Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Martha Vickery

Scholarship support for three decades

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Organization to hold 30th annual gala promoting higher education for Korean American Minnesotans | By Martha Vickery (Spring 2025)

The Minnesota Association for Korean Americans (MAKA) will, for the 30th year, show its support of college-bound Korean Americans with its annual Celebrating Tomorrow Scholarship Gala, to be held April 13, when 22 Korean American high school seniors will be awarded $1500 scholarships.

Because of the anniversary, this year is special, according to President Eunah Oh.  Early board members will be called on to relate the history of the organization, and letters from Governor Tim Walz, the Consul-General of South Korea Junghan Kim, and Korean American community organizations will be read and recognized. They will also recognize long-time MAKA board members and one veteran board member, John Palmer, will relate the organization’s history.

MAKA scholarship awards ceremony recipients, 1995.

MAKA formed in the mid-‘90s and had its first sponsorship gala in 1995. The organization was founded after a group including members from Korean Presbyterian Church got together to fundraise for scholarships for college-bound high schoolers.  In 2001, the group invested “a chunk of money” into a Minneapolis Foundation program to fund a scholarship organization, according to President Eunah Oh.   

Annually, about $8,000 or $9,000 is given out from the earnings of this fund, Oh said.  Other organizations also donate and fund their own scholarships through MAKA’s awards process, she said. In its history, the organization has awarded $385,000 in scholarships.

The Korean Association of Minnesota, Korean Presbyterian Church of Minnesota, and the Minnesota chapter of the Seoul National University Alumni Association have also each sponsored a scholarship recipient this year. Individuals also donate funds under their own name or the name of a loved one. The board members do the work of the organization as volunteers, Oh said, so all donations go directly to scholarships.

Annually, there are about 25 to 30 applicants, and MAKA tries to award scholarships each year to at least 12 recipients, Oh said.  The organization gives out more scholarships if the recipients are similarly qualified. This year, there was a larger group of top scorers, she said, so they added more recipients, for a total of 22.

1999 MAKA board and supporters (made up of first and second Korean Americans, adopted Koreans and adoptive parents). Photo by Stephen Wunrow

The group has always reached out to Minnesota’s high number of Korean adoptees, and adoptive parents and adult Korean adoptees have volunteered in the organization and on the board of directors. “Some scholarship sponsors want their recipient to be a Korean adoptee,” Oh added.

Founded as the Mothers’ Association of Korean Americans, MAKA’s Selection Committee during its first year sent application packets to greater Twin Cities area high schools, and awarded eight students each a $500 scholarship. The website notes that, through the years, MAKA also hosted other fundraising events such as concerts, golf tournaments, a Korean American cookbook, wine tastings and auctions. The organization was renamed Minnesota Association of Korean Americans in 2006.

Notable performers at the MAKA gala include award-winning violinist Sarah Chang in 1999 and famous opera singer soprano Sumi Jo in 2001.

At this year’s event, there will be musical performances, a dinner, the presentation of scholarships, and a speech from this year’s mentor, Catherine Kim, the executive vice-president of editorial for NBC News. Kim grew up in Minnesota and is also a scholarship sponsor.

To qualify for the $1,500 scholarship, applicants must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, be a high school senior in the year of scholarship award, be 25 percent or more ethnically Korean, and have a 3.0 gradepoint average or better, according to the MAKA website.  An extra $500 is awarded to the top applicant, top essay writer, and top athlete. Awardees must also be able to attend the awards ceremony.

Because the organization started giving out scholarship grants 30 years ago “some of the recipients are nearly 50 years old now” Oh added. The gala event also includes a mentor speaker, and some of those speakers were also former recipients, she said.

The organization has been able to grow organically due to involvement by families of former recipients or by the recipients themselves to give back to an organization that gave them a boost during their first year of college.

Her family is typical, Oh said.  Someone approached her when her daughter was a junior in high school and asked if her daughter would like to apply for the scholarship. After her daughter was awarded the scholarship, Oh decided to volunteer with the organization. Oh has served as the president since 2018, and will resign as president soon, but still wants to be a volunteer, she said.

The students who were once recipients often grow up to be future scholarship sponsors, Oh said.  In that way, the organization perpetuates itself by allowing community members to both give back and pay it forward. “My daughter was a recipient in 2016, and now she has become a sponsor,” Oh said. “That happens a lot.”

The 2025 Celebrating Tomorrow Annual Scholarship Gala will be held Sunday, April 13 at the Hilton Minneapolis, 1001 Marquette Avenue, Minneapolis, with reception at 5 p.m., 5:30 opening remarks, followed by dinner, keynote speech, and the scholarship presentation ceremony. There will also be a performance by the K-Breeze Korean Children’s Choir. For more information, contact MAKA at: maka.scholarship@gmail.com or phone: 763-218-6949.

Ticket information: Registration:   https://forms.gle/LWTMmkaUkDiFueqx7 , and payment link on Venmo:  @Doug-Park-108 (last 4 digits of phone number for confirmation 7229)

To know we are not alone

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K.W. Lee ~ Remembering one journalist’s relentless pursuit of justice | By Martha Vickery (Spring 2025)

There were no “thought leaders” or “change agents” back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but veteran journalist K.W. Lee was one at a time 30 years before thought leaders were thought of.  What is called “advocacy journalism” today was unrecognized by the profession when Lee was deep into it, as far back as the late ‘60s, furiously writing for human rights and social justice causes he believed in.  

As an investigator, he was called “an obsessive, even maniacal heat-seeking missile” by his editor at the Sacramento Union.  As a seasoned editor and journalist, he got the nickname “the godfather of Asian American journalism” after founding two English language newspapers in Los Angeles Koreatown. As an elder mentor, he paid it forward in his later years with outreach to strengthen the community and promote the leadership of the second generation.

Local news reporting has been in trouble nationwide for more than a decade, and most media organizations, whether local or national, cannot even support investigations any more. Ethnic media is scarcer than ever, despite the fact that immigrants are the fastest-growing population group. 

For all of those reasons and so many others, the K.W. Lee’s passing on March 8 seems like the end of an era.

Lee, a first-generation immigrant journalist, spent his life with his heart in the Korean American community and his career in the English-speaking media mainstream.  Already a mid-career journalist in the ‘70s, he wrote the news of LA Koreatown in the Koreatown Weekly, which debuted in 1979 to a readership of Korean Americans, non-Koreans and English-speaking urban youth and young adults in the Los Angeles area. He became an interpreter of the social predicament of Korean Americans in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when Los Angeles was becoming a boiling pot of racial tensions.  

For one of his most compelling causes, he got stunning results – his reporting helped free a man wrongly convicted of murder, and in the process, catalyzed a movement that unleashed the voices of a generation of Korean Americans.

Reporting from the trenches

Within the last few weeks, before K.W. Lee’s death, I was reflecting on him and his colorful life while reading Saigu: Korean and Asian American Journalists Writing Truth to Power, a compilation of reportage from the era of the Los Angeles Riots (or LA Civil Unrest) of 1992 (a day known as Sa-I-Gu, literally “four-two-nine” in Korean). The collection also includes some recent thoughtful essays on the lessons of those times.  Lee is a central figure in this colection by 21 contributors, including journalists, scholars, filmmakers, photographers and artists, many of whom are Lee’s former employees and colleagues.  I wondered how to write something meaningful about such a comprehensive and wide-ranging collection from a pivotal time.

Its iconic news photos, many by veteran photojournalist Hyungwon Kang, reminded me with a jolt how long ago 30 years actually is. News photos show Koreatown in flames, a broken urban landscape, a war in city streets with armed young men crouched behind cars, ready to protect businesses from looters.  

There are also not-so-iconic photos of the reporters of that era, snapshots in time of crowded newsrooms with messy desks and giant dated computers, with tired-looking staff smiling amid the chaos of trying to get the next issue out, feeling perhaps that they were in a moment that should be captured. Those images made me nostalgic for newsroom days.

Meeting him changed people

A commonality in many of the stories was a section on “meeting K.W. Lee” like the one by Sophia Kim, former reporter for the Koreatown Weekly. Many contributors told of how his passion and his example persuaded them to write for their community, even for low and uncertain pay, during hazardous times to be an Asian American reporter in LA. 

Kim describes how, out of curiosity, she chased down the editor of the new, scrappy LA newspaper to a small, rented room in the neighborhood. “There I came face-to-face with the man who would become my surrogate father and mentor,” she writes, and describes how, with all the fearlessness of youth, she blurted out that she always wanted to be a reporter. However, she admits in her essay, “Only after meeting with this disheveled middle-aged man with glasses and a foul mouth, did I ever think that going into print journalism was at all a possibility.”  He hired her on the spot.

It made me think of how I first met Lee.  It was many years later. Lee was retired, still writing from time to time, but more engaged in leadership to his beloved community.  Two years before we met, in 1997, I had co-founded Korean Quarterly with a group from our Korean American church and our Korean school.  It was an uncertain time.  I still did not know after two years if I was embarking on a short-term or long-term project.

I drove up to Sacramento from LA to meet him at his home. I remember it was the first time I had ever used Google maps, and also my first solo road trip in California.  I printed out pages, and had my maps laid out in a notebook, turning the pages in my rental car as I drove north from through the almond groves to the scenic capitol city. 

I had flown to Los Angeles to do a story about LA Koreatown. I wanted to talk to some of the people who lived through Sa-I-Gu, and tell the story of the area’s recovery from the civil unrest a few years on. Koreatown was still full of empty, blackened lots and still inhabited by the people who had survived that war.  My brain was full of those images and the reflections of its people as I headed to sunny Sacramento.

I was curious because so many people had urged me to go and meet K.W. Lee.  I knew he would be a good interview, as a person who had been writing for years about Koreatown and Korean American topics.  Turns out, he was equally interested in talking to me. That first meeting lasted a few hours, chatting about the characteristics of the Korean American community we covered.  I was cheered by the visit, and lighter, feeling that I finally had an elder mentor to look to.

After that, we emailed for a couple years, and eventually he visited the Twin Cities to be the keynote speaker at Korean Quarterly’s fifth anniversary celebration, where he got to meet with some of the many adult Korean adoptee contributors and second-generation contributors to our newspaper. He wrote several pieces for us, including an essay, Today’s Korean America is in the heart, in the Fall 2002 issue, in which he described the divisive Korean American community he had observed as a reporter and tried to improve upon through community outreach activities as a retiree.  He also wrote of finding Korean American community spirit in unexpected places, even the Twin Cities. He described the existence of Korean Quarterly as “a small miracle.”

Lee had always kept me on his email list. He sent his own musings and pieces of news from time to time to a large group to colleagues and people he mentored, and I was very honored to be a recipient.  Reflecting on how to write about the Saigu book, and how he was a central figure in the journalism that was so key to that time, I wondered whether a short interview with him might still be possible, although I knew he must be in his 90s.  The stories in Saigu are cleverly pieced together, but it is a long and winding story to learn about how Koreatown found its voice. I was thinking that it would be a perfect focus for the article to be able to quote this famous anti-hero whose courage inspired an entire generation.  

It was right then that I learned that he was gone. He died peacefully and with his family around him on March 8, at age 96. I felt I had missed a last chance to connect with a mentor who I had always admired and enjoyed; someone who always inspired me to promote community and be true to the best principles of journalism. 

The feeling was bittersweet.  I was so sorry to hear of his death, but felt joy for his well-lived life, for the gift of his great mind, tireless capacity for work, big personality, belief in the power of the press, and quest for justice that inspired a community at a crucial time and place.  I felt grateful for his care and encouragement for the next generation, and how so many people he mentored went on to lead in their own ways at his urging and because of his example.

I am especially grateful that he reached out to the very inexperienced staff and supporters behind a small Korean American quarterly newspaper way over in the northern Midwest.

The man on the moon

Reading about the arc of K.W. Lee’s life, it can’t be overstated how unlikely it was that a Korean immigrant, even a well-educated early immigrant with a sophisticated command of English, could become the country’s most respected Asian American journalist.

In a Saigu essay by Soojin Kim, she writes that he described himself  as “a man on the moon” after he immigrated in 1950 to study English at West Virginia University, with the intent of returning to South Korea after graduation. There were only a handful of Korean students in the U.S. that long ago.  He immigrated before the Korean War, and was unable to return after the war began in 1951.  After earning a graduate degree, he got two successive reporting jobs in the south, where the gulf between whites and Blacks was wide, and civil rights causes had barely begun.

Lee, however, was writing about early civil rights issues in the south years before the Civil Rights era truly began, starting with his work at the Kingsport Times-News in Tennessee, as the first Asian immigrant to report for a mainstream daily newspaper.  While working for the Charlotte Gazette in West Virginia in the ’50s and ’60s, Lee covered the Civil Rights movement in the south and plight of Appalachian coal miners.

K.W. Lee interviews Chol Soo Lee in prison in1977.

On death row due to a mistaken identity

Among many stories Lee pursued over his career, probably his most famous was his campaign to reverse the murder conviction of Chol Soo Lee.  K.W. Lee met Chol Soo Lee in 1974 in prison – Chol Soo Lee had been convicted of murder, but had maintained that the conviction was false, that he was mistakenly identified as the shooter of the Chinatown gang leader who was killed.  K.W. Lee, who was working for the Sacramento Union at that time, saw many errors of omission and negligence in the case. The two visited and developed an active correspondence by letter.

Chol Soo Lee was convicted for murder a second time while in prison; he killed a fellow prisoner in self-defense, a member of an Aryan Brotherhood gang.  K.W. Lee’s dogged coverage of the fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom went on for years, and continued after his founding of the Koreatown Weekly.

During that time, the Korean American first generation consisted mainly of small business entrepreneurs, many of whom lived within the bubble of Koreatown with little English proficiency or cultural competence about their new country. The Free Chol Soo Lee campaign united Korean Americans around a righteous cause.  

Photo of front page of the Sacramento Union after Chol Soo Lee won his petition for a new trial.  

That newspaper continued until 1984. Chol Soo Lee spent five years on death row before receiving a new trial, and then was acquitted in 1983, chiefly due to K.W’s investigative work, which comprised 120 articles written over a period of five years. 

Chol Soo Lee’s redemption was later described in a 1989 feature film True Believer, starring James Woods and Robert Downing, Jr.; it was loosely based on K.W. Lee’s involvement.  Lee’s work on the case, and the consequent social justice movement, was more recently portrayed in the 2022 Emmy-winning documentary film Free Chol Soo Lee.

K.W. Lee with the staff of the Korea Times English edition.

Unity in the community

K.W, Lee also established and edited the English edition of the Korea Times in 1990 in Los Angeles, to provide fairer coverage and promote unity for a Korean American community mired in racial tensions. Lee always used his communications pipeline across the language divide as a kind of bully pulpit, to beg and exhort second generation immigrants – an educated, and culturally and linguistically-capable group of young adults – to speak for their parents’ generation.

His agitation for community leadership became more strident after the events of 1992. There was a jury verdict of “not guilty” on April 29 that year for four white officers in the 1991 beating of African American Rodney King after a traffic stop.  A bystander videotaped the horrendous beating, which ran repeatedly on cable TV’s CNN News.

The April 29 verdict was the spark that set off race-based Black-on-Korean looting, arson and violence in Koreatown known to Koreans as Sa-I-Gu, a rampage that caused one person’s death, thousands of injuries and $1 billion in property damage over the six days that followed.

K.W. Lee was hospitalized during those six days of rioting after collapsing in pain, being rushed to the hospital in a colleague’s car, and then to the UCLA transplant center where he had a life-saving liver transplant. He would often talk of how he appreciated the irony of the racial unrest and violence going on all around him, while he was holed up quietly waiting for his transplant, silently thanking his donor – a stranger who might have been Asian, Black or white – for the miracle of a second chance.

In one essay on the LA uprising, he describes laying there, and hearing a voice whisper “put off dying for the duration.”  He wrote that he then “sat up in my sickbed, and, with shaky hands, began editing reams of copy from the nine undaunted staffers – mostly fresh from college or still in college or high school – bravely holding out in the battle zone” of the Korea Times English Edition.

Along with other Korean American leaders of the time, K.W. Lee attributed the extent of race-based violence in part on the immigrant generation’s lack of cultural and language competency and lack of sophisticated leadership that resulted from that.  The solution, he believed, was to urge the second generation to step up and assume a leadership role.  To do that, the younger generation had to be persuaded and motivated to return to Koreatown or other Korean American urban communities, and assume leadership roles, not to flee their home cities to become  doctors, lawyers, and business professionals in the mainstream.

One of many young adults who paid it forward in building up community in the wake of the riots was Do Kim, who returned to Koreatown, after becoming a Harvard-educated lawyer, to work for civil rights activism in his old neighborhood.  Meeting K.W. Lee inspired him to return and then stay there to help the next generation of Korean Americans.  With Lee, Kim founded the K.W. Center for Leadership, still an active organization, which runs a program to inspire leadership in Koreatown youth.

Twenty years after Sa-I-Gu, Lee gave one of his more famous speeches, entitled The Fire Next Time in Koreatown at the 20th anniversary of that event, in which he warned that the generation coming after the Sa-I-Gu generation – 20 years since the fires blazed – still has a responsibility to stand up for their immigrant parents’ generation, and that the job of producing leaders for the next generation is ongoing: 

Come the next fire, your English-speaking generation is destined to become the first and last line of defense for your half-deaf and half-blind parent generation of silence and sacrifice, as your older brothers and sisters demonstrated in the last fire of Sa-I-Gu.

(left) Iconic cartoon of K.W. Lee at his desk at the Sacramento Union and (right) Lee gives the keynote address at Korean Quarterly’s fifth anniversary celebration in 2003.

Many accolades

Lee spent over 40 years working as a reporter, editor, and publisher for various mainstream and ethnic publications, winning 29 professional awards in his career. In 1987, Lee co-founded the Korean American Journalists Association to provide recognition and professional development for Korean American journalists nationwide. In 1990, Lee also established and edited the English edition of the Korea Times in Los Angeles, to provide fairer coverage for a Korean American community mired in racial tensions.

Following the LA Riots of 1992, Lee was one of two recipients to be honored by Los Angeles County for his efforts in “promoting racial harmony in inter-group relations through journalism and community involvement.”

In 1987, Lee was the first recipient of the Asian American Journalists’ Association’s (AAJA) Lifetime Achievement Award. He earned numerous other accolades, including the National Headliners Award from the National Headliners Club (1974 and 1983) and the Freedom Forum’s Free Spirit Award (1994), according to an AAJA remembrance. After his retirement from the Sacramento Union in 1994, he lectured and taught investigative journalism, and contributed to Korean American and other Asian American publications (Korea Times English Edition, KoreAm Journal, and Nichi Bei Weekly, in addition to Korean Quarterly). 

In 2010, he was honored at AAJA’s national convention as an Asian American Founder and Pioneer in U.S. Journalism for his lasting contributions. AAJA’s forthcoming book, Intersections: A Journalistic History of Asian Pacific America, chronicles the legacy of Chol Soo Lee’s story in a chapter by Julie Ha, the co-director of Free Chol Soo Lee.

I wonder this week what K.W. Lee would make of recent assaults on press freedoms and violations of the civil rights of immigrants, particularly those who have been detained or deported without due process. I know he would be grieved and appalled, but also loaded for bear, in front of his keyboard, and ready for action with all the facts in hand. 

K.W. Lee at his desk at the Sacramento Union.

To know that we are not alone

The kind of energy K.W. Lee embodied to sort out truth from fiction and report it, defend civil rights and equality, promote leadership of immigrant communities and encourage the next generation are all needed as much today as they were needed in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.

As a war-hardened veteran of an embattled time, K.W. Lee warned us to be prepared for the “fire next time” if race-based tensions in our local and larger communities continued.  He was sure, however, that the repeating pattern of division can be remedied by raising up leadership, building a supportive community, and having a sense of history so as not to repeat the past.

Reporting and writing can be difficult and solitary.  Sometimes we wonder if anyone is paying attention. But K.W. Lee had a different view. In her essay on the accomplishments of K.W. Lee, Saigu contributor Sojin Kim quotes him as saying “It’s why we write and why we read: To know that we are not alone.”

We are both richer and wiser for appreciating the work of this “godfather of Asian American journalism,” and following his courageous example. And to honor his memory, we should keep building community, and know we are not alone.

Editor’s note: There will be Celebration of Life for K.W. Lee on May 24, 2 to 4 p.m. for all friends and community members at the Oxford Palace Hotel, 745 S. Oxford Ave., Los Angeles 90005. For more information contact Do Kim at the K.W. Lee Center for Leadership (email: dokim@kwleecenter.org).

Photos are printed with permission of the UCLA Press.

A two-nation approach to adoptee rights

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Petition targets laws in both South Korea and the U.S. to enhance search for birth families and secure adoptees’ citizenship | By Martha Vickery (Spring 2025)

Photos of Anne Bertelsen and Alice Stephens superimposed over adoption paperwork.

Restoring adoptees rights to citizenship in the U.S. and broadening adoptees’ access to birth family information in South Korea is the dual goal of a petition created by two Korean adoptees in partnership with several adoptee-led advocacy organizations.

Two women researched and wrote the petition – Anne Bertelsen and Alice Stephens. By asking Korean-adoptee-led organizations and reviewing past legal obstacles faced by Korean adoptees, they narrowed down and identified the most pressing issues affecting rights of Korean adoptees in both the U.S. and in South Korea.

The petition is now ready to be signed, and on a digital platform sponsored by partner organization  Adoptees for Justice (A4J), a lobbying and advocacy program of the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium (NAKASEC) (see the petition here).  The petitioners particularly want Korean adoptees and their (U.S. citizen) family members and allies to sign, however, the petition is open to anyone.

Bertelsen and Stephens also researched adoptee organizations that could help the cause. As much as it was important to write an effective petition, how to publicize and drive it forward was also key.  “That is why we called on Adoptees for Justice to carry the citizenship piece. And we also contacted Adoptee Hub, which is working on the Hope Registry,” a virtual portal to link searching adoptees with searching birth families in Korea, she said.

In addition to A4J and Adoptee Hub (a Twin Cities-based non-profit), there are three other partner organizations: The International Korean Adoptee Associations (IKAA), a global network of adoptee-led, volunteer driven organizations focused on community building; the Inclusion Initiative, which advocates for adult adoptees and adult former foster care recipients; and Paperslip, which helps with birth searches by Korean adoptees who were adopted through Korean Social Services.

Three other individuals, A.D. Herzel, Jolene Olsen and Zhen E. Remmelsberg are also advocating for and disseminating the petition, according to Stephens.

Two governments to be targeted

Bertelsen said they eventually want tens of thousands of signers.  In the U.S. the petition will signal the U.S. government of widespread support for inter-country adoptees’ right of citizenship and demand that citizenship be automatic and retroactive for all inter-country adoptees.  A bill addressing automatic citizenship (the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) ) has been introduced in consecutive Congressional sessions in recent years, but never brought to a vote.

In South Korea, the petition will demand expanded access for adoptees to their own birth family’s records. Bertelsen thinks the petition will get attention “The Korean government historically has responded best when it gets pressured, and particularly by the countries it is aligned with or influenced by,” Bertelsen explained.  

With guidance from Korean adoptee advocacy organizations, Bertelsen and Stephens crafted a petition about law changes in both the U.S. and South Korea that Korean adoptees want to see.

Both petition creators are Korean adoptees. Bertelsen worked for the Accenture corporation as a managing director where she administered some large digital projects, and prior to that, in political organizing and advocacy. Stephens is a writer whose interest in Korean adoptee issues has led her to connections with a wide variety of organizations and individuals speaking out for adoptee rights.

Alice Stephens and Anne Bertelsen.

Finding the key moment to act

The list of what Korean adoptees need most is “quite extensive,” Bertelsen said, “and there can be some disagreements in the community about what to focus on. So we wanted to concentrate on the most universally-desired items, and that would cause the least amount of controversy.”

The two discussed the petition and its possible content for a couple years.  It was after the PBS Frontline documentary television news program South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning (in partnership with reporters Tong-hyung Kim and Claire Galofaro from the Associated Press) first aired on September 20, 2024 that Bertelsen and Stephens decided that such a petition would have additional traction among Korean adoptees and their allies because of the heightened community awareness catalyzed by the documentary.  

The documentary describes how falsified records were used by South Korean adoption agencies to speed up adoptions in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, during an era of military dictatorship in South Korea.  It suggests that (U.S. and South Korean) regulatory authorities suspected fraud or knew about it, but looked the other way.  False records cut off the paper trail, and make it very difficult or impossible for adult adoptees and birth parents to find one another. 

Several Korean American adoptees and adoptees from Scandinavian and European countries were interviewed for the documentary, some of whom found family members despite useless records. One of the interviewees was Alice Stephens.

Alice Stephens being interviewed for the Frontline documentary.

The role of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The documentary also describes how a group of 53 Danish Korean adoptees filed an application in 2022 to begin an investigation of the apparent fraud through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), an independent body established to investigate human rights abuses (See AP’s 2022 reporting by Tong-hyung Kim here).  

Past investigations by the TRC have included offenses by the Japanese Imperial government against the Korean independence movement, mass atrocities of the Korean War and human rights violations during the era of South Korea’s authoritarian rule, according to its website.

The documentary, and previous AP investigative reports by Kim, suggest that there is a widespread incidence of falsified adoption records.  Although there is awareness about falsified records among Korean adoptees and their families and Korean international adoption professionals, there has been no official study to investigate the frequency of records falsification. TRC will be the first to formally report on this issue.

The Commission expanded the investigation of the 53 Danish Korean adoptees to 367 adoptees’ cases. Of those, 32 files (or about eight percent) belong to Americans, Bertelsen said, while more than 60 percent of all Korean adoptees are Americans.  One of the files belongs to Alice Stephens. The due date for TRC’s final report has been pushed forward a few times. A preliminary report was published in late March.

The TRC report – what to expect

If the final TRC report does turn up widespread fraud in the history of Korean international adoption, will it be a shocker? Not for those most affected, Bertelsen guessed.

“For many of us who have been trying to find our records for a long time, that documentary did not disclose anything new,” Bertelsen said.  “Nor will the TRC report drop any bombshells of information on the adoptee community. What I will say about the documentary is that it did raise awareness, particularly for the U.S.-received adoptees, about the fraud.”

Concerning any official response to the TRC report by the South Korean government, Bertelsen said that “based on other work they’ve done, I’m skeptical that they will announce any concrete policy recommendations that will remove the barriers for adoptees to get their information. I think they will respond that ‘there was fraud and we are responsible for that,’ but in terms of what happens after that, I think it will be very little.”

Stories from searching birth parents

Ami Nafzger, director of the Twin Cities-based Adoptee Hub, and founder of the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOAL) in Seoul in 1997, was called on by the petition organizers to be a subject matter expert about birth family search in Korea. Adoptee Hub is a partner organization in the petition campaign. Nafzger has been working with searching Korean adoptees and searching birth parents since GOAL’s founding.

In January, in cooperation with GOA’L, Adoptee Hub launched its Hope Registry, a confidential digital portal designed to allow Korean adoptees and their birth families in South Korea to search for and connect with one another. The registry began accepting birth family applicants and adoptee applicants in January. 

Based on her on-the-ground experience, Nafzger believes the TRC report will turn up a high incidence of falsified records.  Working for GOA’L back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, she explained, birth parents came to her for help searching for an adoptee birth child. Some came to GOA’L because they did not trust the agencies; others came because the adoption agencies turned them away.  

From some of these parents, Nafzger said, she heard claims that the adoption agencies took their child against their will – that they had never formally relinquished their child for adoption. She said that some birth parents told her various versions of the same story – leaving a child in an orphanage for a short period of time (because there were no daycare centers) due to some kind of family emergency, and returning to find their child had disappeared, and the agency had some excuse for it. Some parents even went to media with their stories, she said.

According to Nafzger, adoption agencies always had their own policies concerning birth search when either birth parents or adoptees showed up, which makes records searching even more frustrating.  “They didn’t have any laws,” she said.  “Adoption agencies have said ‘well there are no laws so we can do whatever we want,’ and they did do whatever they wanted.  And the Korean government should be blamed for it because they didn’t do anything about it.”

A three-pillar approach

The petition is built on “three pillars” according to Bertelsen. Two of the demands are directed to the South Korean government. One demand is to make birth family searching less cumbersome for adoptees by removing the legal or policy barriers to obtaining their own adoption records, and by expanding access to an adoptee’s records to siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents of the adoptee as well as to the U.S.-born children of the adoptee, instead of restricting access to the adoptee and their birth parents.  

It also asks the government to make the South Korean DNA database compatible and collaborative with commercial DNA systems Americans use (such as AncestryDNA, My Heritage, 23andMe and FTDNA), which would make DNA matching less expensive and easier.

The second of the three pillars is the demand to appoint Korean adoptees to a board concerning policy about Korean adoptees – the National Commission on the Rights of Children (NCRC). Among other adoption-related matters, the NCRC advises on privacy laws applicable to adopted persons’ birth records, Bertelsen said. The petition also asks for monitoring of and more transparency by the NCRC about its activities.

There have never been any adoptee members of that advisory board, Bertelsen added. The membership at present includes only representatives of adoption agencies.  “There’s an organization in Korea for domestic adoption that has applied and also been denied access.”

Pushing for automatic citizenship

The third pillar of the petition, directed at the U.S. government, is to finally make citizenship automatic for the roughly 20,000 Korean adoptees who were not made citizens by their adoptive parents (or guardians) — the figure of 20,000 just a rough estimate because it is from a report from the South Korean government of the number of Korean American adoptees for whom citizenship could not be verified, according to information from the Adoptees for Justice organization.

A law passed in 2000, known as the Child Citizenship Act, created automatic citizenship for international adoptees who were age 18 or younger when the law was passed.  According to the Q and A section of the petition, that law excluded about 20,000 Korean adoptees who were older than age 18 when the law was passed.  A large group of Vietnamese adoptees who came mainly in the mid-1970s at the end of the Vietnam War were also excluded, Bertelsen said.

A4J has been advocating and lobbying for a bill (the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) ), which has been introduced for consecutive years in Congress since 2015 but never brought to a vote. Upon passage, the law would make citizenship automatic for all international adoptees, therefore it would cover adoptees who are older than the cut-off date of the Child Citizenship Act.  It would also cover deportees, and allow them to return as citizens to the U.S.

Notably, the petition also calls on South Korea to refuse to accept Korean adoptees from the U.S. as deportees, since U.S. citizenship was promised to them as a part of the international adoption process.

Not having citizenship robs adoptees of necessary rights, including key forms of identification, such as drivers’ licenses and passports. It also prevents them from accessing crucial federal benefits, including federal student loans, medical assistance, Medicare, and Social Security, among others.

Because non-citizens with felony convictions can be deported, a small number of Korean adoptees have been either deported or are at risk of deportation, due to being non-citizens in combination with a past felony conviction (See KQ coverage of the pardon campaign for Emily Warneke and Judy Van Arsdale here).

Other goals besides better laws

Bertelsen said there are a couple strategies for doing the petition in this way, and at this time. In addition to changing laws, the petitioners want to increase awareness of the legal barriers for Korean adoptees – to U.S. citizenship, and to records access in South Korea.

Bertelsen pointed out that the U.S. crafted the system of international adoption, and bears some responsibility for its flaws that plague searching adoptees today. Part of the petition campaign is to increase awareness of those flaws as experienced by Korean adoptees, and ask for legal relief from them, she explained.

The petitioners also want to make adoptees and allies aware that the NCRC has been directed to consolidate adoption records from all the adoption agencies into one system. How the government will do that is a big unknown.

Item six of the FAQs on the petition states that the records transfer will happen in July 2025, and states that “there has been little public communication about how adoptees will be able to access these records after that transfer.”  Adoptees fear that they “could face even greater barriers than they do today,” according to the petition FAQs, and it calls on the government to ensure “transparency and accountability” throughout the records transfer.

Building greater pressure for the Adoptee Citizenship Act (ACA) is another crucial goal.  A large quantity of signatures will indicate the support of the electorate.  The ACA needs more push – it  has never had enough support to bring the bill to a vote.  It came closest in 2022, when it was added to the Chips Act, but the ACA portion was stripped from the bill before the vote. A4J had worked for months, lobbying individual states for support, and visiting key  conservative states that year to garner support resolutions  (see KQ’s coverage of the 2022 lobbying effort here).

A coalition in a big wide country

Although the numbers of adoptees who arrived in the U.S. between the mid-‘50s to mid-‘90s is large (110,000 to 120,000), Bertelsen said, that amount is  “a needle in a haystack” compared to the population of the U.S. “In a place like Denmark, the percentage of adoptees compared to the whole population – that number is quite large. So, there’s a bit more awareness and cohesion in that country,” Bertelsen said. Danish adoptees were able to leverage the pressure for a TRC investigation because of better recognition and support for their cause by their country’s government, Bertelsen suggested.

Bertelsen said the petition is designed to get Korean adoptees to speak with one voice about the issues of greatest need to them, she said. “So our work here is also to focus on U.S. adoptees and coalesce them.”

Pushing for the long haul

In addition to building a coalition of support, sustaining the push for the petition is also a key concept.  Making law changes is characteristically slow. Therefore, the petition campaign will need sustained energy to be successful.

In the U.S., it is hard for a relatively small population group to get Congressional attention, as A4J has experienced repeatedly with the Adoptee Citizenship Act.  With the distractions due to upheaval by the new Trump administration, getting that attention could be even harder in the near term.

To make matters more complicated, no South Korean ambassador has been appointed yet in the new administration, and some State Department officials have been fired, Bertelsen said.

In South Korea, meeting Korean American adoptees’ petition demands could also take some time. Bertelsen said that both modifying privacy laws and requiring representation by adoptees on the NCRC board will require legislation. There is no such bill proposed right now in South Korea – it will need to be written and get support by South Koreans first.

Bertelsen has visited South Korea often in recent years, in part to find allies for better birth records access. There are sympathetic legislators there who would take an interest in the cause, she said.  But even with a legislative sponsor, new legislation is a long process.

“Nothing with diplomacy is quick,” she said, “but this is time to act, due to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigation, and because of the documentary coming out.”

Although there is no one organization of U.S. Korean adoptees, she said, she is confident in the expertise and reach of their U.S. organizations and IKAA, the one international partner organization. “There are some amazing organizations that are trying to make a difference and focusing on issues they have expertise in and the resources for. That’s terrific and we need that kind of sustained push to do that.”

In addition to the link to the petition, the petition will be introduced and linked on the websites and social media sites of the petition partner organizations. A link for the Frontline documentary “South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning” is  here. KQ will update this story for any outreach events or further developments.  

Showcasing stories of adoptee lives

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Day-long virtual Adoptee Literary Festival set for March 22, 2025 | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2025)

A virtual event by and for adoptee writers and authors, the Adoptee Literary Festival will be held March 22. An all-volunteer, all-adoptee-run event, the festival will provide a safe space to discuss the adoptee experience and the challenges of writing and publishing one’s own adoptee stories.  

This is the second such festival of adoptee writers. The first was in 2022, and both were created and administered by a volunteer group of adoptee writers.  Both the premiere 2022 festival and the upcoming event are headed up by co-founder Alice Stephens (author of the novel Famous Adopted People), with co-director Susan Ito (author of the memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere). Co-founder and poet Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and board members Sara Easterly and Mariama J. Lockington are also co-organizers.  The festival is free to attend (donations encouraged and reservations required), and will run from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The conference will begin with a keynote speech by Shannon Gibney, an adoptee author from the Twin Cities (her memoir The Girl I Am, Was, And Never Will Be: A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption is one of her books). Gibney’s keynote address will kick off the festival at 10 a.m. CT (11 a.m. ET).

Featuring adoptee writers Susan Ito, Eric Smith, Sarah Myer, Nicole Chung, and Mariama Lockington among others, the program offers four cross-genre panels open to all registrants, and four workshops open only to adoptees. Topics include: The challenges of publishing as an adopted person; writing about estrangement; queer and adopted writers; writing about the “ghost kingdoms” or lives that could have been; and writing for spoken word, personal narrative and public performance.

Participants will also be able to view a pre-recorded “sizzle reel” of 15 emerging adoptee writers reading excerpts of their own work.

Stephens said that despite all the extra work involved, the 2025 conference organizing group decided to expand on the offerings of the 2022 workshop, and sought funding to provide small honorariums for the panelists, workshop facilitators and the keynote speaker. So far, there has been an enthusiastic response to the expanded program.

Stephens said that all four workshops, which have a limited number of slots, were at capacity and closed three days after registration opened on February 11.  General registration, which covers the keynote talk, panels, and readings, is ongoing.

An important part of the planning for the conference was to ensure that the conference focused on and was staffed by adoptees, down to the organizers, volunteers and presenters.  The group got their wish.  “Everybody involved in the conference is an adoptee,” she said.

The fast registration response to the adoptee-only workshops reveals a need, Stephens believes. “I just feel like there is a real hunger for that kind of a space,” she said. “to have writing workshops where adoptees can just be adoptees and not worry about people not understanding where they are coming from, and the special feelings adoptees have – the things most people do not think about because they are not given an authentic story of adoption.”

Another purpose of the festival is one of building solidarity and showing strength in numbers. Having a conference for this special subgroup of writers will “kind of show the world that there are authentic adoptee narratives, and that there are lots of adoptee writers and that what we are writing is very different from what the mainstream publishing industry does,” she said.

Stephens guesstimated that probably hundreds of books are published yearly with some kind of orphan theme, “but if you look at the authors, not one of them is adopted.” Stephens also has personal experience with struggling over time to get her novel published, and “there was a very fierce resistance to my adoption narrative. Publishers said they didn’t understand it and didn’t know how to market it. Meanwhile, they are churning out the books by non-adopted people because they conform to a narrative that society expects — that adoption is a heart-warming thing all of the time.”

Mainstream publishers have thoroughly missed the chance to tell stories that include the nuances and complexities of adoption, Stephens believes, and it’s not because adoptee authors have not tried to get their stories out there. Rather, it is because most publishers are convinced there is not enough reader interest, Stephens explained.

Nicole Chung, in publishing her memoir All You Can Ever Know, made the idea of adoptee memoir a possibility with her national best-seller story that spoke to a wide range of readers, Stephens added. “Since then, many memoirs by adoptees have been published, but many of them are not with the Big Five (U.S. publishing houses with numerous imprints).  Many are by university presses or smaller presses.” Although memoirs are making some headway, fictional works by adoptees has still not gotten enough attention, Stephens said.

Stephens said she is committed to the Adoptee Literary Festival because, due to the nature of adoption, adoptees (and adoptee writers) are scattered across a big landscape, making an intentional community very important. “I think the adoptee writing community is a beautiful community and one where I feel really safe,” Stephens remarked. “I really believe in this mission – that adoptee writers need to be more visible and that we have to get together and be a community that tries to further our community.”

The Adoptee Literary Festival email is:  adopteeliteraryfestival@gmail.com. The website with registration information is: AdopteeLitFest.com.

Stories of small survivors

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Filmmaker tells his father’s story in a film to honor Korean War children | By Martha Vickery (Winter 2025)

Actor/producer Arnold Chun is creating his dream film, and he needs to do it on a schedule. The time crunch is because of the age of the target audience – he wants Korean American elders like his parents to be able to see it before time runs out for them.

The future film Children of War is now quite a few steps past being just a dream. There is a producer and a director on board, and some of the cast has been hired.  Chun created a concept trailer for the crowdfunding site GoFundMe. He has also scouted some locations in Korea to use for the film.

The story describes the lives of child survivors of the Korean War. A group of kids, abandoned by family or orphaned during the Korean War, band together to survive. They live on the streets, digging through garbage, begging or stealing food to stay alive. Some hide together in makeshift camps to avoid North Korean soldiers who kidnapped abandoned kids for forced conscription as child soldiers.

Filmmaker Arnold Chun and (right) photo of children taken during the Korean War.

The story is the filmmaker’s father’s story. It is also a description of thousands of children across Korea who were innocent victims of war.  Parents died, homes were bombed, families fled and sometimes in the confusion and desperation, children were separated from their parents. Few survived. Of these child war survivors, only a small group of elders in the U.S. and Korea as eyewitnesses of this era.

Chun relates that until he was an adult, he hardly believed his dad’s story of being abandoned as a pre-teen and surviving the war.  It was too far removed from the filmmaker’s middle-class upbringing in California. “I remember guilt trips my dad put on me for wanting something like that pair of Air Jordans that had just come out.  He would tell me ‘I didn’t even have my first pair of shoes until I was 16.’  Or ‘Don’t complain about the food. You’d better eat every bite of food on that plate. Do you know how long I went without food, and how much I had to struggle, and how difficult it was for us to find food?’”  

In the midst of teenage self-absorption, he said, he dismissed the statements his dad made about the extreme childhood deprivation he once experienced.  It was years, Chun said, before he could really hear the story. As he got older, and became a film and TV storyteller, he became more interested in the stories of both his parents of their childhood in wartime Korea, and they eventually opened up. He internalized their stories, wondering what to do with them.

About 14 years ago, after accruing years in the film business, Chun described how he finally sat his father and uncle down and got each of their stories on a recording and on paper. From that, he wrote a first draft of a screenplay. Then he put it away, not ready to go to the next step.  A little over a year ago, he said, his brother urged him to continue with the project, even if it was produced as just a short film, so that his father and other survivors of that generation would be able to see the film before they pass away.

Some of those child survivors, like his dad, and can still tell their own stories. Others died as children, their stories never known to history. Through eyewitness accounts woven into imagined stories, Chun wants to create a film that will honor them all. The story will also appeal to a broader audience as a human story about the many millions worldwide, past and present, whose lives are upended by war.

Chun is fundraising for this project.  Right now it is planned as a 25-minute short film, which could be used for fundraising events by Korean American groups or veterans’ organizations and could also be used as a proof-of-concept for a future feature-length film.

The film will concentrate on the stories of two brothers, Chun’s father Young Il Chun, and his uncle Keun Jong Chun, who was the elder brother by about nine years.  Their father had been killed by the Japanese (during the Japanese occupation years, prior to 1945), and their mother was raising the two brothers by herself.  When elder son Keun Jong did not come home one day, their mother set off to find him, leaving the younger son, Young Il, at home alone.

“The war started a couple days later, then the house my dad was staying in got damaged by artillery fire,” Chun explained.  The house was uninhabitable “and that’s how he ended up on the streets with a bunch of orphans who banded together and became an orphan-posse gang, just trying to survive the streets of Korea until the armistice happened.”

Keun Jong had a different story of what happened to him during the war.  A stranger offered him some some bags of rice one day, and when got into the truck to get the food, he was detained at gunpoint, and driven with other teens to North Korea to be a child soldier. He was put to work for the North Korean army, burying dead bodies and doing menial work. Later, Keun Jong was forced to fight with the North Korean troops against South Korea.  He eventually deserted his troop and joined up with a gang of kids in the mountains, hiding and waiting for the war to end.  He and the other kids were captured, threatened and nearly killed at gunpoint by South Korean soldiers.  They somehow persuaded the troops they were on the South Korean side, and Keun Jong joined up with the Republic of Korea army after that.

During the war, while wandering and homeless, Young Il, at about age 11, managed to find the home of an aunt in another town.  Through her, he found his mother, but she had gotten married to a man who had two younger sons. Young Il was not welcome and was verbally and physically abused by his new stepfather. He left that household and wandered some more.

The armistice happened in July of 1953, and Keun Jong’s capture by the South Korean army was in the spring of ’53.  After the armistice, Keun Jong “went to a South Korean army base and for the next eight or nine months, spent time looking for my dad in Seoul,” Chun explained. “He found my dad at some child center or orphanage place in 1954.”

Chun still marvels at this part of the story – how his uncle used all the time he had to search for months, in a poverty-stricken and devastated country, never giving up hope that his little brother was still alive. When his uncle died about seven years ago, and the whole family went to his funeral, “I never saw my dad cry so hard,” he recalled.

After Keun Jong found his younger brother, Chun explained, he had to figure out a place for Young Il to live – and not with their mother who (he believed) had abandoned them. Keun Jong asked the army base for help, and they helped him place Young Il in the home of a nearby Korean couple.  From then on, Young Il grew up with that couple and thought of them as his parents.  In 1988, while travelling with their dad in Korea, Chun and his brother met their dad’s adoptive parents and their birth grandmother.  

“I remember when I first visited them, I was confused about ‘who are these people?’ “ Chun recalled. His dad had introduced them as his parents, “but I was like, ‘they can’t be your mom and your dad, because we just stayed with your mom so who are these people?’”  It took years for Chun and his brother to piece together the story of their dad’s and uncle’s childhood years.

Chun never heard his birth grandmother’s own life story, including first losing her husband, and then losing track of both of her sons.  Now, he wishes he had been able to hear her version of those years.   As a younger teen visiting Korea, he had trouble absorbing the reality of his dad’s childhood.  In terms of his grandmother’s story, he reflected “I really wasn’t old enough, and I did not have the maturity for it.” 

He remembers noticing during the childhood trip to Korea that his dad was “awkward” with his birth mother.  “And when she died, my father and uncle did not go to her funeral. That spoke a lot about how they viewed her,” he said.

These days, Chun said, he tries to understand his grandmother’s predicament and that of his father and uncle, from the perspective of surviving those impossible times.  In creating the film, he said, he would like to find other survivors who were once abandoned children during the war and hear their stories.  He also wants to tell some imagined stories, of kids who survived by hiding in the mountains, or were forcibly drafted and became child soldiers, or ended up in orphanages.

Chun plans to fund the film through individual donations and through sponsorship by organizations, including American veterans’ organizations, since many veterans helped abandoned children during war. The GoFundMe site explains about the “why” of the film and its purpose of recognizing this special group of war survivors.

The filmmaker wrote in a recent text that he is re-setting his expectations for speedy funding commitments, since the dire need of victims of the Los Angeles fires has temporarily diverted attention and resources of charitable organizations from other projects.

As a young adult, Chun majored in history at University of California at Irvine, did various jobs in his early career, including coaching children’s sports, teaching Sunday school, teaching in an exchange program in Japan, and working at a large engineering firm.  His career in Hollywood started around 2007 when he was asked by a friend to help on a movie set while on a hiatus between jobs. He accepted, and became fascinated at how a movie is put together. During that short time on the set he helped out “with coffee and errands, actually got to drive a police vehicle from the rental agency to the set – that was quite an exhilarating experience because people actually do slow down,” he said.

During his volunteer stint, he had conversations with director Eric Kim about the film business and its opportunities.  Kim persuaded and encouraged him to become an informal apprentice and learn the business of film and entertainment production. He accepted, and now, 21 years later, Chun has worked in production with some of the most famous directors. “I got to spend three and a half weeks with Clint Eastwood on Letter from Iwojima, got to work on Michael Bae on Transformers 2, and with actor/director David Schwimmer on an HBO series,” he said.

His career continued to move in an upward direction “even though I never thought it could be a career path,” he said.  He expresses surprise that he made it in such a tough business.  The fierce competition, and “just being an Asian American” meant that there were very few opportunities for upward mobility in the field.

Auditioning in Hollywood as an Asian American, until very recent years, “was always like samurai, ninja guy, laundromat owner, liquor store owner, tourist who can’t speak English, interpreter, Japanese game show host, North Korean soldier, North Korean Communist insurgent – ths list goes on and on,” he said.  This kind of systemic discrimination pushed him towards directing, with the goal of putting people of color in meaningful parts, and at center stage.  

Chun independently produced and directed the film Eli’s Liquor Store, (2007) about a black liquor store owner in Los Angeles during the era of the LA Riots. Chun chose the time period because it was a pivotal time in his youth, and because it was an era of racial reckoning in Los Angeles. The film “flipped the switch” on the usual roles in that setting, since the store owner was Black, not Korean, and the customers were a mix of people with a community in common.  

The film was screened in African American and Asian film festivals, and was nominated for a Melvin Van Peebles Trailblazer Award, an award of the Critics’ Choice Association of Black Cinema, among other awards. Screening the film at festivals gave him rare opportunities to discuss his goals in promoting diversity in the film business, and to unpack the events of the LA Riots with Black and Asian American community members.

Being a teen at the time of the LA Riots also made him passionate about how he, as a second generation person, had a duty to preserve and memorialize Korean American history “and how our stories and our culture is intertwined with the fabric of American history.”

The untold stories of his parents – and other Korean American elders – are presenting a particular mission for Chun. “As a filmmaker, and as a person on this journey, it became evident to me that if we don’t listen to our families’ stories and if we don’t preserve the cultural lineage of our families, then how can we pass that on?” he said.

Chun thinks specifically of his three sons, age nine and six and four, and other Korean American parents whose immigrant parents have similar stories of their childhood.  He remembers how, as a kid, he thought his dad was just guilt-tripping him with the stories of his childhood, when actually he was telling him the unvarnished truth.

Chun said he wonders if his skepticism was because there was no historical frame of reference for him to learn from – whether some historical knowledge would have helped him imagine his parents growing up in wartime in another country.  But there were no films about their stories in those days, and “the Korean War part of most high school history books was just a paragraph,” he said.

Chun believes a film, particularly one that puts children in the storyteller role, is a perfect learning tool to tell history to kids. He also thinks it has to be an independent production “You can’t really wait around for Hollywood to want to do something,” he said. His film will appeal to kids, but it will also reach a broad audience of adults.

Chun was able to engage Young Woo Suh as the producer on the Korean side (Suh also produced the hit Korean American romance Past Lives in 2023). Chun also scouted sites in Korea, and has chosen several Korean child actors for the main parts. There is an estimated budget of $500,000 for the 25-minute short, including some funding for public relations and marketing.  

Chun said every group he has talked to has expressed support and enthusiasm. He reached out to more than 70 veterans’ groups in late November, he said, and “it was so humbling because a lot shared their own stories and were very supportive of what I am trying to do.”

2025 is the 75th anniversary of the June 25, 1950 start of the Korean War, and there will be many commemorative events in South Korea and in the U.S. However, to do the film in the first half of 2025 in time for the anniversary events would be challenging at this point, particularly because funding is still not secured. Plan B, he said, is to make the film during the second half of 2025, in time for the winter galas of veterans’ and Korean American organizations that could screen it.

Despite the enthusiastic support, he said “it has still been quite challenging to get the funding to make this come to life.”  It comes down to finding the right individual, organization or group of organizations now, he said. Everything  is lined up, he said, and “we just need to execute!”

The GoFundMe site for Children of War with a trailer explaining the project, is at this link.  There is also an Instagram site for the film at:  childrenofwarshortfilm, and a website at:  https://childrenofwarshortfilm.com.

An ambassador for Korean Americans

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Julie Turner serves a diverse demographic as Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2024)

Julie Turner, Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights.

International human rights might be one of the most difficult specialties of diplomacy, but it is the chosen work of Julie Turner, who was sworn as the U.S. Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Issues last fall.  A Korean adoptee and career diplomat with the State Department, Turner has been working on issues involving people in the East Asia region, Korean people in both North and South, and with Korean Americans for almost 20 years.

Turner is the second such special envoy.   The position, an ambassador appointment, was vacant for six years, from January 2017 (beginning of the Trump administration) until President Joe Biden nominated Turner in January 2023. She started the job in October 2023 after a Senate confirmation.

The vacancy occurred despite a law (the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004) requiring the President to fill this position. There is a bill before the House of Representatives to reauthorize the 2004 law (the North Korean Human Rights Reauthorization Act of 2023), which has yet to come to a vote.

No diplomatic relationship makes diplomacy difficult

As the special envoy, Turner is charged with engaging in diplomacy with the North Korean government to advance human rights.  However, the North Koreans are not talking to the U.S. government right now and have not been for a number of years.

Starting the job after a long vacancy, Turner has begun to make some small gains. There is, however, is a bitterly long history of how the U.S. has either ignored or tried and failed in its diplomatic overtures to North Korea (see sidebar below) up to and including many current events as this relationship continues to falter.

Despite not being able to engage officially with the North Korean government, Turner meets and works to advance specific policies with a diverse group of North Korean refugees and South Koreans.

A diverse constituency

Coming into the job after a six-year vacancy, there were a lot of priorities to re-order. As special envoy, Turner has been concerned with Korean Americans’ human rights for many years.

One of these is the predicament of Korean Americans who have family members in North Korea. This subgroup of Korean Americans were born before the 1948 division of Korea, fled their homes in (what is now) North Korea immediately before or during wartime, and eventually immigrated to the U.S. from South Korea.  

Many people in this group, all elderly, still have immediate family in North Korea; the majority of these Korean Americans have not seen their family in North Korea since they fled south, after which the border between the two Koreas was closed.  Although there were occasional family reunification events with South Koreans and their North Korean family members, Korean Americans were never included in those events. However, some Korean American U.S. citizens have located and visited family members in North Korea up until the 2017 travel ban.

Because a state of war remains between the U.S. and North Korea, normal diplomatic relationships have never been established, and the U.S. has no embassy in North Korea today.    

Turner frequently engages with North Korean defectors, both in the U.S. and in South Korea.  She works with groups in South Korea who help North Korean defectors. Defectors are conferred automatic South Korean citizenship upon entry to the country.   

Turner is concerned with securing citizenship for and recognition of refugees who came to the U.S. from North Korea. A few came directly, but most entered South Korea and established citizenship there first.  

She is also concerned with the U.S. citizenship issues of Korean Americans, including adult Korean adoptees without citizenship. A bill in process (the Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2024) would grant citizenship to international adoptees, no matter their citizenship status, including those who have been deported to their birth countries after being criminally convicted.  An earlier version of this bill was passed by the House in 2022, but was stripped from the bill it was attached to before going before the Senate for a vote.

Growing up to be a diplomat

Turner grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, and like most Korean American kids, was unfamiliar with the issues of Korea and its people as a child.  Beyond knowing she came from there, her experience with Korea was limited to attending a Saturday school to learn Korean language and culture and develop familiarity with the local Korean American community.

Her parents always pushed her to form links with Korea and its people and culture, but she admits that until she grew up, she really did not see the relevance.  “Like many adopted Korean children that went to Korean Saturday morning schools, I was somewhat resentful that I was spending Saturday mornings at school and not watching cartoons,” she recalled.

She remembers that as a seven- or eight-year-old, she submitted an essay to a children’s magazine, the Pennywhistle Press. Along with her essay, she drew a picture of an American flag, and in the essay, she expressed “gratitude to the U.S.” for citizenship. “So, even as a small child, I think I always expected to serve.”

Although she did not realize it then, Korean school would be her first baby step toward a future vocation in international diplomacy. She learned how to speak Korean early, although she says she feels like her Korean language is “still trapped in my 11 or 12-year-old self.”  Some benefits of Korean school were intangibles; how her imagination was expanded to other cultures and people, and growing up knowing other Korean American kids and adults.  She also studied the Korean martial art taekwondo, and eventually achieved a black belt and competed in the sport.

As an adult, she said, “even with all that connectivity to Korean culture, Korea was not something I necessarily wanted to focus on as a career path.”  That thought would change over time in a big way.

As an undergraduate, Turner went to Pepperdine University near Los Angeles, and studied religion, political science and sociology.  In pursuing an interest in social justice, she worked with homeless teens through some non-profits in downtown LA.

After college, Turner was accepted to the University of Maryland’s graduate school of public policy, “then 9-11 happened,” she said.  “And I think for a lot of people, it was a world-view-shifting event.”

By that time, she said, she had already worked for a think tank on Middle East policy, and had studied the intersections of Islam, politics and religious freedom. With her research background, she decided to change her M.A. degree concentration to international security and economic policy.

A move to the State Department

Her first full-time State Department job was with the Information Resources Management bureau (Office of E-Diplomacy).  She thinks her experiences qualified her; she had worked as a website designer/builder to earn money during her graduate studies, with some training from her dad, who was a systems engineer. She took the job because “I thought I could use my artistic leanings as well as a bit of the computer nerdiness I had been raised with.”

At the State Department, a fellowship bought her time to explore its various departments.  She particularly liked the bureau in which she still works, the Department of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.  With that team, she worked on a report on religious freedom concerning some Central Asian countries. “I fell in love with what that bureau was and that I could continue to use my expertise in the religious freedom and tolerance area,” Turner said. She ultimately accepted a full-time position there.

A learning curve on the East Asia team

She was “quite content” she said, and could have continued, loving that job.  But just a few months later, there was an opening in the East Asia team. “Someone in the team had heard that I spoke a little bit of Korean,” she said (with a laugh to emphasize how little Korean language she thinks is still in her brain). The person asked her to consider transitioning to the Asia Pacific group.

“I decided to make the jump, although I did not really know much about Korea from a political or foreign policy perspective. My only interactions with Korea had been through the Korean adoptee community …so it was a pretty steep learning curve,” Turner recalled.  She worked on issues in North Korea, South Korea, Japan, and a “huge chunk of Southeast Asia – all places I had not spent a lot of time thinking about before.”  

At this point, Turner has now spent 20 years working in the East Asia group; part of that time was as the special assistant to the first Special Envoy for North Korean Human Rights Robert R. King (who served 2009 through 2017).  In early 2023, she was appointed to be the new special envoy by President Biden, and in fall 2023, she was confirmed by the Senate.  Other offices she held include director for the Office of East Asia and the Pacific, and before that, the director for Southeast Asia at the National Security Council.

A chance she never expected

Today, as a recognized expert in human rights and democracy with a focus in East Asia, Turner said she has reflected on the arc of her career and wondered “Huh, how did I end up here?”   

In the State Department, she was in the path of some key career opportunities, she said, although the chance to work for human rights in Korea and for fellow Korean Americans was beyond her expectations. Over time, she has become passionate about the work, especially  “in listening to and being responsive to the Asian American community as a whole, who really feel connected to these issues,” she said.

There have been many policy ups and downs during her 20 years as a specialist on North Korea; through it, her knowledge has been steadily building. “But now, the people, the issues, the connections I’ve made, and the stories I now carry with me of some of the divided families or North Korean refugees I’ve met – they’ve all undoubtedly left such a huge mark on my life, that  guess I can honestly say I love my job and feel very lucky to do what I do. As hard of an issue as it is to work on, on a daily basis.”

Visiting with the Japan Minister of Foreign Affairs to discuss abductee issues (credit: RFA) 

A grasp of the historical context

Part of working with issues in Northeast Asia is understanding the modern history of the region, including the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945), World War II, and the Korean War. In general, “understanding historical context is critical to the work we do here as diplomats here at the State Department,” Turner said.

Diplomacy on behalf of human rights requires an attitude of optimism, patience and the skills to creatively solve problems with diplomatic partners, where often few opportunities are available.  Even when an unresolved war legacy exists between countries, diplomats can work on behalf of their governments and keep discussions and partnerships active.

As an example, Turner pointed to how Vietnam and the U.S. improved their diplomacy.  The relationship in the post-Vietnam War era was complex, and still is, “but when you look at where we are now, compared to where we were 30 or 40 years ago, you can see how far we’ve come,” she added.

Similarly, Japan and South Korea have rebuilt their relationship in the years since Japan’s occupation and subjugation of Korea, which began in 1910, ended with the surrender of Japan in 1945 at the end of World War II.

Human rights updates from North Korea

Without a way to personally observe the human rights situation of North Koreans, Turner’s team refers to human rights reporting from the United Nations (generated by the High Commissioner for Human Rights) and other U.S and South Korean sources.  

For example, in early July, Turner went to Seoul ahead of South Korea’s official July 14 “North Korean Defectors’ Day,” and participated in the Seoul Forum on North Korean Human Rights, where she met with government officials, civil society organizations, and industry groups. Approximately 6,400 former North Koreans reside in Seoul, according to Seoul Mayor Se-hoon Oh, in his address to the forum.

Turner participated in an April Korea Society forum entitled Capturing Lost Ground on North Korean Human Rights, in which she related how North Korea has completely cut off official communication with South Korea in recent months, and enforced punishments for anyone possessing foreign media or even for using South Korean slang or pop culture references in conversation. 

These laws heavily target teenagers and young adults, Turner said in the interview. “I have teenagers myself, and thinking about it in that context is alarming, and really underscores a need for the international community to come together to find a way …to make progress for the North Korean people and protect their rights and freedoms.”

At the forum, Turner noted that it has been 10 years since the UN’s first Commission on Inquiry report about North Korean human rights. That report was derived from testimony given in 2013 public hearings of 80 witnesses and survivors of human rights abuses by North Korea against its own people; it has been instrumental in directing U.S. human rights diplomacy with North Korea.  

The crackdown on foreign influences is not recent, although it has intensified.  In 2022, Elizabeth Salmon, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) reported on “disproportionate measures” in sentencing against infractions of laws about use of foreign media. These include the 2020 law against “reactionary ideology,” which contained “punishments including the death penalty for accessing foreign information.” Eyewitness reports in late 2022 indicated the government publicly executed two teenagers for watching and distributing South Korean movies in the city of Hyesan, on the China border.

 A June report in the Korea Times report noted that there are two other repressive laws concerning the effect of foreign popular culture: one is a 2021 law on education of young people; and one enacted in 2023 on the protection of Pyongyang dialect and culture, which bans use of South Korean pronunciation and slang words.

Activists in South Korea have arguably exacerbated the crackdown by North Korean authorities by sending balloons over the border into North Korea bearing USB drives loaded with K-dramas and pop music, as well as leaflets criticizing North Korean leader Jong Un Kim.  North Korea has retaliated by sending balloons carrying trash and human waste to the South.

Defectors describe the tipping point

Turner commented that she has heard a lot about the effects of these laws in conversations with North Korean defectors.  One young woman told her that K-dramas, which are typically 16 episodes long, are often loaded onto USB drives with only 14 episodes, leaving fans hanging without an ending to their story.  She was watching My Love From Another Star , and “got to the end of the 14th episode, and she was just so consumed with wanting to know how it ended that she actually defected,” Turner related. Safely in South Korea, the young woman was able to call her dad through a network of other defectors, tell him she was okay, and, of course, how the story ended.

On its face, the story was bizarrely funny, but also indicated some important ideas about what kinds of influences move people to act. “Every single North Korean refugee I have met can point to some piece of information, some kind of foreign exposure that set off a light bulb” for them, Turner recalled. Depictions of how people live outside the DPRK are especially influential. North Koreans are also drawn to TV shows and Youtube channels depicting former North Koreans living in new countries, and having lives that are “prosperous in comparison to their own,” she explained.  

“For some, it’s just more simple, like a TV show where someone is taking a shower and the bathroom is steaming up with hot water,” she said. One defector saw an movie scene like that, and told her he imagined the prosperity of a home where there was so much hot water, 24 hours a day, she said.

One man told her that he once lived close enough to the border that his own radio picked up South Korean broadcasting. His triggering event was when he heard a news item about a train accident that set the schedule back 30 minutes. He was surprised “that the government would send a message out to the people that the trains were only 30 minutes behind,” Turner explained. “That stuck out, he said, because he had once waited at the train station for three days for a train that was never coming.”

Imagining reconciliation for North Korean refugees

As ambassador, Turner often talks with North Korean refugees about their lives leading to their defection and flight to either South Korea or the U.S.  No North Korean refugees have had closure or reconciliation of their traumatic past. Often their new lives are also very difficult in a brand new culture, adding another layer of traumatic stress.

Turner imagines there will eventually need to be a process of “truth-telling and memorialization” of these times.  ‘It is a journey,” the ambassador reflected. “…Truth and reconciliation, accountability, all those things are very multi-faceted and require a lot of work and are a long-term process. We’re not going to wake up one day and feel like we’ve reached the pinnacle of accountability for the human rights abuses that have been committed by the North Korean government.”

At present, Turner explained, the assignment to her group is to continue to try to engage, despite the difficult U.S.-North Korea relationship. There are some smaller issues, for example, talking with North Korean leadership about how to improve disability rights there; it’s an area where North Koreans have expressed interest in reforming some laws.

In general, she said, they are using every channel, to send messages that they are ready to get back to negotiations and discussions “because we do want to get back to the table and we are willing to come to the table without preconditions.” However, she said, right now “we are not getting a response.”

Turner with ROK Foreign Affairs Minister Tae-yul Cho (credit: ROK MOFA)

Representing Korean American interests

A big part of Turner’s job is representing the interests and voices of Korean Americans, whether they are North Korean refugees, first-generation South Korean immigrants and their second- and third-generation families, and Korean adoptees and their families. There are also thousands of unaccounted-for American prisoners of war (or listed as “missing in action”),  presumably dead, whose families want to repatriate their remains to the U.S. from North Korea. Turner advocates for those families also.  There are also families of South Koreans who were abducted to North Korea for various reasons.  Some of those family members immigrated and are now Korean Americans.

As part of her work with Korean Americans, Turner frequently discusses issues with the Korean American community, gathering comments and opinions, in order to “feed that information back in the policy-making process, and be responsive with that.”

The next year’s priorities

There is a long list of priorities for human rights in North Korea and for Korean Americans affected by policies towards the country. Picking priority issues is always difficult, however a very time-sensitive one for 2025 is the family reunification issue, since those family members are now in their 80s or 90s.

“I also want to be very focused on providing support to the North Korean refugee community” of the U.S., she said. “They go through so much to get to safety. If they are able to make it all the way to the U.S., we want to make sure we set them up for success.”

For the people inside North Korea, Turner continued, “we want to make space for conversations about disability rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, or really any other conversation we are able to have with North Korea.”

Also on her agenda for 2025 are conversations about improving North Koreans’ rights to information “because I do believe that an informed citizenry is the key to peace, stability and security, and so a government that is responsible and focused on meeting the needs of its people is going to be a better contributor to regional security and stability.” Even as technology makes the flow of information-sharing easier, she noted, “we have to make sure the end-users can consume that information.”

The adoptee identity as an asset

Her current position is very different from others she has had in that her status as a Korean adoptee is an asset, in conversation with the many Korean and Korean American people she works with. By the end of 2024, she will have traveled to South Korea five times.  She is still waiting for an invitation to visit North Korea.

“It has been meaningful at a personal level as a Korean adoptee, in having the opportunity to be connected back to Korea,” she said.  “One way is with North Korean defectors as I talk about identity, because they are also trying to find own identities as North Koreans in South Korea, or as Korean Americans in the U.S… I get share a lot about my identity as Korean or American, or Korean American.”

She credits her parents for making the Korean American connections that got her thinking about identity early. “When I talk to them on the phone,” she said, “I thank them for that!”  

A step forward, two steps back: A short history of U.S.-North Korean relations

Government building in Pyongyang. Photo by Stephen Wunrow

The short history of recent U.S.-North Korea relations is a series of attempts at a step forward resulting in two steps back.  The early 1990s were marked by growing concern over the North Korean nuclear missile development program. Then-President Bill Clinton appointed former Secretary of Defense William Perry to get the diplomatic relationship back on track. Perry did so, with help from the South Korean President Dae-Jung Kim.

During the final months of the Clinton Administration, there was a higher level of activity and some warming of North-South relations following the first inter-Korean summit in June 2000.  Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK) and was filmed as she sat with children in their school playground.

Pyongyang citizens gathered to support the Joint Declaration meetings, that began at the June 15, 2000 summit, that negotiated family reunions and other issues between North and South Korea. Photo by Stephen Wunrow

President George W. Bush jettisoned that progress with his hardline tactics and his famous line about North Korea being a part of a global “axis of evil.”  While North Korea signaled willingness to negotiate with the Bush Administration, the Bush policy continued to pressure for a “complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement” of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, which left very little room for negotiations.

There were also the Six-Party Talks (2003 to 2009) including China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the U.S., to control North Korea’s nuclear weapons and related research programs. That effort broke down over disagreements on verification issues.

The Obama Administration (2009 to 2016) adopted a policy of “strategic patience” toward North Korea, which resulted in doing nothing to advance diplomatic initiatives. It instead increased sanctions on imports to North Korea, and further isolated the regime.

Finally, the Trump Administration, beginning in 2017, traded the “strategic patience” policy with one dubbed “maximum pressure” which was designed to increase sanctions against and isolation of North Korea. Trump famously said that if North Korea continued its threats against the U.S., it would be met with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” North Korea continued with its nuclear arsenal development and in 2017, successfully tested the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile.

However, in January 2018, North Korean leader Jong Un Kim accepted South Korea’s invitation to participate in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Trump postponed South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises until after the Olympics. The Olympics were a hopeful time, and led to an inter-Korean dialogue, including a meeting between South Korean President Jae-in Moon and North Korean leader Jong Un Kim. The two discussed eliminating the threat of war between the two nations. 

Kim and Trump met in Singapore June 12, 2018, at which they produced a statement pledging to improve relations and create a lasting peace. North Korea also pledged to “work toward complete denuclearization.” Trump also reportedly agreed to sign a declaration formally ending the Korean War, which was only halted in 1953 with an armistice.

There was some movement toward denuclearization after 2018, however the U.S. and North Korea have been stuck since the 2018 Summit on details including the meaning of denuclearization. U.S. sanctions have stayed in place.

Trump and Kim agreed on a second summit, which was held in Hanoi in February, 2019.  It ended abruptly when the Trump team walked out.  According to Trump, the U.S. walked away because Jong Un Kim demanded a total lifting of sanctions in return for his country’s concessions. But North Korean Foreign Minister Yong Ho Ri countered that North Korea only sought partial sanctions relief in exchange for closing its Yongbyon nuclear complex. The two sides vowed to continue discussions.

Recently, Biden administration has worked to counter North Korean threats with a “trilateral” military and strategic alliance of the U.S., South Korea and Japan, but has done nothing to modify the sanctions that are one of the major impediments to forging a better diplomatic relationship. There has been consternation at the recent partnership between Russia and North Korea, and North Korea’s dispatch of its own troops to Russia, presumably to fight in the war against Ukraine.

There is recent broad support, including the Korean American community of a bill (H.R. 1369, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act),  to direct the Secretary of State to advance a peace treaty with North Korea. The bill would also lift or modify the longstanding travel ban preventing Americans from visiting North Korea, so that Korean Americans would be able to visit their family members in North Korea. That bill was introduced during the 2023-2024 Congress, but has not been passed by either House or Senate.

So, that happened

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Korean American peace activist denied entry to South Korea: No reason given | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2024)

The timing was like a mean pre-Halloween trick on October 30 when peace activist Christine Ahn was ready to board a plane in Honolulu bound for Seoul, for a couple weeks of meetings with activists and government; the highlight was a keynote speech for a youth peace conference in Gyeonggi-do. 

When she got to the airport, she was denied a boarding pass by Asiana Airlines, and told that she had been banned from entering South Korea, no reason or explanation given.

It was not the first time that Ahn, a prominent Korea peace and reunification activist and co-founder of the women’s peace advocacy organization Women Cross DMZ, has been denied entry into South Korea, however, it was still unexpected.  During the Trump administration, another time of heightened tensions between the two Koreas, Ahn had been banned from entering the country, but the ban was reversed under President Jae-in Moon’s administration (2017 to 2022).

Ahn said she has travelled to South Korea twice since the current conservative president, Suk-yeol Yoon, was elected in 2022. There was no reason for her to think this trip would be upended.  The denial of entry into the country “comes as a huge surprise,” she said.

“They are so opaque,” she said of the current South Korean administration. “They gave no explanation, but we can just assume they are haphazardly applying the National Security Law, and because I visited North Korea, because I help with trying to establish connection between the  U.S. and the DPRK, and because I visit the  (DPRK’s) UN Mission in New York,” she said.  “The problem with the National Security Law is that it is so inconsistently applied, and for some reason, they decided to deny my entry this time.”  

Although the South Korean government’s actions seem opaque, Ahn’s assumption about the application of the National Security Law is based on her experience. After the famous 2015 crossing of the DMZ, Ahn and other women who crossed from North to South received formal letters once they got to South Korea, warning them that if she or any of the march participants “said anything politically controversial in violation of the National Security Law, I would be deported,” she said. “It shows how arcane the law is, and the fact that it serves to suppress free speech.”

Along with the Women Cross DMZ attorney, Ahn said she immediately got in touch with the State Department, which will try to obtain a formal justification from the South Korean consulate on why she was barred from entering South Korea.

The National Security Law, which Ahn presumes is being used as justification for denying her entry to South Korea, was established in South Korea after the division of Korea into separately governed states, ostensibly to suppress influences from North Korea.  Critics of the law have said that it has also been used to suppress legitimate government opposition, and to quash free speech.  Over the years, the law has variously been used to put pressure on organized labor, peace activism, the press and media, and even to ban artwork and other creative endeavors. The current South Korean Yoon administration is conservative, and in the past, other conservative administrations have enforced the National Security Law in various ways.

Ahn said that, under the Yoon administration, there have been numerous recent attempts to oppress peace activism and suppress advocacy for marginalized groups. She cited a recent attempt by the government to abolish the office of the Minister of Gender Equality. 

Recent reports from Korea watchers have cited other repressive actions. A September 2023 story in The New Yorker reported that police raided dozens of union offices and private homes, accusing labor officials of violating South Korea’s National Security Act and (illegally) coercing construction firms to use union workers. The same story reported that prosecutors working for the Yoon administration “have used their investigatory powers to intimidate and threaten to arrest politicians in the liberal opposition party.” One of those politicians was Jae-myung Lee, who ran against Yoon in 2022.

Christine Ahn (center) with Women Cross DMZ members and other peace activists.

Ahn is the co-director and co-founder of the non-profit group Women Cross DMZ, which began in 2014 and carried out an event over several weeks in 2015 with women’s peace activists in both North Korea and South Korea. The highlight of the event was a crossing from North Korea to South Korea by an international group of 30 women activists, including several Nobel peace laureates, over the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the heavily-guarded boundary between the two Koreas.

Since its founding, Women Cross DMZ has been advancing a message that women’s input is key to peacemaking, and that an end to the Korean War should be formalized with a peace treaty. 

Since the 2015 event, the movement started by Women Cross DMZ has expanded internationally, through a coalition known as Korea Peace Now. Women Cross DMZ has reported on how the U.S. policies toward North Korea — which include sanctions, isolation, and military threats — have not advanced peace and stability between the two Koreas, but rather have heightened tensions and increased the risk of renewed conflict.

Women Cross DMZ and Korea Peace Now have consistently advocated for more effective  diplomacy and more people-to-people engagement. This advocacy has earned widespread support from Nobel Peace laureates, the former UN Special Rapporteur on DPRK human rights, humanitarian workers, prominent feminist activists, and even former U.S. military leaders. In 2022, Ahn was conferred the Social Activist Award at the 18th Annual Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates, held in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

In October, Ahn collaborated in a Chicago Tribune commentary with Dan Leaf, a retired Air Force lieutenant general and a former deputy commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Their essay said the next president must provide realistic off-ramps to war with North Korea, in contrast to the tough talk and ultimatums expressed by the Biden Administration, and by Harris on the campaign trail.

They wrote that the next president must forge a peace treaty that will end the Korean War formally, end the Trump-era travel ban to North Korea that is preventing elderly Korean “more of the same” approach to dealing with North Korea, which has only increased North Koreans’ suffering and driven the U.S, and North Korea closer to war.

In addition having to cancel her keynote address to the International Youth Peace Forum in Gyeonggi Province, Ahn has been re-scheduling meetings with  journalists and leaders in the South Korean peace movement, and with National Assembly members. 

Ahn also has family in South Korea, and had set aside time to visit a shrine to her parents, and attend a family event to remember an uncle who recently died. “This has been heartbreaking in so many ways,” Ahn said.

At the time of the interview, Ahn was still in the dark about the reason she was singled out. She jokes that it could be her imposing physical presence. “You’ve seen me, and all five feet and 100 pounds of me – it is quite terrifying,” she remarked.

However, the Yoon government’s behavior is becoming a disturbing pattern, she added.  “They like to tout defending democracy and freedom, and yet they are quite renowned now for repressing labor activists, and peace movement and reunification activists, so it is quite a dark time for civil society.”

To sign a petition to lift the travel ban, click here.

Clash at the family table

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Jesa shows mismatch of modern life and Korean gender roles | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2024)

Jesa movie poster and filmmaker Jee Hoon Seo.

A new filmmaker who grew up in both Korean and Korean American culture is premiering a short film entitled Jesa, which hints darkly at the emotional complexities and perils of growing up in two cultures.

Jee Hoon Seo has a newly-minted film degree earned at New York University (NYU), and this fall he is jumping into a year fellowship in scriptwriting, and is also planning to enroll in graduate school at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.  

At the same time, his 14-minute Jesa, a thesis film for his NYU degree is being shopped to a variety of film festivals and other screenings.  The film, which is mainly in Korean with subtitles, includes the well-known Korean American actor Esther Moon. Moon also played the role of Mrs. Oh in the award-winning Minari, a 2000 film about the Korean American immigrant experience (KQ review here). She was also in the 2022 Netflix drama Partner Track.

Seo describes his film Jesa was “heavily inspired by my own upbringing” and “the only film I wanted to make when I started at NYU film school.”  In Korea, a jesa is a ceremony commemorating the anniversary of a loved one’s death, performed as part of a family get-together.  The centerpiece of the ceremony is a table decorated with the loved one’s photo, along with an elaborate spread of the person’s favorite foods and drinks. After the ceremony, family members visit and eat some homemade food.  

The ceremony is heavy with tradition and steeped in the Confucian value of respect for one’s elders. Preparing the ceremonial food is traditionally the purview of the women, particularly the daughter-in-law of the family, while the ceremony is performed by the men.  Some aspects of the ceremony could be indecipherable from the perspective of Korean kids growing up in the U.S., and the film points out that culture gap.

In Jesa, the two brothers of the family, an older teenager and a pre-teen, growing up in the U.S., view the ceremony as outsiders.  The other attendees are adults, either immigrants or visiting from Korea.  The film is too brief to get into each of the characters’ stories, but the viewer gets to know the mom who is working non-stop in the kitchen, making the many dishes required for the ceremony.  The viewer also gets to know the two sons; they check in with their mom, and help around the edges.  She speaks Korean with the older son, and with the pre-teen younger son, she speaks in Korean and he answers back in English.

The audience also finds out that the father lives in Korea, and is supporting his wife and sons to live in the U.S.  He is visiting his family in the U.S. for the jesa, and wants his sons to understand the importance of the day.  The two sons are clearly allied with their mom, and the central tension in the film happens when the husband blames his wife for an infraction of the expected decorum. In the conflict, dangerous cracks appear in the thin veneer of Confucian tradition that the family has constructed for the occasion.

The film that almost wasn’t

The movie almost did not happen.  Seo said he started at NYU as a film major, then had to take a hiatus to do his mandatory two-year military service in Korea. Upon returning from military service, “then COVID happened and I kind of put it aside,” he said.  Having doubts even about pursuing  a career in film, he still needed a thesis project after his first film, and became “desperate to pick a subject, and it made sense that this is the only one that I had in mind to do, and would regret not doing if I gave up film.”

Another complication was a serious injury he got whle playing soccer that had him laid up, anxious and uncertain. “It was a pretty bad injury where I couldn’t really go out of my room, and I was confined to a space and was going through a period where I didn’t know whether I could continue to direct.”

At that point, the filmmaker said, “I was like ‘I don’t even know if I can make a film, but if I’m going to do it one last time, this will be it.’  Because it was the film I always wanted to make, and maybe partly what got me into this in the first place.”

Seo said he does not identify with either the older brother or the younger in the film.  Instead, he explained, he concentrated on the modern-day meaning of the ancient jesa ceremony. The film touches on ideas of family and growing up Korean American, as he thought about them as a child, and as he derived deeper meaning about them as an adult.  

Seo (left) does a selfie with the cast of Jesa.

A knack for casting

Seo worked hard to find actors who were native Korean speakers for his film, paying attention to how well they portrayed emotion while speaking in Korean. He recruited Esther Moon, who plays the mother, after they met during his internship with Bound Entertainment.  “I was surprised at how emotional her performance could be in Korean, which is rare in the States, and thought she would be ideal candidate.”

Seo tried to give each actor something to do, even if it was small or in the background. For example, the younger uncle (played by Jude Kim), gets a few laughs in his mini-scene with a bottle of soju that saves the day.

The older teen Tae Young (played by Sung Chul Choi) clashes with his father in defense of his mom after his dad shouts at her in front of the family. Her infraction of the rules is stumbling and spilling soup on the way to the table.  The scene was understated at first, but was developed into a “screaming match” between Tae Young and the father, he said. There is an interesting use of sound when the younger brother Jin Young watches in shock as his father and brother shout at each other, and the scene fades out with a high-pitched tone that increases, in volume, as if the younger brother’s mind is blocking out the harsh words.

There was a screening at NYU this April, and Seo’s team was awarded the “Best Ensemble Acting” award, he added, “It helped validate for me that our performances were great.”

The roots of Jesa

Despite living in the U.S., Seo also spent time in Korea with his relatives, particularly his beloved grandparents. “And to this day, we practice the ceremony,” he said. But, for him, there was a disconnect.  “I was growing up in America with my mom, who raised me kind of by herself.  My dad was still in Korea, and she was taking care of me and my brother, she was going to school learning art therapy,” Seo explained. “She was very busy and was doing this all by herself. It made her a very powerful and independent woman, in my mind, but when it came to being in Korea and doing these ceremonies, she was very much subjected to this specific role.”

As he grew into adulthood, Seo said, his mother started to tell him more about what was happening behind the scenes during some of those key childhood years.  He heard some explanations of things he always thought were ‘off,” he said, “Not just in the ceremony, but in her marriage.  So this film a way to kind of express, finally, those kinds of thoughts and ideas that as a kid I had but wasn’t ready to put out there and express.”

In Jesa, Seo distills his emotions and revelations into a story that describes a mix of tension and unhappiness in the mother, and rage in the father which is disproportionate to the small mistake that happens during the ceremony. Both brothers’ views are also revealed.  “There are two perspectives – innocence, and then adolescence where everything is very hot-headed and you want to fix things, but that can be a bit destructive,” he said.

The older son is frustrated and only partially understands about his mother’s oppressive marriage to their dad; the younger son perceives just a glimpse of his mother’s unhappiness, consoling her and offering to share his prized honey cookie with her instead of eating it by himself.  

Viewpoint from two cultures

In straddling two cultures, Seo realizes how it changed him, and added complexity, as well as discernment, to how he views the world.  The filmmaker shows the viewer the biased and incomplete view of both brothers, and plays with the idea of two unreliable narrations of reality as the camera calmly observes.

After the food is on the table and the ceremony begins, the camera shows the mother standing, unseen, at the back of the room. Seo said he remembers the women of his family sitting in the kitchen during the ceremony.  “They had already done all the work, and the ceremony is just a short thing, maybe a half hour. If there were a lot of guests, it could be an hour of standing. So for them, it was finally their time to have a break,” he explained.

Even as a child, he remembers feeling “that it was so odd that they do all the work but at the end of the day, the men just sort of take the lead. They have a sense of pride and ownership over the ceremony, but all that work is not acknowledged.”  In telling the story, he said, “it made sense to kind of isolate the lone mother figure to dramatize the separation. Everyone else is related by blood, except her. It’s shown, but no one really talks about it.”

Seo said he has “maybe more American ideals about an egalitarian society” than someone who was brought up only in Korea.  He remembers admiring certain views of his American classmates “They seemed to all have this trait of being able to call out the B.S. and say ‘this is not OK – I don’t condone this.’”

In part, he reflected, the story of Jesa was catalyzed by his inability to express how he saw that such cultural practices were a mismatch with modern society.  As an adult and a “fuller version of myself,” he said, “I can now say ‘I don’t think this was the best way to enforce tradition or culture.’ I cannot do anything about what happened, but I can still do my part to tell the story.  It is partly my mom’s story, but I still had my views as a bystander, and that’s the only story I could tell.”

Creating a film about one’s own experience, even when only loosely based on one’s own family, is tricky.  “I definitely had a lot of fear, and had to take precautions,” he said.  However, he said, his family, particularly his grandfather, had always urged him to be honest.  “I wanted to make something I could stand by and be honest about. And this ceremony and my family – they are still people I love and a culture and history that I really value.  But at the same time, I could notice the flaws, and I’m sure other people could notice them too.”

Microcosm of a changing Korea

During his childhood in the mid-2000s, Seo believes he was living through a time in Korea when the traditional strict rules of gender roles, at least certain ones, still applied.  Although he did not know it at the time, things were changing in Korea, and his family, with some in the U.S. and some in Korea, were feeling it acutely.

These days, Seo observed, “Korea is in a very transitional phase. Younger people have a lot of vocal power, and really can just kind of stick it to the older generation and say ‘I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to have kids, and I want a career. I don’t want to have to live with another family.’”

There is also a demographic of what he calls “traditionalist families”; his father’s side is typical of this. Despite his grandfather’s love and high regard for his brother’s wife, “there is an expectation” by his grandfather (and other Korean elders) that women will get married around age 30 or younger  “and then they are expected to bear kids, and my grandfather wants grandsons and great-grandsons.”

Seo has reflected upon some things his mother shared after she saw the film. “One was that when she married – she was 24, and I’m now 25 – her parents apparently literally told her ‘you are marrying off to another family, and you are going to spend the rest of your life with them, and you are going to be their daughter-in-law, and you are going to perform that role, and if it doesn’t work out, you cannot come back, and you have to ride it out.’”

Being told that there was no support system for her was traumatic, Seo said. “It may not have influenced her decision to stay [married) because… like 80 percent of the childrearing was her responsibility.  She said it definitely would have been less stressful and traumatic if her family had told her they were willing to take her back. But she didn’t have that option.”

Having such deep conversations with his mother informed his scriptwriting for Jesa, which is set in the mid-2000s. “The more I think about it and look back, I can see that it was a totally different time, when women had different responsibilities to follow that were not dependent on how they felt or what they wanted.”

As a filmmaker and a storyteller, Seo continually asked himself if he was presenting it “in an authentic manner, without trying to enforce a view or a lesson.”  Too little information, and the audience will not perceive the message; too much and it would become didactic.  Seo believes he hit the balance.

There are moments where the film is depicting the best parts of a family gathering – the food and the laughs, he said. “But there is a sense that we know something is not quite right.”  

Since the mid-2000s, Korean culture has changed, Seo said. The jesa ceremony has become less common. It is also less common for the daughter-in-law to be solely responsible for the preparation. “People are doing it differently because they don’t see the necessity of someone going through all that work …or now, there are delivery services where you can just have the food delivered [for the ceremony],” he said.

Jesa will be screened at two New York film festivals in August – the Asian American International Film Festival and the Greenpoint Film Festival. As a short film, it can compete with other short films, but is not the type of film that typically brings in revenue.  Sometimes, a short film can be a “proof of concept for a feature,” he said, but he does not plan to make Jesa into a feature-length film. However, the film will be useful as a kind of “calling card” about him when investors or anyone else needs to see a sample of his work. Right now, he said, it will not be available for viewing outside film festivals, but he wants it to be on some kind of platform in the future.

During the production of Jesa, he had a chance to apply for a fellowship that required a TV pilot script for entry.  He had no script that fit the bill, and he had a three-week deadline. “I thought that I had always wanted to write about my soccer team – we had a Korean soccer team at NYU, and we had won three championships back-to-back.  And there was always a little bit of drama.” He wrote a script and sent it off on line.  “We went ahead to shoot the [Jesa] film, and months later, I found out that I got one of the fellowships I applied for.”

Film fellowship and grad school

Thesis films in film school tend to be self-reflective, with coming-of-age themes, Seo said. The new film  “will be a rom-com, which is a very different genre and a very different feel … I like romance, and I like soccer, so the next projects will continue to inherit my Korean and American views and experiences, but I feel like family drama is not the only medium or genre I’m interested in.”

The fellowship, from the Hollywood Radio Television Society (HRTS), will also include helpful support in the form of script development and with consultations about how to pitch the film to investors. The HRTS also holds networking and educational events of interest to filmmakers.

At the same time, he will apply for a graduate program from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, where he will continue learning, directing and writing for another two years.

After getting  audience feedback from screenings, Seo said he was pleased that audience members liked the theme of coming-of-age and family interaction.  “I took that as high praise,” he said.  Seo is persuaded that in writing about his own Korean family, the most important information the film imparted was not related to Korean culture as much as it was to universal experiences everyone has with their families.

Other friends and former classmates who came to the screenings knew little or nothing about  Korean culture, but that didn’t matter, Seo said.  “Some of my friends from Boston, and a former roommate from rural Connecticut came to see it,” he recalled. “and my roommate said ‘it reminds me of some conversations I’ve had with my mom.’”

Seo said he is not committed to making Korean family dramas, but he is driven toward the authenticity of writing about his own truths.  “I do things based on my experiences, because I feel things and I want to express them and go on a journey to figure out why it is bothering me or interesting me,” he said. “I think [Jesa} was able to give me a lot of closure in a lot of ways. And now, I’m ready to move on to another subject.”

A trailer for Jesa is on the Asian American International Film Festival website, at this link.

A priority of peace

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Korean American Public Action Committee pushes forward a new peace resolution in Washington | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2024)

Casey Choi, executive director of KAPAC and (right) KAPAC conference participants on the Capitol steps.

How to get to peace in Korea was the topic of a Washington DC event in May that gathered activists from all over the country. The organizer, the Korean American Public Action Committee (KAPAC), a non-profit peace action organization, and the event included meetings among regional representatives from across the county, a press conference, a gala dinner, visits to Congressional representatives, and a demonstration at the Capitol.

Supporters came together for a (politically) star-studded event in support of a bill that seems at first glance to be an appeal for some very modest goals.  But there is one big goal among them that will be a heavy lift – peace.

The conference showcased a bill that has seen little action for two sessions in a row except for an introduction and referral to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It has garnered an impressive 41 cosponsors, indicating broad House support.  However, since its formal introduction in the current (118th Congress) session in March, it has gotten minimal attention from legislators. Korean American House member co-sponsors include Andy Kim (D-MA) and Marilyn Strickland (D-WA).

The conference took on the heavy topic of how to achieve a North Korea-U.S. peace process, complicated by the urgency of hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. The bill states, and the conference topics emphasized, that a Korea peace agreement is of crucial global importance. 

For Korean Americans, there is an added urgency because of the elder Korean Americans who want to be reunited with their North Korean families, either in conjunction with a formal peace agreement or sooner.

Rep. Brad Sherman of California speaks about the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act at a press conference that took place during the event.

Provisions of the bill

Reasons why the U.S. should formally end the war on the Korean peninsula are enumerated in the first few paragraphs of a resolution, called the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, now a House of Representatives bill (H.R. 1369).

Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA), principal author of the bill, spoke about the its importance among the many priority issues before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on which he serves. He has worked on this bill for four years. “It will take time, and no one said it is easy,” he said at a Capitol press conference.

Sherman added that the bill specifies a review of the ban on U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea. The review would be specific to determining whether if the Trump-era executive order could at least be modified to include exceptions for Korean Americans. An estimate in the bill puts the number of Korean Americans with North Korean family members at 100,000. Most are elderly people who were children or teens when they were separated from their families in 1948 when Korea was divided into north and south; they later immigrated from South Korea to the U.S. 

Under the bill’s provisions, a peace treaty would replace the armistice that has been in place between the U.S. and North Korea since the shooting war in Korea was halted 71 years ago. The treaty would establish formal diplomatic relations between the U.S. and North Korea. KAPAC and other political action groups have called for a peace treaty for many years, and there have been many attempts at diplomatic initiatives to achieve a formal state of peace.  The bill cites many of these attempts, reading like a backlog of long-neglected U.S.-Korea diplomatic issues.

It specifically calls out for follow-through on the agreements of the North Korea-U.S. summit meetings in 2018 (between the U.S. and North Korea, held in Singapore); and in 2019 (between North Korea and the U.S., held in Hanoi, Vietnam) through which a diplomatic process was intended, but never established, for a path to peace.

The resolution also specifies that a treaty would open a door to negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile development. An agreement on that issue, it is argued, would bring more stability to the region.  

To keep communications open, the bill specifies that diplomatic liaison offices be established in North Korea and the U.S. This step was also specified in the joint statement, signed by the U.S. and North Korea at the Singapore Summit in 2018, but no action has been taken on it.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) met with delegates from KAPAC during the May conference in Washington.

Building support

More recently, on June 14, Sherman spoke on the floor of the House, reminding his colleagues of his four-year history of working on the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act. He noted that some House members have said that negotiating peace is an “unwarranted concession to North Korea and Kim Jong Un. That is hardly the case,” he said. “The armistice of 1953 was done by both sides.  If an armistice is not an unwarranted concession, neither is a formal peace treaty.” He added that Britain and Canada have both indicated support for the bill. 

South Korea’s support was apparent in the large delegation of South Korean legislators who attended the KAPAC conference, and other South Korean legislators and other political leaders who wrote letters of support.  Conservative South Korean President Suk Yeol Yoon’s administration has not supported the bill, however, one of the South Korean delegation was from the conservative party. The rest were from the South Korean progressive parties, which are the dominant group in the South Korean (unicameral) legislature.  

The conference, held May 22-24 began with a dinner and speakers, included a day of congressional visits, and ended with a morning demonstration at the Capitol.  Elected officials from the U.S. and South Korea spoke at various times about their support of the bill and the cause of peace in Korea.

KAPAC Board chair Augustine Choe in his welcoming remarks thanked the South Korea delegation and the many representatives of Korean community organizations and peace organizations assembled for the conference. Choe said that the 300 people assembled represent 30 million globally who have a passion for Korean peace. He emphasized that KAPAC’s push for legislation is the best path for achieving peace in Korea.

KAPAC and separated families

For some KAPAC members, including executive director and co-founder Casey Choi, interest in the cause of peace in Korea was sparked by the story of their own separated families. Choi’s father was separated from his family because the border was physically relocated after the war broke out due to a change in the area of occupation by the North Koreans. After that, the border was heavily guarded and access cut off to ordinary people.  “He never had any chance to see or meet or hear about his family in North Korea,” Choi said. “And two and a half years ago, he passed away.”  Choi said he promised his father he would bury his ashes in North Korean soil, but so far he has not been able to do so, because the 2017 travel ban is still in place.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) speaking at the event, said that she learned a lot about the divided families when the Congressional Asian American Caucus held a forum on U.S.-Korea policy that discussed the plight of divided families. Chu said she heard testimony from an 86-year-old woman, Soon Hwa Kim, who was a child when she fled her home in North Korea.  “At the time, she expected to spend just a few months away, but it turned into decades of separation.  …She told the forum that that her dying wish was to be reunited with her family,” Chu said.

Chu said that after the forum, she became a cosponsor of what was then H.R. 826, the Divided Families Reunification Act.

David Kim, candidate for the 34th Congressional district of California, at the press conference. Photo by Martha Vickery

David Kim, who is running for the 34th House district, spoke at the conference as a candidate for one of the most Korean American congressional districts in the country. He explained that District 34 takes in most of Los Angeles Koreatown, that it is the poorest district in California and one of the poorest in the nation. His was a dynamic speech from the perspective of a next-generation Korean American leader who is ready to lead on Korea peace issues.

Kim said he remembered as a child singing a folk song in his weekly Korean school about wishing for tong-il, or reunification (Uriui sowoneun tong-il). He suggested that he and his millennial-age Korean American contemporaries may have learned about the divided Korea, and may know that their parents longed for reunification, but that his generation did not experience that longing in the same personal way.

Asked later if Korean American millennials can get behind a peace treaty bill, he replied that perhaps the issue of Korean peace is “not relevant to Korean American millennials unless they believe it’s relevant.  Because a lot of Korean American millennials don’t know that there’s been no end to the Korean War.  I would say a very small fraction are aware that there is still a Korean War going on.” From a standpoint of awareness and education, he said, “there could definitely be more focus on this.” 

Kim said although millennial Korean American legislators, such as Reps. Andy Kim and Marilyn Strickland, have been elected in recent years, none has taken the lead on the peace treaty bill. If and when he is elected, Kim said, one goal will be to raise the number of cosponsors to 100.  The bill needs a “critical mass” of support, and given the large Korean American constituency in his district, Kim said, it should be an issue he can take on and get support for.

Casey Choi, KAPAC executive director and Augustine Choe, KAPAC board chair; at right, KAPAC conference goers assemble at the Capitol.

The travel ban catalyst

When KAPAC was first established, KAPAC founder Casey Choi said, he met with some Congress members from his area of Orange County, California to ask them to work on exceptions to the travel ban for Korean American family members of North Koreans. Through those conversations, he said, he was persuaded that the reach of KAPAC had to broaden to the whole country, that a durable peace with North Korea needed to be the overall goal, and that such a goal would probably require a new bill for Congress to get behind and vote for.  

In the whole history of lobbying for a formal peace treaty, several resolutions calling for peace have been introduced by a variety of pro-peace and pro-reunification groups. There has been movement toward peace at various times, notably toward the end of the Clinton administration, but no initiatives have had permanent positive effects, Choi noted.

That KAPAC was founded the same year as the travel ban was not a coincidence, Choi said. There were some diplomatic efforts by the U.S. government to reach out after the 2017 travel ban was established, but there has been no diplomatic response from North Korea.

Choi said he learned a couple of important things through following this early effort: That it is not very easy in North Korea to track down family, and that the North Korean regime does not attach much value to families being reunited.  “Their priority is to secure their own regime,” he said. Also, he said, he learned that the North Korean government works in a very top-down fashion.  There is a mismatch with the U.S.’s very different diplomatic structure, with lower-level career diplomats doing a good deal of the basic work prior to high-level diplomatic negotiations.

It is logical that the Trump administration was able to persuade North Korean leader Jong Un Kim to meet with Trump in Hanoi (2019), Choi added. The efforts to establish a peace process failed because Trump walked out of the meeting “but his idea was not that bad,” Choi said. The top-down approach Trump took resonated with the way North Korea wants to do international diplomacy.

Pursuing peace on a path through Congress

Strategically, he said, the KAPAC founding group decided it was better to reach out to Congress through a lobbying organization and introduce a peace bill after concluding that behind-the-scenes diplomacy and working with their own California representatives would not be enough.

There was a sense that taking action was time sensitive. The current state of cold war could turn into a hot war easily, Choi pointed out. “North Korea is completely capable of waging another war against South Korea,” Choi said, which would wreak devastation and suffering on both Koreas.

Sherman is walking a narrow path to negotiate broader bipartisan support for the bill despite Washington hardliners who would demand only capitulation from North Korea. Although bill has garnered strong support in in the House, getting it through a Republican-dominated Senate will be another kind of challenge.  There probably will not be a vote during this session, Choi predicted.

Choi said he was encouraged by the strong showing by South Korean progressive legislators at the conference, indicating a growing constituency of South Korean voters who want a peace treaty. That leaning was apparent in the recent 2024 bi-election, Choi mentioned, in which the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) emerged victorious, winning a majority of the 300 seats in the National Assembly, with 175 of seats to the conservative People Power Party’s (PPP) 108 seats. Voter turnout was 67 percent, which was the highest record in 32 years. 

Space is at a premium in congressional offices as KAPAC delegates asked their U.S. representatives for support and thanked them for their pledges of support for the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act.

Peace as a way to prosperity

South Korea has done well for the past 74 years despite the constant specter of a future war. Yet, Choi said, not many foreign companies invest in South Korea, which probably has to do with the long shadow cast by North Korea’s missile development.

A deal that would effectively manage the nuclear issue would be a win-win for the two Koreas, and therefore, for the U.S., Choi explained.  From the North Korean perspective, if the U.S. could lift sanctions in exchange for a nuclear weapons control agreement, the North’s national security and economy would benefit.  The sanctions are supposed to control for materials that could be made into weapons “but in reality, sanctions harm the everyday running of North Korea” and even contribute to food shortages, he said.

To those who would criticize the bill as making a deal with a “rogue nation,” Choi said, “You know what?  I don’t need any formal diplomatic efforts and dialogues with my friend.  It’s actually for my enemy, the ones we don’t trust. …We need to give them some kind of security cushion, that we are not going to invade. That is in the declaration, and that’s why it is an important peace-building gesture for North Korea.”

Reviewing the text of the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act in a congressional office.

Taking care of the peace process in this generation

Choi said another objective of KAPAC is maintaining an appropriate pace for passing the bill and pushing for speedy action on the peace process that will follow, including obtaining exceptions to the travel ban. “I don’t want to drag this on for a long time. I want to finish it as soon as possible, so that we can start seeing some changes by the U.S. government.”

So far, the process of getting support for the bill through co-sponsors has been slow but steady, however, the route could be streamlined if the support is there. “They could mark it up in committee and put it to a vote, and they could pass it,” he said. “Consensus is important, but the number of co-sponsors does not really matter.”

Another reason for progress and speed, he said, is the history of attempts at peacemaking that have not moved forward at all, or have moved forward, then backward.  The weight of responsibility for this process has been heavy, Choi said, for him and other children of wartime immigrants. “It should not be like this for our offspring,” he said, referring to Korean American young adults.  “We should not be giving this difficult and big problem to our next generation. We should finish it in my generation, and I really believe we can do it.”

The Korean American Public Action Committee (KAPAC) maintains a website at this link: https://www.kapac.net.  Progress of the bill is on the U.S. Congress tracking website at this link.

Hopeful KAPAC members at the conference.

A door opens for birth searching

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AdopteeHub in Minnesota and GOA’L in Korea launch collaboration for search and post-reunion services | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2024)

July will be the launch of a new birth search portal by the Twin Cities-based, adoptee-run organization AdopteeHub. The portal will be a key part of a birth search service that is the first of its kind in the 60-plus year history of international adoption.  It will blend technology with expert research, counseling and translation to achieve reunifications of Korean family members with their birth children across the miles and cultures.

The new database, called the Hope Registry, will be a confidential way for both birth parents in Korea and adult Korean adoptees to enter their personal information as a first step in a birth family search or birth child search.  Korean families searching for children they placed for adoption and adult adoptees searching for their original families will get expert assistance to help them in subsequent steps, ideally (but not always) culminating with a family reunion that will be permanent and meaningful.

A bilingual and bicultural approach

Ami Nafzger, executive director and founder of AdopteeHub, said that their organization is partnering with the Seoul-based non-profit Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOA’L), which she also founded in Korea (in 1998).  The two organizations will administer the program in two languages and in two cultures. This joint, bi-cultural approach will allow both native Koreans and Korean adoptees to voluntarily post their own information on the new data base as the first step in the often-complex process of finding birth relatives.

Nafzger visited the GOA’L organization in late May to meet with and train staff who will administer the Hope Registry, the database part of a larger program that will include post-reunion support. Prior to the July launch, she said, she will also train two Minnesota-based staff to help register adult adoptees for the new program.  At launch time, set for July, she said, only U.S. Korean adoptees can register. The program will be expanded later to include Korean adoptees living in other countries.

GOA’L Family Search Team, Yeo Kyung Wie and Kyong Mi Paek, with Kara Rickmers (center), GOA’L Secretary General.

Kara Rickmers, GOA’L’s secretary general since February, met with Nafzger several times during her May trip to GOA’L headquarters. GOA’L welcomed the partnership, Rickmers said, which has been in process for about a year.  Right now, she said, adoption agencies do not have a legal way to share information with birth parents about adoptees, and there is no service available to help birth parents search. 

The Korean government’s National Center for the Rights of the Child (NCRC) runs a database on which anyone can enter their information, but that database is public, therefore many birth parents and some adoptees are reluctant to use it. The data on it is not actively managed, so it does not work as a staffed search service like the Hope Registry, according to Rickmers.

Under a recent law, adoption agencies were supposed to consolidate adoption records under one service, however, that project was never accomplished, due in part to the agencies’ reluctance to follow the new law.  Agencies retain their own information and release adoptees’ files according to their own policies, Nafzger said.

Having lived in Korea and worked with searching adoptees through GOA’L starting in the late ‘90s, Nafzger sees the birth search challenge from both sides.  The situation for birth families is unchanged from the situation she observed when she began to do searches in Korea nearly 27 years ago, she noted. In terms of search services, she said, “I’ve talked to a few adoption agencies, and they’ve said there is still nothing for birth families.”

Korean adoptees have had a few more resources available, but there are many deficiencies in search options for adoptees as well, Nafzger observed. Typically, adoptees might put birth search information on social media such as Facebook, which is problematic.  She said of Facebook “All the viewers can see it, it’s not specifically going to the Korean community, and it’s all in English.”  

A key ingredient – privacy

Since the mid-1990s, when a large group of Korean adoptees reached adulthood, many have tried to find their birth families in various ways. They have used newspaper advertising, appeared on popular morning TV shows in Korea that feature people looking for lost friends and family, employed detectives, and used a DNA database maintained by South Korea law enforcement. Sometimes, adoption agencies or other organizations offering homeland tours to Korean adoptees supply staff who  assist in birth searches while tour participants are in South Korea.

The disadvantage of many of these methods is that birth families and adoptees must be willing to go public with their search, which can be a negative and intimidating experience. None supply follow-up for adoptees in the important post-reunion phase of the journey.

In contrast, she explained, the Hope Registry database will be in both English and Korean, and the information entered by the users is confidential.  Only basic information, approved by the user, such as a name and a photo, will be available for viewing by other registered users on the portal.  Each participant will enter more details, however, that information will be only for viewing and use by the staff working confidentially to match participants with family members.

Funding a labor-intensive project

Entering information on the database is only the initial step in part of an overall program that combines technology, data and guidance.  The researchers find key information or ask the participant for more information “because the more information we can gather, the better a chance for a match,” Nafzger said.

Many adoptees have already entered their names and information on GOA’L’s database.  GOA’L database enrollees will need to separately enroll with the Hope Registry, although information on the GOA’L database will be used by staff as one of the search resources, Nafzger said.

Because of one anonymous major donor, the start-up costs for the program are covered. Participants will be able to register for $30. Another donor, the Thomas and Wonsoon Foundation, funded by Korean adoptee and entrepreneurial inventor Thomas Park Clement and his wife, artist  Wonsoon Kim, will supply the funding for DNA matching of birth parents and adoptees, and will also support the post-reunification program. This grant will make the DNA test free for program participants.

Success of the program will depend on sourcing more funding and getting ongoing support from donors who are on board.

Preparing for anything to happen

As a social worker with years of experience in birth search, Nafzger said she favors doing an initial  “readiness assessment” for Hope Registry enrollees, possibly a counseling session paired with a questionnaire for all participants, so that adoptees and birth families will be prepared to deal with all the possible outcomes of a search.

Other readiness resources for adoptees, still to be developed, may include examples of stories and/or videos about adoptees who searched and were reunited, or not reunited, or those who searched but were rejected by their birth families, Nafzger said.  Through GOA’L, similar resources in Korean will eventually be available for Korean nationals who enroll, she said.

There are no models for AdopteeHub to follow on how to help after a family is reunified -– post-reunion support services will be a new invention. Nafzger observed that “Post-reunion resources are missing. They just don’t exist. And we need to start doing something around those things. Too many adoptees have found families, but then lose contact with them.”

Managing expectations across cultures

Rickmers, who has lived in Korea for six years, and worked with GOA’L for the last four years, noted that there are many search resources available for adoptees, compared to almost none to help a family that is newly in reunion. Beyond the language barrier, she said, there are the larger problems of “the expectations on both sides -– the point of view of the birth family and the adoptee are often very different in terms of what a reunion means to them,” she said.  Such expectations “can often lead to miscommunication and suddenly they are no longer speaking and no longer in reunion.”

Back in the ‘90s and early 2000s when Nafzger was finding birth family matches for adoptees who came to her through GOA’L, the organization got a publicity boost through a story in the newspaper Kyung An Ilbo and after that,  through a KBS network TV documentary. As a result, several hundred Korean nationals volunteered with GOA’L, mainly to help with birth searches. Because of those native speakers, hundreds of parent-child reunions were achieved, she said. Native Korean volunteers are still essential to GOA’Ls program today.

The GOA’L staff who will work with the Hope Registry are two native Koreans “who have both worked overseas for many years,” Rickmers said, “and they can understand the Korean perspective but can also advocate for the perspective of the adoptee.”  Over time, she said, GOA’L will “build up its post-reunion program in a more nuanced way, and work towards a formal reunion support program, with AdopteeHub, including the steps of how to prepare for the reunion, how to negotiate issues, and how to follow-up over time with birth families and adoptees, she added.   

GOA’L can also work with birth family members and adoptees when an in-person search is impossible due to either party’s work commitments or financial issues.  Services will include translation/interpretation and help in initial meetings and follow-up virtual family meetings.

Rickmers noted that GOA’L has had success in posting printed flyers on bulletin boards and in community centers and marketplaces in a neighborhood where an adoptee was known to have been found. The flyers include a photo and list any relevant information about the adoptee, asking for those with knowledge of that adoptee or their family to come forward.  

However, she added, there is a limit to what GOA’L can do by proxy when the adoptee is not in Korea.  Also, she said, the response is much more enthusiastic in a community when the adoptee personally shows up with a GOA’L staffer. “When people see this person who has come so far to do this thing, then we can see how the community oftentimes opens up and people will almost bend over backwards to help this person,” she said.

Walking neighborhoods to do birth searches is also a good way to inform Korean nationals about how the Hope Registry works for birth parents. Because some birth parents they search for are elderly, GOA’L will produce information on paper, and allow prospective enrollees to pick up a form in someplace like a community center and mail it into GOA’L, she said.

Nafzger said that use of technology, including virtual calls and social media, along with translation services, counseling and guidance, is another way to enhance and support reunions and for enrollees across the world work  on their relationship over time.

Building participation among birth families

Rickmers said another part of GOA’L’s role will be to announce the opening of the registry to the Korean public at the right time, and campaign for it through its own contacts and through the media. It’s essential for the success of the program, she said, that Korean birth parents trust the program and come forward to add their information to it.

Nafzger said she will be discussing the new program with adoption agencies with the objective of achieving their support and will agree to refer birth families to the program when they walk into the agencies seeking information about their adult birth child.  

A larger but related issue to persuading the public to use the Hope Registry, Rickmers said, is for Koreans to accept Korean adoptees as members of Korean society. She wonders how best to promote this idea,  whether it is getting Korean adoptees to volunteer for causes in the community, to campaign through media, or just break down cultural barriers through people-to-people exchanges.  It is a long-term objective, and a societal issue “that goes beyond GOA’L and even beyond adoption,” she said.

Searching for birth family is a personal decision.  Nafzger said she expects the energy for the new birth search service and post-reunion support service  to build slowly.  “I think once some adoptees have done it, others will learn about it and want to do it,” she said.  “Other people may need [a birth search] but maybe not now. We want to provide that safe, comfortable environment.  We want the resources to be there when they are ready.”

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