Hamburger Money

From second to sixth grade, I left my house every other Saturday around 9 AM to visit my grandparents. The trip was an hour-long subway ride followed by a 30-minute walk. By the time I got there, Grandpa would always be watching Major League Baseball, live from the US where it was still Friday evening. His eyes glued to the screen and the commentators’ voices blaring, he would take a while to realize I was there. When he finally spotted me waving from across the living room, a big grin would spread across his face.

Grandma would fix us a quick lunch, and then we would sit around and chat. After a while, Grandma would clear her throat and pull out a white envelope from her apron. And then Grandpa would deliver the exact same speech: “Do you know why American college students can study until 3 AM? It’s because they eat hamburgers at midnight. I am giving you this money so that you can have as many hamburgers as you want so that you can work hard, just like them. Don’t spend it on anything else!” Inside the envelope was usually 100,000 won—enough for more than ten Whopper meals.

To understand Grandpa’s “hamburger theory,” one has to understand his life journey first. Grandpa was born into a poor family in 1926 in the northeastern part of Korea. From an early age, he understood that studying was his only ticket out. After getting into the most prestigious university in Seoul, he moved his entire family with him, away from the Communists who were taking over the North after Korea’s independence from Japan in 1945. To support his family, he worked a morning shift at a newspaper and then ran across town to attend his afternoon classes. He was one exam away from becoming a diplomat when the Korean War broke out in 1950. By the time his five years of military service ended, he had met my grandma, married her, and taken a job teaching English at a local elementary school to support them.

Just when his path seemed set, an old friend at his alma mater reached out. With the streets still full of orphans, widows, and veterans with disabilities, the government had asked the university to build a social work department from scratch. The plan was to send people to the US for graduate training and bring them back as instructors. So in 1965, Grandpa left behind his wife and two baby boys and set foot in Iowa City, Iowa.

He had not sat in a college classroom for a decade, and he was the only international student and one of two minority students in University of Iowa’s social work department. His professors worried that he was not speaking up in class and some even considered failing him. Money was always tight. One day, he went grocery shopping and found an aisle full of cheap canned meat. Overjoyed, he grabbed a few cans and rushed home. As he started cooking, his roommate walked in and asked why he was heating up dog food. “Why, I got it as a surprise for your dog!” he shot back.

Walking back from the library late at night, he would look through the windows of the brightly lit diners and watch American students chatting and laughing over big, juicy hamburgers. And so began his lifelong faith in the power of hamburgers.

For somebody who survived Japanese colonial rule, extreme poverty, and an all-out war, studying a completely new discipline in a foreign language thousands of miles away from home was just one more item to cross off his list. He returned home after earning his master’s degree (his request to remain in the United States for a PhD was denied) and started his assistant professorship at his alma mater later that year. Every morning for the next 24 years, he put on his old grey suit, donned his favorite ivy cap, and marched to class. His last challenge took place when the university required all faculty to hold doctorates, forcing Grandpa to defend his dissertation in his late fifties before a committee of junior professors who held American PhDs, all of whom he had taught as undergraduates. He later told me that, of everything he had endured, nothing had frightened him as much as that defense. He finally earned his PhD at 57 and then retired eight years later in 1990.

By the time I entered middle school, I was too busy with schoolwork to make the weekend trips to see Grandpa. Still, he found ways to slip me some “hamburger money” whenever he could. As the years went on, the envelope got thicker—cram schools, study-abroad programs, and finally, full tuition at a private university in New England. By then, Grandpa had become quite wealthy, though you would never have guessed it from the jacket he had worn for thirty years. I sat quietly as he traced the numerous digits on the tuition invoice with his finger, one by one. Still, when it came to my education, he never hesitated.

When I returned home from college every summer and handed him a very unimpressive transcript, he never showed concern. He supported me when I told him I wanted to chase his original dream of becoming a diplomat, and later when I changed my mind during military service and decided to enroll in a political science master’s program in Korea. His reaction was always the same: “Do you need more hamburger money?”

The only time he raised his voice was when I told him I wanted to apply for a second master’s program in the US. The first one was not going well, and I was worried that no PhD program in the US would want me. His face turned red, and he looked me straight in the eye and yelled that American schools would be making a huge mistake not to choose me. This was only months after he had fallen down the stairs at home, an injury he would never recover from.

He was right. I got into graduate school, got married that spring, and then began my PhD in the US later that August. Meanwhile, his health continued to deteriorate. When I visited him after my first year of coursework, he had grown noticeably quiet and thin. I watched my parents feed him, push him around in a wheelchair, and help him use the bathroom—something his pride would have never allowed.

On the last day of my visit, he gestured for me to sit beside him and asked—gasping after every word he managed to utter—whether I had enough money to study. I reminded him that I was on a full scholarship that even came with a monthly stipend.

He fell silent for a while, then asked the same question again.

When he asked a third time, I realized that this would be our final conversation. It killed me how even then, while dementia was taking everything away from him, all he wanted to know was whether I needed more hamburger money. I turned away and wiped the tears from my face as I assured him one last time that I didn’t need any more money from him.

Today, August 16th, 2026, marks five years since Grandpa passed away. Whenever I felt like giving up the PhD during those five years—and there have been a great many of those moments—I thought of the man who ran across town to attend class every day, drenched in sweat; who left his job and his family to answer his country’s call; and who, in his late fifties, was tested by the very students he had once taught. And then I remember that my worst day as a PhD student would have been everything he could have possibly asked for.

I should have thought twice before taking all that hamburger money.