The first time I met my father, I was 10 years old. This isn’t exactly true, since I was 4 when he left us for America, but my memory of my toddlers years is basically nonexistent. So as far as I was concerned, the man was a stranger.

But not a complete stranger, since I’d seen photographs of him. Some of these were old, like a picture of him in high school, looking stylish in his black uniform with silver buttons, but most were from the early 1970s, various shots of him working at the company he’d built, an import-export business that was successful enough to employ over 500 workers.

I didn’t know what to make of this person. He didn’t exactly seem friendly, because there was hardly a photo where he was smiling. Perhaps he didn’t enjoy posing in front of a camera. Or maybe he knew that the good times weren’t going to last forever, because his company did go belly up and now he was half a world away, struggling to make a better life for us.

During those years in Seoul, I wondered about my father. From the bits of conversation I’d caught from my mother and my relatives, I knew he liked to fish and play golf, but these were merely facts. Who was this man, really? Was he kind? Was he fun? What would he think of me?

On a frigid February morning in 1981, we left Kimpo Airport, flew 20 hours in the air, and landed at Newark, and there he was, waiting for us.

I would soon learn that he was not a man who wore his heart on his sleeve.  Although he had a boisterous laugh, I didn’t hear it often. And as for what he thought of me, I have no idea. I figure he was proud of my accomplishments — graduating with honors from high school, attending an Ivy League university, moving out and finding a good job — but we never got close. As I grew up, the prospect of establishing a genuine relationship with him seemed too daunting, so instead I chose to spend time with his fictitious counterpart. I started writing my first novel, an autobiographical work that recounted my first year in the States with one crucial deviation. In it, the father character is the antithesis of my own, an open-armed pal of a dad who laughs and cries at the drop of a hat.

My father passed away before I finished the book, but if he were still around, I would thank him. Because in his own way, he taught me to use my imagination, to unravel the mysteries of my life through the written word.  Without him, my novel wouldn’t exist.