Susan Knight (birth name: Yim Hee Jung), 37, was born in Seoul and currently lives in Cumming, Georgia with her husband and three children. This is her story of resilience of growing up in poverty and moving to the U.S. at age eight to join her mother and stepfather, a U.S. soldier.

“I love cooking because of the gratification of pleasing people. You know immediately if your food was great. You know even faster if it’s shit,” says Brian Huskey, 33, who emerged among the top five in Top Chef’s Season 11: New Orleans.

Late one evening while mourning her late husband, Pega Crimbshin (nee Ock Soon Lee), 81, of Cabot, Pennsylvania, found a box that he had handcrafted and shown to her in January 1954. He had informed her that they contained important papers.

Kim’s paintings often engage with themes of vulnerability and contrast, and her artistic influences extend beyond visual artists to include writers (such as T.S. Eliot and the Korean poet Midang), her grandmother, and her friend who was a flower vendor on 14th Street.

“You know how sometimes you meet someone and it just clicks,” Kleisley said. “That’s how it was when I first met Mark.” That 1951 chance meeting near a stream in Korea blossomed into a 60-plus-year friendship for the Marine from Rochester, N.Y., and the former homeless kid from North Korea.

Rek’s love for music has been with him since his youngin’ days and he has always been drawn to many different genres. He loved 90s Kpop and was into learning the choreography.

Smith is an inter- and multi-disciplinary artist whose work engages with themes of memory and identity as well as political and social landscapes. Her work has been featured in GQ, The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, The Washington Post, and Angry Asian Man, among others.

I expected the artist Daru to be a mysterious and distant character, even more so due to her impressive credentials: a Bachelor’s degree from the prestigious Seoul National University in 1977 and a Master’s degree from the Pratt Institute in 1980.

“Divided Families,” the documentary that Ahn co-directed and co-produced, tells the stories of Korean American immigrants who have been separated from family members in North Korea for more than fifty years as a result of the Korean War, which divided the country into north and south.