Author: Erin Million
Why did you migrate to the United States?
In my case, I guess love
dictated, I should say. I met him [An American Soldier] at a party. I
went to a party with some other students. We knew a few Americans, a
few English too, but mostly Americans were teaching us in school.
Because in our class, except the teacher I had, mostly the teachers who
taught us English learned from other Koreans. So the government tried
to get native English speakers in school because our pronunciation
wasn’t very good. So we knew some of those people and we had a party
and that’s were I met him. I was eighteen, I was in high school. I
also came for opportunity and I wanted to see, you know, curiosity. You
hear about all these woman’s rights and I wanted to see with own eyes
and live in that society.
Chung’s marriage with the Army soldier wasn’t received well by her father:
At first, he was very disappointed. I didn’t tell him until I already got married. I didn’t have the heart to tell him because he was thinking that I was going to marry one of his friend’s sons. I was, what do you call it, a rebel. I was young and I was really into European things and Western things, very much. And a lot of my friends were too because we were young, in high school, and we didn’t want to look back at ancient types of stuff. We wanted new happening types of things. I don’t think he had negative things to say about Westerners he just thought I was going to marry who he had chosen.