South Korea

A 2011 KQ essay reiterates the sticky issues plaguing the U.S. relationship with North Korea, then and now | By Jimmy Carter (Winter 2011 issue)

Editor’s note:  As the 39^th U.S. President Jimmy Carter is honored after his recent passing at age 100, we are reminded of his many distinguished accomplishments of his post-presidential era, one of which was as an unofficial U.S. envoy from the U.S. to both North Korea and South Korea.  This essay, under the headline “The winding road to permanent peace: A short history of North Korea’s consistent message to the U.S.”  from KQ’s  Winter 2011 issue (available in original form in the KQ Archive), was written by Jimmy Carter after the former president was asked to consult with the North Korean leaders on its development of enriched uranium. The enriched uranium process was viewed as an infraction of the non-aggression agreements that came out of the Six Party Talks.

This very factual essay, which reads like an update from a diplomat, shows Carter’s skill at reading between the lines of the North Koreans’ acts of aggression, and noting that that nation’s behavior may be a thinly-veiled signal that “they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future.”   At the end of the essay, Carter reiterates his belief that avoiding war will certainly require “a permanent peace treaty to replace the ‘temporary’ cease-fire of 1953,”  a step that activists are still working to bring about in 2025, 14 years after Carter’s essay was first published.

No one can completely understand the motivations of the North Koreans, but it is entirely possible that their recent revelation of their uranium enrichment centrifuges and Pyongyang’s shelling of a South Korean island last November are designed to remind the world that they deserve respect in negotiations that will shape their future. Ultimately, the choice for the U.S. may be between diplomatic niceties and avoiding a catastrophic confrontation.

Dealing effectively with North Korea has long challenged the U.S. We know that the state “religion” of this secretive society is juche, which means self-reliance and avoidance of domination by others. The North’s technological capabilities under conditions of severe sanctions and national poverty are surprising. Efforts to display its military capability through the shelling of Yeongpyong Island and through weapons testing has provoked anger and a desire for retaliation.  Meanwhile, our close diplomatic and military ties with South Korea impels us to comply with its leaders leaders’ policies.  

The North has threatened armed conflict before.  Nearly eight years ago, I wrote about how, in June 1994, President II Sung Kim expelled The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors and proclaimed that spent fuel rods could be reprocessed into plutonium. Kim threatened to destroy Seoul if increasingly severe sanctions were imposed on his nation.

Desiring to resolve the crisis through direct talks with the U.S., Kim invited me to Pyongyang to discuss the outstanding issues. With approval from President Bill Clinton, I went and reported the positive results of these one-on-one discussions to the White House. Direct negotiations ensued in Geneva between a U.S. special envoy and a North Korean delegation, resulting in an “Agreed Framework” that stopped North Korea’s fuel-cell reprocessing and restored IAEA inspection for eight years.

With evidence that Pyongyang was acquiring enriched uranium in violation of the Agreed Framework, President George W. Bush — who had already declared North Korea part of an “axis of evil” and a potential target — made discussions with North Korea contingent on its complete rejection of a nuclear explosives program and terminated monthly shipments of fuel oil. Subsequently, North Korea expelled nuclear inspectors and resumed reprocessing its fuel rods. It has now acquired enough plutonium for perhaps seven nuclear weapons.

Sporadic negotiations over next few years among North Korea, the U.S., South Korea, Japan, China and Russia (the so-called Six Parties) produced, in September 2005, an agreement that reaffirmed the basic premises of the 1994 accord. Its text included denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, a pledge of nonaggression by the U.S., and steps to evolve a permanent peace agreement to replace the U.S.-North Korean-Chinese cease-fire that has been in effect since July 1953. Unfortunately, no substantive progress has been made since 2005, and the overall situation has been clouded by North Korea’s development and testing of nuclear devices and medium-and long-range missiles, and military encounters with South Korea.

North Korea insists on direct talks with the U.S., while leaders in Pyongyang consider South Korea’s armed forces to be controlled from Washington and maintain that South Korea was not party to the 1953 cease-fire. Since the Clinton administration, our country has negotiated through the six-party approach, largely avoiding substantive bilateral discussions, which would have excluded South Korea.

This past July I was invited to return to Pyongyang to secure the release of an American, Aijalon Gomes, with the proviso that my visit would last long enough for substantive talks with top North Korean officials. They spelled out in detail their desire to develop a denuclearized Korean Peninsula and a permanent ceasefire, based on the 1994 agreements and the terms adopted by the Six Parties in September 2005. With no authority to mediate any disputes, I relayed this message to the State Department and White House. Chinese leaders indicated support of this bilateral discussion. North Korean officials have given the same message to other recent American visitors and have permitted access by nuclear experts to an advanced facility for purifying uranium. The same officials had made it clear to me that this array of centrifuges would be “on the table” for discussions with the U.S., although uranium purification -a very slow process, was not covered in the 1994 agreements.

Pyongyang has sent a consistent message that during direct talks with the U.S., it is ready to conclude an agreement to end its nuclear programs, put them all under IAEA inspection and conclude a permanent peace treaty to replace the “temporary” cease-fire of 1953. We should consider responding to this offer. The unfortunate alternative is for North Koreans to take whatever actions they consider necessary to defend themselves from what they claim to fear most: A military attack supported by the U.S. along with efforts to change the political regime.

The writer was the 39th president of the U.S. This op-ed was published Nov. 24, 2010 by The Washington Post. For more information, visit: Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope. www.cartercenter.org

One Left: A novel ~ By Soom Kim (translated by Ju-chan and Bruce Fulton)

(University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2020, ISBN #978-0-29574766-8)

Review by Bill Drucker (Spring 2023)

As the old woman folds her blanket, she hears on the television that the last one has passed.  An onni – sister, a comfort woman.  “No,” the old woman mutters.  “There is still me.”  She cleans her room and walks out to the veranda.  She sees a dead magpie next to her shoes, a gift from her cat, Nabi. 

So begins a fictional story that describes a very real group of war survivors.  One Left is a beautifully-written novel, dedicated to the Korean women who were forcibly drafted into and survived military sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army in the World War II era. The story has emotional honesty and gravitas, and can be a hard read at time.  After just a few chapters, the reader may have to pause.  The narrative tugs at our hearts. 

The quiet, low-key story begins with the description of an old woman who lives in squalor in a depressed neighborhood.  The woman had lived in a tiny apartment for the last five years where her nephew had placed her. Her nephew’s motive is to have an address in an area he believes will get renovated and be more valuable in the near future.

Her self-isolation is due, in part, to the fact that she is afraid of her own past as a so-called “comfort woman,” or military sex slave.  Kidnapped at age 13 by the Japanese military, she survived and went back to Korea after seven years to an unwelcoming family and country. The TV news of the death of the woman assumed to be the last onni makes her want to speak the words “I was a victim too.”

The scenario is realistic, as only a few hundred women in South Korea came forward starting in 1991 to publicly tell their stories of the war crimes committed against them. Many became activists for the cause. The total number of Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery is estimated at 170,000 to 200,000; only a fraction of that number survived.  Due to the shame of publicly admitting even forced prostitution, it was always understood by the comfort women’s activist movement that there must be hundreds of survivors who remained anonymous.  

Magpies figure into the story.  In the West, the magpie is a harbinger of bad news.  In Korean culture, it is a national bird, the bearer of good news and luck.  In Korea, magpie songs can mean that guests or good news will arrive soon.  

In the story, the woman’s cat drags a dead magpie to her door, leaving her anxious about what it could mean.  The stray cat’s name is Nabi, Korean for “butterfly.” The butterfly is the symbol for the global human rights and justice movement of the former comfort women and their supporters.

In actuality, there are less than a dozen declared former comfort women alive today in South Korea.  These elderly women have been dying at a faster pace as the years pass. However, the awareness of the global human rights campaign of the former comfort women is alive and growing today, due to the reach of the internet and the many women’s rights and human rights activists who have taken up the cause.   

Their campaign, which began in 1991 and extends to the present day, is to demand justice and reparations from the Japanese for their war crimes against them, including educating the next generation in Japan about the true war history, which is sanitized in Japanese culture. The movement also supports other movements to support women in war.

One Left is Soom Kim’s first novel that has been translated into English. She is a prize-winning writer of nine novels and six collections of short stories.  The book is well-researched, with interviews of the actual comfort women, and reviews of the records compilations.  Award-winning translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton are familiar names, with their fluid translations of literary works from Korean to English.

In this a telling of a tragic history from the perspective of one elderly former sex slave who sees herself as “the last one,” Kim revitalizes energy for this irreconcilable injustice in a new generation of readers.  

Banned Book Club ~ By Hyun Sook Kim and Ryan Estrada

(Iron Circus Comics, Chicago, 2020, ISBN #978-1-945820-42-7)

Review by Joanne Rhim Lee (Winter 2023)

On her first day at university in Seoul, Hyun Sook encounters student activists who invite her to join their protest.  As an innocent college freshman, thirsty for knowledge and yearning to find her place, she answers, “I just came her to study, you know?  I have nothing to protest about.” 

Banned Book Club is Hyun Sook Kim’s gripping graphic memoir, set in 1983 amidst a violent uprising against the military dictatorship of President Doo-hwan Chun.  Though Kim changed some names for privacy and safety reasons, the author shares her real experiences and those of her close friends over a period of four years, during a time of her own personal and political awakening. 

Hyun Sook’s parents own a restaurant and never attended college. As a new college student, Hyun Sook understands that she needs to put her head down and focus on her education.  Her mother is not even supportive of her studies, believing that she would be more useful helping them at the restaurant, but her father encourages her to dream big.

Like most college freshmen, Hyun Sook hopes to make new friends, so when one of her classmates invites her to join a book club, she eagerly agrees.  After all, she is a literature major and loves to read classics such as Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter.  However, during her first meeting, she discovers that the club members are reading books by contemporary authors including Noam Chomsky, Che Guevara, and Paulo Freire; she soon realizes they are all banned books. 

Hyun Sook’s first instinct is to flee, as she knows that in the current climate, she could be arrested for activities that are even remotely political.  She does not want to lose her scholarship, disappoint her parents, or worst of all, go to prison.

Later, in one of her first literature courses, she learns that many of the great writers she admires, including Shakespeare, were actually quite political, and that their stories often commented on contemporaneous events, such as the misdeeds of their kings or other leaders.  As a public university employee, her professor knows that she is under certain constraints on what she can tell students. However, the professor challenges Hyun Sook to draw parallels and come to her own conclusions about the current political situation in Korea. 

Still curious and wanting to connect with others, Hyun Sook attends a film club, where she views footage of the famous Gwangju incident, which occurred a few years earlier, in May 1980.  In high school, she was taught that North Korean spies tried to overthrow the South Korean government in this incident.  Her friend Hoon patiently explains that that was not the case. She begins to wonder what really happened. 

In South Korea in 1979, a military general Doo-hwan Chun, a close aide of the president, seized power through a coup after President Chung-hee Park, was assassinated.  Park, another military dictator, had ruled since 1962, and had declared himself to be South Korea’s president for life.   

Students and other activists rose up to protest the new President Chun’s illegal takeover of power, but their actions were quickly put down by Chun’s military force, which killed over 600 protesters.  To distract the public and the international community from what he was doing, Chun claimed that he was protecting his people from a North Korean Communist invasion. However, there was never any invasion. 

In the story, Hyun Sook’s friend Hoon explains that with constant repression and violence, Chun was successful in breaking protesters’ spirits.  “They just got so beaten down by all of it for so long, they got tired of talking about it.  It became normal.  That’s why we protest.  That’s why we read books we’re not supposed to.”

As Hyun Sook’s eyes are opened to the world outside of her sheltered family life, she sees that perhaps there is more she wants to do than just read books.  At the same time, as she becomes more invested in her new friends’ lives, she sees firsthand that there are often very real consequences to speaking out against injustice. 

Illustrator Hyung-Ju Ko’s stark black-and-white illustrations perfectly capture the fear in Hyun Sook’s eyes and the danger of the larger political situation, but also the kindness and humanity in her classmates’ faces and actions.  With growing courage, Hyun Sook achieves her goal of making friends, and also finds her voice along the way. 

Banned Book Club could have been merely a 1980s history lesson, but Kim bookends her story with a class reunion in 2016, when the reader learns what happened to all the activist members of the original book club.  In 2016, some of them are still demonstrating on the streets to force another President Park to step down; this time it is President Chung-hee Park’s daughter Geun-hye Park, who was South Korea’s president from 2013 to 2017.

Kim’s story is a reminder of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  When (the second) President Park was impeached, then found guilty of corruption and imprisoned, a few brave individuals, including in her own administration, stood up for justice.

Leading up to Park’s ouster, an estimated 16 million people nationwide peacefully demonstrated for 20 successive Saturday nights in South Korea’s cities, standing outdoors with candles. This Candlelight Revolution sustained the determination and solidarity of South Koreans that Park must be removed from office and prosecuted.   

Since this dark period of South Korean history, things continue to improve and the arc is bending.  Kim’s memories of coming of age during a confusing time are a good reminder for all of us to stand up and speak out against injustice, even though we might prefer to put our heads down and walk past it.

If Yoon’s impeachment opened extraordinary spaces of participation, now they must become integrated into the ordinary workings of democracy | By Dae-Han Song (Spring 2025)

On April 4, 122 days after martial law was declared in South Korea, the constitutional court upheld the National Assembly’s impeachment motion and dismissed the former president Suk Yeol Yoon.

While toppling the president involved a Herculean effort, the greater challenge will be changing social conditions to prevent the rise of another Yoon. After all, eight years ago, then-President Geun-hye Park was also impeached. The failure of President Jae-in Moon and the Democratic Party to fulfill the mandate for social change and reform demanded by the candlelight uprising led to widespread disappointment and discontent, ultimately paving the path for Yoon’s election.

With the clear frontrunner Jae-myung Lee of the Democratic Party declaring himself a “center conservative,” the election has become a contest between conservatives. And while a Lee victory might be necessary to root out those that directly supported and defended Yoon’s self-coup (when he tried to overcome his political impasse with the National Assembly by declaring martial law), it also requires laying the foundations to break the vice grip on power held by the liberal and conservative parties that brought Korean society to this point. To do so, the people need the power to recall elected officials and directly propose their own laws.

Déjà vu

Eight years ago, riding high on the exuberance of the candlelight uprising (which led to the ouster of President Geun-hye Park),  the Democratic Party’s Jae-in Moon was given a mandate for reform. With two years left in his term, his party was even handed a supermajority (180 out of 300 seats) in the following National Assembly. Yet, despite his campaign promises, Moon failed to make Korean society more equal (i.e., he did not substantially increase the minimum wage, control housing prices), safer (i.e., he did not mount a full investigation of the Sewol Ferry Tragedy to prevent its recurrence, or follow through with criminal accountability for industrial accidents), and free from discrimination (i.e., he did not advance the comprehensive anti-discrimination bill).

Now, with the Democratic Party’s Jae-myung Lee the clear frontrunner in opinion polls, the Democratic Party is likely to win the presidency again. If the conservative People Power Party proudly carries the legacy of dictatorship, the liberal Democratic Party, whose ranks swelled with democratization activists from the 1980s, has long been captured by the economic elite. If Lee wins, he would be in a strong position to implement reforms because the Democratic Party will maintain its supermajority in the National Assembly (achieved in 2020 and 2024) for at least the first three years of the next presidency.

Yet, looking at Lee’s track record as the Democratic Party leader since 2022 and his campaign rhetoric, it’s unclear whether his administration would offer policy solutions to ordinary people’s most pressing problems: Inflation, growing inequality, housing prices, and discrimination. After all, during Lee’s leadership, the Democratic Party used its supermajority mostly to play the blame game with the Yoon administration. And, rather than addressing inequality by redistributing wealth through taxation, it abolished the financial investment tax and is now talking about increasing the portion of inheritance exempt from taxation.

Unsurprisingly, before Yoon’s self-coup, the Democratic Party was nearly as unpopular as the People Power Party. Even now, a vote for Lee has simply become a vote for the lesser evil. And while choosing the lesser evil is necessary to root out the elements of Yoon’s self-coup, breaking out of this impeachment-elections-impeachment cycle requires structural changes.

Break the cycle

Today, all parties agree on amending the 1987 constitution, which established the current formal democracy. Even the disgraced conservative People Power Party is calling for constitutional amendments to shorten the next presidential term, given their likely defeat. The Democratic Party is proposing to amend the constitution to redistribute power from the executive to the legislative branch. Yet, neither is addressing the limitations of the 1987 constitution: a formal democracy that limits democratic participation to voting during elections.

Impeaching President Yoon created an extraordinary opening for ordinary people (among them, young women and members of the LGBTQ+ community) to rise up as democratic actors. Without expanding participation, formal democracy’s response to their efforts, growth, and exuberance amounts to: “Thank you for defending democracy. Please make sure to vote.” Korea’s democracy must accommodate the democratic space for these emerging actors to shape their lives and future beyond choosing between two parties.

That’s why a progressive current is forming around the need to expand participatory democracy. More specifically, the People Power Direct Action (established to organize ordinary people to impeach Yoon and expand direct democracy) is proposing to root out the self-coup elements. It wants to do this by empowering people with the right to recall elected officials and propose their own laws. With such expanded powers, voters could remove leaders who have lost their democratic mandate.

Before declaring martial law, Yoon’s actions and policies had already turned him into a lame duck president with approval rating at around 20 percent.  Yet, without the recall referendum, voters could do nothing but wait for him to complete the second half of his term. Furthermore, even after Yoon carried out martial law and was impeached by the National Assembly, the public had to anxiously wait for the Constitutional Court to uphold the impeachment.

Secondly, the power to propose laws would break the vice grip held by elite interests. If the conservative party proudly carries the legacy of dictatorship, the liberal party, whose ranks swelled with democratization activists from the 1980s, has long been captured by the elite. After all, in one of the issues most important to young people – housing – (conservative and liberal) National Assembly members are aligned with the elite.

The average real estate assets for National Assembly members stand at KRW 1.9 billion (about $1.3 million), nearly five times the national average. Among the top ten wealthiest, four are from the Democratic Party; the other six, from the People Power Party. In fact, the largest real estate assets – KRW 41 billion (roughly $30 million) – are held by a Democratic Party assembly member. Most importantly, 54.7 percent of the members of the three permanent committees connected to real estate have significant land holdings themselves. If the National Assembly fails to propose bills that control housing prices, it’s because it hurts their interests.

The same argument applies to controlling financial speculation and stock ownership. And if this is neither shocking nor unique to South Korea, then democracy requires that common people be given the power to propose laws that represent their interests.

Lessons across time and place have shown us that the way to the greatest evils are the accumulated disappointments and anger from settling for the lesser evil. To break free, people need to be able to rise as democratic actors. If Yoon’s impeachment opened extraordinary spaces of participation, now they must become integrated into the ordinary workings of democracy. The ability to recall elected officials and propose laws would be a start.

This article is reprinted from Globetrotter with permission.

How home cooking brings comfort and a sense of belonging | By Suni Miller Zmich (Spring 2022 issue)

According to my infant medical records, when I was nearly a year old, I only weighed eight pounds – the same as my oldest daughter’s birthweight.

I am a Korean adoptee, but my parents rarely acknowledged my Koreaness as a child because I rejected it when they tried. I remember eating Korean food only twice during my childhood, but I loved the traditional Jewish and southern food that came with my family. Surely, my need to savor was brought on by the malnourishment I endured as an infant.

Food is primal for me, probably because of my rough start in life. It is my obsession.

Recently, I drove home with two-and-a-half gallons of kimchi, sporting red splatters on my coat from the gochugaru (Korean red chili powder) mixture, looking like a victorious paintball player. Over my lifetime, as a Korean adoptee in a white family, I haven’t known many other Koreans, and have had very few chances to be in a close community with any. For much of my life, I felt very white, despite what the mirror (and others) told me every day.

Serendipitously, I had been invited to a kimjang – a traditional collective making of kimchi. The energetic group of ladies at the event were welcoming as we gathered outside. A few were “Korean-Koreans” (i.e., Korean immigrants who have been making kimchi since childhood), but most were Korean adoptees like me. As we chopped vegetables and mixed the ingredients with our gloved hands, camaraderie and obscene amounts of garlic were enfolded into the concoction. We joked about motherhood and Asian babysitters – sending us into fits of laughter.

Afterwards, I wondered if acceptance is exactly what the kimjang tradition was meant to nurture – a time when Koreans are unguarded and understood. Being included brought a sense of completeness that I subconsciously searched for my entire life (not to take an inch away from my American family’s Jewish and redneck traditions). As a nomadic Army brat, I never knew that Korean adoptee communities existed in America until recently.

Last year, when I spoke to Joy H., one of the interviewees for my book, Through the Lens of Ourselves, she described a “subtle internal click” that happened when she met her Polish biological family. A significant portion of our conversation was dedicated to nuanced Polish recipes. Her newfound heritage has given her an excuse to eat kielbasa, the sausage she loved her whole life. The completeness she felt washed over me as she talked about her birth father’s family Christmas tradition of making pierogis (think: flat half-moon shaped ravioli boiled and sautéed in butter and garlic).

Reflecting on my satisfying kimjang day, I thought “Now I get it.” My “click” was raucous and permeating. Who would have thought that kimchi could not only be healing for my digestive system, but also for my soul? I knew also that it was not just the kimchi produced, but that the satisfaction came from doing something so basically Korean with other Korean people, and the acceptance I felt from that gathering.

Food has always been central to my family. From my adoptive Jewish family on my mother’s side, I learned about the healing properties of matzo ball soup, the equivalent of American chicken soup. My beloved grandmother taught me an adaptation of the traditional recipe. After cooking the stock for hours, she would mash the vegetables and garlic through a colander, returning them to the pot to create a thicker and more rustic soup. Traditionalists say that the vegetables are “spent” after boiling them and should be discarded. I disagree. They still offer textural and visual value. The miniature pieces of carrots lend a welcoming rich color to the dish and create a comforting and substantial mouthful.

Similarly, years later, when I tried the Korean soup yukgaejang for the first time, I immediately understood it to be the equivalent to matzo ball soup. The bold reddish color reminded me of an amped up version of my grandmother’s recipe. The beef bones are simmered for hours with vegetables to slowly develop a depth of flavor.

I have had both soups at different times when I’ve been under the weather. The matzo ball soup reminds me that I am loved by my Jewish family. The yukgaejang makes me feel better physically and simultaneously reminds me of how I yearn for familial tradition. The flavors are addictive, and the experience is psychologically familiar. The taste is of something I once lost as an infant and now rediscovered through my senses.  The spiciness of the broth opens my sinuses, allowing me to breathe both literally and metaphorically. I can taste the minerals from the shiitake mushrooms – almost as if they were plucked from Asian soil, giving me a glimpse into the lives of my ancestors. I can picture my Jewish grandmother having tea with those ancestors in the afterlife.

My aunt once told me that after my parents adopted me, my grandmother became obsessed with all things Asian. Even though I spent a lifetime often feeling out of place due to my adoption, the time spent with my grandmother was the exception. Being with her, and in her house, was always a homecoming experience. Our relationship revolved around food – she would take me to fancy restaurants – just the two of us.

The heart of her house was a supersized gourmet kitchen, complete with two types of grills, two sinks, state of the art appliances, and matzo ball soup made with love. At one point, she gave me her porcelain china and formal dining room furniture – they are now beautiful antiques. Her spirit joins us at the table for holiday meals, as we sip from Limoges teacups painted with Asian designs. When I open the cabinet doors, I swear I can smell her house and the hundreds of meals she served.

Recently, a friend and I joked about how I lucked out having a Jewish family, since Jewish and Korean cultures share so many values. Both cultures carve out distinct divisions between right and wrong, and coloring outside moral lines is not negotiable. Righteous outrage at injustice is expected. Education is paramount. But it is our love of food that brings Jewish and Korean family members back to the table over and over.

In contrast to my mother’s Jewish family, my dad’s family members are self-proclaimed rednecks (of the Appalachian hillbilly variety). Growing up, my mom and dad used to joke about how “red” his neck was. When I was a child, I thought they were referring to his skin color because he has some Cherokee roots, and his neck is tinged with red undertones that are pronounced when he tans.

From my redneck relatives, I learned about the importance of slow-cooked grits and the joy of biscuits made from scratch. I remember my dad fondly talking about visiting his grandfather in coal-country Kentucky. They would have a grand-slam breakfast before a full day of manual labor, fueling up to make it through the workday. It recently occurred to me that the love needed to create country home-cooked breakfasts is not unlike the soulful effort put into kimchi-making. Kentucky breakfasts are made to last through long workdays. Kimchi is created to last for months. Both are made with love and intention. Both are shared rituals.

For most of my lifetime, I wasn’t so sure that my redneck sensibilities fit well with my Korean roots. However, I have come to the conclusion that when it comes to our attitudes about food, we match. Whenever I would visit my dad’s parents, Granny would stuff me with American junk food, potatoes and gravy, and packaged white bread slathered with butter. As we left, she would insist I take a handful of candy bars for my trip home. Proffering food was her version of love. As an adoptee, I think I somehow understood that, never turning down a serving.

When my Jewish grandmother learned about the non-nutritious food I indulged in while at Granny’s house, she was aghast, telling me I needed to say “no thank you.” I never did. How could I reject someone’s love when that’s what I craved my entire life?

My obsession with food is probably a big part of why I fell in love with my husband. When we dated, he cooked for me, and when I had his garlic-forward alfredo sauce for the first time, I knew I was in trouble. He cooks about 90 percent of our dinners, and for 32 years he has shown me his love over and over.

As young adults, my husband and I gravitated towards the European peasant cuisines rich in aromatics. As we developed our palates, I realized garlic was the constant thread in our adventures. As we moved across culinary continents, our exploration of Asia brought us to Korean cuisine, lured by its abundant use of garlic and spice.

As child, I loved when others cooked for me – it gave me a sense of belonging. As an adult, I still love being fed, but I love to cook for others too. Breakfast is my favorite meal to make for my daughters – certainly a vestige of my redneck heritage. Fill ‘em up before sending them out into the world.

My daughters are now busy adults and come home when they can. We are all looking forward to our next visit because I bought large kitschy glass containers which will be transformed into kimchi jars. My girls are excited to participate in our first family kimchi-making party, a kimjang. And I am equally excited to nourish their souls with the Korean tradition of love.

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.