I Watch the Moon Landing in Black and White

On a crowded room in 1969, and the trade I didn’t know I was making.

October 13, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung

So… in July of 1969 there were perhaps four television sets in our part of town, and one of them was ours.

On the night of the moon landing our living room filled up. Not with family; with the neighbourhood. Men I half knew and men I did not know at all came in and sat on our floor, shoulder to shoulder, and stayed for hours. The room was small. It was July in Korea. Every man in there was smoking, and a good number of them were passing gas without apology or embarrassment, because that is what a room full of men does when it has been sitting on a floor for three hours.

I was eleven years old, in grade four, and I had my eyes glued to the screen.

And I watched Neil Armstrong come down that ladder and put his foot on the moon, and I heard him say the thing about a small step and a giant leap, which I did not understand at all at the time, being eleven and Korean and not yet in possession of much English.

It was the largest thing that had ever happened. Every person in that room knew it. Nobody moved.

What I remember most vividly, though , more than the moon, more than Armstrong, is the smell of that room. Cigarettes and men and summer. Over fifty years later I can still put myself back on that floor.

And I remember one other thing.

I remember wishing I could see it in colour.

We had a black and white set, because that is what Korea had. The networks in North America had gone to full colour prime time by the mid-sixties. Korea did not broadcast in colour until 1980.

Korea was already manufacturing colour television sets during those years. For export. We were building them and shipping them out to people who would watch the world in colour, and we were watching the moon landing in grey.

I don’t say that bitterly. It was simply the arrangement. Poor countries make the thing; rich countries watch on it. Nobody explained it to me and nobody had to.

So the first seventeen years of my life happened entirely in black and white. Not metaphorically. Literally. Every image of the world that reached me: the news, the films, the soap operas, the moon, arrived without colour, and I assumed that was what the world looked like on a screen, because I had no evidence otherwise.

Then in 1975 I got on an airplane. Well then everything changed upside down.

The night before I left, I was watching Korean television. The programs then were mostly domestic melodramas, and they were unrelentingly grim, because they were reflecting a country that was unrelentingly hard. The one I remember involved a father working as a street porter, carrying other people’s luggage on his back for coins, who is struck by a bus partway through and left crippled, or possibly killed. I have forgotten which. The family suffers. That was the genre. That was also, more or less, the news.

In black and white.

Then I flew for a day, and I landed in Canada, and someone turned on a television.

And there was Happy Days.

Fonzie with the leather jacket and the thumbs. Hanging out at a diner full of teenagers whose largest problem that week was a dance.

And one other thing; everything in colour.

My entire visual world changed in about twenty-four hours; from a grey country where fathers get hit by buses to a bright one where nothing much is at stake and everyone has excellent teeth. I was in shock. I remember standing in front of that screen feeling something close to vertigo.

I knew I was not in Kansas (Korea) anymore.

Now. I told that story from pulpits for years, and I always told it the same way, and I was always pleased with it.

Black and white to colour. Korea to Canada. Grey to bright. A conversion narrative with a happy ending, and the audience liked it, and I liked it.

Well… I don’t think that’s quite what happened.

Because consider what was actually in the black and white. My mother and father were in it. Seven of us in a small house. A neighbourhood close enough that four TVs served everyone and nobody thought that strange. A living room that filled with men who came without being invited and stayed for three hours and were welcome. Whatever else it was — and it was poor, and it was hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise — it was full.

And what I got in exchange was colour. Which is exactly what it sounds like: the surface improved.

I do not regret coming. I want to be clear about that. This country gave me a life, a profession, a family, forty years of work I loved. I chose it and I would choose it again.

But I no longer believe I simply upgraded. I made a trade, at seventeen, without being told the terms. Part of what I traded was that floor, and that crowded room, and the particular way a poor neighbourhood holds a person. I did not know I was trading it. I thought I was just getting a better television.

Nobody sits on my floor now. My living room is lovely. It has a view.

I went back to Korea eventually, after many years, and could not find the place I had left. The streets were gone, the mountains straightened out to make rooms for row after row of apartment towers, the whole country had been rebuilt while I wasn’t looking. It had got its colour too, and more besides. It is a wealthier country than the one I moved to, by some measures.

So both worlds are in colour now, and I belong entirely to neither, and that seems about right.

What I keep isn’t the colour.

What I keep is a stuffy room in July with the windows shut, fifteen men on the floor smoking, a boy of eleven flat on his stomach with his chin in his hands, and the greatest event in human history arriving in shades of grey on a small screen in the corner.

I remember wishing it were in colour.

It never once occurred to me to wish for anything else in that room.

Fitting together is not a skill but an art… the art of love.

Richard