The Children They Left Behind

from
The Korea Times
German Longs for Reunion With Her Husband in NK
By Sa Eun-young, Lee Ye-ha

A German woman has expressed hope that the upcoming inter-Korean summit will be a breakthrough toward meeting her husband, Hong Ok-geun, 73, who was sent back to North Korea 46 years ago.

"I believe that my long-time desire will come true now that talks between South and North Korea are taking place," Renate Hong, 70, told a news conference in Seoul Thursday.

The now elderly Hong first met her North Korean husband when she was 18 and they were both students at a university in East Germany. The two fell in love and married after dating five years.

Hong, however, has not seen her husband since North Korea forcibly called back students studying abroad in 1961. They had been married for one year and Hong was pregnant with their second child.

At first, the couple were able to keep in touch through letters, but all contact was cut off after two years and despite numerous attempts Hong was unable to learn about her husband's well being.

It was only this year that she heard the long-awaited news that her husband was alive. According to the German Red Cross, Hong Ok-geun is a retired scholar living in Hamheung, South Hamgyeong Province.

With new hopes of being reunified with her husband after nearly half a century, Hong visited Cheong Wa Dae Thursday to deliver a petition to President Roh Moo-hyun, which asks for his support in opening a way to meet her husband.

Also attached was a petition Hong hoped President Roh would pass on to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il when they meet for the inter-Korean summit slated for Oct. 2-4.

Although it was not easy raising two children on her own, Hong told reporters that her sons were her source of strength and she was happy being able to raise the sons of the person she loved.

Hong's greatest desire is that her two sons will be able to see their father even if she is unable to see him.

A documentary was made last January depicting Hong's story, ``Renate Hong's Longing Song for Her Husband--I hope to see you again." An encore will be aired on Q Channel at 9 p.m. Monday.

Hong's schedule in Korea includes meeting former President Kim Dae-jung and visiting Mount Geumgang in North Korea before leaving Seoul next Friday.

Wanted: Allies

Since I began conducting interviews at the start of my third week here, I've been feeling drained of life, energy, emotion. While I haven't had much luck finding interviewees, those I have found have a lot to day, interviews typically lasting two hours, and even two-and-a-half on one occasion.

I've been conducting interviews with for sub-populations:
-mixed-race Koreans
-mixed-race Korean-American expatriates
-Korean college students(re: their attitudes about race and multiculturalism)
-service providers that work with mixed-race Koreans

And, the stories I'm getting from all four have made me feel trapped.

On Saturday, I interviewed two young men, one of mixed white/Korean heritage; the other, of mixed black/Korean heritage.

"We don't think we've experienced very much racism," they told me early in the interview.

But, when we discussed, later, why they wanted to move to U.S., I probed:

"Would you want to eventually come back to Korea?"

"No," they answer, "there's no opportunity for us to succed here. Korean society will only care about us if we become celebrities."

And there was also the mixed-race Korean-American activist I had lunch with. He moved here seven years ago, changed his names from American to Korean, and has been building a life here and doing what he can to empower the native mixed-race population.

"I don't really feel like I have many allies here," he told me over bi bim bap.

"...how many do you have?"

*Long, long awkward pause*

"One."

"...one organization?"

*Long, long awkward pause*

"One person," he answers, "...and, actually, she lives in Okinawa [Japan]."

What's become clear to me is that there is a political and social agenda to erase Korea's mixed-race population. It's why I've had such a hard finding mixed-race people(over the age of 18) to interview. It's why the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, with a team of 10 researchers, could only identify 50 mixed-race people(many under 18) during a seven-month study it conducted in 2003.

Why this erasure?

In this society that celebrates its, “unified bloodline,” mixed-race people embody the disruption of that bloodline--they are living legacies of the sexual exploitation of Korean women by foreign men. And Korean society just doesn't want to deal with the way it is complicit in this exploitation. It would rather ship these swarthy babies to the U.S. for adoption and create a social climate in which people of mixed-race who have the misfortune of growing up here can't possibly imagine leading fulfilling lives in Korea, yearning desperately to immigrate to the U.S. at first chance, or exiling themselves to lives of social isolation.

The reason I've been feeling so down for the past couple weeks, I've realized, is because there is movement here before. I was not working on any more sunny of an issue during the 10 weeks I spent in Washington, D.C. before arriving in Seoul. But, I was part of a tight-knit, hard-working activist community. Here, there is only erasure and silence.

Daughters of Dictators

You could call her Korea's Hilary Clinton or Seoul's Virgin Queen.

Tomorrow is the nationwide primary election for Korea's right-leaning Grand National Party. On this Saturday night, the last-minute speeches have been made, and tomorrow conservative Korea will choose between former Seoul mayor Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, the daughter of assasinated South Korean Dictator Park Chung Hee. While Park has lost her front runner status, with Lee leading the polls for weeks, there's still the chance of an upset victory given the volatility of Korean politics.

Park, who has never married, was Chairman of her Grand National Party until this past May. Her father is remembered both as the father of Korean industrialization and as a ruthless dictator. After her mother was assasinated in in 1974, Geun-hye was regarded as the nation's first lady. During this time, pro-democracy activists (political opponents of her father's military dictatorship) continued to be subject to arbitrary detention and torture, and human rights were considered subordinate to economic development.

How, given all that, you might wonder, is she still a viable--indeed, a leading--candidate for the Korean presidency. With the economic disasters of the 1990s and the leadership scandals of the current Roh administration, many Koreans have grown nostalgic for the economic growth and "strong" leadership of Geun-hye's father's regime.

And, Geun-hye isn't the only female descendent of a brutal dictator to rise to politial power. In Italy, former topless model Alessandra Mussoli(yes, the granddaughter of that Mussolini) won a seat in parliament in 1992 as a member of neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano. She later
founded a new party of the extreme right, Libertà di Azione ("Freedom of Action"), and recently responded to criticism by trans-gender Italian M.P. candidate Vladimir Luxuria, sayng, "it's better to be a fascist than a faggot."

It's interesting, I think, when you look at a sampling of the roots of some of the world's most politically powerful women.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi's father was the mayor of Baltimore fo twelve years.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, current Presdient of the Philippines, is the daughter of a highly esteemed former President.

Indira Gandhi, who served three consecutive terms as India's first(and only to date) female Prime Minister, was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru and grandaughter of Motilal Nehru, famous Indian nationalist leaders.

P.S. FOUR wonderful interviews today. Exhausted. And airconditioning has been on full blast.

Five Generations On, Mexico's Koreans Long for Home

I woke up at 11:45 A.M., a half hour ago, to fully blasting airconditioning.

This morning, an article from today's Chosun Ilbo, the Korean newspaper that has historically provided the most coverage on mixed-race issues, I've heard from a couple different sources.

Five Generations On, Mexico's Koreans Long for Home

A fourth generation Korean-Cuban, Patricia Lim, 39, lives on the outskirts of Havana, about half an hour drive west of downtown. The paint on the outside of her shabby house wore off long ago, rendering the walls colorless. Inside, Lim and her mother Cristina Chang Kim, 79, warmly welcome a reporter from the Chosun Ilbo. An old fan rattles away on the ceiling. Looking at the stained refrigerator, radio, and decades-old appliances, one wonders if any of them work properly. Just outside a window a junked car slouches in the dust.

Even after four generations Lim retains Korean features on her face, her black eyes stretched sideways. "Even though I speak no Korean, I think of myself as a Korean," she says. She is one of the descendants of 1,033 Koreans who left Incheon in 1905 to settle farms in Mexico producing henequen, a fiber used to make rope and twine. After some time in Mexico, Lim's grandfather headed for Cuba in 1921. "You can make money if you work on a sugar cane farm," someone told him, and he ended up in a Cuba-bound ship. Sadly the price of sugar plunged in Cuba and Lim's grandfather had to return to the dreaded henequen farm.

Cuban descents of Korean immigrants who worked on henequen farms in Mexico. Patricia Lim (far right) is a fourth generation Korean-Cuban, the others are fifth generation. As the generations advance the descendants appear less Korean.

Erdi, 21, is a fifth generation Korean-Cuban. His grandfather married a Mexican and his father a Cuban. At first glance Erdi appears to be fully Latin. Dark skin, big eyes, curly hair, and of course not a word of Korean. "It’s true part of me has Korean blood but I think I'm a Cuban for sure," he says. Time is dissolving the Korean DNA in the descendants of the Henequens, as the farmers called themselves. They are, technically, Latin Americans, not just in appearance but in their way of thinking, culture, customs and language. A Cuba-Korea culture center was built in 1921 that taught Korean writing and history in an attempt to remind the descendants of their heritage. But lack of funding shuttered the center and now it's hard to find a Henequen offspring who can speak the language.

About 800 descendants of Korean henequen farmers live around Havana, Matanzas and other areas of Cuba. Most work in farms; some toil in small factories. A few have advanced to specialized jobs - a doctor, a teacher, a car engineer -- but even they are not too well off. The situation is not too different for the 20,000 to 30,000 descendants living in Mexico. Ulises Park is a rare wealthy Henequen son. A third generation Korean-Mexican, Park, 68, owns a large gas inspection office in Yucatan and also chairs a Korean descendants group. Most of the descendants struggle day to day as wage earners. More than a few of the Henequen offspring long for their native land on the other side of the globe. During the Japanese occupation Cuba's Henequen immigrants gathered spoonfuls of rice and sent the "independence fund" to the provisional government.

Even now Koreans in Cuba gather every Independence Movement Day on March 1 to eat and share Korean food. Mexican-Koreans also kept this year's Independence Movement Day, and on Sunday held an early celebration for Independence Day in Yucatan. These days about 300 Korean descendants are studying their ancestral language at a Korean school in Mexico. More and more students want to go to Korea and learn the culture and technology. "Even though our faces are Mexican, we have Korean blood in us," says Seidy, 27, a fourth generation Korean-Mexican and president of a Korean descendants group in Merida. "There are many students who want to go to Korea."

Link to Original Article

oh no he didn't

It's 4 A.M. I've been up late working on an essay.

My landlord has just turned the air conditioning off again.

You cannot survive Seoul summers without air conditioning. But somehow, my landlord thinks it's ok to turn off the air conditioning during the hours when he assumes people are probably sleeping or out of their rooms(roughly 2 A.M.-5 P.N.) because he is a cheap ass. Why do I call him a cheap ass? Because the air conditioning is ALWAYS on when I go to complain on the second floor where he hides away in his office, pretending not to hear my first knocks on his door.

And then, he makes excuses, either
a)using complicated Korean, so I can't understand what he's saying
b)using really simple Korean, but assuming I am stupid and won't know that he's bullshitting me. I.e.: "Oh, the ajuma is up there cleaning right now. I'll turn it on later." Three hours later...still waiting.

I just haven't had any luck with landlords. During my semester in London, we all dealt constantly with the ineptitude of our rental agency, Central Estates. Our agent, Joyce, it is a universally-agreed-upon truth, had the worst customer service skills any of us had ever encountered, ignoring our requests for repairs, never returning phone calls, and really, just being appalingly ridiculous. And, they charged me $160 to breaking one desk lamp that really couldn't have cost more than $20 or $30.

Since I have no scheduled interviews(yet), I will probably be in my weenie bin of a room all day tomorrow working on these damn essays and my air conditioning better be on. I will keep you updated on this important matter.

the daily grind

Sorry, FSTK readers, but some fellowship application deadlines have been putting substantial blogging on the backburner.

I started phase 2 of my research today, waking up early(9:20 A.M.) to conduct some interviews over at Ediya Coffee near the front gate of Sogang University.

I tracked through Sogang, Yonsei, and Ewha Universities, three of Korea's most prestigious universities(all conveniently located within a 15-20 minute walk of each other where I live in Sinchon), on Monday afternoon, posting flyers that promised free coffee and English practice for any student willing to do an interview with me about multiculturalism in Korea.

I've only had a few bites so far, but the first bite called up two friends who I interviewed after we finished our iced coffees and mochas. Just those three interviews have been enormously helpful in giving me insight into how Koreans think about race; though my first interviewee thought that multiculturalism meant the different Korean regional cultures, and immediately began singing his praises of Cholla-do, a region in southwestern Korea, where his mother's family is from.

After the interviews, I head over to City Hall for a meeting with a racial discrimination lawyer at the National Human Rights Commission. He wasn't much help, but he gave me a copy of 2003 report on mixed-race people published by the Commission. And my Mom, whose been worried about how I'll be able to work after she leaves next Tuesday, embarassingly harassed a London School of Economics intern into agreeing to translate for any interviews I do next week.

And Saturday evening, finally, I'll be interviewing a mixed-race male my age!

America's Comfort Women

I'll post some pictures and thoughts on today's Wednesday Demonstration for the comfort women tomorrow. But, for today's post, I wanted to share an interesting piece from the Christian Science Monitor.

I'm still in the process of translating and transcribing my first interview, but I'll put some thoughts on it up soon.

In criticizing Japan's history textbooks, Americans should think twice
By Jonathan Zimmerman
May 4, 2005

NEW YORK – Should history textbooks make you love your country? Most people would say "yes." And that's why textbooks inevitably distort the past - even here, in the good old USA. Americans like to think they've reckoned with their history, while other nations remain mired in propaganda and distortion. Americans should think again.

Consider the recent controversy over history textbooks in Japan. Last month, Chinese and Korean protesters took to the streets to condemn a new set of Japanese junior high school texts. The books omit mention of "comfort women," the roughly 200,000 females - mostly from Korea and China - whom the Japanese forced into sexual bondage during World War II.

But scour the textbooks that Americans use in schools, and you won't find any serious discussion of our own comfort women. I speak, of course, of female African-American slaves. Sure, today's textbooks - unlike earlier versions - contain lengthy descriptions and denunciations of American slavery. So far as I know, though, not a single commonly used textbook explains one of the most brutal aspects of the institution: coerced sexual relations. And I'm betting that most Americans would just as soon keep it that way.

Take the example of Harriet Jacobs, who was born into slavery in North Carolina in 1813. She was sold at the age of 12 to James Norcum, who soon began making sexual overtures to her.
As Jacobs later recalled in her memoir, Norcum told her that "I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things." And so she was. Although Jacobs occasionally managed to escape her owner's clutches, he did own her. To get sex from her, Norcum sometimes promised her new clothes and other presents; at other times, he simply held a razor to her throat. And that, my fellow Americans, is what we call rape.

You do the math. Between 1850 and 1860, the number of blacks in slavery rose by about 20 percent. But the number of enslaved "mulattoes" - that is, mixed-raced slaves - rose by a remarkable 67 percent, as historian Joel Williamson has calculated. To put it most bluntly: Black slaves were getting lighter in skin, because white owners were raping them. It's really that simple - and that awful.

As the great African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass recounted in his autobiography, the black female slave was "at the mercy of the fathers, sons, or brothers of her master." Black women were also abused by slave traders, who often raped them before selling them to the next white man - and the next round of sexual coercion. Undoubtedly there were slaves who may have chosen to have sex with their owners. But what does it mean to "choose" sex, when you know that the wrong choice might get you sold, or even killed?

Some masters seem to have treated their slaves like spouses, sharing living quarters and doting upon the children of these liaisons. More often, though, they simply pretended that it all never happened. So did the masters' white wives and daughters, who turned a blind eye to what was occurring right under their noses.

And so do we. How many American children know that Thomas Jefferson, father of our Declaration of Independence, fathered children by his slave? And how many American parents want their children to know that?

Let's imagine that a coalition of West African countries - say, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and the Ivory Coast - staged demonstrations against American history textbooks, demanding that the books include our sordid history of sexual coercion against black people. I think most Americans would scoff at "outside interference" and invoke their own patriotic imperatives.

In other words, they'd behave just like the Japanese. Defending the omission of comfort women from schoolbooks, the Japanese society for History Textbook Reform argued that other nations have no right to define the Japanese past. Only Japan can do that, a statement from the society says, because history aims at "deepening love towards our country."

And that's precisely the problem. Of course the Japanese should admit the terrible harm they inflicted upon Chinese and Korean comfort women between 1937 and 1945. But we also need to acknowledge our own African-American comfort women, who were sexually enslaved for more than two centuries. It might not make us feel more patriotic, but at least it would be true.

• Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education. He is the author of 'Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools.'

Mark One Race Only

In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau allowed people to check more than one racial category on the census questionnaire for the first time.

6.8 million people checked more than one racial category. 868,000 checked Asian and White.

So, what did these 868,000 check before 2000?

My family never talked about the mixed-racedness of its children. Growing up, the fact that I was of mixed-racial heritage was always just that, a fact. To me, it seemed normal that I couldn't talk with my Korean grandmother; it seemed normal that I ate rice with every meal, whether bul go gi or hamburgers; it seemed normal that my parents didn't have the same skin color. That was just my life. It wasn't until coming to college, until last fall, really, that I began to realize that yes, growing up as a person of mixed-racial heritage has impacted me in ways I wasn't fully conscious of as a child.

And, being here in Korea, studying mixed-race issues with my Mom as translator, has led to some long overdue conversations about race.

She asked me, as we transcribed my first interview--a man who railed on the Korean government(update later!)--if I felt like a, "second class citizen" in the U.S. Her phrasing was a bit dramatic, but I did my best to explain my deal, talking about the invisibility of mixed-race people in American society and culture, how until 2000, the U.S. Census demanded that mixed-race people choose only one race. And I asked her, what did she check for my brother and me on the 1990 census, the year I turned four and he turned three?

"White. You both looked white. Your last name was white. And you spoke English."

The Hills Are Alive

Day 3(August 11): From Boseong back to Seoul

I've decided to write about my family road trip last week from the end to the beginning. Our last day requires only a few words and a few more pictures.

We woke up early for the drive back to Seoul, making only one stop: the green tea hills of Boseong.

A backdrop for many Korean movies and TV miniseries, the Boseong Tea Plantation is basically the greenest place you'll ever see. When you climb up into the hills, you can see the ocean behind the green mountains in the background of this picture.

Women working in the hills.
A close-up of some tea leaves.

Fifty Pounds of Books

"People in town go inside because the sky weighs too much at noon. They wait for hot food with lots of pepper so the day will feel cooler by comparison. They drink sweet drinks and swallow bitter coffee to distract their insides from the heat and weight of the sky"

-Toni Morrison, Tar Baby-

Everywhere I go, I bring a small library with me. During the summer, especially, I make ambitious reading plans, filling my suitcase and carry-on bag with just enough books to be under the airline's weight limit. This can cause for some heavy bags since I also insist on bringing all seven journals I've filled during college everywhere I go(I trust no one not to read them).

In my most desperate act of book-bringing, I brought a small suitcase filled with fifty pounds of books as my carry-on item when I flew back to Yale for my sophomore year. But, if you take a look at my personal library at Yale--and the wonderfully spacious bookshelves Morse College teased me with--my tactics might seem a little more justifiable.

-

Now, I'm not as bad during the summer. But, leisure reading--along with family road trips, vapid pop songs, and sunburn--has always defined summer for me. So, I do usually bring a dozen-or-so books with me and buy three or four more over the course of the summer. True, I've never made it through even half of the books I lug out to wherever I end up, but that never puts a damper on the next year's ambitions.

This summer, I did better than last, plowing through:

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Saidiya Hartman)

(Recommended by a couple past TAs)

Persuasion (Jane Austen)

Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood (Ann Brashares)

The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman: Of Tales and the Telling of Tales(Laurel Kendall)

Passing (Nella Larsen)

Flight (Sherman Alexie)

(I got to see him speak in D.C.)

Fade: My Journeys in Multiracial America (Elliot Lewis)

(An impulse buy at Busboys and Poets, my favorite D.C. bookstore-restaurant)

Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

(This is the second novel of a Yale African Studies grad student. She was one of my classmates in a seminar last fall, but I didn't know she was a hugely successful author--mainly in the U.K., I think--until I saw this novel on bestseller displays in every bookstore in London)

There's also one book I bring wherever I go: June Jordan's collected essays, Some of Us Did Not Die. If you've never read Jordan, read her now and love her forever. I'll probably be writing my senior thesis(in History and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration) about this poet-professor-activist from U.C. Berkeley. With perfect timing, Harvard just made her personal papers available for research this summer.

Yesterday, on the bus ride out to Suwon to visit my harabu-gee (grandfather)'s mountainside grave, I began what will probably be my final summer read: Toni Morrison's Tar Baby. Along with reading a Jane Austen novel each summer(check), the other great literary quest of my young adulthood is to read all of Toni Morrison's novels in the order in which she wrote them. My relationship with Toni hasn't been as steady as Jane's. During December of my senior year of high school, I read The Bluest Eye and Sula and then Song of Soloman on a flight out to Honolulu the summer after my freshman year at Yale. But, once I've finished Tar Baby, I'll still have half of her oeuvre to get through: Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, and Love.

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I started off with that passage from Tar Baby because it reminds me so much of Seoul in the summertime(even if Toni's writing about Christmas in the Caribbean) ; and I love those moments when a writer captures my right here, right now.

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Here, too, the summer sky is heavy with rain. In Seoul's crowded streets, women are on constant guard, ready to run for shelter at the first sign of rain, desperate to protect their perfectly made-up faces, their straightened hair(shout out to Aashika). Men and women pack into restaurants to beat the hot, humid afternoons, ordering stamina-boosting dishes like sam gae tang(chicken broth with ginseng) or bo shin tang(dog stew), convinced that they'll sweat out the heat by slurping down these steaming hot stews. And if they can't eat the heat away, they'll head over to airconditioned cafes to sip overpriced coffees, nibble on cookies baked with love, and chat away for hours.

Defeated Capitals and Hills of Tea

I'm back in my tiny room watching The Day After Tomorrow on TV after three days of travel.

We drove along the West Coast down to the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula and then back up to Seoul today just in time to see my cousin, Soo Min, in her Dae hang lo theatre premiere.

Dae hang lo is Korea's Broadway, so it's a pretty big deal for Soo Min, a college student, to have been cast in this professional production with a well-known director(whose amazing Korean adaptation of Our Town I saw at the National Theater last summer) and cast. It was pretty intense for a debut role: she played the ghost of a girl who had been gang-raped by seven of her boyfriend's friends, became pregnant as a result, and then committed suicide.

On our drive back up this morning, I finished the last few pages of Jane Austen's Persuasion, the only Austen novel I had yet to read. Every summer since my sophomore year of high school, I've read one of her novels during our summer family trips. Pride and Prejudice (2002) during a road trip to Mammoth Mountain. Emma (2003) while driving up to San Francisco for my cousin, Peter's wedding. Sense and Sensibility (2004) during a family road trip through Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. Northanger Abbey (2005) in Honolulu. Mansfield Park (2006) in Maui. And, finally, five summers later, Persuasion (2007) was completed in Boseong, South Korea this morning. So, it's a kind of end of an era for me, but an era I'll get to revisit next spring, as probably the only male in Stefanie Markovits' Jane Austen seminar.

Some writing about the trip to come over the next few days.

P.S. I have my first interview--finally!--on Tuesday afternoon!

signing off

I'll be on the road and away from the computer(probably) for the next few days, road tripping with my mom (umma), younger brother (nam dong seng), sam chon (uncle), and hal muh ni (grandmother) down the West Coast of Korea.

Two of my good friends here, Kaila and Jane, as well as the rest of the Light Fellows from Yale, won a week-and-a-half trip all over Korea sponsored by SK Telecom(one of the main cell phone service providers here) , so I'm a little jealous, but this should be fun. Last night, we shared some parting bing sus (traditional Korean summer dessert) at Milky Road, again, our favorite yogurt place. As happened last summer, bing su has frequently taken the place of dinner in both our budgets and stomachs.

Before: Jane topped her bing su(traditionally just ice, but Milky Road gives you yogurt, too!) with bat (red bean), sesame ice cream, creme de cacao, and blueberries; I, with strawberries, blueberries, cereal, and duk(kind of like mochi)

After: Love the face, Jane

(also, note: my hair is currently in a wonderful state of being)

some not-so-funny Asian english

So, I don't think making fun of Asian English(or the sound of Asian languages, Rosie) is ever funny. Yes, I know that my Mom has an accent. Yes I know she can link English words together in occasionally bizarre phrases. Thanks for letting me know. But that's a whole nother post...

Since July 17, 2007(about 3 weeks ago), three former comfort women have died without being acknowledged as survivors of the worst incident of mass sex trafficking in modern history, without receiving an apology or reparations from the government of the country that perpetrated this terrible sex crime. Here are their obituaries, all translated into English by Ja-young Kim, and all posted on website for the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan

r.i.p...

Hwang Sun-I
Ms. Hwang Sun-I passed away at 8 o'clock on 6/23. She had stayed in the asylum and recently was in the hospital. Born in Hadong, Kungnam in 1922, Ms. Hwang was forcefully drafted when she was 13 and suffered in Mongolia, Hong Kong, Singapore as a "comfort woman." She came back to Korea when Korea became independent but could not settle in her hometown because of the fact that she was a "comfort woman." She had surgeries last January and February because of the lung cancer. She had neither family nor relatives.Even though there is some good news such as the U.S. House's "comfort women" resolution, victims are still frustrated over Japanese government's evasion of responsibility and deception. In this circumstance, the number of survivors is decreasing everyday. Therefore, it is urgent to solve the "comfort women" issue as soon as possible.

Suk Bok-dal
At about 1 o'clock in the morning, on Thursday, 8/2, Ms. Suk Bok-dal (82) passed away in San-cheong, Kyungnam. At first she wanted to bury her heartburning forever, but, in 2004, reported that she was the victim. The doctor had said that she was getting better, but we heard the sudden notification that she passed away. She had had lots of pains and bitterness in her heart, but she shall rest in peace. She would look down at us with bright smile.

Lee Sun-san
early morning, 8/3

Ms. Suni passed away because of her illness. Sadly enough, her death was right after the adoption of the U.S. resolution that was expected to be the new turning point. Last January 31st, she had an accident so had to get big surgeries for several times. And on August 1st, after the surgery, the doctor told her health was very bad with low blood pressure and blood from the anus. Two days later, she died alone in the Hospital. We are sorry because we could not do anything for her when she was with us. We wish that she now rested in peace.

Ms. Lee Sun-san's brief biography

1922. Born in Gajae
1937. Fifteen years old, she was deceived, drafted to China through Osaka, and forced to be 'comfort woman' for seven yrs
1944. Came back to her hometown, Gajae
1946. Married
1992. Reported that she was the victim
2007.8.3. passed away

rain or shine

The 772nd Wednesday Demonstration.

Every Wednesday in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul.

Since January 8, 1992.

For readers in Seoul: Come out next week, especially, to show your support for a global action week organized by the

Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan

A big turn out today--even bigger than last week--despite the rain.

One of the organizers, sporting their trademark yellow vest, addressing the crowd.

Some of the hal muh nis (grandmothers) under a tent.
(In Korea and the Korean diaspora, you often refer older women as hal muh ni)

This guy kept looking back at my brother and me. I wondered why--and then I saw him join his Korean wife...who had a baby carriage.

Some of the hal muh nis. The organizers handed out ribbons to the crowd and we tied them together, forming several big ribbon circles within the crowd.

Shouting the traditional end-of-demonstration demands for justice. I still haven't heard them clearly enough to figure out what they mean.

glamour girl

Last summer, I tried to spend time with my hal muh ni (grandmother) at least a few times a week. One day, we'd meet for for lunch or dinner somewhere around Seoul. One day, I'd stop by after work for dinner at my yeemo (aunt)'s house where she lives half of the week. And, every Sunday, usually, I'd go over and spend the afternoon with her at my sam chon (uncle)'s house where she spends the rest of the week.

Nosing around her apartment one Sunday afternoon, I discovered some old family photo albums and saw that my Mom was quite the glamour girl in her youth. In both family portraits, she's really the only one you could call glamorous, I'd say.

Even now, at fifty-eight, when she and I stopped at a bar to use the bathroom at 2 A.M. during an all night drive down from San Francisco, guys my age were offering to buy her drinks.

my big break!

Well, I hope so.

Having my mom here to help out has been great. She's been helping me schedule appointments, snoop around Seoul for leads, and bug my relatives to tap into whatever connections they might have. After lunch this afternoon(my--and also Gwyneth Paltrow's--favorite dol sot bi bim bap), we took the subway just outside of Seoul to Bucheon for a meeting with the Executive Director of Pearl S. Buck International Korea(PSBIK), the organization working with mixed-race children in Korea.

I'd been told that PSBIK was too busy to help students do research, so I wasn't hoping for much, maybe just a chance to volunteer. But, after we went through the usual Korean pleasantries, the usual exclamations of, "oh, but you don't look mixed...," Kyung-Hee Bae, the Executive Director, ended up making a dream of a proposal.

Although PSBIK works primarily with children, they do keep in touch with the young adults who have participated in their programs, and Ms. Bae promised to try to arrange for me to meet with two guys, ages 18 and 19. Normally, she told me, when you interview someone in Korea, you pay them an honorarium, but she wanted to propose an alternative: why didn't I spend a day with these guys, get to know them, treat them to lunch, and give them a crash course in how to do basic daily activities in the U.S.(one is starting college in the states soon). And, also, since they'd both like to practice English more, why don't I offer to keep up an e-mail correspondence with both of them.

I did run into one problem that I hadn't considered, but it seems so obvious now that I should have. While thinking aloud about my options, Ms. Bae named a few mixed-race young women in the age group I'm going after, but when she offered to arrange some introductions, she left them out, only naming the two mixed-race young men.

"What about the girls?" my Mom asked her, "you know, he's[me] very gentle"
(My mom's English usage is not always right on the mark; what I think she was doing here, was not making gender generalizations, but rather trying to explain that I'm very sensitive to gender issues in the work I do)

"I'm sure he learned that from you, but, you know, they don't speak English very well," she offers as an excuse, knowing that I have my Korean mother with me as a translator.

We proposed a different option: my Mom spending some one-on-one time with the girls instead of me, so I'm hoping that will work out. Actually, really, as the bolded try should indicate, I'm hoping something comes of this period. I've already been disapointed once by a seemingly all-knowing contact.

searching for new sheroes

So, most readers probably know that Hilary Duff is a personal shero of mine. To launch into a full explanation would take too much space, but I've loved her since the Lizzie McGuire days and have seen her twice in person.



The summer before starting Yale, I drove up to Hollywood with friends for the premiere of A Cinderella Story and while I was in London last semester I was probably less than ten-feet away from her as she performed in a Soho club.




But she's been disapointing me lately.

First, there was her turn as a Maxim cover girl.

Then the "op-ed"(I apply that label loosely) she penned for the The Observer, entitled, "What I know about men ..." It featured Hilary spouting such gems as:


"I'm not, like, a crazy feminist. I think women definitely need men. Like, I couldn't imagine having a girlfriend!"

"I want to have a husband and two kids and a nice little life baking pies."

"Women are definitely home-makers. We're obviously very different from men."

And, then, there's her new orientalist music video for the single, "Stranger."


You won't have to wait too long before you see her decked out in "Indian" jewelry and make-up bellydancing because because, you know, just like all feminists are lesbians, all of Asia just oozes sex.

I'm not abandoning her just yet, but suggestions for new personal heroes are welcome.

food, food, tea.

The Light Fellowship is a wonderful fellowship at Yale that sends one-hundred-or-so undergrads out to China, Japan, or Korea every summer for language study. I got one for study in Seoul last summer, and a couple of my Light friends got the fellowship again to come back this summer.

The Fellowship also sends Yale representatives to conduct site visits each summer, to observe the language programs Light Fellows have chosen and make sure Light money is being well-spent. This year, Kyle Farley, the Dean of Jonathan Edwards College and his wife, Veronica did the Light visit and we've been busy spending time with them(mainly eating) since yesterday evening. We started their trip off last night with three giant-sized yogurts at Milky Road, our favorite yogurt shop. From there, we went to see Subway Line 1, Seoul's longest running musical. Then, this morning, we were up early for a trip up to the DMZ, and finally lunch and tea in Insadong, the, "street of traditional Korean culture," according to the Korea Tourism Office.

The photo regulations on DMZ tours are, more or less, that you can't take any photos. So, I don't have anything from our tour. But, here is Kaila enjoying our feast at Sanchon, a Buddhist temple vegetarian restaurant(reviewed in the New York Times twenty years ago, they'd like you to know). We ordered a set meal that cost about 18,900 per person(roughly $20) and had maybe a dozen or so different dishes.


Including six different varieties of spinach!


Dean Farley feeding Veronica a clove of garlic


Phillip and Presca adding some glamour to the back alleys of Insadong


After lunch, we showed the Dean and his wife around Insadong for a bit before returning to a tea house next to Sanchon where most of us ordered traditional Korean cold teas--pear, cinnamon punch, rice punch and--and relaxed. One of the fun of the parts of this tea house is the birds they have flying around inside that may also poop on you. Here, Kaila is fanning Phillip.

the hostage crisis

A couple people have asked me what it's like to be in Korea right now during the hostage crisis.

Basically, there's a lot of America-bashing going on(I must have passed two, possibly three, different anti-American protests yesterday walking from Gwanghwamun subway station to the Japanese embassy, a path that takes you right by the U.S. Embassy), and if you're interested, check out Metropolitician's post on "The South Korean Stockholm Syndrome."

I've hit some roadblocks in my research, including the always frustrating NGO-academia divide: "We're too busy; we don't have time help students." Having worked for three different NGOs(including one in Korea) for the past three summers, I understand where they're coming from, but that doesn't make it any less frustrating. So, no updates on that front.

My Mom's coming into Seoul tonight for the first time in six years(and to be my translator)!

Facing History

I woke-up around 11 A.M. this morning and hurried over to Gwanghwamun for the weekly Wednesday demonstrations in solidarity with the surviving comfort women, the women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. Because I had class at Sogang from 9 A.M.-1 P.M. last summer, I only had the chance to go a couple times, but I'm hoping to go every week while I'm here.

They've been having these protests every Wednesday since January 8, 1992. That's right--for the past 15 years. You'd think the Japanese government would be embarassed by now that they have seven or eight of these hal uh nis(grandmothers) and a hundred or so of their supporters coming out every week simply asking for an official apology for what happened to them. You'd think that it wouldn't have come to the point where the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution yesterday calling on the Japanese government to accept responsibility for its coercion of women into sexual slavery. You'd think that they'd just apologize--not take out a Washington Post advertisement claiming that, actually, the women had worked as licensed prostitutes(I was at work in D.C. reading the Post the day that advertisement was published and was just livid for the rest of day). But, no, the Japanese government has some weird historical memory issues going on(not that most governments don't).

From an academic standpoint, all of this is very interesting to me, this issue of historical/cultural/societal memory of atrocity. Especially the case of World War II. Why is it that Germany throws Holocaust deniers in jail for five years while the Japanese prime minister makes regular visits a war shrine that honors, among others, World War II war criminals. As a student, activist, and human being concerned with dealing with these histories of trauma, I have a lot more questions:

How do we go about changing long-ingrained collective memory?

How do we identify, study, and gauge collective memory?

Where do we look for evidence of collective memory?

How do we trace collective memory formation?

And, above all, how can we explain these variations in the collective memory of World War II atrocities?