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But then Edward had enough of shipping and came home, and everything changed. He would never have insisted on Kay staying in the kitchen—he was both worldlier and not nearly cruel enough. The question was more, How would he fit in? Where was his place now? What would he do? You have to feel for Edward—he’d spent the better part of a decade toiling in one of the world’s most dangerous professions, and upon his return he found his home filled with strangers, his country in the midst of an industrial revolution (not to mention a brief but severe recession at the end of the 1970s), and his own children barely able to recognize him. As he looked for ways to establish himself, his marriage with Kay began to fray.

For all the confidence Kay had earned as a single parent, this struck surprising terror into her. As a woman in a male-dominated society, Kay could never shake the feeling that by stepping into a “man’s role” she was violating some natural law of the universe. “My mother is a very complicated person,” Gab says. “On one hand she’s a sort of feminist, believing women ought to be assertive and independent. For instance, when I was growing up she used to tell me that the sort of woman she admired was an ‘inteli,’ which comes from the English word ‘intellectual’ but in Korea means an educated, independent, career person. However, she also believes that women should cook, clean and raise kids, and anything different from that freaks her out. In her mind a woman should stay at home, because anything else will eventually break up the family. It’s unnatural, she thinks. And since she’s also very superstitious, these things really bother her.”

So when Edward came home and found himself uncharacteristically idle, Kay decided she would give up her own independence in order to restore the “proper” marital balance. She came up with a plan. “My mother knew my dad would never be happy in Korea,” Gab explained, “so she offered to move to the U.S., because that was a country he knew.” (During his time in the U.S.-sponsored engineering program, Edward had been stationed for a few months on the West Coast.) Of course, the fact that Korea as a whole was experiencing a fit of migukpyong—America fever—nudged her along as well. Twenty years earlier, there had been almost no Korean immigration to the States, but since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which ended the de facto policy of accepting only white immigrants, Korea had sent more émigrés here than any country except Mexico or the Philippines. Kay, who had never been outside Korea, had zero interest in America. She disliked the food, didn’t particularly care for the culture and had heard too many stories of Koreans in the United States who ended up working twice as hard for less money. (They used to say that at Kimpo Airport you could spot the immigrants coming home from America because they all looked like guh-ji—bums. Kay was also disturbed by the ubiquitous stories of immigrant parents being abandoned by their Americanized children.)

Approximately a million people of Korean ancestry now live in America, and the sheer size of the group is a factor contributing to its success. There are Korean radio stations, Korean newspapers and Korean business associations with considerable lobbying power in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Korean businesses tend to work with other Korean businesses and depend heavily on networks built around social organizations such as churches. However, Gab’s family always seemed to unconsciously avoid places with large Korean populations, starting out in Houston for a couple of years, then moving to rural Ohio, and finally in Staten Island (which at the time had fewer Korean residents than any other borough). This made the struggle of adapting to a new country even harder than it could have been. As Kay had feared, the family suffered a steep drop in its standard of living—everything they’d brought with them from Korea, all the proceeds from selling Kay’s businesses, went into founding a family-owned