Therese Park

On Aug. 11, 2011, I attended a reception at the Truman Library honoring two local students — Riya Mehta of Pembroke High School and Sophia Mauro of Barstow School — who finished in the top five at the 2011 National History Day Competition in June.

According to a news report, about 700,000 students and 40,000 teachers from all 50 states participated in History Day programs, and only about 2,000 winners were selected to compete at the national level.

Sophia won fifth prize for her one-person play, “The Integration of Kansas City’s Black and White Hospitals.”

Speaking in the voices of several white doctors involved in decision making at the time, Sophia took the audience with her to 1957 in Kansas City, when the city operated two public hospitals, General Hospital No. 1 for whites and General Hospital No. 2 for African-Americans, and walked with them until the two hospitals merged into No-Color Hospital in 1962.

Sophia engaged her audience with confidence, knowledge of her topic, and most importantly, deep compassion for those mistreated by whites due to their skin color at the time white doctors dominated the medical field.

Riya won third place with her presentation “The Forgotten War: A Diplomatic Failure.”

As a Korean who lived through the war as a child, I was intrigued by her choice of topic and her understanding of the Korean War — how and when the country was divided, why four million lives from both sides were lost during a 3-year-long war that didn’t melt down the Iron Wall called the 38th Parallel, and how the war ended with the truce signed by only Americans and Chinese, without the Korean leaders’ signatures.

Riya ended her performance with North Korea’s brutal attack of the South on Nov. 23, 2010, emphasizing that the two Koreas are still enemies.

Coming home, I made a few notes in my head. Students like Riya and Sophia will someday make their own history in America, but I won’t be there to tell people that I watched their performances at the Truman Library one August evening in 2011 or to personally congratulate them. But by sharing my memories of the time I was their age, maybe I can tell them how fortunate they are compared to the youngsters of the Third World in the earlier generation.

During the fall semester in 1953, shortly after the war ended on July 27, all school kids were put to physical labor under the motto “The future of Korea is in your hands!” One of the projects we middle school kids participated in was planting trees on our bold mountains that had been robbed of mature trees during the 35 years of Japan’s colonial rule — 1910 to 1945. Our tyrants shamelessly chopped down trees from our mountains and hillsides and shipped them to Japan or Manchuria or the Pacific to build battle ships, Zero Fighters, and kamikaze planes.

We planted for weeks that fall and in spring, we went back to the hillsides to plant more, until our hands blistered and our backs ached. Then came another project, more difficult than planting trees.

In 1954, our school was still occupied by the South Korean army that had used our three-story stone building as a make-shift hospital during the war, but they graciously let us use their crudely built army huts in the school property as classrooms. Still, we needed a place large enough for weekly assembly of 500 students.

Most seventh graders were assigned to carry dirt from the mountains to our campus, each 10 trips a day, while older students worked with volunteers and parents, mixing concrete, nailing and even installing roof tiles. I remember how laborious it was to carry buckets filled with dirt all day! But our teachers, who didn’t do any labor except marking the charts they were holding, constantly reminded us that our sweat and blisters would become the solid foundation on which our country would stand someday.

That “someday” came sooner than we had thought. Men and women of my generation are the ones who helped our ailing motherland get on her feet and walk on the path of steady progress, and today, South Korea boasts her status as the United States’ seventh-largest trading partner and the 15th-largest economy in the world.

While I am proud of Riya and Sophia, I respect their teachers, who showed them the path to excellence.