Yong Ho Kwon’s quixotic quest

to find meaning as a perpetual outsider in the New World

 

A precocious child of the Korean Diaspora, Yong Ho Kwon spent all his unforgiving nomadic life as an early 20th century Sisyphus, but left behind the indelible footprint of a never-die Don Quixote.

His is a page right out of the anonymous history of orphans of the world — the “nobody/nowhere” exiles from a conquered kingdom that was wiped off the map at the dawn of the last century.

Legally excluded from mainstream society on this vast and indifferent continent, these widely dispersed newcomers harvested discrimination, isolation, loneliness and the indignities reserved for yellow surrogate slaves without a country.

Neither Chinese nor Japanese, these early pioneers without a national identity were lost in the shuffle and led an invisible existence. Part of a patriot breed, these early sojourners gave their blood-and-sweat money to the cause of independence. At the end of the Pacific War they greeted the Allied victory only to witness their liberated homeland divided and plunged into a fratricidal civil war. Trapped in their own exile, they died in nameless farm camps and rooming houses as birds of passage that couldn’t go home.

A prototype of his peers in exile, 17-year-old Confucian scholar Yong Ho Kwon came to America in 1905 to attain Western education but found the door to the job market closed.

On the margins of the American frontiers, the perpetual outsider eked out a hard living as a cook, a houseboy and with odd jobs. Throughout, however, he defied his lowlife fate by pursuing lofty goals: as a freelance inventor for patents in aeronautics as well as a freelance advocate for “peaceful co-existence” through neutralization of his divided homeland.

At age 15, the Pyongan province native mastered all the Chinese classics, ready for the national civil service exam for high office at the end of the Yi Dynasty, but Japanese occupation replaced the system with Japanese. Undeterred, Kwon roamed the rural Hwanghae Province as an itinerant teacher of Chinese.

At 17, he couldn’t stomach the Japanese rule. Hungry for Western learning, he said goodbye to his pregnant wife for a Hawaii sugar plantation, the first leg of what turned out to be a lifelong nomad life.

University education didn’t help the “alien ineligible to citizenship” get a decent job. While hopping from one menial job to another for the rest of his life, he doggedly engaged in aerodynamics research for patents only to be rejected each time.

In later years, homesick for what was once the undivided motherland, Kwon poured his lifetime savings of $1,500 into pamphleteering for “a unified, neutral Korea in peace.”

His parting shot: the 32-page hardback book, Peaceful Co-Existence and Other Thoughts.

The simple but prescient proposal in his book — 1,000 copies of which were distributed free among libraries, foreign embassies and interest groups — called for each side to reduce its armed forces to no more than 10,000 and to abolish the barriers at the 38th Parallel, and allow free travel between the two Koreas on the basis of joint national passports issued by each government.