In 1905, when Korea fell under Japan’s control, Easurk Emsen Charr, a 12-year-old boy from Pyongang province, landed in San Francisco with one burning ambition: to return home as a medical missionary.

He had to stop in Hawaii since he didn’t have enough money to travel to the Promised Land. To pay back the passage, the boy worked on a sugar plantation for months, for 5 cents an hour, 10 hours a day, six days a week.

Upon arriving in San Francisco, he met the legendary Ahn Chang Ho, who would arrange for him a houseboy job, then “white collar jobs” as a busboy and waiter. He would follow Ahn to Riverside, Calif., where he would pick fruit alongside the great patriot and labor organizer.

A true believer in the American Dream, Charr would spend a quarter century chronicling his glorious American venture in The Golden Mountain: The Autobiography of a Korean Immigrant, leaving out all the pain and hurt of anti-Asian exclusion laws and humiliation that dogged him throughout his extraordinary passage.

An excerpt from the preface reads:

 

A former missionary to my native land once suggested to me that I should tell the thrilling story of the immigrant lad whose wonderful dream came true in more ways than he had ever dreamed … during the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, I left the ancient “Hermit Kingdom” and sailed westward in quest of the Beautiful Country, poetically called “The Land of Golden Mountain.” … This is the New Promised Land that I found flowing with milk of wisdom and honey of freedom. I am exceedingly glad that I came to America, and I am humbly proud that I am an American citizen. May God bless America, my country, my home.

Charr volunteered for the Army and worked in the pharmacy of a hospital. This certificate marks his honorable discharge on May 29, 1919.

 

In 1975, Sonia Shinn Sunoo, a member of the Korean Oral History Project and author of the project’s first volume, Korea Kaleidoscope, interviewed the 85-year-old author and his wife, Evelyn, at their home in Portland, Ore., where the couple had settled since his retirement from the federal Civil Service in 1965.

“He reluctantly discusses racial discrimination because of his patriotic feeling toward America,” Sunoo spoke of her impressions. “The dream he held of America at age 12 remained unchanged after 70 years. He steadfastly clings to his dream of America: ‘The Golden Mountain’ of opportunities flowing with the milk of wisdom and honey of freedom.”

Only in this oral account did he reluctantly spill out some of his suppressed anger and pain. He died five years later at the age of 91.

 

HERE IS EASURK EMSEN CHARR’S STORY IN HIS OWN WORDS:

I came to Riverside to pick oranges and lemons there until late fall. During the summertime, I picked grapes in Cucamonga, somewhere near Riverside.

There were quite a few Koreans, 10 or more.

The camp was populated by Mexicans, Negroes, Japanese and now Koreans. I was one of the overgrown kindergarten pupils learning to read the First Reader. “I see mama. I see a ball. I see an apple,” and so forth. So I started to learn English at night school until the orange season began just before Christmastime.