Martha Vickery

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 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.

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.  

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.

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 20^th 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.

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. 

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.

Three cases of Korean students dealing with oppression by immigration officials as part of a recent crackdown ~ By Martha Vickery (Summer 2025)

On July 21, a Korean American legal permanent resident, Tae Heung “Will” Kim, was detained by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) at the San Francisco Airport and held there for more than a week, with no chance to consult with an attorney.

After that week of being locked up, sleeping on a chair in a room where the lights were on 24 hours a day, and being denied contact with the outside world, he was transferred to a detention center in Arizona. He is now reportedly detained at another ICE facility in Texas, his state of residence, awaiting a September 4 hearing at which the government must make a case for his deportation. 

Kim’s ICE detention and incarceration is one of three recent detentions (and attempts at detention) by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) involving three adult Korean students who are living in the U.S. legally.

Beyond the fact that all three are students, and ethnically Korean, these three cases are also alike in that the U.S. government is claiming that they are subject to deportation due to some minor infraction of law. In the times before this recent crackdown, such infractions would not have been considered deportable offenses. One of the students was arrested because of what ICE claims is an expired visa, which, even if true, would be a civil offense, not a (deportable) criminal offense.

All three have received support from immigration advocacy groups, and their stories have received positive news coverage as a result. Notably, one of the students has filed suit against the Trump Administration for violation of her Constitutional rights to free speech.

The targeting of legal residents and current visa holders

The similarities and many differences of these cases are emblematic of how greater numbers of legal immigrants, across a wide spectrum of ages and life circumstances, are being targeted. People are routinelly detained and arrested in airports by customs agents, or kidnapped off the streets by masked and unidentifiable ICE agents, held without access to legal help, and denied their constitutional rights. 

Although the national focus has been on the large numbers of Latino immigrants, particularly in California, who have been indiscriminately rounded up in workplaces and shopping centers, the Asian American community nationwide is also in peril of Trump administration recent anti-immigrant crackdowns.

According to Becky Belcore, executive director at the National Korean American Service and Educational Consortium (NAKASEC), the reason lies in the statistics – the Asian American community is the only racial group that is still a majority immigrant population. Sixty-seven percent percent of Asian American adults are immigrants, and 54 percent of the Asian American population overall are immigrants, she said.

Students seem to be a particular focus of the recent crackdown. A recent State Department report shows that 41 percent of F-1 (student) visa applications were denied in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, the highest denial rate in a decade.  As of August 20, 6,000 student visas were revoked by the Trump Administration, and some students are mounting legal challenges to these revocations, according to a report in Inside Higher Ed. In some cases, courts have reversed the revocations.

Two students imprisoned without access to counsel, on no specific charges

The cases of Kim and Purdue University student Yeonsoo Go are alike in that both were held, at least at first, without access to legal counsel, and without formal charges being filed against them.  Being held without access to communication and without a charge obviously introduces a level of fear and intimidation into the process, compared to the conventional and Constitutional process of being under arrest on a specific charge and having the right to speak to an attorney about disputing that charge.

Yeonsoo Go, age 21, was arrested by ICE July 31 outside a federal courthouse in New York after reporting for a routine visa hearing.  Go was first held at a Manhattan facility, then flown to an ICE detention center in Louisiana before being released on August 5.

While ICE contended that Go’s R-2 visa expired more than two years ago, the Episcopal Diocese immigration attorney Mary Rothwell Davis, in a report in the Episcopal News Service, said it is unclear why Go was detained for an expired visa when her visa is not set to expire until December 2025. Davis explained that Go was in the process of applying to convert her current visa to a student visa. She said the hearing had gone very well on July 31, just before Go was arrested, that the judge had apparently been satisfied with her visa status, and had granted Go a hearing date for late August.

Go’s mother is Episcopal priest Rev. Kyrie Kim, who works for the Episcopal Diocese of New York. Go’s original R-2 visa, issued to religious workers, was issued to both mother and daughter in 2021 so they could live in the U.S. together while Go’s mother took a clergy position for the diocese. 

During the five days of Go’s detention, the Episcopal Church community along with the immigrant rights community publicized Go’s detention, and united in several rallies to call attention to it.

ICE waits at courthouses

Youngwoon Han, organizing director for NAKASEC, which has worked to raise awareness of these cases, said ICE is making a practice of arresting people at courthouses. These are typically immigrants following the legal requirements of their residency and attending hearings to renew their visas. This practice is obviously a disincentive for legal residents to follow the law.

Han said there is widespread concern in the community about this ICE practice, evidenced by the large number of calls to NAKASEC’s immigration hotline by people worried about going to their hearings for fear of being detained.

According to a report by the HANA Center of Chicago, the new national budget has the capacity to harm immigrants in numerous ways. It funnels an unprecedented $170.7 billion to immigration enforcement, while cutting funding for critical services like food assistance, healthcare and legal aid. These are programs that millions, immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, rely on every day.  

The budget also imposes “new, punitive application fees on immigration protections, which are expected to go into effect before the end of the federal fiscal year in October 2025” according to the HANA Center report.  

Kim – denied legal counsel, detained at an airport

Of the three students, Kim is the oldest, at age 40, and has lived in the U.S. the longest, since age five. He was arrested in the San Francisco airport upon arriving from South Korea after a two-week trip to attend his brother’s wedding. According to his attorney Eric Lee, the cited reason for his arrest was a 2011 misdemeanor drug conviction for marijuana possession.

Lee said that Kim had completed the required community service sentence at the time for the misdemeanor offense, and followed the appropriate legal procedure to get that record sealed, but the government used it anyway.

Kim is currently a Ph.D. candidate studying infectious disease at Texas A&M University; his specialty is in researching a vaccine for Lyme disease, a non-curable tick-borne disease that infects 476,000 people annually in the U.S. according to the Center for Disease Control.

Kim’s is the most urgent of the three, because he is still incarcerated. He was transferred from the airport to an ICE facility in Arizona, and transferred again to another ICE facility in Raymondville, Texas. He has recently received a “notice to appear” on September 4 in immigration court in Texas.

NAKASEC held a press conference by Zoom on July 31, 10 days after Kim was detained. In his remarks, his attorney Eric Lee said he spent a week trying to find out where Kim was being held and what the charge was.  At the time of the press conference there was still little information on whether Kim would be released from detention, or whether he would be detained indefinitely until immigration proceedings.  His attorneys were permitted one meeting with Kim, but only after more than a week of detention. Lee said he also spoke by phone to ICE officials who were at the airport and in charge of Kim’s detention.

Kim’s case is an example of why poor treatment of immigration detainees is a rising concern among immigration advocates. Paul Krooth, Kim’s immigration attorney, explained during the press conference that the fact that his client was detained in an airport is itself problematic, since it is not an authorized detention facility. There is no healthy food, nowhere to get good sleep, no access to the outdoors, and no medical care.

There are also no set rules about the care of detainees applicable to an airport, Krooth added, making his client’s status in terms of legal rights more precarious.  Kim’s mother Sharon Lee said that her son has asthma and she did not know if he had access to his medication. NAKASEC has received no recent update on Kim since the press conference, Han said.

Han noted during the press conference that his office at NAKASEC reached out to two U.S. senators in California, as well as to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, whose district covers San Francisco. They also called the office of Michael McCaul, the U.S. representative whose 10th district includes Kim’s residence. NAKASEC also alerted two Korean American members of Congress, Rep. Young Kim of California, and Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey, Han said.  

A suit to enforce First Amendment rights

Student Yunseo Chung’s ordeal began in March, and is unique in that Chung, an undergraduate student at Columbia University, and a permanent resident, was pursued by ICE but never arrested.

In March, ICE searched her dorm room and reportedly went to her parents’ home, but did not find her. She went into hiding and simultaneously filed suit against U.S. government for depriving her of her First Amendment rights to free speech. 

In early 2025, while a student at Columbia, Chung was arrested and paid a fine for a trespassing charge in connection to a pro-Palestine advocacy demonstration on the Barnard College campus.  The government’s attempts to detain and deport her were linked to that arrest and accused her of anti-Semitic activities.

A search warrant, unsealed at the June 5 hearing, shows that Secretary of State Marco Rubio authorized the citing of a rarely-used federal statute in the warrant: it concerns concealing or harboring an alien. 

A memo by Rubio describes how Chung’s and fellow Columbia student and pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Kalil’s participation in “antisemitic protests and disruptive activities” served to “undermine U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States,” and that his determination was based in part on Chung’s “citations for unlawful activity” at the protests.

Kalil, who was a leader of the pro-Palestine student movement at Columbia, was captured and detained by ICE, and released after 100 days. The judge who ruled to release him specified that Kalil’s First Amendment rights were violated. The government has appealed.

Chung’s lawsuit was upheld at the June 5 hearing.  Southern District of New York Judge Naomi Buchwald issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting ICE from arresting or detaining her. Chung’s case was backed by several civil rights organizations, including Notdutdol for Korean Community Development.  Chung did not appear at the June 5 hearing, but about a dozen supporters sat in the audience.

According to a report from Nodutdol, a New York-based advocacy organization that has been supporting Chung, the government asked the judge to dismiss Chung’s lawsuit.  The judge rejected this argument, and pointed out that ICE has failed to issue Chung a notice to appear in immigration court. A post from Nodutdol suggests that the absence of any criminal charge against Chung is a government tactic to keep her in a “a legal gray area and prevent her from challenging the legality of its decisions.“

Immigration rights groups take action on many fronts

Many non-profit immigration and legal advocacy groups are filing suits, often collaboratively, to defend due process and other Constitutional rights – particularly to halt the so-called “expedited removal” of immigrants to another country. “Expedited removal,” begun by the Trump administration, means being deported before having a chance to make a case in court before removal.  

In March, according to a report by the Justice Action Center of Los Angeles, several immigrant rights groups jointly filed a lawsuit to halt Trump administration’s attempts to strip certain immigrants of their due process rights. The suit , filed in the district court in Washington, DC, is a collaboration of the UndocuBlack Network (UBN), the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), and the national immigration rights group CASA, with legal representation from Justice Action Center.

Chung’s suit is also supported by several legal rights groups, including: The Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility (CLEAR) Project of the City University of New York; the asylum advocacy organization Human Rights First; and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. The court’s upholding of Chung’s charge means she will be able to pursue her prosecution of the Trump Administration. Chung’s suit, and others like to defend the Constitutional rights of immigrants, have the potential to neutralize the administration’s attempts to prosecute and/or deport immigrants without due process.   

Chung’s suit is a drop in the bucket of many lawsuits by both legal immigrants and U.S. citizens who have been wrongfully treated by ICE and other government authorities in recent crackdowns.  However, the bucket is filling up as more individuals and groups jump to the defense of immigrants.

Misery for the innocent and waste for taxpayers

There is much harm and waste in imprisoning and prosecuting individuals who have done no crime and are in the country legally.  There is the wasted time and resources for individuals, along with the trauma, misery and physical harm, and many life disruptions that result from immigration detention of innocent people.

Attorney Lee remarked, during the press conference on Will Kim’s detention, “The manner in which Customs and Border Protection held Will incommunicado for over a week and denied him his most basic rights as a member of the people of this country should shock us, not only because of Will’s absolutely critical research work trying to find a vaccine for Lyme disease, or because of his 35 years of residency, but because it tells us something deeply concerning about the attitude of this administration to the Constitution, which after all Trump attempted to overthrow on January 6, 2021, and which he later said he planned to terminate. We are now seeing what that looks like.”

Lee also remarked on the cost of Trump’s huge reallocation of funding toward mass deportations, specific to what it would mean to the state of Texas, where Kim is incarcerated, and where recent flooding has destroyed billions in infrastructure and property and caused many injuries and deaths.  The question came from a reporter covering the community that is part of Texas A&M University, where Kim works.

“The Department of Homeland Security, instead of providing necessary resources to help Texans who are going through this devastating situation, is directing immense amounts of resources away from FEMA and away from helping people deal with natural disasters,” said Lee.  “They are locking up, then flying people like Will around the country –  spending thousands of dollars to punish this individual who is engaged in research that will save the lives of people in Texas and all over by providing a vaccine for Lyme disease.”

The case of Will Kim is an opportunity for people to realize “whether they voted for Donald Trump in the last election or not” Lee said, “that the anti-immigration crackdown that this administration is launching is based on a lie,” he said.  “The goal was never to make America safer – the goal was never to make America healthier. The goal was to create the infrastructure for an attack on the rights of everybody – citizens and non-citizens alike. And that’s why this case is so important.”

Belcore said Kim’s situation is urgent, and symbolizes many whose cases are not well known.  “Our goal is for everybody to know about what is happening to Will Kim. Because we want him to be released, but also because his case is representative of many people being disappeared by CBP and ICE. So it can symbolize a larger call for this to stop. We will continue to advocate to members of Congress, and also other elected officials to reach out to other decisionmakers to help make his release happen and work with his legal team for his release.”

Editor’s note:  NAKASEC’s Know Your Rights immigration hotline is:1-844-500-3222 and its website is: www.nakasec.org.  NAKASEC’S Know Your Rights app can be downloaded free at: https://nakasec.org/resources/know-your-rights/

Korean adoptees, public TV and public radio collaborate in a Twin Cities broadcast event | By Martha Vickery (Fall 2025)

The complex topic of deliberately falsified information in many Korean adoptees’ adoption files will be the subject of a free live broadcast event happening November 11 in St. Paul.

A South Korean government announcement about the false records dating back decades was issued this spring and included an apology for the widespread fraud. The high incidence of falsified records means that it will (or has been) very difficult or impossible for affected adult Korean adoptees to find their birth families.

The forum, to be held Tuesday, November 11, 6 p.m. at Arbeiter Brewing Company in Minneapolis, is part of a series of live community discussions for the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) program North Star Journey Live, designed as dialogues from underrepresented communities.  The November 11 event is a special collaboration of Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) and MPR. The general public is invited to the event (tickets required), which is titled Mistaken: Minnesota’s Korean Adoptees Grapple with Confessed Systemic Corruption.

The program, which will be taped live and re-broadcast later as a daytime radio program, will feature four speakers and a host, reporter Kaomi Lee, who is also a Korean adoptee.  Lee is usually covering stories about Minnesotans outside the Twin Cities for the weekly local news show Almanac on TPT.  She was asked to host this forum, not only because she is a member of the group being discussed, but also because she is knowledgable about the topic.  

The show’s MPR producer, Kelly Gordon, is married to a Korean adoptee. In addition to the North Star Journey Live series, Gordon also produces the Big Books and Bold Ideas series, featuring live book author talks, as well as the Minnesota Now radio program.

Gordon explained that North Star Journey Live began in 2020 during the pandemic, using remote zoom call discussions designed to invite community dialogue during a time when people were isolated. Once they could hold live events, the program continued with in-person forums such as A Post-George Floyd Reflection, when the former police chief and others discussed individual and community healing and rebuilding after Floyd’s public murder by Minneapolis police; and the FRONDO at the State Fair, a live event that brought together the Hmong and Black cultures of the Frogtown and Rondo neighborhoods (i.e., FRONDO), for a community discussion.

The panel speakers for the next North Star Journey Live event  (all Korean adoptees) include: Ami Nafzger, president of AdopteeHub, which reaches out to adult Korean adoptees with social and self-care programming and birth family searches; Cameron Lee Small, a therapist who works in adoption literacy and counsels adoptees and their families; Matt McNiff, director of the Camp Choson summer Korean culture camp; and Mary Niedermeyer, the CEO of the non-profit organization Communities Advancing Prosperity for Immigrants (CAPI).

A recent announcement after years of build-up

Many adult adoptees have known for years, at least anecdotally, that Korean adoptees frequently found significant errors in their own adoption files. A PBS Frontline TV documentary (South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning), first broadcast in September 2024, documented and described in detail the systemic neglect and abuse of the adoption system in South Korea, and the fact that other countries with programs to adopt Korean children failed to scrutinize these programs for signs of fraud, and in some cases, simply looked the other way.

The TV film documentary was a collaboration of the Associated Press (AP) and PBS, and was possible due to years of reporting and research work by AP reporter Tong-hyung Kim. It was nominated for Peabody and Emmy awards, and was conferred the 2025 Osborn Elliott Journalism Prize and two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for its in-depth reporting on systemic corruption.

A few months after the broadcast of South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning, on March 25, 2025, the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) admitted its own system was culpable in fabricating or falsifying adoption records, and it issued a public apology.  The statement came after a nearly three-year investigation by the TRC, which examined more than 350 files submitted voluntarily to its investigation by Korean adoptees from many countries. Of those, the TRC reported that 56 contained falsifications that rose to the level of human rights violations. The other 311 cases were each deficient in some way, but were set aside due to lack of time.

Every major news resource nationally and internationally reported on this revelation, after which social media posts by Korean adoptees and allies proliferated. Although many Korean adoptees had known for years about the false records, others in the community were in shock at the revelation.

Minnesota producer takes on the story

Gordon said the idea for the program came when she was asked by a (Korean adoptee) manager of the Duluth MPR station if they could do a program about this issue, which affects many Minnesotan Korean adoptees, particularly older ones, since the files were falsified mainly in the ‘70s and ‘80s. After research and many talks with community members, Gordon assembled a panel who are all Korean adoptees and who had expertise on the topic. She said Lee was a “natural fit” to be the host.

The level of knowledge is uneven in the community among the general public and adoptees, Lee explained, which makes an event like this a way to get out some basic information to Korean adoptees and a mixed public audience on a very complex topic.  

For some adoptees, Lee said, the Frontline documentary “may have been the first time they had even heard that there could be some falsification of records and that their story of their file may not be the true story.” The documentary brought the story to a much wider audience than it had had in the past, “including some adoptees who haven’t been connected or haven’t done much searching, so I think it was quite shocking for a lot of people,” Lee said.

In recent weeks, there have been other developments, including that the new South Korean president made his own apology for the falsified adoption records in a speech on October 1.

The timing is one factor that has pushed this issue of accountability, in South Korea and in their own communities internationally. An important part of the timing is the age of the affected population of adoptees. Adoption is a “lifelong issue,” Lee said, that changes through one’s lifetime as one is aging.

An interest in their roots

Lee said that she has observed Korean adoptees going through a later-in-life type of coming out as an adoptee, “and developing interest in their roots and in family connections.” There are also many with aging adoptive parents, becoming caregivers at some point, and when adoptive parents die, feeling the grief as another kind of abandonment. “It opens up some new things. If adoptive parents are no longer with you, you are alone in the world again, which may be triggering.”

Lee found out in recent years that her own adoption records are probably fraudulent. Listed as abandoned on the records she found, she said that there was no statement in the file about who brought her to the orphanage, no consent for relinquishment, no record of the police being called, and no record of an attempt to locate family. She does not know if any of the information is true; because it was so sparse, she suspects it was fabricated.

A shoddy transfer of agency records

The revelation about false adoption records, combined with a more recent controversy regarding the transfer of all adoption records from individual agencies to the South Korean government both caused confusion and distrust among adoptees.  “There was a lot of anger over a decision to store the records in some kind of suburban storage facility that was not even archival quality,” Lee said. “It feels like, once again, our records are not being treated with care and adoptees themselves are not being treated with care. Again, that we are not deserving of that kind of respect for our own lives that others receive.” 

After much protesting by adoptees, and media attention about the records storage in recent months, Lee said “we learned that the records are now slated for storage at the national archives where they should have been all along.”

Concerning the records debacle, Lee said, many question remain about “whether agencies got rid of records of things they may have been liable for” prior to the mandated transfer, she said. “That is the accountability factor that adoptees are still looking for.”

The first resettled Asians

Minnesota is a place where “most people went to school with an adoptee, is married to an adoptee” or there is some family, neighborhood, or workplace connection, in metropolitan areas as well as the most remote rural areas, Lee observed.  “We have really embedded ourselves in the culture here. And as a group we were really the first Asians to be resettled here. But because we came as children and not as family units, it made our immigration story very different.”

Korean adoptees, at least until recent years, were “kind of a silent group,” Lee said, but it is an interesting immigration story that so far has not been well explored, she said.

However, Korean adoptees have increasingly become been more active and more vocal. They have taken on the burden of self-advocacy and the movement has gathered strength.  They have also been doing the work, arguably, that governments should have done, in securing their rights to their own records. “We adoptees have been the ones doing the research and putting the pieces together,” Lee said.  In South Korea, several groups of European Korean adoptees have taken their grievances about adoption records to the court system, asking judges to decide whether their human rights have been violated.

An event with a dual purpose

According to Gordon, the program serves a dual purpose as a gathering place where people can discuss with one another and hear speakers, and as a radio broadcast that a wider audience can enjoy.  It will also be videotaped for use as a Youtube video and posted after the event, she said. “The people in the [live] audience will be primarily Korean adoptees, but we are taping it to play to the tens of thousands of listeners on Minnesota Public Radio,” she said, “and I’m guessing since Minnesota has the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the U.S., I think everybody in Minnesota probably knows somebody who is a Korean adoptee …I am trying to make sure we are talking to this audience as well.”

Bringing up important questions

Lee said that for adoptees, the event will consider questions unique to the international adoptee identity. Adoptees are a diverse group, and ideas about justice and fairness to adoptees will vary, she said, “But I really think that having our records truly open to us is the kind of accountability everyone all agree on,” Lee remarked.

There are many layers of human rights violations to correct, “the rush to send us away for profit, and the shoddy paperwork and the falsified stories, names and identities.  And just the very active hiding of identities and the paper trail, and non-transparency. These kinds of things are the abuses adoptees have had to endure,” said Lee.

Although at this point in her life, Lee said she is skeptical as to whether accountability will happen, she believes that a sincere attempt at amends and truth-telling by the South Korean government can help adoptees emotionally. “I do think that if the government would release our records, that would go a long way in making things right and restoring justice to us.”

Lee said, that for the adoptee audience, she hopes the event will spark some questions that adoptees must ask themselves about the current revelation. “It’s human nature and as you go through life and you’re middle-aged and older, you start to think about what did your life mean, and your purpose in life, and your adoption and why it happened, and the family you might not know about.” 

Considering this issue on the records fiasco in South Korea, Lee said she is curious to ask fellow Korean adoptees questions like “What does justice look like for you? Is this something you need to know before you die?” And “Do you think it will help you in your own healing?”

Update: MPR will broadcast the full North Star Journey Live forum Mistaken: Minnesota’s Korean Adoptees Grapple with Confessed Systemic Corruption on Wednesday, November 26, at 9 a.m.  After that, the videotaped version will be available on Youtube.

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.

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 75^th 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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