Every Korean schoolboy or -girl, every taxi driver, every computer programmer, everybody from the highest to the lowest levels of this society knows the glorious tale of how King Sejong took it upon himself in 1443 to construct an entirely new...
Jimmy Jones, Steve Jones, Red Robbins, Gerald Govan, Larry Brown and Doug Moe were key players for the New Orleans Buccaneers of the American Basketball Association in the late 1960s. When visiting Dallas to play my beloved Chaparrals, they too...
My young friend Daryl Deanne Dayanan is a junior at the University of Negros Occidental-Recoletos in the Philippines. She is majoring in secondary education with a focus on math, and making excellent grades. DD, as I often call her, contacted me...
Six months ago, I penned a Korea Times column entitled “In dire need of political maturity.” In it, I urged a hyper-conservative Korean friend to accept—or at least not actively oppose—the liberal government of President Moon Jae-in. Doing so, I...
A fellow American-Korean named Ron Roman invited me to visit him in Pyeongtaek last month. He first got here in 1977. We had a nice time, and our discussion ranged over many topics. One was our mutual love of reading. A few days later, Roman...
After I got a University of Texas diploma on May 22, 1976, the decades have rolled by. That’s one form of distance, another being the 6,000 or so miles separating the USA from Korea. If the bonds between me and my alma mater are not as strong and...
When are Mother’s Day and Father’s Day? I could not tell you to save my life. Such artificially designated days have never registered with me. I choose to honor good parenting at any time of the year, and this is the day for me to bow deeply to...
There was no excuse, none whatsoever, for my having failed to vote in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. The USA is a participatory democracy, and expats only have to take a few simple steps in order to cast a ballot. Thrice I did...
In the spring of 1983, I started working on my first book. It pertained to racial integration of Southwest Conference football. I was deeply disappointed when I learned that John Westbrook had died. What guts it must have taken to walk onto the...
For more than 100 days now, people in the once-lovely town of Portland, Oregon have been rioting, burning, looting, vandalizing, terrorizing and protesting in the name of “social justice.” Nothing they have done upsets me more than...
Frank Sinatra recorded “There Used to Be a Ballpark” in 1973. If this does not rank among classics like “My Way,” “Strangers in the Night” and “New York, New York,” it was still a good one. The song captured how a community had lost its baseball...
Back in 2013, my student Juliana Kim spoke enthusiastically about skiing at Vivaldi Park, 63 kilometers east of Seoul, every winter with her husband and children. Whether they visited the place in summer for its equally famous water resort, I am...
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