LEISLE CHUNG WAS BORN ON A SMALL FARM IN Seongnam, South Korea, in 1975. The farm belonged to her grandfather. Her father, Han, had been born and raised there along with his older brother, Kae Hoon, and five other siblings. Farming is a hard way of life even in good times, but in 1975, the people of South Korea were still struggling to recover from the devastation of the Korean War. Entire cities had been burned to the ground during that conflict, and almost three times more civilians died than soldiers. Leisle’s grandparents had been left dirt-poor, and Leisle’s father used to go to school with nothing to eat all day. Children from more fortunate families brought rice to eat, and if their family was especially prosperous, they even had an egg, while Leisle’s father could only sip his water and watch them eat.
It cost money to go to school in Korea, just as it did in Vietnam, and when Han reached high school age, his father called him in one day and told him, “I can’t afford to send you to school anymore. You need to come home and work the farm so we can send your older brother to school.” As in most traditional Asian families, the priority went to the oldest son; everything the family did would be dedicated to making sure the oldest son became educated and successful, and then that son was expected to help the rest of the family.
Han’s older brother was very intelligent and did well in school. He was even accepted to Seoul National University, the most prestigious college in all of Korea. But to continue funding Kae Hoon’s education, the family had to sell off parcels of the farm until there was barely enough land left to work. For Han it was like standing on an ice floe that was melting all around him and wishing he knew how to swim.
What made it even more difficult for Han was that he was very intelligent too. He dreamed of all the places he wanted to go and the things he hoped to accomplish, but he was a common laborer trapped on a small farm with no education, money, or opportunity; and as he watched his older brother succeed, he saw his own future slipping away. But Han was a good son who remained loyal to the family and sacrificed his own future to help ensure his brother’s success, and after graduating from Seoul National University, Han’s brother pursued that success by moving to the United States.
One day Han met a beautiful young woman named Sunny, and before long they fell in love and married. Following Asian tradition, Sunny moved in with her husband’s family, and it was painful and embarrassing for Han to see his young bride forced to share in his family’s poverty. Leisle was born the following year, and it was even more painful for Han when he saw that his wife had to walk to the river each day to wash the baby’s diapers just as poor Korean women had done for thousands of years.
Han decided he was tired of waiting for his chance at success. Sunny agreed to remain in Korea with baby Leisle while her husband went ahead to the United States, and when he had found a decent job and had saved enough money, he would send for his wife and daughter to join him.
Han’s previous work experience had been mostly in farming, so when he came to America, he first moved to Iowa to try working as a farmhand; but the long Iowa winter was more brutal than anything he had ever experienced in South Korea, and he decided not to stay. Just nine months after he arrived in the United States, Han was living in Denver with a steady job and a place to live, and he immediately sent for his wife and daughter. Little Leisle was almost a year and a half old by that time and didn’t even recognize her father at first; she was old enough to talk by then and she kept calling her father “Mister.”
Once the family was reunited, they began to move from place to place in search of higher-paying jobs and better opportunities. Atlanta was their next stop, followed by Russellville, Arkansas, and they finally settled in the small town of Lincoln, Arkansas, about forty miles north of Fort Smith and only a few miles from the Oklahoma border. Lincoln was a tiny rural town of just fourteen hundred people, and the average income at the time was close to the poverty line. The ethnic makeup of the town could be described in one word: white. There were almost no blacks, the only Hispanics were the migrant Mexican workers who passed through town, and it was highly doubtful that anyone in Lincoln had ever met an Asian. That might not sound like a land of golden opportunity for a Korean family, but the town had one thing going for it: Lincoln had the cheapest land in all of Arkansas. Han and Sunny would be able to afford fifty acres of land, so they decided to settle, and Lincoln became their home.
In some ways the story of Leisle’s family sounds a lot like my own: poor Asian family leaves their homeland and travels to America in search of opportunity. But there is one major difference in our stories, and its significance cannot be overstated: Leisle’s parents were immigrants while mine were refugees. Han and Sunny left Korea because they chose to; we left Vietnam because we had no choice. They chose America; America chose us. They hoped for a better life; we just hoped someone would take us in. Those seemingly minor details account for an enormous difference in the mind-set of an immigrant and a refugee: an immigrant is motivated by the desire for success while a refugee is often driven by the fear of failure.
In Korea there had been no outlet for Han’s ambition, but in America he saw endless possibilities. He arrived with just two hundred dollars in his pocket, but he took every odd job he could find, even working as a janitor in a French restaurant, until he had saved enough money to buy a farm. When he first arrived, he didn’t know a word of English, so he taught himself by attending church services and going to public parks, where he could strike up conversations and learn. He was a voracious reader, and he was constantly studying and taking correspondence courses to expand his horizons. He was always experimenting with side businesses just to see what might catch on. He raised deer and planted an herbal garden; he started an Asian pear farm to see if he could sell pear cider and vinegar; he eventually developed a successful business, selling herbal remedies and alternative medicines. When a business failed, as most of them did, he was disappointed but never allowed himself to get discouraged because he believed that in a land of possibilities there was no such thing as a roadblock—only detours. Han and Sunny believed they could accomplish anything they set their minds to in America, and to me the most important thing they ever accomplished was passing that attitude on to their daughter.
Leisle grew up surrounded by her father’s books, and in the margins she found notations scribbled in Korean and words and phrases circled and underlined to be looked up later. Her father didn’t read books; he devoured them, and Leisle learned to do the same. There was a small public library in Lincoln, and anyone checking out a book there was likely to find the name Leisle Chung written on the back because she read every age-appropriate book on the library’s shelves.
Han and Sunny instilled in their daughter the belief that she could do anything. Han told Leisle that Koreans were naturally intelligent, and Sunny told her daughter that Koreans were simply superior people—but at the same time they taught her Christian humility, which allowed their daughter to be confident without becoming arrogant. It’s an attitude that ought to be instilled in every child: “I am a naturally intelligent person. I was born to be a superior student. Anything is possible for me if I work hard enough.”
But Han and Sunny gave their daughter more than confidence; they also gave her discipline. School and study came before everything else, and nothing less than an A was acceptable. When Leisle was only in eighth grade, she took a yearlong high school course in geometry, and she finished one semester with a B—quite an achievement for a girl two years younger than everyone else in her class. But her parents said, “You obviously don’t understand the subject matter. You have to take the class again.” And she did. In ninth grade her parents made her repeat the entire year of geometry to prove that she was capable of getting an A. She wasn’t proving it to her parents; they already knew. She was proving it to herself.
Han and Sunny also gave their daughter vision; they constantly challenged her to aim for the stars regardless of the outcome. In middle school Leisle ran for student council secretary and won. When she told her mother the good news, her mother asked, “Why didn’t you run for president?”
“A popular boy was running for president,” she said. “I wouldn’t have won.”
Sunny shook her head. “I would rather you go for the best and lose than try for second best and win.”
It’s no surprise that in high school, Leisle was the president of every club she was in. Going for the best was her only option; it was the only thing her parents allowed her to do—and Leisle soon discovered that when she went for the best, she usually succeeded.
I marvel sometimes at the power of the attitude that Leisle’s parents instilled in her. I came to America as a refugee from a despised country, so I constantly felt that I was weak, inferior, and second-class. Leisle’s parents taught her to be proud of her Korean heritage, so she constantly felt that she was strong, superior, and always top of the class.
Han and Sunny were wise enough to recognize that they were only two voices in a town of fourteen hundred, and they knew it would be difficult to keep their daughter shooting for the stars if no one around her was doing the same. They wanted to expose their daughter to a community that valued achievement as much as they did. There was a Korean church in Springdale about forty-five minutes away, and they met on Saturdays because that was the only time the church building was available. There Leisle found an entire culture of adults who shared not only her parents’ Christian faith but their attitude toward achievement. She couldn’t help noticing that when their children went away to college, they always seemed to go to schools such as Duke, Stanford, and Georgetown. Three of Leisle’s cousins went to Harvard; one of them went on to Harvard Law School, one to Harvard Medical School, and one to Harvard Business School. Leisle grew up thinking that’s just what Asians did.
Han and Sunny had very modern ambitions for their daughter, but at the same time they were a traditional Korean couple and followed traditional roles. Leisle has a brother named Isaac who is three years younger than her. Sunny once walked into the kitchen and found her son washing dishes, and she told him to stop. “When you’re married, break a few dishes,” she advised him. “Your wife won’t ask you to do dishes anymore.” Han insisted that his daughter learn how to cook, or else she would never find a man who would marry her. Who would want to marry a president who can’t cook?
If there was anything lacking in Leisle’s education, it was social. To keep her focused on her studies, dating was out of the question for her in high school, and since she had an eight o’clock curfew, her dates wouldn’t have lasted very long anyway. Leisle’s parents had reason to be protective of their daughter; her high school had the highest pregnancy rate in the state of Arkansas, and it was the first high school in the state to offer contraceptive advice in the school health clinic.
By the time Leisle graduated from high school, she was valedictorian and student council president. She applied to Yale early because that’s what Koreans did, and she was accepted in December of her senior year. When Leisle’s parents heard their daughter had been accepted to Yale, her mother collapsed on the sofa and wept while her father scooped up Leisle in his arms and swung her around until she was dizzy.
In some ways Leisle and I were similar, but in other ways we could not have been more different. We were both high achievers, but we did it in different ways and for different reasons. Leisle was confident, but I had something to prove. She was disciplined while I stayed busy. She was focused like a laser beam, but I was like a fire hose with no one holding on to the end. She knew where she was going, and she worked hard to get there; I worked hard, too, but with no particular destination in mind. Leisle’s motto was, “Aim for the stars and see what you can hit.” My motto was, “If you hit what’s right in front of you, you don’t have to aim.”
But despite all our differences, there was one quality we had in common that would ultimately bring us together: she knew nothing about boys, and I knew nothing about girls.