Radical Read Free

United States and becoming licensed to practice there. In those days one airplane per week took off from Korea to the States. My dad landed an internship at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh and made plans to leave Korea in July. He asked Inza to marry him and hoped she would join him in America.
    â€œYour halabujee [my mother’s father] wasn’t having that,” he told my brothers and me. “He wasn’t going to risk having his eldest daughter jilted in a foreign land. Either we would get married in Korea or we wouldn’t get married at all.”
    Needless to say, they married in Korea. After the wedding in June, Shang flew off in July, and Inza joined him in Pittsburgh a month later. My father struggled with his new language and surroundings, but he succeeded well enough that the director of medical education commended him in a letter to the dean of his school in Seoul.
    From Pittsburgh, my parents moved to Seattle, where my father started his residency at the University of Washington. My older brother, Erik, was born in Seattle. In 1967, the family of three moved to Ann Arbor so my father could complete his residency at the University of Michigan. I was born there on Christmas Day, 1969. Thus my middle name: Ann. My younger brother, Brian, came fifteen months later.
    My dad made $400 a month, minus the requisite amount he had to send to his family back home. So it amounted to a pittance. My mom, unable to speak the language and knowing no one, was bored out of her mind. She spent her days walking the streets of Ann Arbor, stopping in front of the pizza parlor and soaking in the smells of cheese and garlic but unable to ever afford a slice. She would often wander into the A&P grocery store and just walk up and down the aisles. One day she fainted, tired from her pregnancy, and the shopkeeper forbade her from coming in again.
    Desperate for cash, my father would drive to Toledo, fifty miles south, once or twice a month, to moonlight—supplement his salary by filling in for doctors at Mercy Hospital. That allowed him to establish a connection with Toledo and Mercy, which offered him his first real job, director of the rehab department, at $2,700 a month when he finished his fellowship. “I thought I was the richest man in the country,” he explained to my brothers and me.
    O UR HOUSE SCREAMED “FOREIGN” from the moment you crossed the threshold. From the overpowering stench of kimchee (fermented cabbage) and ojinguh (dried squid) to the shoes neatly lined up outside the front door (you could never wear shoes in the house!) to the Asian screen that my mother had custom made for our front entrance, nothing in the Rhee house was normal or familiar to my American friends. You knew from the start that you were about to enter a different world. My friends marveled as they inspected the Korean artifacts that adorned the hallway, the smelly antique Chinese herb chest that was the centerpiece of our living room, and the brush paintings that my aunt had created.
    â€œWeird!” they’d announce gleefully after thoroughly surveying the lay of the land.
    But even more foreign than the odors and decor was the way my family operated, and specifically, my role in the family unit. We were living in America but trapped in the landscape and mind-set of South Korea circa 1950. That meant that the men ruled the roost and the women served them.
    One memory that has stuck with me was when my little brother, Brian, who was not academically inclined, came home with a bad grade. My mother immediately grounded me. He was allowed to go out; I had to stay in.
    â€œYou’re his older sister,” my mother told me. “It is your responsibility to make sure that he is doing what he needs to do.” “Whaaaa?” I thought. That was crazy talk! In modern-day America that rationale made zero sense, but to my mother, it was perfectly logical.
    Another particularly humiliating experience took