Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Martha Vickery

Learning from trees and mountains

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Ung Lim Lee’s landscape exhibit shows one artist’s persistence in following his dreams | By Martha Vickery (Spring 2023)

Artist Ung Lim Lee uses markers, colored pens and oil paints to create his works of art.

In his artist’s statement for his upcoming exhibit in St. Paul, artist Ung Lim Lee quotes a Korean
proverb which is echoed in English and other languages – “I will plant an apple tree even if the world comes to an end tomorrow.”

The proverb is especially meaningful for this 90-year-old artist whose aspiration for a fine arts
career lived in his heart for more than 30 years while he pursued a more lucrative career in
commercial art to make a living for his family.

His finely-detailed depictions of landscapes, many of mountain scenes in Korea, comprise his
new exhibit entitled Mountains and Trees. It will premiere at Xia Gallery in St. Paul with an
opening reception Friday, June 9, at 6 p.m. The artist’s subject matter symbolizes his yearning
for homeland; he often describes the mountains and trees of Korea as emblematic of the Korean
people’s endurance.

Lee had a small art exhibit some years ago, targeted to friends and family at which he sold some
pieces. The Xia Gallery exhibit is Lee’s first public art exhibit.

Lee relates in his artist’s biography on the Xia Gallery website that he was born in 1932, and
grew up as a happy child in a wealthy family in the small city of Sariwon, Pongsan County,
Hwanghae Province, Korea, in a region that is now North Korea. Although Korea was under
Japanese rule at that time, he was sheltered from the hardships of the occupation.

He adds one other detail, that while in primary school, he lost his left lower arm in a train accident. Although the loss of his arm never deterred him from any ambition, he always keenly felt society’s prejudice towards disabled people.

At age 18, Lee was happily enrolled in art school, but that education, and everything else in his
well-ordered life, would soon be taken away when war began in June 1950. With his family, Lee
fled south to the city of Daegu, in what is now South Korea.

Lee’s father also died at that time. In addition to the grief and turmoil, Lee also had more
responsibility to support his mother and two sisters. “Finding employment with a background in
European painting in the middle of war was futile,” he wrote. He was suddenly very far away
from his sheltered upbringing in Sariwon.

After a few years of constant struggle to work and support the family, one of his sisters moved
to the U.S., and invited him to join them. By then Lee was married with one son, but he traveled
alone to the U.S. to get a job and a home first. He settled in Connecticut, at first with his sister
and family. He relates that, memorably, the process of getting his first visitor’s visa involved
drawing a quick portrait of the ambassador during their meeting. He remembers the date,
February 22, 1964, as the date his life began in America.

After further struggles, working for low wages while trying to get a work visa, he finally got the work visa which would open the door to building a stable life in the U.S. It involved writing a petition letter in English, which he did himself, using a Korean-English dictionary. Writing the letter took three months of evenings after work, trying to craft an understandable letter, he recalled.

After getting the work visa, his wife and son joined him in 1965. He began a career in
commercial art by learning it “from the ground up,” he wrote, running errands and doing other
tasks for an advertising agency. He began to draw various products, and learned how to do
advertising layout. He eventually got a job with a freelance commercial artist – the job was to
create drawings of airplane engines. From that employer, he learned other aspects of the
commercial art business.

After 30 years doing commercial art, he still nurtured the dream of returning to fine art.
Although he pursued a career in commercial art for 30 years, his ambition was always to return
to fine art. “I always kept my childhood passion,” he said in a translated written interview. He
worked on his own fine art pieces whenever he could. He moved to Minnesota to be with family in 2017,
and starting in 2020, worked more intensively on his artwork during the pandemic lockdown.

Kumgangsan (Diamond Mountains) in North Korea by Ung Lim Lee.

Lee wrote that a significant and artistically-inspiring life event was going to Kumgangsan
Mountains (Diamond Mountains) in North Korea. The area was opened to visitors through the
establishment of a special tourist region. Visitors were admitted to the national mountain park
starting in 1998 until 2008. The area has unique sharp peaks, dense pine forests and contains
some ancient Buddhist monasteries.

The ancient pine trees started to take root in his imagination. “I started expressing the
perseverance of Koreans through pine trees in my art” he wrote. “Like Koreans who have
overcome hardships, I explore the strength of pine trees that dig their roots into rocks.”

In his artist’s statement, he makes an observation about trees:

There are many things to learn from trees. Once they root, they grow there until they die,
whether it’s a good environment or not. They don’t fight over territory even if branches
from neighboring trees invade their space. They don’t complain if parts of their foliage
are shaded from exposure to the sun. They are always in one place. When tree roots grow,
they may encounter tough boulders along the way but with persistence and tenacity they
can break even the toughest rocks. They slowly crack through and find their way.

His mastery of commercial art media also found its way into his work. Korean artists often use
ink or paint on durable hanji paper, which is made of mulberry tree bark. But the fine lines and
rich colors of traditional Asian-style paintings can also be rendered beautifully with modern
media including permanent markers and acrylic paint. Lee said he has even drawn with a plain
ballpoint pen on wooden boards. Permanent markers are useful at “capturing all the vibrant
colors,” he wrote.

Rich Lee, who is helping him prepare the exhibit, calls his father an “upcycle artist” who
can look at an abandoned cabinet door with trim on all four sides and see a ready-to-paint panel
with its own built-in frame. On his Instagram page, the artist posted several examples of imaginative use
of media, including a diptych (a joined two-panel work) made from two dry erase boards on which he
drew with permanent marker; a painting rendered with acrylic paint on frosted glass; and drawings with pen on sheets of rubber.

It seems that no media challenges this artist – he makes the media do what he wants with a
combination of knowledge and experience plus the will to do the job. This quality is echoed in
what Lee feels about the importance of persistence and determination. “Some give up before
even trying,” he wrote. “But I never give up. What I hate most is how society prevents me from
even trying just because I have a disability.”

Lee writes that he looks back on his long life with “complex feelings.” Like many first-
generation Korean Americans, he has experienced much suffering and turmoil, but also the joy
of conquering many challenges. “I try to express how I have overcome these obstacles through
my art,” he wrote. “I can proudly say that I have lived and survived like pine trees and this
willpower allows me to draw on sleek glass with a ballpoint pen.”

Editor’s note: Korean Quarterly thanks Bomi Yoon Newman for expert translation help for this story.

Ung Lim Lee with his sons Martin, King, and Rich.

Ten Years Ago in KQ

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In 2013, imagining the end of guns, a treaty, and hope for a new president | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2023)

(Korean Quarterly published a print edition from 1997 to 2022 ~ this article appeared in the Winter 2013 issue. All 25 years of KQ content will be part of a digital archive here at koreanquarterly.org and will debut on the KQ website soon.)

Author Marie Myung-Ok Lee “The End of Guns”.

Ten years ago in Korean Quarterly, the winter 2013 issue came just weeks after the tragic shooting of 27 people – young elementary students and their teachers – at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. The lead essay in that issue, headlined The End of Guns, was by novelist, creative writing professor (and former Minnesotan) Marie Myung-Ok Lee.

She observed that anyone responsible for commenting on yet another horrific mass murder in our society will not be jumping in front of cameras to make any kind of point, call for any kind of action, or demand a response. Instead, policymakers and change-makers predictably wait in desperation for the news cycle to just move on to the next big thing “because no one wants to deal with this issue of guns. Specifically, that we could stop what is basically mass murder of innocent people simply by taking the guns away.”

How sadly this points to how the more things change, the more they stay the same, as another senseless shooting rocked the nation, especially the Asian American community in January of this year, when 18 people were gunned down in two separate incidents in California, one of them at a Lunar New Year celebration.  Lee points to the puzzle of South Korea, how it is a country under a constant perceived threat from its neighbor North Korea, yet everyone walks around unarmed and unafraid.  Indeed, she wrote, the small minority of people allowed to keep guns for hunting or athletic competitions must store them at the police station, not in their homes.

Guns and freedom are equated in U.S. society, Lee said, but South Koreans are arguably freer. They don’t worry about shootings in schools or at public events, while in the U.S., gun rights advocates continue to fight for the “right” to bring loaded guns into churches, schools, courthouses. People feel less safe as a result.  “Why should we as citizens be held hostage to a kind of deadly domestic terrorism that has a criminally easy solution?” she asked.

Lee’s novelist career after 10 years

Recently, Lee wove an often wickedly funny discussion of current events into her 2022 The Evening Hero, published in 2022.  The story is a fictional look at one Korean American doctor in rural Minnesota (modeled after her own dad), and what can happen to rural peoples’ health care when their small-town non-profit hospitals are bought out by private equity firms, then closed down. Although the story is fictional, the life-threatening predicament of many rural towns losing their only hospital is very real. The story also veers into black comedy with its take on what happens when the profit motive decides what kind of health care gets promoted and what kind is eliminated.

Remembering the old Park regime, hoping for a new Park regime

Also 10 years ago, several essayists wrote about the 60th anniversary in 2013 of the armistice that ended the Korean War combat, but never officially ended the war. In 2013, South Korea had elected a new president Geun-hye Park, daughter of the former military dictator Chung-hee Park.

Essayist, peace activist and former missionary Dorothy Ogle remembered the elder Park’s regime well. During that time, she and her husband George Ogle were career missionaries in South Korea. They had been there for 20 years; all their children had been born and brought up there. She relates that 38 years before writing the essay in 2013, “our lives as missionaries came to a sudden end when …Park deported my husband George Ogle because he prayed in public for eight innocent men who had been falsely accused of having Communist ties, tortured to confess, and sentenced to death by a secret military court.”  His deportation served as “an object lesson to President Park’s detractors that no criticism would be tolerated,” she wrote. The family permanently left South Korea in 1975.

She expressed hope for the younger Park’s new administration, noting that the new conservative president “publicly apologize for the violence of her father’s rule, and her presidency represents an opportunity for her to reckon with his legacy.”

She also wrote that a peace treaty between the U.S. and North Korea to officially end the Korean War and restore normal diplomatic relations between the nations would, for the first time, truly give peace a chance, after decades of ignoring, lambasting, and infantilizing North Korea’s leaders and people. George Ogle died in November 2020; Dorothy still lives in Colorado. Peace treaty advocacy is still upheld by several U.S. activist groups, notably Women Cross DMZ.

Also in the winter 2013 issue was news and analysis around how North Korea had launched a rocket in December 2012 which successfully deployed a communications satellite. The Obama Administration decried the accomplishment, saying it “violates international law,” according to a column from the winter 2013 issue by John H. Kim.  The rocket launch, which delivered its payload into earth orbit, was technically a space launch and not a weapon launch and did not violate international law, observed Kim, and the accusation did not stand up to legal scrutiny. It was only one recent example of the repeated U.S. failings in foreign policy around relations with North Korea that Ogle had also pointed out.

As for the younger President Geun-hye Park, 10 years on, we know that her administration was an ill-fated one. It came to an ignominious end in March 2017 when South Korea’s legislature voted for her impeachment and the high court unanimously supported the vote. It was the culmination of a series of botched response to a national tragedy, the Sewol ferry disaster, coupled with a political scandal involving her aide Soon-sil Choi making policy decisions that were the sole purview of the president.  

A commemoration and protestors seeking justice for the victims of the Sewol ferry disaster, which sparked the Candlelight Revolution. Photos by Stephen Wunrow

An ouster by candlelight

The impeachment followed weeks of peaceful protest by the people of South Korea for 20 successive Saturday nights.  The initiative brought nearly 20 percent of Korea’s population to the streets of its cities, putting pressure on the legislature to act on the demands to impeach the president. The so-called Candlelight Revolution was characterized by patience and humor – street art, TV skits, blogs and performance pieces all called for the president to be kicked out. Park was eventually put on trial on bribery and corruption charges, and received a sentence of 25 years and pardoned in 2021.

An identity of color, light, and a bit of fun

KQ also interviewed artist Jooyoung Choi and got permission to use one of incandescently colorful images for the cover of the winter 2013 issue. Choi’s use of color and multiple images, and her inspirations, including kitschy store signs, posters, advertisements and pop art, give her images their layering and suggestions of more than one message.

A Korean adoptee, Choi learned Korean while in college at Massachusetts Institute of Art, and made contact with her birth family during that time. In her work, she explores a cultural and inner journey of leaving Korea, growing up in New Hampshire, finding her way back to Korea, and integrating those pieces through a 10-year career to become a multi-cultural artist.

These days, Choi is still a prolific working artist who also delves into video, sculpture and art installation projects. According to her artist’s statement she is using her art to explore themes such as “anti-racism, gender inclusivity, trans-racial adoptee rights, post-traumatic growth, and spirituality rooted in social justice.”

Artist Jooyoung Choi and her artwork that appeared on the cover of the Winter 2013 issue of KQ (which was also the cover of Lee Herrick’s book Gardening Secrets of the Dead)

Poet to poet laureate

Poet and Korean adoptee Lee Herrick was also profiled 10 years ago. He had just published his second book of poetry entitled Gardening Secrets of the Dead, with cover art by Jooyoung Choi. Brought up in California, Lee teaches creative writing at the college level. These days, he teaches at Fresno City College and the MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. While his first collection This Many Miles from Desire, was very personal, Gardening Secrets is about “homage, honor, question, and memory,” he said.  

Herrick was the City of Fresno poet laureate from 2015 to 2017. In November 2022, Herrick was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to be California’s 10th poet laureate. The governor’s press release announcing the appointment reads, in part:

As a teacher, poet, and father, Lee writes movingly about his identity as a Californian and encourages others to reflect on what the state means to them,” said Governor Newsom. “Lee’s dedication to highlighting the diverse experiences of Californians, and making them so accessible through his poetry, makes him a perfect candidate for Poet Laureate. I look forward to his work to inspire communities and individuals across the state through the power of the written word.

After a tragic Lunar New Year, hope

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Minnesota’s Asian American caucus steps up with bills to recognize hate crimes, curb gun violence | By Martha Vickery (Winter/Spring 2023)

The Minnesota Asian Pacific caucus: Rep. Ethan Cha, Sen. Susan Pha, Sen. Foung Hawj, Rep. Fue Lee, Rep. Liz Lee, Rep. Kaohly Vang Her, Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura, Rep. Samantha Vang, Rep. Jay Xiong and Sen. Tou Xiong.

In a race against time, Minnesota’s legislature, with its slim Democratic majority in House and Senate, along with its Democratic governor Tim Walz, is engaged this winter in a fast-changing session, working on bills at a quick pace, as can only be done in a so-called “trifecta” state. The roster of bills is a hopeful one, featuring many that will improve life for marginalized Minnesotans, including children, elders, new immigrants, and the poor. 

Trifecta as it applies to politics was a new word to me this year, maybe because it is such a rare occurrence in our state.  A trifecta state is one in which a House majority, Senate majority and the state’s governor are all of the same party. Nationwide, it is not so rare, but it is in Minnesota.  The last time there was a Minnesota trifecta was in 1990, which was also accomplished with a very slim majority of the Democratic Farmer-Labor (DFL) party for one session.  

There are currently 22 Republican trifecta states and 17 Democratic ones in the country.  There are 11 divided governments in which neither party holds trifecta control, according to the website Ballotpedia. In 2022, Democrats flipped the Michigan legislature from red to blue, and gained governorships to achieve trifectas in Massachusetts and Maryland. Dems also retained the control of the legislatures in Colorado, Maine, Nevada and Oregon.

.MAP caucus town hall forum for Asian American community, held February 17.

Perhaps one of the busiest groups in the Minnesota state legislature is the Minnesota Asian Pacific Caucus (the MAP Caucus), which gave a press conference on January 23, just after the Lunar New Year weekend and the horrific mass shootings of Asians and Latino victims in two separate incidents in the communities of Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, California, at which two shooters killed 18 people. The Monterey Park shooting was at a Lunar New Year event.

The mood was somber but also hopeful at the first press conference of the re-formed DFL MAP Caucus, chaired by Rep. Ethan Cha (D-47B), who was newly elected in 2022.  Rep. Kaohly Vang Her later noted in her newsletter that their 10-person caucus of seven representatives and three senators is the second-largest Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) state behind Hawaii. She also wrote that Minnesota’s AAPI community (which in the 2020 Census topped 365,000) is the “fastest growing demographic in the state.” The MAP caucus also held a town hall-type event on February 17 to hear issues from the community.

Back in 2021, after the Atlanta shootings, and well after more than a year of growing numbers of hate crimes against Asians in Minnesota and nationwide, a very similar anti-hate crimes bill was patiently shepherded through a contentious legislature by principal author Rep. Samantha Vang (D-38B), with other coauthors. Vang, co-founder of the MAP caucus, appeared at the January 23 press conference to speak again about the same bill she has been championing for two years, now updated to this year’s version  (HR 181, nicknamed the Stop Hate bill). 

Two years ago, Ron Latz (D-46), DFL lead for the 2021 conference committee, speaking to KQ 10 days before the 2021 session ended ended, was presciently pessimistic about preserving the anti-hate/bias crimes portion of the bill.  Despite strong support and preparation, and testimony by Katie Wright (the mother of Daunte Wright, who was killed during a traffic stop by a Brooklyn Center police officer), and Brandon Williams, nephew of George Floyd, the bill disintegrated. Republican members, Latz remarked, were only focused on the budget.

This session, it’s different.

In its press conference, the group talked more about anti-hate legislation and anti-gun legislation than the rest of the bills that are priorities for this year. Rep. Her noted that their caucus knows they are only chipping away at the edges of a pandemic of gun violence. “No one law is a panacea,” she said. The MAP caucus is strong on topics like safe gun storage and increased restrictions for open-carry laws, in addition to setting up a structure to educate law enforcement about and legally define and recognize hate/bias crimes.

Even if stricter gun laws are achieved, no Minnesota law will prevent the flow of guns from other states, Her noted.  The caucus is strong on gun laws “at the risk of doing nothing,” she said. Federal legislation must happen too.

Other hopeful bills for Asian Minnesotans and the larger community include a bill to increase funding for English language learners (authored by Rep. Her); a bill to make ethnic studies a requirement for every high school student in Minnesota (authored by Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura (D-33A) ); capacity-building grants for Minnesota non-profit community organizations which filled public service gaps during COVID and reached many immigrant and marginalized Asian Minnesotans (authored by Sencer-Mura); and an AAPI Veterans’ Bill to boost mental health care and other health coverage for Asian American veterans (authored by Sens. Foung Hawj and Susan Pha).

You can’t be a pessimist if you are also in the business of creating legislation. Vang, along with her anti-hate coalition in 2021, would not shut up about the need for educating police and changing the structure of police departments to recognize hate crime for what it is. She is still talking.  The Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition started up in 2019, and educator and now-representative Sencer-Mura has championed their bill.  They are still talking after two years.  This session is the first opportunity for progressive causes like these to get real traction. 

That opportunity could slip away quickly – the governor’s desk will soon be buried in an avalanche of new bills. Between now and the end of May, there will be some new progressive laws to report on, in this state and in other Democratic-trifecta states nationwide.

Brave spirit

Over the winter 2023 quarter, a new book was launched by long-time KQ contributor Heinz Insu Fenkl, and KQ got one of the first post-launch interviews.  A prolific writer, Fenkl has published only two novels, both autobiographical, about his childhood and early-teen years as the son of a GI father and Korean mother, growing up on the military bases and in the camptowns near Inchon.  Over the last 25 years, while not writing his novel, he taught English literature at State University of New York- New Paltz, and translated Korean prose and poetry into English, publishing eight books of Korean literature in translation.  He also learned a lot about ancient spirituality, philosophy and religion as a part of it. In the interview, he discusses his youthful, often funny misadventures of his youth and the unique culture in which he lived. He also reflects how, through his childhood, Korea changed and Westernized at a fast pace, while its ancient beliefs held sway, just below a thin veneer of modern life.

The joy of learning sijo

Another interesting literature project is a book on the Korean poetry form sijo, by the Chicago-based Sejong Cultural Society’s co-founder Lucy Park along with Wisconsin high school literature teacher Liz Jorgensen. The Sejong Cultural Society recognized a long time ago that to have a sijo-writing contest, the contestants first need how to write a sijo, not exactly a standard form in elementary and high school curricula. However, before students can learn it, teachers need to learn how to teach it – for some, teaching any poetry form is tricky.  The Society has been sponsoring classes in instruction of sijo for teachers for many years. Jorgensen, who embraced the craft, teaches it every year, and helps her students to enter the poetry contest, collaborated in this book designed not only to teach the poetry form, but to help other teachers to persuade students to try it and learn to love it.

The life course of adoption

How adults experience and grow into their lives as adoptees is the topic of a new survey of adult adoptees, now live and available from a website. Hollee McGinnis, an activist and researcher, has created the survey to further study her own group, adult transnational adoptees, to learn more about how their identity, and also their mental and physical health, may be affected as they age.  

This time of year is all about hope, especially right now in Minnesota, where spring is only an intellectual exercise. Staying strong as the snowbanks grow in late winter is the only way – that and snuggling in with a good book – we have a few recommendations.

Happy late winter, someday to be spring.

Boy with a brave spirit

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In Skull Water, Heinz Insu Fenkl weaves a hero’s quest into an insider’s story of 1970s Korea | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2023)

As a kid growing up near a U.S. Army base in Korea, son of a Korean mother and a German soldier father, Heinz Insu Fenkl ran with a small gang of half-Korean military kids who belonged nowhere and everywhere. 

In February, the author, scholar, and professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz launched Skull Water, his second autobiographical novel based on his gritty, often perilous youth in the early ‘70s in Seoul, and near the huge ASCOM base in the Inchon area. Back then, the country had a thin veneer of rapidly-changing modern life, but just under the surface were the unchanging ways of traditional Korean seasons, stories and spirituality.

His first novel, Memories of My Ghost Brother, tells the story of Insu as a younger boy; Skull Water is a kind of a sequel, the life of an adolescent just before his jump into the unknown – relocation to yet another military base, this one in California.  

Both novels read more like memoirs, and when talking about some of the incidents in Skull Water, Fenkl often adds “and this really happened.”  As fiction, the author had more freedom, with ordering parts of the story, changing the timing, and in being able to leave things out. In some cases, he said, the truth really was stranger than fiction, so he modified his telling to make it more believable.

Fenkl’s story of growing up describes two disparate cultures he inhabited. His daily life was tied to the U.S. military base, but at his mother’s house outside the base, he absorbed Korean daily life. There was a tension of ancient and modern – he was especially attuned to ancient beliefs and wisdom absorbed through his Korean elders.

From a broader perspective, the rapid growth and change in Korea during that time mirrors the life of the character Insu.  It describes a country trying to rebuild within 20 years of the unspeakable losses of the Korean War, with the nation under military dictatorship.

A significant character is Big Uncle, his mother’s eldest brother. Intelligent and well-read, Big Uncle rejected the eldest son’s traditional role of administering the family estate. Instead, after the war and many misadventures, he lives in exile in a mountain cave, across the river from his village. Big Uncle is a geomancer, a traditional vocation that involves reading the energy (ki in Korean) of the landscape and finding the best places for important sites such as graves, houses, and well water. For many years he treats a mysterious foot injury that never heals.  

Big Uncle also divines the future by throwing tiles to form the hexagrams of the Chinese I-Ching (in English, the Book of Changes), a ceremony that would have a deep influence on Insu the character, and on Fenkl as an author writing Skull Water many years later.  Rejected by most of his family, Big Uncle welcomes the friendship of the young Insu.

The title Skull Water describes a quest that Insu pursues after he hears that the water remaining in a dead person’s skull after the flesh is gone will cure any illness. His determination that he and his friends will find skull water and cure his uncle is both a heroic journey and a fool’s errand. For Insu, the adversity and the foolishness of the quest is also a journey of self-discovery that enables him to appreciate his loyal friendships and family ties, even as their familiar presence are about to be lost to him.

The narrative about Insu in the 1970s is interspersed with chapters about Big Uncle’s life as he flees southeast ahead of the North Korean army in 1950, hampered with a badly injured foot. It describes how a young woman, also alone, befriends him and provides for him along the way. This part is truly fiction – the author does not know what happened to his uncle on his lonely flight for his life to Busan, only that it must have changed him profoundly.

Fenkl writes with insider knowledge of the squalid life in the camptowns around the U.S. military bases, and the corruption, exploitation, easy money and human misery of those times. 

As a multi-lingual scholar of Korean folklore and literature, he also weaves in folktales, Daoist philosophy, Buddhist wisdom, and shamanic rituals into his writing, creating an atmosphere of stark realism mixed with dreams, myths and glimpses of the spirit realm.  

Covers of North Korean graphic novels, most translated into English by Fenkl.

Fenkl’s fondness for folktales also extends to popular culture tales told in Korean comics, graphic novels and films. He voraciously read comics and watched movies as a kid.  He has collected and translated Korean comics as an adult, including a several series of North Korean comics for Korean Quarterly, such as The Crystal Key, which was published over several years (and will soon be uploaded to the “webtoons” section of the KQ website). The North Korean cartoons included interpretive notes to enable readers to understand North Korean culture and political concepts through the stories.

In a launch event sponsored by the Korea Society in early February, Fenkl explained how he used the I-Ching (specifically his Big Uncle’s ancient version) to guide and inspire his writing. He illustrates the novel with ancient Chinese pictograms, and explains their layered meanings in one of the afterwords.  Readers fluent in Korean and English, who also know some Chinese characters, will find wordplay in the story which layers richer meaning from Korean literature and folklore into the story, the author said.

The character Insu describes is what the author saw many times in his youth; Big Uncle throwing black and white stones six times, one for each line of the hexagram, while muttering the correct interpretive phrases for each one. He assembles the character’s six lines by drawing each line in the dirt, then interpreted the meaning of the character.

Fenkl explained how the story is divided into six parts, similar to a shamanic kut or ritual ceremony to prepare a spiritual path for the dead. The story’s unfolding is also kut-like, as Insu goes through a self-discovery process, puts to rest the ghosts of his past, and becomes spiritually ready for an unknown future.

Fenkl’s mother.
Fenkl’s father at the DMZ Joint Security Area circa 1971.

The narrative, from the perspective of a child, describes the dangerous freedom Insu enjoys as a mixed-race kid of a military officer and a Korean black-marketeer mother. With their military transportation passes, his little gang goes everywhere by bus or sometimes in a truck with a soldier who is going that way. They were seldom supervised, and make friends with questionable characters – one soldier who sells black market Army goods, and another who runs the morgue. They visit bars, drug dens, and a dog market. Black-market sellers, including Insu’s mother and his friends’ mothers, were prevalent in the neighborhood because the nearby Camp Market base was a major U.S. military supply hub for the entire country.

The author remembers many misadventures with his band of camptown kids, which he relates now with a mix of humor and horror.  After a hospital burned down “we found medical supplies still in there, so we would take those supplies and sell them on the black market in Shinchon,” he said, “or the other thing we would do is crawl into the dumpster outside the dispensary … In those days they did not have those biohazard containers, so we would take the used syringes and clean them and sell them to drugstores.”

He also remembers swimming in a creek with his friends which was actually an open sewer on the ASCOM base perimeter. “We would see human feces floating down,” he said, and then would keep swimming.  “We were totally clueless as kids.”  

In more recent years, the ASCOM base has had a more sinister reputation, Fenkl said.  Former military personnel who lived near ASCOM base sued the U.S. military for alleged poisoning by Agent Orange.  The carcinogenic dioxin Agent Orange was used as a defoliant at the DMZ, and was allegedly stored at the ASCOM base.  The other base Insu visits, the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, was vacated by the U.S. government roughly five years ago, and now looks like a vast, empty space rimmed with skyscrapers. There are numerous competing plans for this piece of prime real estate – Fenkl said he favors the option which would develop the land into a park in an area where there are few public green spaces.  

Camptowns were also known for sex trafficking and other exploitation. Toward the end of the story, Insu’s older friend Patsy (a former member of the kids’ gang), another mixed-race teenager, is living in a hotel paid for by a Japanese man who is mostly absent. She spends her time dressing up like Holly GoLightly, played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The persona is so convincing that passers-by murmur “it’s Audrey” as she goes by.

Patsy, a few years older than Insu, is both a dreamer and a truth-teller. She treats Insu to a room service lunch, and explains that she will soon be marrying – not the Japanese businessman, but another guy, a military officer who went to West Point. When he suggests that it doesn’t sound like much of a plan for the future, she replies that “people like us don’t really have a future. The present just keeps …changing, is all.”

At the end of the story, Patsy sends him a postcard she illustrates with an Audrey Hepburn theme, telling him she has started a new life with the West Pointer. The postcard is a message to Insu that the last of his posse is gone – one boy has already departed for the U.S. with his family, the other mysteriously disappears. Upon receiving the postcard, Insu cries in heartbreak.

Patsy is manipulating circumstances to escape family violence, and using the sexual exploitation she is suffering to help her exit Korea.  At his age, Insu does not know what to make of it, but the reader “will probably infer that her future is not  going to be that romantic Breakfast at Tiffany’s scenario she seems so fascinated by,” Fenkl said.

The character seems like a dreamer, but in fact her eyes are wide open. On the one hand, the Audrey character is a performance, “but on the other hand, it is her fantasy wish fulfillment which, deep-down, she knows is not going to be how her life plays out,” the author observed.

As Insu meets and gives his last goodbyes toward the end of the story, more than one character explains the aversion military folks have to saying goodbye, both because it’s painful and too frequent in that life; also because there is a good chance of seeing one another at another military base, at some future date.

Interestingly, the author gives away no grown-up clues about any character’s actions in the narrative. Instead, he stays true to the Insu of adolescence, an unreliable narrator who has little insight into adult motivations, and who thinks only vaguely about the future. The reader has more insight than Insu throughout the story.

He had few mentors at that age, the author reflected at his book launch event.  He remembers thinking of pursuing a military career like his dad.  Instead, as an adult, the author’s life path was something he never could have predicted, one more like what his Big Uncle would have followed, had he lived in more normal times.

Throughout the story, spiritual experiences seem to chase Insu, and teachers like his Big Uncle and one monk, Mumyong sunim (sunim is a form of address for a monk), seem to appear when he needs them. The monk shows up a couple times when Insu is in the mountain forest near the temple.  Their final conversation occurs near the end of the story, when the monk finds him at a grave trying to make amends by carrying out a solitary ceremony. Their conversation seems to prepare Insu for the final spiritual reckoning to come.

Mumyong tells Insu of the famous story of Wonhyo the monk, who drinks water from a skull by accident, in the dark while spending a night in a cave.  The water is satisfying and delicious. His discovery the next morning that he drank water from a skull horrifies him, but from the experience, he achieves enlightenment.  A missing piece of the story, Mumyoung tells Insu, is that a mischievous spirit (tokkaebi) led Wonhyo to drink the skull water. Did the tokkaebi do a good thing while making mischief?

Mumyoung points out that Insu has tried to do the right thing in terms of spiritual amends, but that he is still ignorant, particularly of the consequences that could proceed from his actions.  Insu realizes he is lost in his ignorance – he shares his uncertainty with the monk. “Ignorance is ignorance. Knowledge of one’s ignorance – awareness of it – now, that can be a good thing,” Mumyong replies.

Fenkl said that American author Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that the journey of the best boat is one of “a hundred tacks” in a zig-zag course when going against the wind.  When you are sailing on a tack “you think that’s where you are going, but when you pause to look back, you realize you have been going northeast the whole time,” Fenkl explained.  The advantage of maturity is that one can wholistically see the direction of one’s life, he suggested, by looking back on many tacks; that perspective is denied to the young.  “The monk is pointing out that kind of quality,” he said.

Insu is left with some assurance that his future is not so dark as it appears in the moment, but still fears that when he leaves “the land would be pulled out from under us, and if we ever did return, it would not be the same place that had received us,” the author writes.

One of Fenkl’s more challenging projects in recent years was in producing a translation of 108 Zen poems by the monk Musan Cho Oh-hyun. While writing Skull Water,  those Buddhist spiritual insights were very much with the author.  Fenkl noted that the conversations between Insu and Mumyoung were taken, in part, from conversations he had with Cho.  In an afterword,  the author reveals that he had a dream conversation with Cho that inspired him to take on the difficult translation project.

It was Asian studies classes starting his second year of college that helped the author to reclaim his Korean side, Fenkl reflected.  With the benefit of some academic context, he was able to see his culture of origin in a new light.  “In trying to figure out the sort of things my Big Uncle was doing in consulting the I-Ching, I educated myself in my own tradition. “I became a real professor and not a dilettante scholar like Big Uncle, but I learned the I Ching also through his unorthodox method and now use it that way. It’s a parallel in my own life.”

Fenkl was able to write Skull Water in recent years in part because some whose lives are fictionally depicted, like his mother and Big Uncle, are now gone. Those stories could not have been told so easily in the late ‘90s, when he penned Memories of My Ghost Brother.

A part of what allowed the author to weave folklore, shamanism, Buddhism, literature, and daily life into one story was his education and many years of fascination and hard work on literary translations.  He conceived the story of Skull Water and began to write it about 25 years ago. During the same years, he also published eight books of Korean literature in translation. It was not really a 25-year project he said. It was intermittent due to the constant flow of other work.     

Fenkl and his mother.

His story-telling may have also emerged from family tradition, along with a dose or two of DNA. In addition to Big Uncle, whose every conversation was a story, Fenkl said his mother was a dream interpreter, and is described in Skull Water doing fortune-telling with hwatu (flower cards, used for gambling games).

One of his mother’s two sisters is still alive in the U.S. Fenkl is hoping, perhaps through FaceTime, to hear more of her life, for a possible future book about her and the lives of his mother and the other sister.

Although it is autobiographical, the story is fiction because it is the easier path. Fenkl can only write his own experience, and guess at the experiences of others. If his Big Uncle could read his book, Fenkl said, “he would probably be very amused, and would want to give me a lot of corrections about the Korean War sections. I would have to write another book for him.”  If his mother could read it, he said, “she would argue with me about many of the things I depicted about her, like the gambling losses, and the money she stole from me. And then I would have to write another book about her!”

Heinz Insu Fenkl’s website is: www.heinzinsufenkl.com  Skull Water is published by Spiegel & Grau, New York (www.spiegelandgrau.com)

Mapping the life course of adoption

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Researcher initiates study to look at health and social influences for older adoptees | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2023)

She has been at adoption research for 25-plus years, a long time in a scholar’s career.  If circumstances had been different, adoption researcher/activist Hollee McGinnis might have decided to put adoption-related research away for awhile.

However, some significant recent events, including a life-altering bout with cancer, and the introspection brought on by pandemic times, has motivated her to give adoption research another look.

Specifically, she wonders if answers to some key questions might help her own peer group, the more senior members in the community of international adoptees, to understand their identity and their health as they get older.

Her current project, ongoing but still taking shape, is a study of older transracial adoptees and what is important to their identities and relationships. The project, under the umbrella name  Collaborative on Adoption and Alternative Care Research (CAARE) will receive research on adult adoptees, a seldom-studied group, and results will be shared with the adoption community.

The project is starting with a survey questionnaire intended to “map the life course of adoption.” McGinnis will administer this initial research, called the MAP study, with help from other adoptee researchers and adoptee organizations.  The information gained from this and future studies is intended to build “a practice of collaboration and co-creation of knowledge and wisdom by and for adoptees,” according to the website.

College to community organizing

When in college, McGinnis changed her major from Asian Studies to American studies “to learn more about who I was as a person with an Asian face, an Irish name, and a blond-haired mom.” Being an Asian Studies major was wrong for her, she said, because “my Asian studies aim was to learn about being Asian to fulfill everyone’s expectations about what I should know to be Asian.”

Her instincts continued to lead her to research her own group. Her senior project looked at Korean adopted young women, and collected information on how they viewed their own identity. “I was basically studying myself,” she said. 

Following that, in 1996, she enrolled in a self-expression and leadership course that challenged participants to do a project in one of their own communities. There were a lot of younger Chinese adoptees at the time, which was the impetus for her co-founding, with a group of adult Korean adoptees, the New York City-based Also Known As (AKA). The group celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2021. It was created, in part, to give international adoptees a structure for creating mentoring relationships with younger adoptees.

Also Know As (AKA) 25th anniversary celebration in New York (Hollee McGinnis lower right, in green).

AKA was in a small group of the first adult adoptee groups to form, and a network grew as a wave of other adult adoptee groups formed around the same time. The growing power of  internet technology also helped this quiet revolution gain strength. Finding Korean adoptees is easy now, she said, “but back then, I never would have imagined there would be such a community. In 1996 you could not google “adoptee” and find an adoptee!  I had to go to adoption agencies and adoptive parents’ groups and it was hand-to-hand, phone-to-phone kind of effort to find each other.”

One goal of the MAP study

One of the two goals of the MAP study will be to discern the significance of adoptee organizations to adoptees’ in their adulthood.  McGinnis’ own experience and her observation of the work done by many other adoptee organizations indicates to her that adoptee organizations are important.  However, no researcher has inquired into the ways they are important, and to what extent they are important in adoptees’ lives.

Getting the participation of adult adoptee organizations for the study will be the easy part. She will be calling on the member organizations of the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) for networking help.  Choosing a “control group,” the people who have not been involved with adoptee organizations, is the only way to show if adoptee organizations have had an effect on adult adoptees. Finding those participants will be more challenging. 

By talking to AKA members and others in adult adoptee groups, McGinnis said many have told her they realized the importance of the group to their lives only after they stumbled into the group or went because of a friend’s invitation.  “It’s not like other affinity groups,” she said. “Like ‘oh, we’re all adopted – let’s go hang out?’ It may not make sense at first.”

“When I decided to reach out and connect with other adoptees and their experiences when I was 24, it was like multiple refractions of my experience mirrored back at me,” she said, showing her all the directions her life could have taken, but didn’t.

“There’s no way for you not to begin seeing your own life in different ways when you are hearing other people talk about their own experience. That’s how you suddenly see what you couldn’t see.” But, she added, the adoptee has to be developmentally ready to really hear other’s stories, and to think about them in the context of their own life.  That developmental step occurs at different times for adoptees, she added, and some are not ready to get the full benefit of an adoptee group until they are in their 20s or older.

In 2009, for her Ph.D. dissertation, McGinnis studied the mental health of Korean school children who were raised in orphanages. When she started her job in 2017 as an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Social Work, her youngest son was barely two. She wanted to do more research in Korea, but with young children at home, she decided not to go that route.

For the Eva B. Donaldson Adoption Institute,  McGinnis led a study dubbed Beyond Culture Camp. She learned that, from a 486-person sample of 50 percent Korean adoptees and 50 percent white adoptees, adoption identity became stronger over time. In the same group, the importance of racial/ethnic identity became less important over time.  She always wanted to follow up on this finding.  

The Beyond Culture Camp results hinted that adults are not done with adoption when they are 18 or 20 or even 50 – a good reason to look at the significance of adoptee groups as to adoptees as they grow older, she said.  

“I began to think that there was a need to literally map the life course of adoption,” McGinnis said. “We have not done that yet.  That’s what I am hoping this project is going to be the beginning of.”

Life happened, time flew by, and in summer 2019, at the beginning of lockdown times, she was diagnosed with lump in her breast, and she had a lumpectomy. The lump was benign, but in the margins, there was cancer.  The benign lump allowed the doctor to find the hidden cancer early.

The experience “catapulted me into some really deep soul work. I call it my ‘Adoption 2.0.,’” she said. She wondered why she had cancer, despite not having any genetic markers for it in any of her tests.  “It was something environmental,” she said.  There were no simple answers to the “why.”

While at home and recovering from cancer treatment, she noticed that Korean adoptees and other transnational adoptees got together more frequently during the pandemic.  After being out of the adoptee community conversations for some years, she said, “I started to just kind of join in.”

She discovered that the people Zooming were a different population than those who were formerly active in adoptee organizations.  Some had never participated in an adoptee event before.  “They were like the people I missed 20 years ago,” when finding people to join Also Known As, she said.   They were not averse to getting together with fellow adoptees – they were just “doing other things in their 20s,” she said.  

The pandemic Zoom meetings made her even more curious about the 40-somethings who had never been in any group with fellow adoptees.

Mapping the health of transnational adoptees

Another wake-up call was that “in my close group of Korean adoptee women, maybe eight of us, about half of us were diagnosed with breast cancer in our 40s. That was another thing – what the hell was going on?” McGinnis had read research about complex trauma causing the kind of stress that creates physical symptoms. She wondered about her adoptee women friends, so many with similar early breast cancer.  

Before getting too far into the project now online as CAARE, McGinnis said she reviewed the literature of adult adoptee physical and mental health.  “We don’t really know very much,” she said.  Because there have been no recent studies, the oldest research participants in any study are in their late 20s.  Charting adoptees’ health in adulthood became the second aim of the study.

The goal must include mental health influences as well, she noted.  She hopes to identify stressors and traumas, such as systemic racism, that may affect the physical and mental health of adoptees as they age. “Complex trauma is the way people internalize the things that have happened to them,” and how they talk to themselves about it, McGinnis explained. “In other words, the voice that says ‘I’m not good enough,’ and ‘I’m not lovable,’” she said. “Those are the things that, early on in life,  get lodged in the mind and the body, and, I think, make you sick, potentially, if you don’t identify them, bring them up to the light, love on them, and shift them profoundly.”

As old as adoption research is, looking at adult adoptees as a research topic is still relatively new.  Policies around child welfare have been around “rescuing children from what are perceived as dangerous situations, and getting them out of childhood, but not setting them up for what they need for a thriving adulthood.” One of her  hopes, she said,  is that “if we can map what adoption looks like in adulthood, we can go back and change policies so children can get what they need for thriving adulthoods.”

Sharing knowledge in the early stages

McGinnis plans to invite community discussions of initial study results, rather than the traditional approach of waiting for a final report.  This sharing method, called the “decolonizing methodology” was developed by indigenous scholars who were tired of researchers extracting information from their communities, and never sharing with the communities it came from, McGinnis explained. With this approach, adoptees can “take that knowledge and make meaning out of it, and have it help them, instead of having it hidden behind some kind of expert paywall.”

McGinnis will discuss some initial results in a session to be held at the IKAA conference to be held in July in Seoul. Her presentation will be part of the Sixth International Symposium on Adoption Studies to be held during the IKAA meeting, on July 12.

The perspective of mid-life “makes us ask deeper questions about our legacy, meaning, and one’s sense of self – it is a different focus than adults have in their 20s.” Although experts always say that adoption is a lifelong journey, there is little information on how transnational adoptees view this lifelong relationship, and how social and cultural connections affect it. 

The survey (website link below), for U.S. placed adoptees (international, domestic, or from foster care) age 18 and older, asks questions about physical and mental health, and tries to get at whether participation in adoptee-led spaces and groups affects adoptees as adults, and if so, how. It also asks participants about exposure to trauma as a child and as an adult, and any experiences related to loss.  It takes about an hour to fill out, according to McGinnis.

As part of her legacy, McGinnis wants to help fellow adoptees to offer their experiences navigating adulthood as an adoptee to inform the perspectives of future adoptees and adoptive families. Going from community organizing, to work in policy, and then research, McGinnis describes herself as “still a story-teller, but I am trying to tell stories with data and patterns.”

For her, thinking about the data and patterns of adoption started with listening to adoptees’ stories. “That is an education you cannot get in a graduate program. It is profoundly transformative.  I was always thinking ‘where are the threads?’ and ‘what are the themes in common?’ and ‘how are these stories converging and diverging?’ and that’s what I am still doing now.”

The website for the Collaborative on Adoption and Alternative Care Research (CAARE)  www.caare-research.org and the MAP survey is on a clickable link on the site.

The annual gathering of the International Korean Adoptee Association (IKAA) annual meeting information is at: https://www.ikaa.org/2022/09/27/2023-ikaa-korea-gathering/

The haunting of the untold story

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Author Interview: Grace M. Cho honors the Korean diaspora, and her mother’s life, in Tastes Like War | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2023)

Author Grace M. Cho and the cover of Tastes Like War

Author Grace M. Cho, like many who lose a family member after a long illness, had a period of grieving where she could remember only the sick and helpless mother she had been trying to help in the years leading up to her death. But this period was followed by a healing time during which she began to remember the healthy, gifted, energetic mother she knew through her childhood and teen years.

Writing down her memories was the beginning of a complex memoir, Tastes Like War,  about her mother’s life, and her own life as her mother’s daughter. Intertwined in the stories and emotions of the memoir is the harsh backdrop of post-war Korea that her mother survived, the oppression of the U.S. forces in South Korea, the shock of immigration and the constant stress of surviving in a rural white society. She also links her mother’s early and continuous trauma, including being cut off from Korea, to her descent into schizophrenia, and her eventual death from that disease.

She also writes of her mother’s creativity, especially when it came to food, and how preparing and eating Korean food together was a healing force in their relationship.

Tastes Like War was the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award for Adult Nonfiction.  It was also a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction.  Beyond those honors, Cho has toured widely to discuss her memoir and her research into immigration and war trauma, and its effects on survivors’ long-term mental health. She has heard many stories from readers whose experiences were similar to her mother’s; connecting with others’ stories has been validating.

Cho is a professor of sociology and anthropology at City University of New York (CUNY) at Staten Island. Her writing style is engaging in that she writes about psychological/sociological principles at a micro-level, through people’s lives; as well at a macro-level, in analyzing the effects of the U.S. military presence on the Korean people during and after the Korean War.

Understanding the Korean War through survivors’ stories was also written into her breakthrough study, entitled Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (2008), for which Cho received an American Sociological Society book award in 2010. At CUNY, Cho teaches on topics having to do with war survival, immigration and trauma.

Although it is a memoir, and more personal than her previous works, Tastes Like War continues the same strategy as her first book, Cho said. She explained that she tries to find “creative methodologies for exploring social issues; prior to publishing my first book, I even did some performance artwork related to the themes I was exploring academically.”

In graduate school, she recalled, one of her advisors, a proponent of experimental writing as it relates to trauma, got her thinking on how to better communicate the effects of trauma. How past life experiences reverberate into the present and future was apparent to her – how to talk and write effectively about the topic became her cipher to crack. The puzzle, she said,  was “how to communicate something that is more on the level of the affective, or more on the level of the unconscious.”

One of the author’s first experiments on alternative ways to teach about war trauma was as a performance artist in the touring art/video/audio exhibit Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War,” The exhibit was once co-sponsored by University of Minnesota Institute for Advanced Study and several Twin Cities Korean American organizations in 2007.  Cho and co-collaborators Hosu Kim and Hyun Lee did a performance piece for that exhibit.

That the exhibit was built around not only survivor experiences but also the memories of children of survivors resonated with her, she said.  She remembers that she “really related to what some of the second-generation children said about feeling haunted by what their parents didn’t talk about, so that’s sort of how I started doing more creative work on this within academia.”

Cho writes in Tastes Like War how she received news of her mother’s death just before publication of her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora. In that study, Cho describes the dominating presence of U.S. military in South Korea, and its effect on the impoverished and powerless Korean people during the post-war years.

Exploring this cultural and sociological milieu became her way to understand her mother’s life, her illness, and her sudden death. “I imagined her in every scenario I wrote about,” Cho relates in Tastes Like War. “My mother was the figurative ghost of my book, and she began haunting me in a new way once she was actually dead.”

What sparked Tastes Like War was writing “just as a way of remembering all the little things about my childhood that were coming back to me,” Cho said.  During her young adulthood, she said, “my mind was consumed by dealing with the trauma of my mother’s mental illness and trying to understand her past in Korea,  and of uncovering a history that was just really heavy.” 

Grace Cho’s mother Koonja, and a photo of Grace’s graduation.

Remembering her mother’s life was “joyful,” she said. From the perspective of her childhood, her mother was bright, energetic, capable and creative.  Despite the weight of grief “I was able to recover those memories, and I realized I had forgotten so much about her because of the heaviness of her schizophrenia.”

She writes of her mother as a clever forager, who was able to find the best places to pick fiddlehead ferns (gosari), burdock and seaweed – all common wild greens for Korean tables. Later, she discovered she could make good money foraging for wild produce that was in greater demand – mainly mushrooms and wild blackberries. She also made and sold blackberry pies and jam. During the height of foraging seasons, she seemed driven – walking the woods by day, and working at a part-time job by night. Her father, who had been a merchant marine, was older than her mother, and had several heart attacks during her teen years. As he slowed down, her mother sped up, and provided income and other support for the family.

Although her mother was known and liked in the community through her foraging business, her skillful cooking, and other work, she was not truly accepted, the author writes. The cultural divide was wide and the systemic racism deep in rural Washington state. It affected Cho and her brother as well.

Cho described herself writing in a state fueled by grief. She penned bits and pieces of memory. A common interest in Korean food bound their mother-daughter relationship.  Her mother’s energy for cooking and feeding people was always extravagant. Cho relates craving her mother’s flavorful food after her death. Food was part of the grief, but also part of the solace and healing.

Grace Cho with her mother Koonja at home.

Cho relates that she was also hungry for her mother’s stories of home, which her mother parceled out sparingly. Sometimes she revealed shocking facts, for example, when her mother talked about her sister – an aunt who Cho had never heard of. Cho writes that her mother told her about her one day, that she had suddenly disappeared during post-war confusion, and she never found out what happened.  Cho knew that there was many more stories her mother left untold.  She pieced fragments together as well as she could over the years.

“Originally, when I started developing those memories into memoir pieces, I wasn’t thinking I was going to write a memoir,” the author reflected.  She thought she might “develop it into something.”  Feeling unfamiliar with the genre of memoir, she signed up for workshops with other writers who were doing memoirs.

The workshops were encouraging, as the writers’ cohort swapped stories and shared their challenges. “I kept getting this feedback that it seemed like I was holding back on something, and that there was a bigger story,” she said. “I was sort of reluctant to put that in, because I had already written a book [Haunting the Korean Diaspora] about the back story.” But because her group told her the back story needed telling, she incorporated some of the research described in her first book. “Once I made the decision to make this another hybrid text mixing research and memoir, then I started to research other areas as well, and more specifically, around schizophrenia.”

Cho’s instincts always told her that her mother’s schizophrenia was, in part, caused by her traumatic past. A war survivor, Cho’s parents met when her father was a merchant marine and was visiting Korea. After they married, Cho’s mother and father along with her older brother settled in his hometown in rural Washington in the late ‘60s. After that, Cho’s mother was isolated from anyone who could relate to her experiences.

In her research, Cho theorizes that the mental health issues of many immigrants are linked to their past,  particularly those who fled their home countries due to traumatic events like war, and landed in a vastly different culture, where their experiences were not recognized or validated. These characteristics, called social risk factors by the psychology community, are increasingly recognized as contributors to schizophrenia. But when Cho’s mother was first suffering, social circumstances were not seen as risks. 

Her mother’s behavior began to change when Cho was a young teenager and got progressively worse.  As a child, she recalled “it did not sink in for me that it was a real struggle for her to make it in that community.”  As a teenager, Cho tried in vain to understand her mother’s behavior but was often terrified, mystified or embarrassed by it.  

As she got older, her need to understand only deepened.  “My mother was a mystery I was trying to solve, and it was what drove me for much of my adult life, because of my own traumas of witnessing her mental health unravel when I was a teenager and being so helpless, and not finding any sort of support for her.”

As a researcher, Cho explained, her curiosity also sent her to the scholarship around her mother’s illness. She started reading the work of experts who theorized that schizophrenia is not an isolated pathology, but is wholistically related to one’s past, particularly to past unaddressed trauma. She concentrated on “the social risk factors for schizophrenia that were linked to immigration and to being a person of color in a white neighborhood.”

Cho said she also found that in other cultures, schizophrenia is not thought to be an irreversible condition; other cultures view it as a condition that sufferers can recover from. That Western experts today still treat it as chronic could be one of the factors that makes it worse for patients in the mainstream U.S. health system, Cho said. It is also the most stigmatized mental illness, she added, “which does not bode well for recovery and also changes the dynamic of the family.”

In cultures where schizophrenic patients are expected to recover, Cho said, “families and communities do a much better job of integrating their person and keeping them connected to day-to-day activities, whereas in the U.S., we tend to ostracize and separate those patients.”

Hearing voices is a symptom of schizophrenia; Cho’s mother also heard voices. The traditional Western medical model is to think of this symptom as “purely biological,” Cho said. Therefore the patient gets medicated until the voices go away. This requires some powerful drugs that are unsafe in many ways.

Western psychiatry is only lately beginning to look at factors such as the patient’s social context and life history, the author explained. “Hearing a voice was automatically grounds for diagnosing someone with a serious mental illness, whereas in some other contexts hearing a voice could have a different meaning.”

When Cho was 23, just starting her Ph.D. program, her mother separated from her father and moved to New Jersey, near Cho’s older brother’s home.  Cho’s sister-in-law told her, while Cho was visiting at her mother’s new home, that her mother was getting worse. She also eventually told her the part of her mother’s past she did not know, that her own brother remembered but never told her. “Grace, your mother used to be a prostitute.”

In time, her brother and father both confirmed it to be true. She experienced the shock of finally knowing the family secret, followed by sadness and shame.  In dealing with it, she writes that the shame was something “that I would later come to interrogate and beat into submission through my research.”

After learning that her mother had a past as a sex worker, and in watching her mental health decline further, Cho said, “it sort of became a life mission for me to want to understand her in a deeper way and through a lens of compassion because I started to realize how stigmatized she was because of her association both with the U.S. military bases in Korea and because of the label of being schizophrenic.”

Cho’s mother never told her directly that her past included sex work – and Cho never directly asked.  She learned in her research about the era, that in Korea, “from the time the U.S.  troops arrived until pretty much until the present day, there has been sort of a stigma attached to women who fraternize with American soldiers …a woman could be a bar hostess, or a cocktail waitress, or a singer in one of these establishments, and even if she is not explicitly a sex worker the assumption is always there.”  The way the stereotype affected the women psychologically at that time, and during their lives, is much the same, she said.  

Cho said she wanted to honor her mother’s truth in living bravely and authentically despite the constant stressors her mother experienced as an immigrant of color, and despite the crushing weight of her past trauma. She also wants to honor the women of her mother’s era, whose hidden labor in the camptown neighborhoods near U.S. military bases lifted up South Korea’s economy from very dark times.

Cho said she also wants to honor her with the witness of her own memories of her mother’s life “as this person who was, in a way, so powerful in the community even though she wasn’t respected by that many people …that she was somebody who fed and nurtured people even if they didn’t see her as an equal citizen.”

The author sees her mother as typifying so many immigrant women in the U.S. “They have to work all of these really difficult jobs that no one else wants, and sort of bear the brunt of misplaced anger and racism.”

Cho knows her mother’s life goal was to be an educated person. “That was denied her, but the second-best thing would be for her children to become educated.”  There is a through-line in the story, Cho said, “about how much she emphasized education being really important for me, and that it would somehow redeem her and it would allow her to sort of let go of some of the traumas from her past that made her feel ashamed.”

It is a Korean ethos, that if a child grows up to be successful, that the parent can feel that they did something right. “She pushed me to get my Ph.D.,” she said.  The energy Cho needed to get through a Ph.D. program was a combination of “her making it so apparent that she wanted me to do it, and also my desire to give her something to look forward to during her darkest moments.”

Her mother died many years before the author thought of writing a memoir, but Cho reflected, “I imagine my mom seeing the success of my memoir as her success.”

In contrast, she added, her family members, particularly her brother and his wife, made it clear they did not want her publishing anything related to their family’s history, and were opposed to her writing her first book. She did not let their feelings deter her. “My mom actually was supportive of my first book, and she was the only person whose opinion really mattered to me.”

Cho said in a more recent interview that she has continued to be asked to speak about her research and her memoir during 2022, and it looks like 2023 will include many appearances on college and university campuses. “My head is still very much in Tastes Like War.  I haven’t really been able to move on to anything new since then, which is fine, and I’m happy to do that.”

The book is in the process of being translated into Korean, and her next small project is to write a preface to the Korean translation for a Korean audience.  “It is something that will be very emotional to me, because I will be speaking to the society I felt my family was exiled from. I will frame it around questions of exile, and homecoming,” she said.  She will also visit Korea next year with her nine-year-old son, a trip that was postponed due to the pandemic. She expects to do one book launch event there.

Cho said she is also working on a children’s book of a story of a little girl and her mother. The mother hears voices, and the child tries to understand how her mother hears things she cannot hear.

During this academic year, she has been teaching a course on the sociology of mental illness, and some of the ideas concerning possible links between socio-cultural conditions and risks of mental illness (explained in a book she quotes in Tastes Like War entitled Our Most Troubling Madness by T.M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow).

Now, more than a year after publication of Tastes Like War, Cho has benefited from the supportive comments from a wide and diverse readership. Many are readers who “have had someone in their family who has been diagnosed with a mental illness, or who themselves have been diagnosed with one.” 

Another group of supporters, surprisingly, have been from her hometown of Chehalis, Washington. “I don’t hold back at all in my critique of that town, yet I’ve had a lot of people from the town either reach out to me to say they also experienced it the way that I did, or maybe they didn’t experience it that way, and they are sorry and apologized for being complicit with a lot of the things that I described in the book.”

More broadly, Cho said, “what I hope it can do is to give more people the courage to speak about things that were told we’re not supposed to speak about, and I think, particularly around those experiences that we call mental illness, or around [experiences] like sex work or war trauma that are supposed to be so shameful,  that we should never talk about them again.”

Delving into the research for the original thesis that became Haunting the Diaspora, which was then incorporated into Tastes Like War, was also something she personally needed, Cho said, “for my own sanity and to understand my family history.”  In psychoanalytic language, Cho said, bringing up a topic that has been shrouded in silence is like “releasing the ghost in a public arena” she said, “so that’s exactly how I have thought about my writing, as carrying the legacy of the trauma and wanting to, I guess, escape the grip of the ghost so that it’s not so powerful, by making it public.”

Mall of America booms with Kpop, percussion and dance

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Korean Cultural Festival unites Korean Americans from Twin Cities and Chicago | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2022)

JangMi Arts perform at the Korean Culture Festival at the Mall of American in Minnesota.

Korean music, percussion and dance groups from the Twin Cities and Chicago performed in a free festival celebrating Korean culture, held at the rotunda of the Mall of America in Bloomington on Sunday, November 6.

The Korean American Association of Minnesota sponsored the event, which featured several Twin Cities-based performing groups. JangMi Arts performed dance and drumming, and Shinparam Korean Traditional Drum Troupe performed a samulnori-style concert percussion piece.  MKDC Kpop dance group also moved to the latest Kpop beats, and Lee’s Champion Taekwondo Academy did a martial arts demonstration.

Jangmi Arts excite the audience at the MOA with their skillful moves and beats in the Samgo-mu Three Drum Dance.
Shinparam Korean traditional drum troupe perform a fast-paced version of Yongnam samulnori.
MKDC Kpop dance group impressed the crowd with their choreographed moves.
Lee’s Champion Taewondo Academy students show their stuff.

There was a fashion show created and modeled by the Korean Student Association of University of Minnesota featuring formal hanbok (Korean traditional national costume) as well as some humorous Korean haute couture, such as Korean school uniforms and outfits perfect for midnight trips to the convenience store.

Performers from the Korean Performing Art Institute of Chicago at the MOA event.

Chicago performing groups include the Korean Performing Art Institute of Chicago (KPAC) led by artistic director Byoung Sug Kim, which showcased traditional and contemporary Korean percussion; and the Chicago Korean Dance Company, which performed several traditional Korean dances.

The Korean American Association of Minnesota (KAAM), a business, cultural and service organization of the Twin Cities Korean American community, collaborated with the Korean Consulate of Chicago, which provided funding for the event.  The KAAM website is: www.mnkorea.org

Ten Years Ago in KQ

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PSY’s 2012 success story, a film about raising women up, and a conservation convention in an uproar | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2012 issue)

(Korean Quarterly published a print edition from 1997 to 2022. All 25 years of KQ content will be part of a digital archive here at koreanquarterly.org and will debut on the KQ website soon!)

PSY

PSY danced on the cover of Korean Quarterly in fall 2012, and KQ writers Teresa Thomasulo and Andrew Lam took a serious look at the funny phenomenon of Jae-Sang Park (alias PSY), his catchy rap song Gangnam Style, and the music video that  got 500 million hits on Youtube from July through September that year.

“Anthropologists and linguists no doubt are having a field day trying to chronicle and dissect how, in the early autumn of 2012, Gangnam Style, a comic pop music video from South Korea, became an American idiomatic expression,” Lam wrote in his analysis. PSY’s rise to stardom was nothing less than meteoric – in short order, it became the most-watched video in Korean entertainment history. It prompted many U.S. spoofs, including Mitt Romney Style, that year.

Thomasulo explains in her analysis that Gangnam became an entertainment center when zoning regulations pushed new entertainment businesses to the neighborhood south of the Han River (gangnam literally means “south of the river”) and that area acquired its own hipness. 

She discussed how PSY was preceded in using English lyrics by many Korean artists, such as BoA, Rain, Super Junior, and the Wonder Girls, but that those artists achieved only limited mainstream success in the U.S. There was a goofy quality to Gangnam Style that caught viewers’ attention; it also had a social satire theme, poking fun at the upscale apartments and stores, fancy cars, stylish clothes, elite educations and other materialism that characterizes the Gangnam area.

Hallyu, the Korean wave of popular culture that has been pushing a tide of Korean cultural influence in everything from food to TV dramas since PSY galloped out on the stage, has not lost steam yet, 10 years later. 

There have been many other crossover firsts of the Korean wave since then, including film director Joon-ho Bong’s Parasite, a black comedy considered by many critics to be the best film of the 21st century. The film won the leading four awards at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2019 (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film).  It was the first non-English-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Squid Game, the popular drama series that was the most-watched drama on the giant streaming service Netflix last year. Interestingly, Squid Game was also a dystopian look at a ridiculously tragic end game demonstrating what happens when so many are shut out of high achievement culture that is so prized by the society.  Interestingly, both Squid Game and Parasite explore a common theme; the rebellion of ordinary people against the trap of their dystopian capitalist society, which PSY also explored with humor.

Mira Chang, producer of Half the Sky.

A film to raise up women

Also 10 years ago, KQ  profiled documentary film producer Mira Chang, and her project Half the Sky, a two-part film that premiered in October 2012 and told the story of projects ongoing in 10 countries to improve the welfare of women and girls.  The project also created short documentary films for use in fundraising by the organizations profiled in the documentary. The film was co-produced with documentary journalist (and New York Times writer) Nick Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn, a journalist who co-wrote the original book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

Kristof still writes about global health, women’s health, human rights, and global affairs for the New York Times. WuDunn, who was the first Asian American reporter hired by the New York Times, is now working as a bank executive with Mid-Market Securities, a boutique investment banking firm. Her interests include projects serving women entrrepreneurs and businesses that measure both social capital and economic capital.

Mira Chang produced the innovative documentary series How to Survive a Pandemic (HBO, 2022) directed by documentary filmmaker David France. It takes an inside look at how the COVID-19 vaccine was invented and rolled out under great time pressure and during a pandemic, exploring the work and collaboration of health agencies worldwide as well as the political and moral failures of government to act equitably.

Conservation convention near an environmentally-damaging naval base construction site

Ten years ago, KQ also followed the ongoing protests in Gangjeong, a tiny village on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where a controversial submarine naval base was already under construction, and where activists had been holding daily protests and other actions for years.

Into this environment, the South Korean government decided, rather illogically, to pay for and hold a conference for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).  Three writers submitted essays to discuss the base, what happened at the Fifth World Conservation Congress, and the progress of the activist movement to stop the project.

Writer Koohan Paik, a filmmaker and international activist, speculated that the South Korean government decided to host the conference in order to “greenwash” the base project and other issues  such as the export of nuclear energy to developing Asian nations. But due to activists stepping up activities and educating participants before and during the conference, this effort backfired. The activists sold yellow t-shirts printed with the slogan “No War Base on Jeju,” then set up a mobile stage outside the conference and held their own concert, which drew hundreds of spectators. There were small performance-art happenings during the conference to spark conversations about endangered species that would be harmed by the construction.

Protesting the naval base being built at Gangjeong, Jeju.

Theology professor Min-ah Cho reported how the site became the center of a kind of pop-up inter-faith alliance.  Mass was celebrated every day there, Protestant pastors led afternoon prayers, and Buddhist monks held evening dharma talks.

While Cho was there, construction crews had nearly finished the base foundations. However, protestors and religious leaders vowed to never give up their quest for justice in Gangjeong. “We believe that to protect peace and life is not a matter of ideology. It’s the call of the Gospel against human power destroying the kingdom of God,” said Franciscan friar Yoeng-Soep Suh.

Gangjeong naval base protest.

The movement to stop the base got more world attention because of the attention brought by the Fifth World Conservation Congress. However, the base was completed in early 2016.  International activists and supporters from the Catholic Church have maintained an active presence in the community to represent the ongoing protest and the interests of the Gangjeong residents.

(See coverage of KQ’s 2018 visit to the resident activists in Gangjeong https://www.koreanquarterly.org/tag/naval-base-in-jeju/ )

Korean Quarterly, Fall 2012, 15th anniversary issue.

Kimchi and the new normal life

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Familiar people and activities and the orderly nature of fall | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2022)

Minnesota 2022 Kimchi Festival. Photo by Kim Jackson

In addition to visual cues, like geese practice-flying in a chevron shape in the sky or noticing less
pavement on a favorite walking trail as it gets covered with leaves, there are some energy cues that
signify fall is coming. I sense a certain sense of order about fall, some urges to get mentally organized for
the work ahead. Even for those of us who are no longer affected by school schedules, the instinct to get with it happens anyway as vacations come to a close, and we set our minds to being back at work again.

I also found myself tentatively thinking that perhaps, after two-and-a-half years of pandemic ups and
downs, things are getting back to normal. Or at least, in a state of new normal. Certain activities, like
outdoor festivals in late summer and early fall gave me a sense of old times.

Some of the 2022 Minnesota Kimchi Festival kimchi competition entries. Photos by Kim Jackson

One of the days I felt most normal was the day of the Kimchi Festival, presented by Adoptee Hub, a service and educational group by and for adult Korean adoptees, devoted to social services and cultural enrichment specifically tailored to them. The Kimchi Festival, although designed to provide fun access to Korean culture for Korean adoptees through food, was also of interest to a wide audience.

There was a sense of newness because there has never been a Kimchi Festival in Minnesota before. This was the first one, although Adoptee Hub wants it to be an annual event. It was fun to see the Kimchi Contest judges, volunteers from the Korean American Women’s Association, sit down before a bemused audience to give a little critique of the kimchi samples entered into the contest. It may have been a first-time experience for all of us to hear the results of a kimchi contest. Some were “a little salty,” or “a little fishy,” and a couple of the samples, including one made with asparagus, were pronounced to be “innovative.”

There was also a sense of newness because the Twin Cities Korean American community was showing up to its own large-scale in-person event for the first time in a few years. There were vendors, performers, churches, and community groups. It felt both new and old, and both strange and familiar at the same time.

For me, it was super-fun because I had to stop about every two feet as I walked along, to talk to
someone I knew and had not seen since before the pandemic. It was so satisfying to see so many of the
same people again; to know they were the same and see that they were OK.

The food was good too. I was having one of those moments of joy, resting at an outside table after
getting a couple kimchi samples, when a Korean American guy I did not know sat down next to me and we exchanged a few bits of small talk. One of the things he said was “Isn’t it great to just see the people?” I knew what he meant – it was not only great to see any people having fun at an outdoor event
together, it was also special for me and my Korean family members and friends to see so many Korean
faces at the same event. I felt somehow relieved. Intellectually, I knew the folks were still there. But, yes, it was great to just see them.

At the end of 2016, the year after the Adoptee Citizenship Act was first introduced, adoptees and allies from across the country travelled to Washington DC for an Adoptee Citizenship Day of Action, at which they delivered more than 35,000 postcards from supporters of their nationwide advocacy campaign. 

Another event in of the fall involves government getting back into gear. I spent some time delving into
the progress of the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) which would confer automatic citizenship on all
international adoptees, irrespective of their age or date of adoption. It would also bring home all
adoptees who have been deported to their country of origin. In 2022, the ACA made more progress than it has ever made in its seven-year history. It was passed in the House of Representatives in February,
then went to the Senate and was stripped from a bigger bill.

To bolster support for the bill, the lobbying group Adoptees for Justice (A4J) sought and received
support at the state level, including a resolution from the conservative state of Utah to unanimously
support the ACA and call for its U.S. Senators to get behind it. It still could get through in the last months
of the 2022 session of Congress. A4J is urging all supporters to tell their Senators to step up and support
it.

Kudos to Sara Jones, a community organizer and Korean adoptee along with all her allies in the Utah
business and government community for all the work needed to get their resolution through the state
legislation. Bi-partisan cooperation can happen!

Dexieng Dae Yang and Laura Anderson in The Humans.

Also among the fall 2020 stories are reviews of two recent live theater productions that put a new spin
on famous plays. One at Park Square Theater, was The Humans, a Tony-award-winning play that has
seen many productions in many theaters. This one was staged and casted by dramaturg Katie Bradley, a
Korean adoptee, to show this family drama as a family with two Asian daughters. Although nothing new
is added to the play, the substitution of two Asian daughters and one Black boyfriend, instead of a
white family whose members racially match, sends a different kind of message to the audience about
the nature of the drama.

Cast, directors and production crew of Death of a Salesman: (Front row left to right) Katie Bradley, Adelin Phelps, Christopher Thomas Pow, Greg Watanabe, Rich Remedios, Kevin Fanshaw, Ajah Williams; and (back row left to right): Rick Shiomi, Seth Patterson, Lily Tung Crystal, Eric Sharp, Olivia Wilusz.

Similarly, Theater Mu’s recent staged reading of the classic Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman,
directed by local actor/playwright Eric Sharp ( a Korean adoptee) in collaboration with Seth Patterson
and Theater 45, flipped the script on this well-known story of the failed American dream with an all-
Asian cast. Having live theater back is another great joy for Twin Citians as we step into a seemingly fragile new-normal environment.

As we enter the last quarter of 2022, we have to reflect on what a big year it has been for KQ and for all
who support us, as we transitioned from paper and online editions to 100 percent online with a new
digital archive still on the way. Before the end of the tax year, please consider a donation to help KQ
continue to bring this independent, volunteer-driven journal to you into the future. Thanks readers!

Citizenship fight goes on for international adoptees

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Adoptees for Justice calls on supporters in key states, more constituent support | by Martha Vickery (Fall 2022)

At the end of 2016, the year after the Adoptee Citizenship Act was first introduced, adoptees and allies from across the country travelled to Washington DC for an Adoptee Citizenship Day of Action, at which they delivered more than 35,000 postcards from supporters of their nationwide advocacy campaign. 

In the waning months of 2022, at the end of a long year of lobbying and visiting constituents, supporters of the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) are hoping their bill will finally get over the finish line in the Senate, during the session that continued as of September 6, after a summer break.  (See KQ last update on the ACA that ran in the Fall 2020 edition)

The ACA, a proposed law which would confer automatic citizenship to all international adoptees, was passed in the House of Representatives in February as part of a large trade-centered bill, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act  (nicknamed “the Competes Act”), which is designed to increase U.S. semi-conductor manufacturing, and deal with supply chain issues of manufacturers in Asia.   

All bills must be passed by both houses of Congress, so after that passage, the bill went to a conference committee before being sent to the Senate.  After going through the conference committee process, ideally when two versions of the bill are reconciled, a  version of it was passed in the Senate, and eventually made law in late July, as the so-called CHIPS-Plus Act (the long form of the CHIPS-Plus Act is the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semi-conductors for America” Act).

However, in the process of the compromise, the ACA was stripped from the bill, along with other added provisions.  Since July, the strategy has changed, but the fight is still on to ensure citizenship for all adoptees, with help from Asian American organizations and Korean adoptee groups in several key states.

Taneka Jennings, Rachel Koelzer, and Michelle Liang of NAKASEC outside Iowa Capitol in spring 2022

Adoptees for Justice (A4J), the national education and lobbying organization sponsored by the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (NAKASEC), has used the last few months to re-boot, and lobby for the ACA to be passed in another form, either as a stand-alone bill, or as part of another bill.

If passed, the law would cover all international adoptees.  It would confer citizenship on all children who will be adopted internationally in the future; it would also confer citizenship on any international adoptees who currently do not have U.S. citizenship.

Taneka Jennings,  the A4J campaign director until recently, has tracked and lobbied the bill for the last few years. After it passed the House in February, she said, the bill had made the most progress it has ever made to becoming law since its inception nearly seven years ago.

There is still a chance that the ACA bill will make it through the 2022 Congress before the session closes in December. A lot rides on how much constituency support it will get from now until the end of 2022 when the session closes, Jennings said.  

Gathering support from states

A4J has been lobbying in key states to get more support for the bill. According to the A4J website, supportive resolutions have been passed in six states (California, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky and Utah) and six cities (Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Seattle).

The ACA bill was first introduced in Congress in 2015.  Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota was the first to propose the sweeping bill to ensure automatic citizenship for all international adoptees, irrespective of their age or year of adoption. Other legislative fixes, such as the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, covered only international adoptees who were age 18 or younger at the time the law was adopted.  This left a lot of older adoptees out.

Issues associated with lack of citizenship, such as lack of access to medical care and other citizen benefits like Social Security, inability to get student loans, passports, and secure employment, have plagued an estimated tens of thousands of these older international adoptees over their lifetimes. Jennings said that it is not known how many international adoptees are living without citizenship.

South Korea, one of the few governments that tracks the U.S. citizenship of its international adoptees, has reported that there are 18,603 Korean adoptees to the U.S. whose U.S. citizenship was never recorded, Jennings said.

According to Jennings, international adoptees have also reported they have been living with an old “order of deportation.” That is when the country of origin does not accept the deported person because it considers the deportation to be a violation of the person’s human rights, so the adoptee continues to live in the U.S. without citizenship.  

“There are people who have been living in the shadows for upwards of 20 years, unable to work legally or to get benefits,” Jennings said, due to orders of deportation, or other irregularities that prevented them from obtaining citizenshiip.  The inability to get work and proper medical care cause major problems for adult adoptees when they have been unable to obtain citizenship, she added. “Conditions like diabetes and congenital spinal issues – those are a couple of the examples we know of that folks in our community are dealing with.”

In extreme cases, some adoptees have been deported for felony convictions, such as certain drug charges. Others have been impoverished because they are unable to access crucial support benefits, such as Social Security.  As written, the ACA would solve these issues, and bring all the deportees home.

L-R, Staci Robison, Shelly Johnson, Sara Jones, Senator Jani Iwamoto, Larry Jenkins, Jini Roby, Jang Kim.

Jang Kim’s dream of citizenship

Jang Kim, 44, of Utah, is one such Korean adoptee for whom the passage of the ACA would mean a significant and immediate improvement for his life.  Through connections, he met Korean adoptee Sara Jones last year and joined the campaign in Utah to pass a supporting resolution.  As part of the campaign, Jang testified before the Utah legislature during the 2022 session.

Estranged from his adoptive family at age 10 due to his adoptive mother’s severe mental illness, Kim was 18 or 19 when he began to realize that he did not have the correct paperwork to get a driver’s license or to be hired in the conventional way.  His asked his adoptive parents for help, but they could not or would not produce the original adoption paperwork.  Working with U.S. immigration as a young adult, he determined through Korean Social Services that he had indeed been adopted in Korea by his adoptive parents, but that they had never finalized the adoption in the U.S. Legally, he was stateless.

Jang has made a living in the Salt Lake City area by working for friends and family, and also at conventional jobs by getting paid “under the table,” he explained. It was a situation that led to employers taking advantage of his predicament by underpaying and overworking him. Employed at a custom furniture-making company, he learned carpentry skills over time, and worked his way to the level of a master carpenter but never was paid more than $12/hour. The employers would sometimes announce that the staff was required to do an “all-nighter” to get jobs finished on deadline, he added.

On his own, he worked with federal immigration officials, and eventually achieved permanent residency status. There were a lot of process complications – sometimes the officials did not even know how to handle his situation, he said.

Kim eventually obtained a green card, but lost it when his wallet was stolen. That resulted in his having to begin the permanent residency process all over again. It was incredibly frustrating, he said.  “As a green card holder, you can get things like a Social Security card and a [driver’s] license.  But if you lose it, you can’t just get replacements of all your credentials like citizens can. …Even if you have a record of it and lose the physical green card, they will make you go through the entire permanent residency application process all over again. That put me in a tough spot because when lost my green card, I was really back to square one.”

The main advantage to citizenship would be simply a practical one – to be able to have all his documents, and never have to worry about things getting lost and having to start the process all over again. He would have a status that could never be taken away.  

So far in his life, Jang said, he has not been able to think beyond the practical very often. Making a living and affording a place to live took up nearly all his time and energy.  Recently, the idea of life as a citizen is beginning to fuel his imagination. He has never left the country, and has only been outside Utah twice in his life. Citizenship would mean not only access to jobs at a liveable wage, but a passport, and possibly the chance to travel to foreign countries for the first time. 

Jang is a photographer, and likes to take photos of street life. Doing photography on the streets of Seoul and Tokyo is a dream that could be within reach soon.  Citizenship would “give me the motivation and self-worth to strive for some other things too,” he said.

Utah signing of a resolution supporting automatic citizenship for international adoptees: (back row, left to right) Senator Jake Anderegg, Nubia Pena, Rep. Robert Spendlove, Sen. Jani Iwamoto, Sara Jones, Shelly Johnson, Kari Holt-Larson. (front row, left to right) Gov. Spencer Cox, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson.

Sara Jones and the Korean adoptee-led Utah campaign

Sara Jones said she got fired up to do her part for the ACA in her home state of Utah when she heard through NAKASEC that the bill had passed the house but was having trouble with conservatives in the Senate.  Utah bills itself as conservative, but also as family-friendly.  Jones led a coalition of state leaders and community advocates to successfully pass a concurrent resolution (passed by House and Senate, and signed by the governor) in favor of the ACA.

In her career of leading workforce development projects, Jones, a Korean adoptee, has met and worked with many of the industry leaders in the state, as well as with many Korean adoptee leaders.  In gathering her coalition, she strategized that the ACA could be framed as a way to support families and also the future workforce of the state.

One of the co-sponsors was Sen. Jani Iwamoto (D) the first Asian American woman elected to public office in the state, now retired; the other was Rep. Robert Spendlove (R), who also works for Zions Bank and approached the citizenship campaign as a way to cure a workforce issue for the state. She also asked for and got support from some prominent Korean adoptee community leaders in Utah.

Jones said their group’s strategy was that the adoptee citizenship issue is an economic one. “That was something I really pressed on,” she said. “A lot of people assign it as a family or immigration issue, and some people have asked me ‘well why is it an economic issue?’ And I just asked ‘have you ever led your life without citizenship in America?’  It affects everything. It’s a limit to resources, and access to capital and your livelihood… It was so interesting how many policy makers did not understand that. It’s because  they take their citizenship for granted.”

Zhen E Rammelsberg and Taneka Jennings deliver postcards from Iowans in support of the ACA to U.S, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

Building ACA support in Iowa

Jennings said she participated in three trips this spring and early summer to build constituent support in favor of the ACA. The idea was to send a message to U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate, that his state favors citizenship for all adoptees. During the summer Iowa actions, more than 300 postcards were hand-delivered at one meeting with the senator. Nine Asian American immigrants along with faith leaders wrote a coalition letter of support to Grassley. A public meeting was held with the sponsorship of the Iowa Asian American-Pacific Islander Commission, and A4J supporters also talked to participants in the Asian American Festival, CelebrAsian, held in Des Moines in late May. Iowans were overwhelmingly positive and in favor of the bill, Jennings said.

An Iowa Korean adoptee group held constituent meetings with Grassley’s office and, members wrote two op-eds about the topic, Jennings said. One Iowa Korean adoptee went to the town hall constituents’ meeting sponsored by the Asian American commission, and talked to Grassley directly about it, she added.

As a group, Republicans have been in favor of stricter immigration. The lobbying trips in the name of A4J, with support and sponsorship from local organizations, was to persuade Iowans, and through them, to persuade Sen. Grassley, that adoptees were always intended to be citizens, and that their lack of citizenship is due to a legislative oversight. Although Iowans have been receptive “the reality is that there is a conservative camp of the Senate that simply do not want to expand citizenship rights to anyone,” Jennings said.

Facing up to the injustice to adoptees

To fix the citizenship issue for the adult adoptees who were left out of the poorly-conceived Child Citizenship Act is also “an admission that adoptees were wronged, and to face up to the fact that laws on the books are unjust to a whole age group of international adoptees,” Jennings said.

There are still some legislators, among them Sen. Grassley, Jennings explained, who voted for the existing Child Citizenship Act (passed in 2000). A4J has been pushing the agenda that Congress now has an opportunity to repair this legislative oversight that has been a source of hardship for thousands of international adoptees.

“It is not super surprising that we would be facing a lot of barriers,” Jennings observed.  “From our perspective, it’s not anything our community has done. It’s the brokenness baked into our adoption and immigration systems, and we’re asking for it to be fixed, and that there’s a level of taking ownership at a systemic level that is kind of hard [for some legislators] to do.” 

Although the Adoptee Citizenship legislation has the potential to improve the lives of tens of thousands of international adoptees, it is considered a small bill when compared to many others in terms of the numbers of people affected, she explained.  The bill will be in the Senate to be voted on this fall, possibly as a stand-alone bill, and possibly as a part of another bill.  It is standard practice to make the smaller bills parts of larger bills, according to Jennings.  

 “Our bill has wide bipartisan support, and we think it has the best chance in these broader bill packages of passing.” In the end, Jennings said “It does not matter if it is passed as a stand-alone or part of a larger bill – we only want to see it pass.”

Constituency support for the Adoptee Citizenship Act is crucial right now.  Adoptees for Justice has a form to fill in for a letter of support to national elected officials at this link https://www.adopteesforjustice.org/take-action/

Copyright ©2023 Korean Quarterly. All rights reserved.

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