www.koreanamericanstory.org

Photos from 5-8-2012 Annual Benefit

KoreanAmericanStory.org's second Annual Benefit "A Celebration of Multi-Cultural Korean Americans", took place on May 8th, 2012 at the French Culinary Institute.  Our special guests, Marja Vongerichten and Will Demps, shared their stories as bi-racial Black-Koreans.  Theirs stories were humorous at times, and sometimes they were poignant and heartbreaking, but they were definitely authentic and shared from the heart. 

We thank all the planning committee members: Julie Young, Michelle Kim, Mark Lee, Yoon Lee Perera, Young-Yi Clinton, James Lee, Anne Behk Chung, John Kwon and Theresa Choh-Lee.  Big hugs to all the  attendees, donors and those who participated in the auctions.  A special thanks to our corporate sponsor, Amore Pacific, who were very supportive this Benefit. A heart-felt thanks to Marja Vongerichten for donating her time, talent and 3 dinners!  Marja, you are incredibly gracious and wonderful to work with!  We also thank Will Demps, who had to fly out from CA 2 times to prepare and to attend our Benefit.  He will be flying out for the 3rd time to take the auction winners to L'Artusi.  You are awesome Will!

Thank you Nathan Hale Williams for being an incredibly funny and energetic auctioneer!  Finally, to all the auction winners: Thank you for bidding generously!

NY Korean Fashion Show

KoreanAmericanStory.org was at the New York Korean Fashion Festival, sponsored by KAMA, in Flushing, NY where we took the opportunity to record some more of your stories.

2012 KoreanAmericanStory.org Annual Benefit

Bring Ms. Hwang Back Home

“We were like any other family before this happened, leading a normal life,” said Mr. Chung, husband of Kyeong Sook Hwang.

November 25, 2011 was a day after Thanksgiving. It was when Ms. Hwang was unexpectedly arrested at the New Jersey Somerset County DMV while trying to renew her license. She remains in jail today, separated from her husband and their two children, who are 11 and 3 years old.

Ms. Hwang came to the U.S. in 1996 in pursuit of a better life—the typical and familiar American Dream many Korean Americans strive for. She built a life here. She became a wife and a mother of a daughter and a son, for whom she always drove to drop off and pick up from school. This was the reason why she was renewing her driver’s license that day.

But Ms. Hwang is an illegal immigrant, which legally complicates the situation.

“It's two-fold,” said Jae Sup Song, a representative from the MinKwon Center. “The case right now is being counted as criminal. Once that gets resolved, it will most likely turn into an immigration case. At that point, we will then continue to fight against Ms. Hwang’s deportation.” 

Race(ism) 101 - Reflections on the Sa-I-Gu LA Riots

"The ultimate world-historical significance--and oddity--of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced civilization," Mike Davis, City of Quartz.

I was driving home, listening to 92.3 The Beat, a hip-hop radio station, when the acquittal verdict for the three police officers charged in the Rodney King beating was announced by the DJ. This was a year or two before the takeover of The Beat by DJ Theo Mizuhara, his silky voice becoming synonymous with all things hip-hop. I wonder if he would have been able to calm the rage of his listeners, whether his Japanese-American background would have meant anything for those calling in to voice their outrage and pain. I can remember how the ever-present sun made it necessary for me to put down the sun visor even though I was wearing sunglasses. It's funny how you remember such tiny details.

My car became an echo chamber as listeners called in, expressing their rage, disbelief, and more profoundly, powerlessness in a world where the definition of justice was meant for others and not for them. The acquittal of the three police officers was the final insult, the final denouement, you could say. Soon Ja Duk's acquittal in the shooting death of Latasha Harlins was a wound barely scabbed over for those living so many miles south of the 10 Freeway. Their lives were as removed from the glitter and fairy dust so synonymous with the other zip codes. Metal bars across every window and door in their neighborhood served as a reminder of being shut out from the endless possibilities of invention and reinvention and being shut in to their dead end lives. It's a sick irony the prison industrial complex reigns so prominently and dominantly in this state where the instinct for self-protection, to keep the world out, was not just symptomatic of tough neighborhoods, but was endemic to this suburbanopolis of perpetual sunshine, Pacific Ocean, and the dream factories of Hollywood. Every house, no matter how simple or grand, whether in Compton or Bel Air, resembled a prison with bars or fortress-like walls and electric gates.

Hold the Date for Our Annual Benefit

Please hold the date for KoreanAmericanStory.org's Annual Benefit which will be held on Tuesday, May 8th, 2012 at the 5th floor loft of the French Culinary Institute in SoHo.  The theme will be "A Celebration of Multi-Cultural Korean Americans". Our special guests will be Marja Vongerichten, cookbook author and host of the PBS series "Kimchi Chronicles" and Will Demps, former NFL player now entrepreneur/model.

Click Here for more details

Watercolors

The week after he returned from the hospital, she came home from teaching her fourth grade class to find him listening to Beethoven and pushing himself around with a broom and dustpan on his lap. She called it the accident again, and he whirled his wheelchair around so his back was to her.

“I'm talking to you,” she said.

He zoomed over to the boombox and boosted the volume. The music filled the room like water. She waited for him turn it down again. He scooped up the tiniest amount of dirt; Beethoven's noise cascaded onward. “I can't hear myself,” she said.

The day of the accident, he'd worked out a plan to find his birth mother in Korea, though she'd said she didn't care about his past or skin color. Their housekeeper, the bitch who came once a week and wanted to sleep with him, had encouraged him.

Now she couldn't help asking what she'd meant to ask the day of the accident. She yelled it over the music.

The Burden We Carry

Living in Korea hasn't been easy.  Well, as easy as I thought it would be.  When my husband received his assignment to South Korea, I breathed a sigh of relief.  He’d just returned from a deployment while we were stationed in Hawaii, right after an internship year as an Army Psychologist.  Needless to say, I was ready for a breather and I thought I was getting it.

An assignment to Korea meant that a deployment was almost not happening during our tour there.  Even more in our favor, my parents had immigrated to the US from Korea 37 years ago, making me ethnically Korean, although not nationalistically Korean.  Korean food was my comfort food, I thought myself fluent in the language, I could somewhat read and write Korean and I was curious about the place my parents came from so I thought I would be more comfortable at our new duty station than the average military family.  The closer our move date got, the more excited I got.

Ha.  I laugh at my old self.  It’s not like I could have changed our duty stations.  One does not tell the Army where one wants to go or doesn’t want to go.  One simple goes where one is sent.  And I am that one’s wife.  But.  I should have known that like other cities and other places we were sent to, Korea wouldn’t be any different.  Where people live, it’s all the same.  

In Korea I found it’s the same too.  Just with more jostling, loud talking and Han – that indescribable holding onto of pain and longing that creates a layer on relationships I don’t quite understand yet here.