Passport Number 2,906

If this blog is about anything, it's about travel and nostalgia. So this week, as I sit at home, I'm going to go much, much further back.

This is my father's Korean passport, issued in 1953. It's passport number 2906, which, I believe, means that it is the two thousand, nine hundred and sixth passport issued by the Republic of Korea, which only came into being in 1948 or so. You can see the stamp by U.S. immigration dated November 3,1953. My father came to the U.S. on a freighter that shipped food to American GI's from the U.S. and came back mainly empty, passing through the Golden Gate Bridge on its way into San Francisco Bay, where I would spend so much time decades later. About that boat trip, he said he had never eaten so much meat before in his life: this was a time when Americans ate meat three times a day, and Koreans perhaps once a month.

It's a truly remarkable story, much more so than anything I will ever be able to tell. Two years ago I recorded his recollections as we were driving across the country, and I've transcribed the recordings, but I haven't gotten around to writing them down in narrative format. But it includes dodging the conscription efforts of the North Korean Army, going months if not years during the war without word of his family, applying to a handful of American colleges picked more or less randomly out of Peterson's Guide, finding an American guarantor by pure chance through a family friend living in the Netherlands, getting into a one-year program at Wesleyan, and leaving on the aforementioned boat with neither the money nor any intention to return after that one year. When he finally arrived at Wesleyan it was mid-November; when he hadn't shown up for the beginning of the year the college had sent him a letter saying not to come, but he had never received it. It was many years before he would go back to Korea.

I think of my father sometimes as I jet around the world, occasionally even in business class, complaining about airport food. He still insists on flying coach, even though I always offer to upgrade him.