A Letter from Your Cleaners – 28
Meetings and Partings – Part 1
The year 2016 was a season when a massive, indelible line was carved straight across the center of my life. It was the historic year when my household, which had been completely shattered and collapsed into ruins after I danced to the tune of that reckless hut-ba-ram (the restless wind), finally crawled out of that long, dark tunnel of hardship to discover its true path. Looking back from the vantage point of today, I realize that era was still a chapter of my youth; yet, at the time, my age had already safely crossed well past the grand threshold of sixty. Even through the grueling realities on the ground, I spent my days continuously carrying the word “gratitude” directly upon my lips. For that was the exact, magnificent year when I was permanently and split-votedly liberated from every single layer of my crushing debts after a decade of absolute struggle.
During the beautiful spring of that very same year, my son—who had stubbornly refused to leave our family home even after securing a steady, professional career—abruptly packed his bags, left a short letter resting quietly upon his desk, and stepped out into the world to pursue his own destiny.
And when summer arrived, my wife and I embarked on a historic milestone: our very first joint vacation alone as a couple since our immigration to the United States, joining forces with a dear friend couple to experience a grand cross-country train journey.
[Hanna and Hannah]
We swept out of our front door early in the morning at precisely 3:30 AM, heading straight toward Hannah’s house to launch the journey. Hannah is the eldest daughter of the trusted friend couple who would share this beautiful pilgrimage beside us. My own daughter’s name is Hanna; because our two families chose to pronounce the identical English name with slightly separate, distinct nuances over the years, the names permanently solidified as “Hanna” and “Hannah” within our worlds. My relationship with Hannah’s father has beautifully spanned nearly twenty consecutive years now.
When our paths first crossed decades ago, we were both living inside a vibrant era when our souls were completely overflowing with grand, beautiful dreams. We were young men who had passionately joined forces to establish a grassroots Dry Cleaners Association among the fellow Korean operators in our local neighborhood, driven by the pure, shared vision to lift one another up and grow together. Back in those intense days, both our bodies and our spirits were in the absolute prime of our youth. Managing the affairs of the association and co-leading the Korean-American Association together, our steps naturally drew closer, and because our core principles and the heights from which we evaluated the world aligned with such an extraordinary, flawless symmetry, we seamlessly transformed into brothers who shared a bond free from any pretense. Naturally, Hana’s mother and Hannah’s mother share an identical, deep sisterhood. Tracing the long tapestry of the years we have enjoyed together, I must honestly confess that the central reason we have been enabled to preserve this beautiful friendship is entirely due to the boundless, gentle generosity of Hannah’s parents—precious souls who have untiringly embraced and sheltered our couple, despite our naturally sharp, impatient, and severely narrow temperaments.
The footprints of that intense era feel so remarkably close, as though I could reach out my hand to touch them; yet, among the magnificent companions who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with us back then, quite a few have already departed this earth, others have neatly retired to spend their days in absolute seclusion, and several are currently bedridden, quietly enduring the heavy burdens of old age. While a vast majority of that old circle are actively calculating the exact hour to permanently walk away from their businesses, Hana’s father and I—who were considered part of the younger tier back then—remain robust, fiercely active on the frontlines of our trades. Of course, Hana’s father has gracefully shifted his trade, moving away from dry cleaners to operate a grand, large-scale commercial car wash enterprise today.
Because the drive from my front door to Hana’s house takes roughly twenty minutes, and heading from their driveway to the Philadelphia International Airport requires an identical twenty-minute margin, we resolved that launching our journey from their residence was the absolute most logical strategy.
In all honesty, the central catalyst that successfully pushed our two couples into co-planning this magnificent vacation was entirely thanks to my daughter, Hanna.
It happened in the middle of June, when my wife and I traveled out to Manhattan to spend a brief weekend visiting our daughter. Backed by several previous trials and minor errors, we had finally reached a wise threshold where the complex maze of the New York subway lines no longer felt foreign or intimidating to our steps. That afternoon, our feet carried us to visit Ground Zero. And it was during that solemn walk that Hannah quietly turned her face toward me and pitched a question: “Dad, do you and Mom have any official plans to visit Korea this year?” She explained that she had managed to secure a fifteen-day window of paid vacation time, and if her parents were planning a journey back to our homeland, she desperately desired to join forces and travel beside us.
My response back then must have arrived as an utterly abrupt and out-of-the-blue statement to both my wife and my daughter; yet, it was the absolute, naked confession of the deepest meditation occupying my spirit during that precise season.
“Hanna,” I said calmly, “your mother is already planning a journey to visit Korea next year, and my intention was to wait and travel beside her then… But what if we try something completely separate this summer? Let your mother and you handle the trip to Korea next year, and this summer, why don’t you and I board a train together to execute a grand, cross-country journey across the American continent?”
Watching my daughter hesitate, I aggressively pushed the idea forward. “What do you think? Isn’t it a magnificent blueprint, Hannah? I’ve already carried out some deep research on Google, and the archival routes of these long-distance train journeys look absolutely breathtaking. Let’s map out a complete itinerary tailored perfectly to your vacation window. I’ll email you the official Amtrak links tonight, so why don’t you try co-planning the route?” Pressed by my intense eagerness, my daughter simply returned a gentle smile and whispered a single, quiet word: “Okay.”
Yet, the moment we parted ways with our daughter and boarded our commute back home, my wife turned her face toward me, her expression completely filled with a biting, absolute amusement. “My goodness,” she laughed flatly, “how on earth can a father remain so utterly blind to his own daughter’s heart? Do you honestly, in your right mind, believe that Hanna would ever willingly choose to spend her precious vacation locked inside a cramped train cabin with her father? Please, wake up from your hollow dream!”
True to form, my wife’s judgment was absolutely accurate. For from that afternoon onward, my beloved daughter Hanna never once resurrected the narrative of the train journey.
A short while later, early in July, our couple happened to stop by Hannah’s house to share a simple cup of warm tea . Sitting in their living room, I casually brought up the story of the cross-country train journey—a dream that had hollowly evaporated into nothing more than an empty foam. The moment my narrative ended, Hannah’s father—hailing from the rustic southern provinces of Chungcheong, a man whose speech was naturally slow, deliberate, and unpolished—returned an incredibly simple, lightning-fast response : “Well, if that’s the case, let’s just pack our bags and go together, just the four of us!”
Though his words were slow, his capacity for raw action was unmatched; while it would ordinary take me a full hour to navigate a road, he possessed the fast grit to conquer it in half that time. Sure enough, a mere single week after that tea conversation, he had successfully designed and finalized a flawless, comprehensive itinerary for our vacation.
And it was strictly in accordance with the meticulous blueprints drawn up by Hana’s father that our couple swept out of our driveway at that early hour of 3:30 AM.
[The Sky and Han-wool]
The train roars steadily forward through the pitch-black darkness, cutting a straight line across the vast, sweeping expanses of the Nebraska Great Plains. Every single layer of the internal loudspeaker announcements—which had spent the day beautifully narrating the unique historical heritages and ancient pioneer legends tied to each passing station—has been completely silenced. It is a thoughtful, gentle courtesy designed to ensure that the traveling passengers can indulge in absolute comfort and a peaceful night of deep sleep. I sat completely frozen by the dark window, stubbornly refusing to close my eyes until the train successfully cruised past the city limits of Omaha.
For Omaha was the sacred, heartbreaking ground where my beloved son spent four full consecutive years of his youth.
As the train rattled through that dark landscape, my spirit was completely crushed under a heavy, suffocating mountain of absolute remorse. Every bit of that pain was entirely my own fault—for it was born solely from my own blind, overbearing fatherly greed. Perhaps that destructive vanity had first taken root the exact second I went out of my way to construct a name for my newborn boy that was far too immense and heavy for a small human frame to confidently carry. I had proudly baptized him Han-wool—a profound Korean name that literally translates to “The Entire Universe.”
Weighted down by the sheer magnitude of that name, my boy grew up at an extraordinarily slow, late-blooming pace. Tracing the footprints of his childhood, where is the father on Earth who would refuse to praise his own flesh and blood? Yet, my boy was genuinely, to the absolute core of his being, a remarkably gentle and good-hearted soul. Even in the reality of my right now, that goodness remains completely unbroken.
The trouble, however, was that he was simply slow. Furthermore, while his physical frame eventually multiplied until he stood at twice the physical size of his father, his inner spirit remained incredibly tender. Through his elementary and middle school years, he managed to return home with decent grade reports that left no room for sharp scoldings; yet, the moment he stepped over the threshold into high school, my wife and I found ourselves continuously summoned to the principal’s office. It wasn’t that my boy was executing any malicious acts or stirring up rowdy trouble; rather, he started achieving poor marks in class, consistently. He barely managed to crawl across the finish line to graduate from high school. Yet, through a miracle of his own, his official SAT scores returned with a remarkably solid tier, meaning that if we had aggressively searched the field, there were plenty of decent universities that would have open-heartedly accepted his enrollment.
And it was right at that pivotal junction that my destructive greed flared back to life. I aggressively stepped forward to push a proposition directly onto my boy: “Han-wool, rather than carelessly drifting into any random university in your current state, why don’t you try enlisting into the military first?” Tracing that choice from my today, utilizing the beautiful excuse that I desperately desired to see my son grow into a rugged, rock-solid man was nothing more than a convenient lie to shield my own ego.
My profoundly good-hearted son completely submitted to his father’s words. He packed his bags to endure his grueling basic training in the blistered lands of Texas, and was subsequently stationed right here at the military bases of Omaha, Nebraska, where he ground through four full years of hard service. During that exact chapter of history, the total number of U.S. troops deployed to the frontlines of the Iraq War was climbing to its absolute peak, and my wife and I spent every single day with our hearts locked in a suffocating cage of terror. Weeks after his enlistment, when I traveled out to Texas to meet my boy at his graduation ceremony, the single realization that violently pierced through my chest was a crushing weight of pure shame: ‘Ah… I have executed a monumental error. This was nothing but my own selfish greed.’
Mercifully, my boy safely completed his four years of military service in Omaha and walked back through our front door. Yet, on the eve of his official discharge, my stubborn vanity flared up one final time: “Son, what if you try extending your contract? Remaining inside the military structure might actually be the safest path for your future…” For the very first time in his entire existence, my son sharply cut through my words: “Dad! You have absolutely no capacity to comprehend how brutal and terrible a place the military truly is! I am getting out!”
Cruising through that dark landscape of Omaha—the exact city where my son had surrendered the golden prime of his youth to pay the price for his father’s ego—I found it completely impossible to surrender to sleep.
Following his discharge, my boy successfully completed his university degree and secured a career. Though his monthly salary remains remarkably modest, he harvests an absolute, profound joy executing his daily role as a social worker, devoting his life to caring for and protecting late-blooming children whose struggles perfectly mirror his own childhood. Yet, for a long time, he stubbornly refused to move out of our house. Even when his younger sister, who is six full years his junior, would look at him with a face filled with absolute, biting amusement and whisper, “My goodness, you crossed the threshold of your twenties a very long time ago, aren’t you embarrassed to still be cohabiting with Mom and Dad?”—he would simply look away, pretending he hadn’t heard a single word.
Then, on a sudden day, a quiet transformation multiplied across his routine. He began returning home late in the evening, his responses to our inquiries turned vague and distant, and his actions began to drift in a completely separate direction from his words. A woman had entered his life. Before long, I caught a glimpse of my son standing beside a young woman whose skin was deeply, beautifully dark. And a short margin of time later, the two children stood hand-in-hand before our couple and delivered a bold declaration: “We are getting married!”
I must honestly, nakedly confess that my inner spirit was consumed by an excruciating, deep agony. In the beginning, I foolishly blamed my son, believing this pain was a burden he had intentionally slung onto my shoulders; yet, as the currents of time rolled on, the realization that firmly took hold of my soul was that this bitterness was entirely a creation of my own hidden, unyielding prejudices. It was an agonizing wound born from facing my own blatant hypocrisy. I had spent my entire adulthood parading myself as a progressive intellectual, confidently lecturing others that “living as an immigrant on this land means you can never dare to evaluate a child’s romantic partner based upon the color of their skin”; yet, the exact second that reality crashed into my own living room, my entire progressive armor shattered into pieces, exposing the raw, ugly truth of my own limitations. Today, that beautiful, dark-skinned young woman no longer addresses my son by his birth name . To her, he is simply “Han.”
And that was how the train kept roaring forward through the dark, leaving Omaha far behind.
As the dawn approached, I desperately desired to stand by the window to capture the exact second the sun broke over the horizontal edge of the earth, illuminating the sky with my camera lens; yet, well past the midnight hour, sleep refused to visit my eyes.
Once our grand journey drew to its final close, Hana’s mother shared a beautiful reflection regarding her own experience of the sky: “You know, Mr. Kim… as I sat down to review the hundreds of photographs I had captured along the rails, I was utterly stunned to discover that I had taken an overwhelming, massive multitude of pictures focusing entirely on the sky. It made me ponder deeply—why on earth did my lens seek out the sky with such frantic frequency? And the realization that touched my heart was that in our ordinary routines, we live our days so suffocatingly trapped in our busyness that we never once pause to lift our faces to gaze up at the sky. Yet, that magnificent, breathtaking sky has been standing right there before our eyes every single day…”
One day, when the currents of time are perfectly ripe, I will gently take that dark-skinned young woman by the hand and offer a quiet, respectful whisper. I will ask her to cast away the short nickname “Han,” and to confidently call him by his true, rightful name—Han-wool .
Even if it is nothing more than the final, lingering echo of a father’s stubborn greed.
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