My First Journeys to America (1982–1984)
Chicago, Illinois · Hopewell and Princeton, New Jersey
Before I ever decided to leave Korea, America came to find me. During my years at Gold Star Semiconductor, the company sent me twice to the United States for technical training — first to Chicago in 1982, and then to New Jersey in 1984. Each visit lasted two to three weeks. They were the first journeys I had ever taken outside my own country, and they would change the course of my life.
Gold Star’s technology partners in those years were AT&T and Electric — two of the most storied names in American industry — and it was through that relationship that I was sent abroad. Across the two trips I visited AT&T’s offices, toured Western Electric’s factories, and even walked through a Fairchild Semiconductor plant. For a young engineer who had learned his trade in Seoul, where a single shared computer served an entire department, it was like stepping into the future.
AT&T and Western Electric — Gold Star’s American partners, and the doorway through which I first saw the United States
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1982 & 1984 |
Technical
Training Visits · AT&T · Western Electric · Fairchild Semiconductor ·
Chicago & New Jersey |
I was, quite simply, astonished. Everything about these places — the scale of the operations, the cleanliness and order of the facilities, the sheer abundance of equipment — stood in stunning contrast to what I had known in Seoul at that time. I had never imagined that working environments like these could exist.
The training facilities and the teaching staff impressed me most of all. They were wonderful beyond anything I could have pictured beforehand — patient, expert, and equipped with resources that seemed almost limitless. I absorbed everything I could, knowing I might never see their like again.
Between sessions, I walked the grounds of places that felt almost mythical to me. I wandered through AT&T Bell Laboratories’ training center in Hopewell, New Jersey; visited the Educational Testing Service campus, home of the TOEFL examination; and strolled across the grounds of Princeton University. Each of them left me a little breathless. To a visitor from Seoul, they were not merely buildings — they were proof that another kind of life was possible.
Even the travel itself was a revelation. We toured distant factories by airplane, hopping across vast stretches of the country as casually as I might once have crossed Seoul by bus. The sheer size of America was its own kind of shock — a big country seen through the eyes of someone from a small one.
Factory tours by airplane across a vast country — for a young man from a small one, the scale of America was a revelation in itself
I was in the middle of my twenties, and the whole experience felt like a dream. It planted something in me that would not let go: the conviction that I had to find a way back — not as a visitor this time, but as a student.
It was, by every measure, an impossible dream, and pursuing it would mean an adventure I could scarcely afford. Yet the hardest part was neither the distance nor the money. It was telling my parents. When at last I gathered the courage to share my wish to study in America, my father listened quietly and simply said, “Sure, sure, of course” — or something close to that. There was no hesitation and no lecture, only a father’s quiet blessing. I did not yet understand what that blessing would cost him and my mother. Their sacrifice is the reason I ever reached America at all, and it is to them that this book is dedicated.
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