Back to Jindo Furs. Suk-Hee apparently owned a fur, or at least a good replica, and she wore it to my one-person photo-show’s opening at the Pine Hill Roast Beef Restaurant and Gallery in early February 1987. She was the star attraction, because she looked particularly stunning in fur.

    However, in late 1986, as I’ve written, I worked a number of jobs. One was teaching English to the No.3 man in the Hyundai Group, H.T. Lee. That job was obtained for me by the man (I believe, it was B.J. Kim, who had earned a Ph.D. in economics from UW-Madison) who also got me a job for the Korea-Kuwait Bank. I lost the job teaching English to Mr. Lee, when I lost my job for the bank.

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    Teaching English to Mr. Lee consisted of sitting in a conference room each Noon, with him, his assistant, and one or two staffers, and speaking about American and Korean cultures in English.  One day we discussed movie stars, and we both agreed that Robert Deniro was one of the best actors in Hollywood. We also talked about cars and women, but nothing very unseemly.

    The woman who lost me my job with both those organizations was my then-wife. One day, a certain other Mr. Kim at the bank and I were discussing Suk-Hee’s ‘job’ at the clothing store. I was saying I really thought she owned that store, because no one else worked there apparently. When I phoned there, Suk-Hee always answered, if anyone did.

     Well, I asked Mr. Kim to phone Suk-Hee’s landlord (it was a big building she had her store in, with many other stores/stalls, as well, there). The landlord told Mr. Kim that Suk-Hee owned her own store, and that she had been paying her rent on-time for many years. That alone might not have gotten me in trouble, but the landlord apparently told Suk-Hee that Mr. Kim had phoned.

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     Suk-Hee phoned me and cursed very loudly at me. I then headed immediately for her store, at Namdaemun (South Gate area), but when I got there, her sister Chee-Sook, who had a store next to Suk-Hee’s, told me her sister had gone to the bank where I worked, to raise hell with ‘whoever the traitor was’.

      I phoned Mr. Kim, who said my wife was there, and was holding up business on two entire floors of the bank, with her tirade. Mr. Kim said I should go to a coffee-shop across the street from the bank and wait for him to phone. I did. When he phoned, it was agreed that he and Suk-Hee would meet me at a restaurant nearby, to ‘talk things over’.

     The three of us ate at the restaurant, then headed for a coffee-shop where I’d dated one of the waitress — Chong-A was her name. Suk-Hee got fired up about something and gave me hell, which Chong-A got a chuckle from. Then, my then-wife insisted on stopping at a police station, which we did, but they couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong, I guess, though Suk-Hee had her own ideas about that.

     As our taxi was dropping my wife and me at our apartment, Mr. Kim, who stayed in the taxi, told me, ‘Your wife is the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever met.’ That was great, because the next day, when I was officially given notice that I’d lost not one, but two jobs, due to my wife, B.J. Kim said, ‘Your wife is the biggest b—-h I’ve ever seen.’

     It was always a roller-coaster with Suk-Hee, but then it may be with a lot of wives these days, because women rule the roost in so many homes in America and Korea, that men are forced to do their bidding, or move out, which I eventually did with Suk-Hee.

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