I AM KOREAN AMERICAN

Own Words

I came to the US as a foreign student in May 1968 and retired from my long teaching career at the University of Seoul in August 2006. In between, I completed my Ph.D. coursework at Indiana University and taucht at several public universities in the US and worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense as an assistant for environmental quality. I married a Korean woman and became a father of two children. They grew up and are working in their professional fields. I still have a Korean accent. English is not yet my mother tongue. I am a Korean-American, living in the US and Korea, reading two different language daily newspapers every morning. I am a man of the East and West, and will be so, as long as I breathe.

Song of Myself: A Korean-American Life has just been published by Poetic Matrix Press in California. This is my memoir from my first landing in Seattle in May 1968 to today. In the Foreword by Ellen Olmstead, Olmostead states that “Choi rivals Walt Whitman in style and exceeds Whitman in scope.”