009 Orphan, Refugee, Agent, and Champion
I decided to learn about Billy Hong. A contact told me that, for his first few years in the US, the young Billy Hong had boarded with a private detective who was a devotee of Asian martial arts: Jack Moon.I obtained Jack Moon's phone number and he invited me up to his house on Paris Mountain to visit. Jack Moon, tough, built like a bull, but soft spoken, reflected the Japanese attitude of reserve. In conversation, he actually spoke little, and yet I learned everything I wanted from his direct, quiet answers.
When he was ten years old, the Korean War and the Communist army came home to Hyung N Hong. They occupied his village and imprisoned all the adults in their own homes, for security reasons. The children were allowed out occasionally, but the village filled up with invading soldiers, their equipment, and their vehicles.
American Air Force pilots, spotting the village and seeing no sign of normal village life, concluded that the Communists had driven off or killed the villagers. So they decided to level the village. On the morning that they attacked, young Hyung and another boy were allowed to go fishing at nearby fishing hole.
The planes came in swiftly and within minutes had reduced the entire village to a smoking wreck. Only the two boys survived.
The story becomes hazy at that point. Hyung did wander for several days, starving. I don't know if he was still in the area around the smoking remains of the village or if he had joined other refugees and moved on, but not long after the first tragedy, he was shot in the leg by a stray bullet while hiding from a skirmish between soldiers.
Unable to move, and too afraid to cry out for help, he stayed hidden until a small group of American soldiers found him. They took him to a MASH unit, where the friendly Americans removed the bullet and cared for him for as long as they were able. Hong later wrote of them sewing Army scrip into his clothing.
It was during his stay with the Army that he became enamored of Americans and their loud, friendly, generous ways. For a war orphan, they were like a great, noisy household of brothers and friends. He adopted the name Billy when he was with them.
Again, his story becomes hazy. Only rudiments survive from a few written journals he produced when he first came here. The big noses and big backsides of the Americans startled him. He was amazed by the broad handlebar moustache of one of the doctors.
From what I was told and read, he seems to have followed the US army with other refugees, at times slipping into the comforts of sympathetic care from the Americans. And yet there were also long, lonely patches when he simply traveled the countryside. He wrote of seeing the Communist soldiers tie up all manner of minor local officials, down to the mail carriers, with barbed wire and concrete blocks. They did this to the local officials, their wives, and their children, even the babies. Then, with the rest of the local citizenry forced to watch, they threw their captives into deep pools of water at the foot of great waterfalls, where they were all drowned.
Billy Hong hated the Communists all his life. He mentioned once that when he was still a refugee, somebody gave him a bucket of tomatoes. He was lugging his prize along a road when a Communist soldier passed him, took the bucket, threw the tomatoes down one by one, smashing them, then handed him the bucket and walked on.
But he also met unkind Americans. One American gave him a pouch of menthol tobacco and told him it was candy. He gobbled it down and was sick for days. He hated that man for the rest of his life, but he was too frightened of offending his benefactors to tell on him.
Over time, he developed friendships with one group of soldiers and officers from South Carolina. He eventually became a sort of valet and errand boy for an American lieutenant. His life became more stable, and he worked with devoted energy. But as he grew into his early teenage years, he also became a sort of agent against the Communists. This is the haziest part of his accounts of himself, but it seems clear that even while very young, Billy Hong did everything he could to inflict losses on the Communist soldiers. He blamed them for the death of everybody in his village.
As the war drew to a close, his American friends made inquiries about bringing him back to the United States. But there were hundreds, possibly thousands of such cases as Billy Hong. The US government did not allow it. But his American friends promised to help him if he could get to the USA. He was resolved to do just that.
He went to an orphanage in South Korea, but he decided that his best chance to get to the USA was to become a boxer. He had nothing else to do and nothing else to live for, so he took the only money he had and traveled to Seoul, where he asked a cab driver to take him to a boxing gym. His plan was to beg lessons in return for cleaning the place and acting as custodian.
The cab driver, misunderstanding him, took him to the Kukki Wan, the central school for Tae Kwon Do. The young teenage boy begged lessons and offered to work cleaning the toilets. It took a lot of begging and bargaining, but at last he was given permission to sleep in the training hall and care for the place. Years later, Billy Hong's only comment was "I cleaned a lot of toilets before I ever got a lesson."
But over time, the senior instructors came to respect his intentions. The only thing Billy Hong wanted was to become a champion so he could go to America. He cleaned, trained, ate, and slept. And then he trained some more before starting the entire routine over again. He once remarked to Frazer Johnson that he stayed so fixed on his purpose that he could go a week at a time not knowing if it was night or day.
He was still a teenager when he earned his first degree black belt. At 19 he earned his teaching certificate.
By this time, several impoverished but able young men called the training hall their home. They all worked fanatically at building their skills. They taught classes, served as custodians, and trained.
Hong once mentioned that two of his friends, who later came to the USA to open schools, would hone their skills by going to bars and deliberately picking fights. If they could knock out one or two people who willingly fought them, they considered it time well spent. They often invited him to join them.
But knocking out his countrymen, even the criminals who visited the local dives, didn't appeal to Billy Hong. He had strong ideals, and he saved his street fighting for Communist sympathizers or anybody perceived to be “from the other side.”. Even then, he remained active in staunchly anti-Communist groups that stayed in a shadowy netherworld, where they assisted in low-level matters of government Intelligence from time to time. He was never a major player, but he remained a reliable and willing assistant to anything that would further Democracy in South Korea and squelch Communism.
Billy Hong still hated Communism, but his teachers hated the Japanese. Decades earlier, Japan had humiliated and oppressed Korea, a crime that the martial arts teachers did not forgive. Billy Hong and several of his peers were groomed in their skills to attend an international tournament in Japan. When Hong decisively won in his bracket, he realized his dream to become a champion. He sent word to his friends in America, and he left Korea's shores to come to this country on a student visa and enroll in college.
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