In 1953, I lost everything in a rigged poker game in Mairi, Seoul. On the side of the street, I watched the thief, a Dr. Farci, walk off with my money and use it at the nearest whorehouse. He stayed there a good long time. When he left, a group of American Servicemen in an Army issued Jeep rolled off with him. They headed back to the war, and I was left to lick my wounds as a penniless hobo on the dirt streets. At the time, I didn’t know what to do. No one had ever taken me like that. I took up work for a little old lady who fed me dinner for skinning fish in the local market. Without her knowledge my bed was under the working table.

I cut the fish until I was sick of the guts, and then I kept on. On one particularly frustrating day, I saw Dr. Farci walking through the market about six months later. With the knife in hand, I followed him back through a set of streets, and a dark alley, to a whorehouse and waited outside. On his way out, he decided to get back to his fellows through that alley. On his way through, I called to him, greeted him, then gutted him like a fish.