12.16.2021.1

Eight years ago, my younger brother Harold had his portrait hung at Yale Law School in commemoration of his term as dean there. Because of work responsibilities I missed the portrait celebration, and so I decided to write what I would have said had I been there. Last December, when I was trying to write something for Ha’s sixty-sixth birthday, I rediscovered this piece, and together we adapted it and present it here.                  

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HAROLD HONGJU KOH: A BROTHER’S TRIBUTE

In a year and a half, my brother Harold will turn sixty years old, and it will be time to celebrate his Hwegap, the first cycle of his life on earth.  However, it seems clear to me that that’s exactly what you all are doing here tonight (after all, you’re hanging his number from the rafters of Yale Law School!!), so, never wanting to be left out, I decided to write this tribute to my brother Ha.  When Ha’s actual Hwegap does come, we can all write very brief essays: “Ibid.”

IT’S ALL ABOUT ME…

Whenever I write something like this, my wife Carol says the same thing: “This isn’t about (person X), it’s about YOU!”  I usually take this as a terminal criticism, and abandon the project.  This has happened any number of times in the last thirty years or so. (This is known in some circles as “chronic writer’s block…)  Well, the truth is, it is about me.  But it is also about my brother Ha, for in some ways we are inseparable.  When we were kids he strived to measure up to me, and as adults I often measure my accomplishments by his.  But, most importantly, we have grown from being older and younger brother to being colleagues, confidantes, and friends.  He was my best man in 1985, and in important ways he is my best man still.                

THE RE-NAMER

First of all, some terminology.  One of Ha’s most important contributions to our family was that he was the “re-namer.”  Thus, we went from the relatively normal names of Howard, Edward, and Harold to the ridiculous names of Howboob, Hebron, and Habeb.  Actually, I was the first to get my new name.  We were all watching an episode of the Twilight Zone where (unusually) they played a foreign adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”  Toward the end of the film, a delirious man stumbles down a dirt road calling “Hebby, Hebby!”, presumably a reference to his wife in some foreign language.  Well we all started saying “Hebby, Hebby!” to each other, and then the 10 year-old Ha (the same one who wrote that Eddie Stanky letter) somehow made the connection to “Eddie” and I became “Hebby”.  The finishing touch came at Camp Winni, where Reverend Avery Manchester made a statement in one of his handouts that Jesus might just as well have been Herman from Hebronville.  Thus, “Hebron” was born. (It wasn’t too much of a jump to come up with “Howboob” and “Habeb.”)

If you think this was convoluted, let me tell you what he did with “Jeannie”.  At the time we lived next to a four year-old boy who was quite clingy to Jeannie.  Whenever he saw her, he would call “Jeannie, c’mere!” until it started to drive her nuts.  Ha came to the rescue by altering Jeannie’s name so that the kid could not pronounce it.  So he told him that Jeannie’s real name was “Jean-a-roonie”.  Unfortunately the kid was smarter than he looked, and he learned to say Jeanaroonie quite easily.  So Ha lengthened it even farther to “Jeanaroonie-barrel a nika!” and told the kid that if he wanted Jeannie to come over he would have to say “Jeanarooniebarrelanika c’mere!”  That was too much even for this persistent little kid, and he gave up and went inside.

Actually, we didn’t call Jeannie by any of these names.  We used another Habeb concoction and called her simply “Beanhead.”

POLIO

Early on, Ha (short for Habeb of course) was quite concerned with his right leg, which had been affected by the polio which had attacked his spinal cord when he was an infant.  He was given a cumbersome metal brace to wear, and in order to avoid muscle contractures he was given passive stretching exercises for his calf for which he needed a helper.  Our dad became the person who twice a day for over an hour systematically stretched Harold’s calf muscles.  In those days (years) Dad was a pusher and a “yeller”, someone who might nowadays be called a “Tiger Dad”.  However, interspersed with Dad’s seemingly constant shouting,  he had moments of ease and even euphoria, usually sitting in his big chair in the living room reading the New York Times, and yelling “Guys!  I’m PROUD of you!” With Ha and his leg exercises, this nurturing side came out even more, and I think Ha grew up the stronger for it.

I have vivid memories of our childhood, although sometimes jumbled in time.  We had just moved into a rented house on West Rock Ave. in Westville.  At the then-Grace New Haven Hospital, Harold underwent an operation to staple the growth plate in his good leg, to allow his shortened leg to “catch up” to the good one, thereby curing his pronounced limp.  The morning of his surgery, his nurse gave him the “premedication”, a cocktail of demerol and scopolamine given as a shot about an hour before the operation.  Kids often were asleep from this combination on arrival to the operating suite.  As Ha was getting woozy, an orderly came in with a shaving kit, looked at Ha’s two legs, and began lathering up and shaving the smaller right leg.  In a growing haze, Ha said “Wrong leg!”  The orderly stopped and said “What?”  “Look at the chart!  You’re shaving the wrong leg!”  And then he drifted off into a narcotic sleep.  Even at the age of eight, Ha was able to protect himself from the vagaries of the adult world.

 THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS

 After the operation he came home in a full-leg plaster cast, which I found very upsetting.  Those were the days of the Cuban missile crisis, and my anxiety was high.  Every day at noon the Civil Defense siren would sound, and we would all climb under our desks to protect ourselves from a nuclear attack.  Meanwhile at home, our belongings were largely still in corrugated cardboard boxes on the bare wooden floors of our temporary home; this also gave me an unsettled feeling.  I feared what would happen in case of a missile attack, and I was especially fearful that Harold, hampered by his cast, would not be able to run away fast enough from the bomb blast.  And I was not strong enough to carry him!  I remember kneeling by his bedside at night praying to God to keep him safe.

 We lived on a little block that had a playground embedded in the middle of it.  Together with the neighborhood kids, we played stickball with a broomstick and a tennis ball, and kickball with a red rubber ball salvaged from our elementary school.  Within a few days of coming home Ha was using his cast to kick the red rubber ball further than any other kid in the neighborhood!  Perhaps God was answering my prayers…

THE COLUMBIA RECORD CLUB

When Carolyn came into our lives at the age of fourteen, she learned English in about two weeks and then took charge of a family of four brothers and a sister.  Despite barely reaching four foot eight, she was a tough taskmaster.  However, she did want to Americanize herself as much as possible, and so she enrolled in the Columbia Record Club, where you could buy twelve records for only one penny! (As long as you bought two records a year after that for exorbitant prices.)  She started off auspiciously with the Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver, then branched out to Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage… and Bookends.  She also got the Four Lads’ greatest hits, which included a cover of Jimmy Dean’s immortal song “Big John”.  All of these were rounded out by Peter, Paul, and Mary’s In the Wind, which included the song “Stewball”.

Years later, when impromptu entertainment was needed for Carolyn and Woong Kil’s wedding reception at the South Seas Polynesian restaurant, Howie, Harold, Jeannie, Richie, and I sang “Stewball” without rehearsal of any kind (we all knew it from the record).  The opening lyrics were “Oh Stewball was a racehorse and I wish he were mine, he never drank water, he only drank wine…”  In order to explain why we were singing a song about a horse who drank wine, the emcee Dr. Bob LaCamera introduced it as a “good old-fashioned nonsense song, and don’t even listen to the words!” For some reason (perhaps just being children), we were mortified.

DEBATING

When we were in school together at Hopkins, we formed a debating team.  Ha argued first negative, and I was the mop-up person, second negative.  The proposal was “Resolved: that Congress should establish uniform regulations to control criminal investigation procedures.”  Our very first debate was against the powerhouse Boston Latin, who came out with a gambit that we had not even heard of: the “trick case”, in this case gun control, an argument which no right-minded person could stand against. (This was in the decade of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King…)  They mopped up the floor with us.

After that inauspicious start, we regrouped and went on a tear.  We formulated strategies while walking to and from school, carrying our heavy non-ergonomic bookbags over our shoulders while trying different versions of our introductory passages out on one another. (“Rocky” training music here…) Our act became finely honed.  We did background research in the library (no Internet back then…) about cases like  Mapp vs. Ohio and Miranda vs. Arizona, and distilled them into magical 5×7 file cards which we indexed into an intimidating gray metal file drawer, which Harold carried from debate to debate.  Mr. Howie Preston, our team adviser, looked on proudly as we grew into a formidable team.  I developed a technique for showing point for point that the affirmative team had not met its burden of proof, which required not a shred of evidence on my part.  Ha used a more conventional strategy: facts.  He rebutted every fact that the first affirmative presented with an equal and countervailing fact.  Better yet, he often showed that that speaker’s quotes were taken out of context by producing and reading the full quote.  At the end-of-season Southern New England tournament, we beat the storied team of Brouder and Donlon from Fairfield Prep.  We had arrived.

At that point, though, our unbeaten streak was broken by a team made up of two girls from Branford High School.  Ha was more than man enough to handle Linda Donofrio at first affirmative, but I was too stunned by their closer, Gail Hershatter, to put together a cogent finishing argument.  We were edged out by a point.

Despite that loss, we still finished in the top spot overall, and Linda and Gail, who later became a close friend, applauded our accomplishment.  On the way home Mr. Preston drove through Burger King, where I got a Whopper meal and a large strawberry shake, which I consumed in three gulps.  When we got home, Ha ran across the front lawn holding up our winning trophy shouting “We won! We won!”  I, on the other hand, was a little overstimulated and ended up spraying my colorful shake all over that same lawn.

Now, when I hear that Ha has made an argument in front of the US Supreme Court, or the World Court at the Hague, or some other such place, I wonder if these experiences back at Hopkins had any part in shaping his debating skills.  To the extent that they did, I humbly take full credit.

MUNIENTOS

 Despite being high achievers, all three of us were procrastinators.  We managed to keep up with our numerous daily assignments, but always kept “English themes” and term papers till the last minute.  In the meantime, we became addicted to Marvel Comics, which we cleverly hid in the top drawers of our desks so we could simply lean back in our chairs and read them, and come to an upright position when we heard Dad coming up the stairs.

When the deadlines inevitably came, we had a clever solution: munientos (another Habeb-inspired term).  Two or three of us would stay up well into the night.  After about an hour and a half, Mom, who was always up very late, would come up the stairs with a tray of tea and cookies, and we would take a twenty-minute break with her.  After she left, we would work for another half-hour or so, and then one of us (usually Ha) would get very sleepy, and say to the other(s) “Hey, can you give me five munientos? (a pseudo-Hispanic bastardization of “minutes”) We would let him sleep for about ten minutes, after which he would say groggily “Can you just give me five more munientos?”  We would oblige, after which we would be quite sleepy ourselves. “Ha, why don’t you give us fifteen munientos?”  We would go to sleep, and after about five minutes Ha would fall asleep too, and we would all sleep until we were awakened by the rays of the morning sun.  In a total panic, we would finish our papers in about ten minutes, dress, and race off to school. With few exceptions, we got A’s on these papers, mainly because of the “teacher psych” strategy, meaning that we would produce excellent papers at the beginning of the year, then slack off imperceptibly as the year went on.  Using these ingenious methods we grew the legend of the “Koh dynasty”. 

THE THUNDERING THIRDS

Howie and I played several junior varsity and varsity sports at Hopkins, including soccer and tennis.  (I had a brief painful encounter with wrestling, which I will not go into here…)  We were not standouts by any means, but we were able to stay in the middle of the pack.  Ha was hampered at first by his right leg, which had much smaller calf muscles than his left.  Try as he might, he just didn’t have the speed to make the JV.  At that point, something great came along.  Our spirited history teacher, Mr. Karl Crawford, became the coach of the Thirds, historically the leftovers after the varsity (1) and JV (2).  He decided to make the Thirds into a real team, complete with team pride, cheerleaders, and a bright green tee-shirt displaying a colorful team logo. The team name: the Thundering Thirds!  Thirds-mania took over Hopkins that fall, and Ha was the starting right fullback of the team.  What he lacked in speed he made up in smarts and determination.  To this day I can see him wading into a backfield scrum and clearing the ball high over the midfield line, using his right leg!  The Thundering Thirds racked up a winning season for the first time in Hopkins history, and became the darlings of the school.  And my brother again showed that there was not much that could slow him down…

HONG KONG

In the summer of 1970, following my graduation from Hopkins, Dad took me and Ha on a trip to East Asia.  We flew by way of California and Hawaii into Tokyo, then to Hong Kong.  At this point we were scheduled to fly Korean Airlines to Seoul, but when we arrived we were informed that we had not confirmed our reservation and were being bumped to a next-day flight.  Dad was unusually accepting of this decision, but high school junior Harold was livid, and went into overdrive gathering information and ammunition.  “Look” he said, pointing at the small print on the back of the ticket. “It says nothing about confirming your reservation!  You just have to register once!”  He looked over at the line of passengers boarding the plane.  “Look, there’s a big group carrying bags with the same decal!  It’s a tour group!  We’re being bumped to make room for a big tour group!”  He stormed back to the desk, and I saw him hitting the ticket and gesticulating toward the boarding group.  He came back to us with a well-dressed man wearing a KAL suit.  “I’m very sorry for the misunderstanding, sirs.  We unfortunately cannot get you onto this flight, but we can make arrangements for you to stay at our flagship luxury hotel, Ricky’s Hyatt House.”  And then the magic words: “It would of course be at our expense.”  We looked at each other and tried not to grin too broadly. “I guess that will have to do…”

That night turned out to be the most relaxing night of our whirlwind trip.  Dad had no appointments, meetings, or dinners planned, and the three of us were just “guys on the town”.  We decided to go to a movie.  The new American movie based on Arthur Hailey’s blockbuster “Airport” was playing in English with Chinese subtitles.  The theater had plush purple seats.  Harold and I were the only ones to laugh loudly at a few of the jokes, which we later realized did not translate well into Chinese.  For example, there was one scene on the airplane where an annoying passenger keeps bugging the stewardess for peanuts.  When the stewardess goes to the galley, she says to her colleague, “Nuts to the guy in 2B”.  The other stewardess answers “You said it, sister!”

After the movie as we ambled down the street, Dad characteristically several steps ahead of us, Ha leaned over and said to me “Do you think Dad was listening to the English or reading the Chinese characters?”  I responded indignantly.”Dad has been living in the United States for twenty years! Do you really think that it would be easier to read the Chinese than to listen to the English?” At the next corner we caught up to him and asked him, and he stopped to think. “You know guys, at first I was listening to English, but about halfway through I got tired!  And the Chinese characters just went SHOOOP! and came right into my eyes!”

THE NORELCO SHAVER

Three years ago I had a cardiac arrest, and was hospitalized for six harrowing weeks. I have written about that elsewhere in this space.

I have very few clear memories of this time. Most of the time I was in a light medically-induced Versed (midazolam) coma. But I do have one enduring memory.

I was in and out of delirium, trying to get out of bed despite being attached to multiple lines. I was ripping out my nasogastric N-G tube, my drains, and even my vascular access port for hemodialysis.

One morning I felt the area of my mustache and began to rip out small chunks of skin attached to short hairs. I remember being very pleased with myself, figuring out that I could do this instead of shaving.

I fell back to sleep. I was awoken by the sensation of someone stroking my stubble. When I opened my eyes I saw Ha’s face looking at mine with concern.

He stood up abruptly and left the room. About twenty minutes later he returned with a plastic bag. He took out a box containing a brand new Norelco shaver. He turned it on and gently shaved me.

“Hey Ed, don’t pick your skin anymore, okay? I’m leaving this for you.” He plugged it into its charger and placed it on my bedside table.

Harold Hongju Koh is a famous and important man. He has a crazy-busy life, working to change and heal the world. But for six weeks in the fall of 2018 he put all of his priorities on the back burner in order to heal his brother, me. I will never forget the sight of his loving face looking into mine that September morning.

I am proud to be his brother.

Edward Tongju Koh

May 9, 2021