creative flair, although her mannerisms were unmistakably Puritan. Big Dan, a witty comedian working for the Chicago Public School system as a math teacher, had a compulsive gambling disorder. I, on the other hand, was the fighter. Lean and muscled like a gladiator, I bench pressed 365 pounds and packed a punch. Incorrigible and rather onerous, some might say, I always had a big heart, however, for underprivileged kids. I guess it was part of my survival kit. I grew up in Humboldt Park, a tough Chicago neighborhood where drive-by shootings, prostitution, and drug deals are common. After awhile, you just get numb to it, like the frigid Chicago winters, where the wind chill factor can drop as low as -30 degrees Fahrenheit. A large number of the 789 homicides in 1996 were attributed to the notorious local street gangs who ruled the streets there. That hell on earth cloaked my compassionate inner spirit, revealing my harsh outer façade. I was incessantly lonely and yearned for a sense of connection in that world of madness. I often heard whispers in my mind: If I can just make it through another day, I’ll be all right.