The American Dream Proved Harder Than Surviving a War

Never in my life have I touched my father’s hands more than on that cold January night. It was raining outside the funeral home, unusual after a snowstorm. Gently, I moved my fingers across the back of each hand. The small cuts at the fingertips were still fresh. There were also traces of burn marks from the steam press. There was some discoloring of the nails caused by the harsh dry-cleaning chemicals used to scrub the stains out of all those garments. The blisters had long ago hardened into calluses. My mother said his hands used to be so soft.

The body has many stories to tell. It was my father’s hands that told an all-too-common story of a Korean immigrant’s American dream gone sour.

The decision wasn’t easy, but my father decided to emigrate in 1986 to the U.S. because he wanted a better life for his three children. As a graduate of Korea’s top university, he had everything going for him in Korea: an executive position, a nice apartment, world travel, golf.

America would be hard. But he knew hardship. When he was 10, the Korean War broke out. He saw herds of terrorized people fleeing from their homes and scrambling for shelter from falling bombs. He saw orphans crying over their dead mothers and starving people begging for food.

And he saw the American soldiers throwing chocolate bars and gum from their trucks to village children. They were the liberators, these Americans, and theirs was a land of freedom, opportunity and justice. So began my father’s American dream.

Many years later, in March 1986, our family landed in New Jersey. Little did we know that our lives would be turned completely upside down. We started off in a nice suburban neighborhood with the money we brought from Korea. Life was wonderful. Then came the downward spiral. No company would give my father a job. They said he had no American experience and his Korean qualifications did not count. After scores of resumes sent out and only the occasional interview, he resorted to opening up a series of small businesses: the card shop near Harlem, the garment factory in midtown Manhattan and several dry cleaners in Queens, where we ended up living in a cramped apartment in 1996.

My father worked six days a week and took no holidays except for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He got up at 4 a.m. every day to get the machines running in time to open the dry cleaners at 7 a.m. The heat was unbearable, especially in summer. The toxic chemicals took their toll. After a long, hard day, he would arrive home late, bone-tired. Worst of all, the hard work never seemed to pay off. My father never got out from under the mountain of debts, the cut-throat money-lenders, the gunpoint hold-ups, the humiliation, the discrimination and the exclusion. But still he did not give up on the American dream.

It’s a summer afternoon and I’m walking with my father along a busy street in Manhattan. He loves these Sunday afternoon walks. He loves the ambience, the skyscrapers, the outdoor cafes with Manhattanites lounging over their exotic coffees, the commotion. Suddenly, he stops, turns to me and says, “Look at this, Jung-woo. There’s no place like this in the whole world. If you’ve seen Manhattan, you’ve seen all the cities of the world.” I was 17 then. I think I believed him.

It was in January 1996 that the biggest snowstorm hit New York City in more than a decade. The whole city was weighed down under a suffocating thick snow. Darkness slowly closed in on Queens that night my father never came home.

He died of a heart attack on the sidewalk only two blocks away. They found him, a nameless Korean man with two dollars in his pocket, a man who had survived the Korean War but not the American dream.

Never in my life have I touched my father’s hands more than on that January night as he lay cold in his coffin. It would be the last time, and I couldn’t let him go without inscribing in my memory the touch and feel of his hands.