011 Transition and Marriage
As the Tae Kwon Do classes grew and as Billy Hong assimiliated into American culture, he became more a part of the lives of his students and less a part of the rambunctious, independent life on the mountain. The school in Anderson grew. As his first few years passed, he turned out black belt students. He ate with them after Friday classes and was invited to their homes as a guest, a kindness that Billy Hong cherished from happy families. He launched small business ventures in export and import goods, and he even traveled back to his homeland a few times. When he did, he brought back gifts for the children of his studentsYears after Billy Hong's death, one young man at Greenville technical college looked me up to tell me that his father had studied Tae Kwon Do under Mr. Hong, and Mr. Hong had given him a child's crib blanket from Korea for his infant son. That same son now stood before me, grown and married, telling me that his father still had that blanket, a long preserved gift to be taken out and shown when it was story time and Billy Hong came to life again for a few brief minutes in the minds of those who had loved and respected him.
Mr. Hong took up golf (and quickly learned to bet on it), a sport he considered to be the perfect partner to Tae Kwon Do. Its stillness, focus, and demand for power in some moments and delicate finesse in others balanced out the explosive martial art with quiet and concentration.
Younger students showed up at the school on Paris Mountain. Jack Moon, ever the detached, remote budoka, showed little regard for youth. If you walked into his school, you were fair game, and one or two alumni from that training hall ruefully remarked on Moon's ability to put a choke on novice fighters and not let up until they felt truly and thoroughly choked. There was some feeling in some of the graduates of that school that Moon was "not all there." His relentless pursuit of martial perfection and a mindset of detached readiness unnerved less easternized minds. But he used his skills in the mental game of figuring out strategy and built a name to be respected in industry security.
Eventually, Hong built his own school in Anderson and moved in to its back rooms. He palled around with his senior students, golfed with them, ate with them, and engaged in more innocent activities than strike breaking. Hong wanted clean cut, morally upright men as students. Apparently, he was almost Puritanical in his view of marriage, for he would expel students who shacked up with women or were unfaithful to their wives. A strong tradition from the oldest tenets of Korean martial arts remained strong in him: that an immoral person, prone to addiction and slavery to fleshly pleasure, could never achieve much in Tae Kwon Do. A pure mind was essential to raw, undiminished courage; the soul had to endure without cracking. And every student of Tae kwon Do was a representative of its highest ideals.
I have read and heard from students in Japanese martial arts of teachers, even masters, walking home from the bars dead drunk and staggering. In Robert Twigger's book, Angry White Pyjams, the senior teachers and masters got drunk and picked a fight in a bar after the funeral of one of their own. This was not a bunch of 20 somethings as Billy Hong had known back in Seoul, sneaking out behind the backs of the teachers, but adult men with students of their own.
Billy Hong did not allow such behavior. He once spied two brown belt students standing outside the door of a bar in the summer sunshine, drinking beers and just staring out at the street. He pulled over, got out of the car, took the beers from their hands and threw them down. Then he got in the car and drove away. He threw out students who were bullies or anybody who behaved in a lawless way.
He expected his students, at all times, to do the right thing. He wanted smart academics, moral outlook, and "right action." Late comers to class were severely punished with 50 pushups, and if you muffed them, he made you start over again. But I recall one of the most diligent black belt students rushing in to class one night, late. When Mr. Hong, surprised, demanded to know why this was so, the young man said, "I saw two women trying to change a flat off I-85, sir. I changed it for them."
That was an acceptable excuse. He was waved into class with no further questions. Assisting women, helping the elderly, doing anything that was a mark of good citizenship, were all required behavior.
He accepted some students and rejected others. One of his favorite tests for prospective students, on hearing a request for lessons, was to point at the ground and say "fifty push ups." If a man would drop on the spot and do his best to perform fifty push ups, Hong would accept him. But if a man would offer only excuses, Hong would send him away. People who stood in the doorway and stared were sent away. Class was not a spectacle. They could watch for a moment or two, but then they must join or leave.
Once, he had two teenagers hanging around the doorway. He stepped up to them, his eyes glittering. They had not asked for lessons, but he pointed at the floor. "Fifty push ups," he said. One of the boys ran away right there, but the other got down and tried. He pushed out as many as he could. When he could do more, he actually held back tears as he stood up and met Mr. Hong's glittering eyes. "I gotta go home now," he said.
"You come back and take lessons from Billy Hong," Mr. Hong told him. And he did.
I'm not sure what caused the rift between Mr Hong and Jack Moon. Somebody actually offered to explain it to me once, but I was so tired of seeing men in the martial arts break off from each other that I passed on the opportunity. But after the school in Greenville was founded, Mr. Hong stopped teaching on Paris Mountain, and Jack Moon didn't come around more than once or twice from then until the day Billy Hong left Greenville forever. Ukio, from what I heard, returned to Japan.
The transition was complete; the rough and rowdy days of his youth were over. He had the necessary money to arrange a marriage with a Korean woman. With the well wishes of his students behind him, Billy Hong left for Korea to find his bride, assisted by the centuries-old Korean practice of professional match making. He told one of his students that his own plan was to disarrange the little parlor where he would meet his prospective brides, and which ever one straightened it up would be his pick.
I don't know if it was really that simple. I doubt it. But when he returned several weeks later, with the shy, gentle, and lovely Mrs. Joy Hong on his arm, everybody knew he had picked well. They had been married in a quiet ceremony in Korea, but a much more grand wedding was held in the USA, with his old army friends attending, his students around him, and well wishes pouring in. After over 20 years of loneliness and wandering, he had a home, a beautiful wife, peace, and a prosperous life in the country that he loved.
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