By Jason Lim

Although our family left Korea to begin a new life in America over 30 years ago, I never realized that my North Korea born father was an American patriot until 9/11.

My father was always the epitome of the traditional silent type, never raising his voice with his family yet guiding his children by how diligently he worked everyday as the owner/operator of a tiny dry cleaning store in Yonkers, a blue collar suburb of New York City.

He would leave at six in the morning and come back at eight at night, covered with the dirt and smell of cleaning other people's dirty laundry.

Even in the face of some unexpected business or family crisis, my father would be silent, offering no excuses and exhibiting no emotions. The next morning, my father would go off to work as usual, facing mounds of dirty clothes.

My father rarely talked about how he was raised in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. He never mentioned that he was accepted as a full scholarship student to Moscow University Medical School when the Korean War began and erased that option.

He never talked about escaping to South Korea by himself when he was only sixteen. He still doesn't know what happened to his mother and baby sister; consequently, we don't have any relatives on our father's side.

He never talked about fighting in the Korean War when he was only seventeen. When my brother and I were little, he did let us play with an elongated scar stretched across his chest from a North Korean bullet.

All these details we got in rare bits and pieces from our mom, who isn't exactly voluble either.

I never even realized my father spoke six languages _ Korean, English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian _ until I was in college. And here I was all smug to speak Korean, English, and some Spanish.

This was the father I knew, silent, hardworking, and very Korean. Until he called me a few months after 9/11 and told me to come home. He told me that he wanted to talk with me, for the first time in memory!

When I arrived, my father asked me for a favor for the first time in my life. He asked me to quit my job and work for the U.S. government in any capacity that they would take me. It would mean that I would have to go back to school and get a master's degree.

My initial reaction was to dismiss it as ridiculous. After all, I was the chief of staff for the founder of an international consulting firm and was the fastest rising executive in the history of the firm with a guaranteed, financially secure future.

This was the American dream that my parents had sacrificed for all their lives. And he wanted me to go back to school and apply to become a government bureaucrat.

Like any other American, I was deeply affected by 9/11. Three students from my high school were actually killed in the attack. But this was out of the question. I couldn't give up what I had worked so hard for.

Then he said something that stopped my breath. He said, ``Please." My father, who, along with my mother, had slaved in a stifling drycleaners for more than 20 years for his children, felt the need to say, ``Please" to his own son.

He then explained to me about gratitude. His gratitude to America for allowing a onetime North Korean orphan to take care of his family and send his sons to the best schools in the world.

His sense of thankfulness at being granted the freedom and privilege of making his life worthwhile for his family. He said that real patriotism came from acting on your sense of gratitude for your country, not just talking about it.

Having one of his sons contribute to the protection of America was his only way to pay back for what he had received. I hadn't known my father was such an eloquent man.

So, this past June, I began my new life as a government bureaucrat, working in the field of homeland security. My father is quietly ecstatic, and he plans to finally retire. He is 75 years old. And he is a Korean American patriot.

Jason Lim is a fellow at Harvard Korea Institute researching Asian leadership models. He can be reached at jasonlim@post.harvard.edu.