An outcast from birth, Milton Washington is the child of a Korean woman and a black US soldier, who became a "slickyboy", or child thief, and dreamed of making it to America. At the age of eight, he seized his chance. When a beautiful car pulled up one day outside St Vincent's orphanage in South Korea, Milton Washington made a split-second decision that would change the course of his life. A black American couple stepped out. The man was in military uniform, the woman had an Afro and wore a beautiful flowing dress, and when Milton realised that they were going to adopt his friend Joseph - who was black and Korean just like him - he ran to the couple's car, jumped inside and locked all the doors. Crying and screaming for his life, he wasn't getting out unless the man and woman took him home with them too. The couple - Captain and Mrs Washington - agreed to take both Joseph and Milton home, but only to see which of them fitted in best with their family. They would give it a few days, they said, and then make their choice. That night, lying in bed in an unfamiliar bedroom, in an unfamiliar house at the Dongducheon American military base, little Milton made his second big decision of the day - and ran away. "I didn't want to get taken back to the orphanage - maybe they wouldn't choose me," he says."I was just trying to get to America." Before his life in the orphanage, Milton was the only black child in a small village near the border with North Korea. Milton's father, an American soldier, was long gone, but his mother, who worked hard days in the rice fields, loved him and protected him fiercely against the prejudice they encountered. The children in Milton's South Korean village would sing a song about red apples, bananas, a train - and a monkey. "I remember the part of the song they sang to me the loudest. The part about the black monkey's butt being red. That set the tone," he says. It was just an innocent playground song on the face of it - it wasn't racist, or at least, not designed to be. But they turned it into something hurtful: a way to single him out for the colour of his skin. As the son of a black man, he says, he fell "outside of the limits" of what it meant to be Korean in the '60s and '70s. And because his father was not Korean, he had no right to a birth certificate. Milton knew that his father was from the US - in his mind a land of flying cars, where the cities were made of gold, with ice-cream mountains. "I dreamed of going to America because it was full of black people - these magical creatures," Milton says, "and of being accepted." Milton's America was a fantasy land that couldn't have been more different from his reality. He and his mother lived in a mud and stone hut, slept on the floor, and washed their clothes in the river. One morning, village elders arrived at the door and told Milton's mother they would no longer accept "the shame that you're bringing upon this village because of that boy". Although Milton's mother argued their case, she and Milton left their home and moved to a nearby town attached to an American military base. There were cars there, electricity, and money, all of which were new to Milton - salt had been the currency in their village. Milton also saw black American soldiers for the first time, and felt a step closer to finding his father. In the alleys of the red-light district below their tiny apartment, homeless boys begged, picked pockets, and fought with other gangs. The American soldiers called them "slickyboys" - slang for little thieves. And when six-year-old Milton shared a packet of Oreos with the boys - given to him by his mum's American boyfriend - he became a slickyboy too. Milton finally felt like he belonged. "All the black soldiers would give me money - dollar bills, not just change," he says. "It completely changed my life." Milton's mother had become a sex worker in a club in town and went out at night to work. Milton was left alone in their apartment - under strict instruction not to leave, instructions he routinely ignored. One night Milton's mum didn't return from work as expected - the club had been raided by the police and she and all the other women who worked there were sent to jail for two weeks. Free of his mother's rules, Milton and his friends ran wild, stealing drinks from bars and having adventures all over town.