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CHAPTERS 1-4
“Ha, this fucking military…”
A sigh slipped out on its own.
Seven years had already passed since I’d been rotting in the army.
At first it had been unbearable, but in the end I had become a pitiful man abandoned by the armed forces of the Republic of Korea.
“Sir, haven’t you had a bit too much to drink?”
“Hey, hey.
It’s fine.
I’ll be taking off the uniform soon anyway.
They even told me to boost your sales before I go.”
Even thinking about it again made my chest feel tight.
All because of that damned tuition.
When I first got into Korea University, I felt like I had the whole world.
I thought the saying about a dragon rising from a small stream existed just for me.
But that joy didn’t last long.
The moment I saw the admission guide and the tuition I had to pay, I could do nothing but clutch my head.
And then I heard the devil’s whisper.
“If you become a military scholarship student, you won’t end up in debt!”
If I had a time machine, I’d go back and beat the hell out of the version of me who thought that was a smart choice.
Back then, my situation was already difficult.
The mere thought that four years later I might be staring at an enormous negative balance was terrifying.
So now, while my friends had long since entered society, I was finishing seven years of military service.
“I was definitely waiting for my discharge day.
Why does it feel so damn awful?”
“Well, you went to a good school, sir.
Surely you’ll find a job?”
“Yeah.
My classmates are all saying it’s hell out there these days.
I even thought about reenlisting, but that fell through.”
They say unlucky people break their noses even when falling backward.
I couldn’t ignore injustice, couldn’t hold back when I should have, and refused to go along with everyone else.
So I got kicked out.
What am I going to do out there?
Should I have just pretended not to see anything and lived quietly?
The moment that thought crossed my mind, it felt like my breath was being choked off, and I stood up.
“I’ll go smoke for a bit.
Don’t clear the table.”
“Yes, sir.”
I wandered out of the Chungseong Hall and put a cigarette in my mouth.
The army really does teach you a lot.
Heavy drinking, smoking, getting chewed out, and all kinds of bullshit discipline, I learned it all here.
As I walked around aimlessly, I soon found myself near the military apartments beside the hall.
The military apartments, said to be a place only the chosen few could enter.
For someone like me, a ghost bound to the BOQ inside the base, that place felt like a dungeon where some decorated officer might suddenly appear and say, “Well, this works out nicely,” before throwing a forced quest at me.
But now that I was about to take off the uniform, I wasn’t afraid of that at all.
With alcohol in my system, I even felt an irrational confidence that I could blow nicotine smoke right into the face of a colonel or even a general.
In the parking lot, some older kids were playing ball.
A small child was running toward me, squeaky shoes chirping loudly, with his mother far behind.
From the opposite side, a worn-out Retona was speeding toward us.
As I watched this peaceful scene and lit my cigarette,
“Fuck!”
Something was wrong with the Retona.
In that split second, I threw away the cigarette before I even thought and ran toward the child.
“Car!
Stop the car!”
Screeeech!
“Ugh…”
What?
Suddenly my body wouldn’t move.
A terrible dizziness and weakness filled me.
My head spun, and I collapsed forward,
Then, with a horrific impact, a dark sky suddenly spread before my eyes.
Ah.
I got hit by the car.
The child I had thrown away was crying.
The Retona that hit me had crashed into a wall for some reason.
And my consciousness began to fade.
That was the end of my life.
Fuck.
Would they at least count this as dying in the line of duty?
Probably not.
The thought made everything feel unbearably unfair.
If I was going to die like this, then why had I lived such a straight and proper life?
If only I had climbed higher,
If only I had reached the very top, then at least it wouldn’t feel so unjust.
That was the last thought of my life.
The Dawn of the 20th Century
During night duty, there was really nothing to do.
And when it came to killing time, nothing beat reading novels.
Among the ones I read, weren’t there plenty where the protagonist got hit by a truck and transported to another world, possessed someone, or returned to the past?
But I never imagined it would happen to me.
When I opened my eyes after dying, I found myself in the past over a hundred years ago, living as a completely different person.
Eugene Kim.
Born in 1893.
That was the starting point of my second life.
My parents had left the Korean Peninsula and crossed the Pacific, determined to do something for their homeland, which flickered like a candle in the wind.
My father had sold off all the family’s land and boarded a third-class passenger ship to San Francisco to study modern knowledge and contribute to Korea’s enlightenment.
My mother, after enduring countless hardships, had caught the attention of a missionary and come to the unfamiliar land of America.
Both of them had intended to learn and return home, but in a land that was endlessly cold to “yellow monkeys,” they became husband and wife.
And as a result, I was born.
I regained awareness of my past life when I was about five or six years old.
From then on, I worked relentlessly.
The land of freedom, America.
But in truth, it was a land for white people.
Being born as someone from a tiny, insignificant country in the East, less visible even than Black people, initially left me in despair.
And considering the era…
Knowing the future, what should I do to survive in a place where people of color weren’t even treated as human?
At first, I thought I’d use my knowledge of the future to make a fortune and become a tycoon like Carnegie or Rockefeller.
But the 20th century was far more ruthless than I had imagined.
“Hey!
Chink!”
“What’s your problem?
We’re all yellow monkeys anyway.”
“Monkeys?
You Koreans are the real monkeys!”
San Francisco was nothing like the “melting pot” Americans claimed it to be.
White people despised anyone who wasn’t white.
Black people stuck together, living lives where even breathing was painful.
Hispanics from Mexico were no better off, just not slaves, but still miserable.
And Asians…
Pathetic Asians were divided into Chinese, Japanese, and the very few Koreans, constantly fighting among themselves.
But what pissed me off the most were those Japanese bastards, acting arrogant despite being no different from the rest of us.
As Japan gained prestige after winning the Russo-Japanese War, those bastards became more and more insufferable, eventually convincing themselves they were “honorary whites.”
“Hey, Jap.”
“What is it, Chink?”
“Clench your teeth, asshole.”
“You think you’re hot shit just because you did well on a test?
Get him!”
As I grew older, my ambition of becoming an Asian tycoon leading the 20th century gradually faded.
No matter how I thought about it, the moment I built a successful business, the KKK or some gang would show up at my house and turn me and my family into a sieve.
Even Rockefeller himself faced constant threats, arson, and sabotage while building his oil empire.
Instead, another ambition filled my heart.
“Kill Japanese, kill japanese.
Kill more Japanese.”
T/N: had to censor above sentence, contains racial slurs .
Kill them, kill them, and kill even more.
It was a phrase that rolled off the tongue perfectly.
The reason those bastards acted like that…
Because Korea, the Korean Empire, had disappeared from this world.
News from the homeland that Koreans had finally fallen into slavery made even those bastards go wild.
Now, I had no choice but to be called a “Japanese American.”
Fine.
I accept it.
Just wait thirty years.
Thirty years later, Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War would come.
So I changed my goal.
I would enlist in the U.S.
military.
I would rise by offering those bastards as sacrifices to the Pacific.
They say Asians can’t succeed in American society?
Don’t make me laugh.
As long as I know the future, I will succeed no matter what.
This was the best choice, for myself and for my pitiful homeland.
And after all, I had been an officer.
Across a hundred years, I was ready to put on that damn uniform again.
“So, you’re saying you want to become a soldier?”
“Yes.”
“You come home looking like a ragged beggar, and the first thing you say is that you want to be a soldier.
Very impressive.”
At my father’s clicking tongue, I found myself at a loss for words.
Sure, those bastards had ganged up on me three against one without any sense of honor, but I’d at least “fixed” each of their crooked teeth.
Didn’t that make me a decent dentist?
I tried to argue, but it didn’t work on him at all.
“You must have your own dreams.
But being a soldier is never an easy path.”
“I know.”
Too well, in fact.
“Your future can be blocked simply because of your skin color.
You understand that too, don’t you?”
“Yes.
I’m prepared for it.”
“If you said you were just enlisting as a soldier, I wouldn’t say this.
But becoming an officer is different.
You’d be confronting this white man’s world head-on.”
My poor father.
A man who gained a family in a distant land, but gave up his youthful ambitions and willingly carried the burden of a household.
This wasn’t just empty discouragement.
He was one of the first twenty Koreans to settle in San Francisco.
A man who had carved out a place to live through countless struggles.
That was why I could answer like this.
“It’s fine.
Whose son do you think I am?”
More than ten years had already passed since I fell into this world I had only known through books and movies.
And I had watched, right beside him, how desperately my father had fought.
Having grown up watching someone who started with nothing, there was no way I would shrink back when I had the absurd advantage of future knowledge.
“That’s right.
If you’re my son, that’s how you should be.
I had a feeling you’d want to become an officer, so I’ve already made some preparations.”
“Preparations…?”
“Yes.
If you want to become an officer in the United States, you have to attend a military academy, don’t you?
You can’t just walk in.
Go change your clothes.
We have somewhere to go.”
Without fully understanding, I changed my clothes and followed my father.
The place my father took me was a shabby office on the outskirts of the city.
[Korean National Association]
The moment I was about to step inside, I hesitated at the sign that told me where I was.
“Your admission will inevitably become a political and social issue.
So we’ll have to use everything we can and fight for it.
Don’t you agree?”
As if he knew what I was thinking, my father said that to me.
“Greetings, sir!”
“It’s been a while.”
Everyone inside greeted my father at once, and he began chatting with them, shaking hands and exchanging casual conversation.
After quite some time,
“Eugene, greet them.”
“Hello, my name is Eugene Kim.”
“Tall and handsome, truly a fine young man of Korea.
You’re blessed, sir.”
“You think saying that will make me donate more money?
Hmph…”
Even as he said that, the smile never left his face.
“This young man here is Park Yong-man, also known as U-sung.
He probably thinks similarly to you.
He’s busy trying to establish military schools and youth training programs.”
“Haha!
Of course.
The country has fallen, so we must build strength.”
Then he introduced someone else who looked oddly familiar.
“This is Rhee Syngman, Doctor Rhee, who earned his PhD at Princeton.”
Rhee Syngman.
Park Yong-man was also a prominent independence activist, but compared to Rhee, who would later leave a major mark on Korean modern history, his name carried a different weight.
“My name is Eugene Kim.
I look forward to working with you.”
“I hear you intend to enter a military academy.
It’s admirable, a great dream… but may I ask your reason?”
As soon as Rhee asked directly, all eyes in the room turned toward me.
“Boy, why are you hesitating?
Just speak honestly,” my father said, patting my shoulder.
But I couldn’t do that.
Rhee Syngman.
Leaving Park Yong-man aside, Rhee was clearly the type to coldly calculate gains and losses.
When Jang In-hwan and Jeon Myeong-un assassinated the pro-Japanese Stevens, he even refused to defend them, citing his Christian beliefs.
Still, if I wanted support from the Korean community to enter the academy, Rhee was probably the one who could help the most right now.
Which meant I had to say something that would appeal to him.
“The Korean Empire has fallen.”
“…”
The atmosphere sank instantly.
“My blood is Korean, but under the laws of the United States, I am an American citizen.
That is a weapon that only I possess among those gathered here.”
“So you plan to prove your loyalty by shedding blood as an American?” Park Yong-man asked sharply.
“The point is that as an American citizen, I have the right to speak about how this democratic country should act.”
“Go on.”
“Of course, someone like me, a ‘yellow monkey’, won’t be heard by those in Washington.
For my voice to reach them… I would at least need to become an enormously wealthy man living in Manhattan.”
“Hah!
So a young man with nothing chooses the military as the easiest path to success?
Bold… but thoughtful.”
Park Yong-man nodded.