FRIENDS OF KOREA Korea found me

By Bruce Fulton

• Published Nov 6, 2026 6:00 PM KST

I got the call in the summer of 1977, after applying to the U.S. Peace Corps to serve overseas as a volunteer.

The application form allowed us to cite three countries in which we thought we might like to serve. I listed Nepal, Kenya and (a throwaway choice for fun in the sun) the Caribbean.

Peace Corps headquarters told me that no openings were available in those places; would Afghanistan do instead? I hit my mental pause button, went camping for a weekend and checked back in with Peace Corps HQ. Afghanistan was no longer available; how about Korea?

Thinking it was now or never, I took the plunge. Apart from the TV series “M*A*S*H” and the thought that my favorite baseball player, Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox, had flown several combat missions during the 1950-53 Korean War, I knew virtually nothing about Korea. The only image of the country I could recall was the elation of the Korean women’s volleyball team after they defeated the Japanese women in the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.

And so it was that I packed a backpack and a duffel bag, and hopped on a flight to San Francisco. There I met the other members of my K-44 Peace Corps group. After a weekend of medical checkups and cultural pointers from Peace Corps Korea staff, we were treated to a traditional meal of soup and rice and fixings galore at a Korean restaurant in Oakland. I feasted my eyes on the array of colorful side dishes and told myself, If I’m going to eat like this every day in Korea, I’m going to be a very happy man. And I was.

During our 10-week preservice training program in the city of Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, we each enjoyed a home stay. My hosts ran a Korean restaurant, where I had breakfast and dinner seven days a week. My instant affinity with Korean food was a true blessing. That fact was impressed upon me by the fate of the volunteer with whom I exchanged introductions during a community-building exercise early in our training program. An incredibly cheerful person, she returned to America only seven weeks into training. I was told later that she was never able to adjust to Korean food.

At the end of our training program, we had a choice to make before we were unleashed upon our host nation: we could serve in a large city, a smaller city or the countryside. Telling myself I was a country boy at heart, I elected the countryside and in April 1978 was taken in by a family in a Western-style home in Janggye Village in what is now Jangsu County in North Jeolla Province. They treated me like one of the family, seating me with the father and two sons during mealtime, while the mother and two daughters occupied a separate meal table.

Our K-44 group served as English teachers, and for Year 1 most of us were assigned to a middle school where we would teach in tandem with a Korean English teacher and thereby accustom ourselves to the Korean educational system. I had the good fortune to be assigned a teacher whom I was later told was considered the best English teacher in all of North Jeolla Province. The second time he and I met, he astounded me by saying the two of us were lifetime friends. Years later I came to realize that “we” could also be understood as Korea and me.

So much did I enjoy my life at Changgye Middle School, taking my morning jog around the middle school playfield and then a brisk cold shower at home, that I wished to remain there in 1979, my second year of service. But instead I was found by Seoul National University, where I replaced two volunteers from a previous group, one in the College of Humanities and the other in the College of Education. The office to which I was assigned was in a building occupied primarily by professors in the various departments of foreign languages and literature.

Next door to me was Chang Wang-rok, a professor of English language literature with a strong interest in American authors such as Henry Miller and John Updike. Chang had just translated a novel by Hwang Sunwǒn and asked me to proofread his work. I was happy to do so, for the only 9-to-5 job I have ever worked, in the College Book Editorial-Production Department of Prentice-Hall, Inc., had trained me in copy editing and proofreading.

The next thing I knew, the author himself arrived at Chang’s office and presented me with a copy of a selection of his short stories translated by Edward Poitras (who with his wife Genell, also a Korean-to-English literary translator, served in Korea for decades as Methodist missionaries).

I realized almost immediately that I was in possession of the works of a master of the short story. Thus began a relationship with the most accomplished writer of short fiction in modern Korea, a relationship that extended throughout Hwang’s lifetime and continues to this day.

I have come to believe that over the decades since my arrival in Korea in February 1978 I have been found, mentored and encouraged by a community comprising Koreans and Korea itself, augmented by an earlier generation of those located in transit. In short, I believe that Korea found me, and for that I shall forever be grateful.

Bruce Fulton volunteered for Peace Corps Korea K-44 from 1978 to 1979. He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous volumes of modern Korean fiction. Next year he plans to publish his first — and likely only — monograph, “Narrative Mastery in Korean Literature: The Short Fiction of Hwang Sunwǒn,” with Routledge.