(mild piano music)
- My name is John Hong.
I'm gonna be 49 years old this year,
and I was born in Seoul, Korea.
Immigrated to the United States
when I was two, two and a half.
I don't remember back that far,
so I'm told it was around April of 1973.
We left Korea, immigrated straight to Chicago.
My father was doing a combination
of the Peace Corps, and trying to start his own business
at the time.
So we ended up right at the Grace Apartments.
It was right near Wrigley Field,
so about two blocks away from Wrigley's Field.
And then in second grade we moved down to the suburbs.
So, I went from having concrete buildings next to me
to a corn field as my adjacent lot.
I remember being alone a lot, and being scared a lot.
So, typical immigrant story, I think.
My parents worked an awful lot,
so today, my children have my wife as
the professional Uber driver taking them
all over to their activities but,
it's a very different world.
We had a key.
We would go to school, we'd come home,
and you'd have to take care of yourself,
and this went on from,
I remember as early as first and second grade.
Today I believe that is a DCSF call and child abuse.
But back then it was just a norm.
So my relationship with my folks,
I'm not gonna characterize it as typical or atypical.
My mom worked at the U.S. Embassy when she was in Korea.
And then when she came here, I think she realized
she had to do a job.
And I know that they, they struggled financially.
It was tough, right?
So you're immigrant folks, you're here.
My dad grew up under pretty harsh conditions,
so they were sending money back
as the dutiful first-born son.
My mom, actually, is the one that I
give a lot of credit to because,
here she is trying to carve out a life in the States.
There's barely enough budget to go around
for her own family,
and she has to cut out enough to send back to Korea.
So, the feeling and the understanding
of a lot of what the immigrants today go through,
especially from Mexico and other areas, I get it.
There's a large amount of empathy,
I think that I associate that with.
And my father, worked as a salesman in the beginning,
and he was traveling.
His territory was the East Coast.
So, his English was actually pretty good.
He was teaching Korean in the Peace Corps
to the Peace Corps volunteers.
So to be able to communicate on that level
in the 1970s was remarkable.
I think his English has gotten actually worse over time,
but I remember early on his English was pretty fantastic,
relative to what I saw of my friends' fathers.
That's how we grew up,
so communication was never really an issue.
I learned to speak Korean because I was so curious
what the hell they were speaking to each other about
when they didn't want us to understand.
And oddly enough, I can pick up languages
fairly easily, I guess,
so like a lot of immigrants that come here
looking for some sort of community,
we ended up at a local Korean church.
We did study that but honestly,
Sundays were my favorite day of the week
only because that's the time that I felt like
I was with my people.
And you don't realize it's your people.
Back then you think to yourself,
"Oh it's because we're all Christian,"
Up until you go to a white Christian church,
and you think to yourself,
"Are we all praying to the same God,
"because it seems a little different here."
And that cultural Christianity
and my faith got intertwined,
and then later on as I got older,
I had to learn to separate it.
It's just been a really interesting,
it's been an interesting journey in that sense.
I was a five foot chubby Asian kid
filled with really cool breakdancing Filipino guys
in my junior high,
and the first time I tried to breakdance,
I actually broke dance,
'cause I think my back went out,
and it was kinda rough.
So then you ended up from there,
my dad says, "We have to take you to a school,
"'cause I just invested all these years in violin,
"so therefore you're gonna play in the orchestra."
They used that as a reason to get me to
the school that I had to drive into
that was not my neighborhood school,
and then you end up with kids that are
taking their dads' BMWs and Ferraris to prom.
So this entire complexity of my childhood
that goes from one extreme to the next
was just interesting.
So what happens when you get exposed
to that sort of almost polarizing differences,
you just become really observant.
Otherwise, you'll be so mercurial.
You'll be back and forth, and up and down,
all over the place with the wind.
So I tended to just look back and try to figure out,
"Huh, I don't belong over there,
"I don't belong over there, I don't belong over there,
"I don't belong there,"
and church was the one refuge.
Once a week I belonged.
My entire faith journey and the process really,
I think the catalyst behind it all
was the death of my cousin who had come,
at six years old she came from Korea,
because she was born with a congenital heart valve issue,
and she was in New York.
I went to go see her.
Now you gotta remember,
it's my sister, myself, my mother, and my father.
That's it in this country.
So when you meet other folks they're like,
"Oh, my Uncle John's coming over."
I was like, "Oh that'd be great.
"I don't have one."
So there's this real feeling of being on an island.
It's total Swiss Family Robinson
in the middle of nowhere,
and to have your cousin show up,
there was this ray of hope that just kinda took me over.
I was filled with, wow, this is family.
And then you meet this little girl, at six years old,
who's sitting in New York,
and she's having open-heart surgery,
and she's got the zipper.
And they had healed it and they'd sewn it up and everything
and I was in seventh or eighth grade,
and I remember flying to New York, and we had a hotel,
but I wouldn't leave the hospital bed.
I just, I don't know, it just affected me
in a really, really deep way.
So I would stay with her
and wheel her around the hospital floor
in a wheelchair,
and I would speak to her because, like I said,
I picked up enough Korean to communicate.
And this little kid, I remember getting her a present,
and the first thing she thought of was,
"Okay that's for my little sister.
"In Korea, when I go back, I'm gonna give this to her,"
at six years old.
And I just was like,
I had just never met anyone like that.
You know and up until that point,
as I explained to you earlier,
my life was filled with, "What are your intents?"
What I'm looking at people for what's really going on.
How full of shit are you?
And you meet this absolute pure person and individual.
So we come home, and the doctor said she was fine.
We come home and that was the first year I remember
I'd gotten straight As.
And I had never seen that before,
so everyone's happy, and you know we're in a good mood.
And I remember I got a phone call
from my dad saying, "Min died."
And my sister's name is Min,
and I remember saying, "I don't understand
"what you're talking about,
"she's in the next room,"
and it clicked what he meant.
And I lost it, and I remember,
I remember just cursing God.
"If this is purity, then what the hell is this?"
And the thing that really still gets to me
was my uncle, whom I love very much,
my dad's younger brother.
He came because they had said, "Don't bring her back."
My parents had decided, "Listen,
"we're gonna bury her in Chicago,
"and we'd like to keep her with us."
So this man said, "Okay," and we buried my cousin
in our Calvary Church cemetery area in Irving Park.
And the saddest day was not that funeral,
because it was almost surreal to me like,
that's not even her.
'Cause I didn't know what embalming looked like,
and how it disfigures the face.
I didn't understand any of that.
I thought, "Oh my God, they got the wrong girl,"
always looking for some kinda hope
to change the circumstances.
And then I remember my uncle coming to visit
later that year, and you know how when it's cold,
and it rains slightly, and the top turns icy,
and there's a thin layer of ice,
and then there's soft snow underneath?
So we went, the entire cemetery was covered,
and I knew where it was,
and this was the first time he's coming to see
his little girl's tombstone.
And he's like, "Which one is it,"
and I said, "It's right here, samchoon [Uncle]."
He said, "Okay," and his bare hands,
and it's freezing outside, he starts tearing away the ice,
and you can see how cold it is,
and you can see he's cutting himself on the ice.
There's no thought about it.
And he just kept going and you can sense the anger,
and the frustration, as he's tearing chunks of ice away,
and then he finally hits the tombstone,
and there's this, it's like this pinkish hue,
and he's wiping it away, and I realize,
where are the drops coming from?
And it's his eyes, and he's literally sobbing,
and he's wiping away the tombs, that was hard.
That was hard.
That was the saddest moment I've ever had.
The hardest part for me to understand,
in Christian faith, was...
What they call justice.
And when I looked at my little cousin as
this innocent pure creature,
for her to be taken unfairly, in my opinion,
was not justice, and therefore,
how can you call yourself a just God?
And that's what I struggled with for the longest time.
And then you, you always skip the Old Testament.
You always go to the New Testament, right?
So you finally get to Job and you realize,
"Oh, it gets worse."
It's a possibility of much worse,
and then there's that line in Job where
he comes, when the Lord comes down and says,
"Where were you when I created the earth?
"Where were you when I created all the creatures?"
And I'll translate into like the hood version of it.
Basically, "Are you outta your freaking mind?
"Who are you to question me?" and it clicked.
You're never gonna understand a holy and perfect God
with the fallible nature that you're born with.
It's impossible.
So at that point, it stopped becoming empirical,
and became a lot more about your faith.
And then that's when my journey really
started to go in a different direction.
So, the thing that I would tell my children,
and it's the same advice I would give anybody,
trust your network.
Trust your environment and the people who love you,
and then have no fear.
If you fail, fail early, and fail often,
and just keep going.
Don't fail for the sake of failure
and be a complete moron,
but learn from it, make adjustments, and get up.
One of my dearest friends, a guy named Mark Davis,
Mark Anthony Davis, this brother and I,
we had a good time in law school.
Mark's a former professional baseball player,
and one of the just the coolest cats you've ever meet,
and I remember I was talking to him
at the law school library one day about,
"Man, MD, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this girl,
"man, I don't know how,
"how I'm gonna get her to,"
and he would look at me and say "Hong, man
"you got to step up, you," (John clapping twice)
and he stood up, on the table of the law school library,
and said, "You know what I'm talking about?
"You can't give a fuck what these people think!
"You need to step up," and I sat there and went,
"Okay I got it, sit down!"
And he would go on to explain to me
that baseball, like life, is a game of adjustments.
It's a game of adjustments.
But the thing is, you make an adjustment,
and you keep swinging.
I never forgot that, I don't know why.
That's what I would tell my kids,
"Make the adjustment, and try again.
"Make the adjustment and try again,
"'cause at the end of the day,
"God will call the game.
"Until then, you gotta keep playing."
Anything, business, friendships, relationships,
your own personal evaluation,
everything is about adjustments.
So, that's what I would like to impart on them.
My name is John Hong
and this is my Korean American story.