The Kremlin can count on only one real ally in its war in Ukraine. Belarus has offered its territory for the staging of the war, and China has provided some dual-use exports that certainly contribute to the war effort. But only one country has sent a significant number of troops to fight alongside the Russians: North Korea.

Today, about 10,000 North Korean combat troops are stationed in Kursk — along with another 1,000 engineer troops — to protect this western-most city from another Ukrainian incursion and to free up Russian troops to participate in offensive operations inside Ukraine. Another 6,000 North Korean soldiers were killed or injured in previous fighting.

Earlier this year, North Korean leader Jong Un Kim cut a ribbon on a new housing district dedicated to the families of those killed in the Russian war in Ukraine. Recently, at the inauguration of a memorial in Pyongyang to the fallen, Kim celebrated a “new history of friendship with Russia written in blood.” North Korea’s relationship with China was previously celebrated to be “as close as lips and teeth.” But blood goes deeper still.

North Korea also continues to supply Russia with millions of rounds of ammunition — artillery shells, anti-tank rockets, and short-range ballistic missiles. According to Ukrainian estimates, this has amounted to as much as half of what Russian is using in its war. North Korea is certainly supplying quantity, but it’s not necessarily quality. In 2024, one Ukrainian military official estimated that half of the shells North Korea was supplying were duds. No matter: As Russia’s use of its own soldiers as cannon fodder suggests, the Kremlin prefers quantity over quality.

It is telling that Russia, at its time of need, must rely on a country as poor and isolated as North Korea. But what other choices does Russia have?

Some Russian allies have disappeared, like the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, or have been co-opted by the U.S., like the government of Delcy Rodriguez in Venezuela. Other allies haven’t been able to count on Russia, so they haven’t been able to offer much in turn. Iran, for instance, has been receiving some intelligence from the Kremlin during its war with the U.S. and Israel. But aside from some drones, Russia hasn’t sent its ally significant hardware, much less Russian warships full of soldiers.

Russia is at the center of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) — a post-Soviet alliance that also includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — but the group has provided little in the way of assistance even though the CSTO has a mutual defense clause comparable to the North American Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) Article Five. It’s no surprise that none of these countries has sent troops to assist in Russia’s war. After all, Russia didn’t come to Armenia’s aid when Azerbaijan took over Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023. Armenia has boycotted meetings of the organization ever since.

It’s not as if Russia lacks ways of enticing potential allies. Russian fossil fuel exports have become especially attractive as the war with Iran has bottled up other supplies in the Strait of Hormuz. But these exports have been monopolized by China and India, which have been taking in about 80 percent of Russia’s oil. Also, drone attacks by Ukraine have reduced Russia’s capacity to export its fossil fuels.

Russia also supplies the world with military hardware. In 2024, it fell to third place in arms exports behind the U.S. and France, largely because of the requirements of the war in Ukraine. Recently, however, the Kremlin has claimed that it has bounced back by exporting $15 billion worth of weapons in 2025, mostly to Africa and the Middle East. This is still a far cry from U.S. military exports of over $330 billion. But it suggests that Russia is trying to profit in some way from its otherwise disastrous war in Ukraine.

India and Russia have a new military pact, which allows them to station troops, warships, and fighter jets in each other’s countries. This agreement provides Russia with important access to the Indian Ocean. But it doesn’t mean Indian troops are heading to Ukraine. In fact, the only Indians who have fought on behalf of Russia have been tricked into doing so by the Kremlin. And one of the reasons Russian military exports experienced such a major drop, even before the war in Ukraine began, is that clients like India have diversified their imports away from dependency on the Kremlin.

China’s assistance to Russia has been more complicated. In addition to the energy purchases, China is helping Russia by providing up to 90 percent of the country’s high-tech needs. Shut out of U.S. and European markets, Russia relies on China for drone components, machine tools, batteries and fiberoptic systems.

But China is not providing Russia with enough to tip the balance of the war in its favor. Russia, like North Korea, remains something of a liability for China. While Pyongyang is unreliable because of its nuclear program and cyber operations, Russia is unreliable in its willingness to upend international law in the pursuit of its territorial ambitions.

China, above all, wants stability. And it wants to maintain good relations with the West. The unpredictable actions of Russia and North Korea threaten the global infrastructure that contributes to Chinese growth and prosperity.

This, then, is what unites Russia and North Korea. They are both disgusted with the West, with liberalism, and with any aspect of international law that constrains their freedom of movement, whether it’s human rights conventions or rules governing maritime commerce.

This is something relatively new for Russia. Under Putin, Russia initially flirted with the U.S. and established a solid energy relationship with Europe. Now, under Western sanctions, it has become a great deal more like North Korea: Solidly military-first, increasingly authoritarian and repressive, economically autarkic, and suspicious of technologies, like Telegram, that might magnify civic discontent.

The current reign of Donald Trump, an American leader who favors autocrats over democrats, might indicate that this Russian-North Korean model of governance is on the upswing.

But even Trump’s apparent affection for both Putin and Kim can’t make up for the fact that the economies of North Korea and Russia are struggling, that their respective personality cults are showing some cracks, and that the war in Ukraine is not currently going in their favor, with Russia losing territory to Ukraine in April for the first time since 2024.

Russia and North Korea are moving ever closer to each other largely because they don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Even blood oaths cannot make up for the fact that their alliance is one of desperation, not inspiration.

Originally published in Hankyoreh.

The post Russia and North Korea: An alliance of desperation appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

A runaway teen navigates an indifferent Seoul during the 2008 recession

(Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, 2026, ISBN #978-1-6397-3740-6)

Reviewed by Alice Stephens (Spring 2026)

After enduring decades of Japanese colonialism followed by a devastating civil war, South Korea rose from the ashes, acclaimed as “the miracle on the Han River” for its explosive economic development. But this success has come at a terrible price. The nation today has the lowest birthrate in the world and one of the highest suicide rates. The crushing requirements of unfettered economic growth are fraying familial and civic ties, leaving South Koreans on the precipice.

Che Yeun’s debut novel, Tailbone, depicts this precipice through the first-person lens of an unnamed teenager struggling to survive the global recession of 2008. In her final year of high school, her grades plummet, and she drops out. There is no refuge at home. After losing his managerial job in the financial crisis of 1997, her father toils as an underling to much younger bosses, spending his nights pouring drinks for them, returning home drunk and angry to take out his frustration on his wife. She despises her mother for her weakness, hating her acquiescence to her father’s abuse and to her sad and lonely life.

One sticky summer day, the girl runs away from home and rents a room in a women’s boardinghouse where the only rule is no smoking and the stairwells are strewn with cigarette butts. The place is in a decaying, dead-end Seoul alley, with neighbors who illegally dump their garbage on each other’s property. Even the landlady warns her away:

“None of you girls should be living here. I would rip out my eyes if I knew my daughter was living like this.”

The girl finds a role model in Juju, who is approaching 30 and, along with the rest of the boarders, “dated old desperate idiot men to feed their hunger for pretty things. When the hunger grew, they added new idiot creeps to their contact lists on their phones. When even that wasn’t enough, they fooled around with credit cards and payday loans. As the bills mounted, they hunted down even more lonely idiot creeps to settle their accounts for them.”

From her blonde dye job to her tinted contact lenses to her surgically enhanced bust, Juju is a do-it-yourself Frankenstein’s monster. Like that doomed creature, she is desperate for human love, which she thinks she has found with Min, who drives a flashy car, wears fancy suits, and is engaged to a woman from a wealthy family.

Juju shows the girl how to apply for loans under the protagonist’s mother’s name. When she suggests using her father’s name instead, Juju advises, “Always go with mothers… Mothers comply. Even after they find out you’ve thrown them in debt, they just quietly accept the situation and pay off the loan themselves. Mothers don’t call the police or fight back.”

With her ill-begotten gains, the girl blows her money on junk food, makeup, and cigarettes. Free to be an “irresponsible selfish slob,” she fritters the days away, eating corn dogs, dyeing her hair, and aimlessly riding the metro. On a train, an older man asks if she’s being sex-trafficked. “We really used to be a country full of girls like that,” he tells her. “Sold all over the country… That’s how poor they used to be. How poor we all used to be. Before the war and after. But all that’s gone now. Now it’s just girls like you, healthy and educated and sure and lazy. That’s what happens when you’re free to go anywhere you want.” Despite South Korea’s hard-won prosperity, women are still selling their bodies to survive.

The only path out that the protagonist can imagine is to become a flight attendant. Then, she might find a rich man and trap him into marriage, or at least be kept in a nice apartment. But she can’t afford the tuition for the training, and Juju tells her she’s too short, anyway. A departing boarder has left behind a flight-attendant uniform, which she wears around town as a status symbol, basking in the looks of admiration it garners. She also wears it when she engages in sex work for the first time.

When she returns home with the cash she has just earned, her mother refuses her money and turns her away:

“After you left, the house got quiet. That’s when I realized, you were such a loud child. Not your mouth. But your whole body was loud. Everything you needed was screaming at me all the time. A respectable family. A nice bed. A cozy dinner. We never got you that digital camera. There was too much I couldn’t give you.”

Through the blunt yet incisive narrative of one teenage girl, Tailbone presents a frightening portrait of a nation whose rapid economic success has been achieved at the cost of rapid social disintegration. A society built on relentless competition means close bonds — between women, romantic partners, and even parents and children — are tested to the breaking point. Yeun’s bleak and all-too-plausible novel warns us that at the bottom of South Korea’s precipice yawns a very dark abyss.

Reprinted with permission from the Washington Independent Review of Books 

The post The terrible price of colonialism appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

In an atmosphere of fear about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in Minnesota, there are only a few legal experts who can authoritatively refute the rumors, call out the illegal and misapplied policies, and provide help with immigration law.  One of these experts is attorney Greg Luce, who specializes in issues affecting intercountry adoptees. 

Luce spoke about his adoptees-only legal practice during an informational fundraising event at Arbeiter Brewing in Minneapolis, targeted to adoptees and their families and allies. His talk centered on legal remedies for intercountry adoptee adults who, for various reasons, do not have citizenship.

Kira Siegler, president of the co-sponsoring organization AK Connection, introduced the topic and its pertinence to Korean adoptees, particularly Twin Citians who have suffered through the recent Operation Metro Surge sweep of the Twin Cities area (and other locations in Minnesota). It has been a traumatizing time for Korean adoptees, she said. “Our lives have already been shaped by being moved from one country to another, as babies or children, and without having any say.”

With the recent ICE surge as a backdrop, Siegler said, “Today is really a day of naming that reality, understanding it, and knowing what we can do to protect each other, ourselves, and our communities. Resources, education and community are more important than ever before.”  The event was also intended to reassure intercountry adoptees “who feel invisible in conversations about immigration issues, although our community is also affected,” she added.

Trauma for Minnesotans

An estimated 3,700 people were arrested and detained during the Minnesota surge, but only 24 percent had any criminal record, and a fraction of those had any pending criminal offense, according to statistics released in March by the Deportation Data Project.  An analysis of available data by Sahan Journal showed that 70 Minnesota children were among the detainees, with some sent out of state for detention.

A (yet unknown) number of detainees were citizens, including demonstrators and observers arrested ostensibly for being in the way of (or in the vicinity of) ICE activities, or for being non-white and looking like an immigrant. Anecdotally, Korean Quarterly has learned that least three adult (citizen) intercountry adoptees were among those detained by ICE agents and later released.

The March event was co-sponsored by AK Connection, a non-profit organization by and about adult adopted Koreans in the Twin Cities area, and the national non-profit group Adoptees United. Proceeds benefitted Adoptees United, which covers certain costs related to citizenship-related expenses and provides informational outreach about adoptees’ rights and adoptee citizenship. Adoptees United also supports adoptee advocacy, related to both immigration issues and access to adoption records.

A law practice by and for adoptees

Luce started his practice, the Adoptee Rights Law Center, in 2016, and the non-profit Adoptees United in 2019.  He began the practice, he related, after having legal problems getting his own adoption records in Washington, DC, where he was adopted and brought up.  His initial idea was to specialize in adoptee records access and to do advocacy for adoptee rights.  He credits his wife with supporting the idea and supplying almost all of their income, which allows him do low cost or pro bono (free) work in his adoptee-centric practice and later, to establish and develop the Adoptees United organization.

He was surprised at first, he said, to find out that citizenship was such a big legal issue for the intercountry adoptees he met.  To meet that demand, Adoptees United developed the Citizenship Clinic, to provide structure, education, and representation for adoptees seeking legal help to obtain citizenship. Except for certain fees and costs of doing its business, the Citizenship Clinic provides legal assistance on a pro bono basis.

He said he wanted, as much as possible to “take the money out of the equation” so that no intercountry adoptee would have to delay getting citizenship because of cost. “The money raises expectations on both sides.  It interferes and also creates barriers for some people who maybe could afford it, but put it off.  People really just need to get it done,” he said. “I really think there should be no financial barrier at all.”

His belief in making legal help more accessible began when he worked for a legal aid organization on tenant rights and avoiding eviction; he quickly learned how crucial the timing can be.  He is also personally motivated to be of use to fellow adoptees, and “I really love what I do,” he said.

The organizational structure allows Luce to represent those who might otherwise risk the delay of obtaining citizenship. There is also a pay-it-forward tradition; clients who can afford it often later donate to Adoptees United to defray the costs for others, he said.

Particularly in the last year, Luce said, he has been overwhelmed with cases of adoptees whose citizenship was never finalized.  His caseload as of March 15 included 215 active and 195 closed cases, a lot for one attorney.  Recent stringent federal enforcement has has heightened concern about immigration status, Luce said, and the number of new clients reflects this.  

Becky Hanson, a Korean adoptee from St. Paul, told the group how the Citizenship Clinic, and Luce specifically, helped her obtain her own adoption records.  Hanson said she was nervous about  immigration enforcement back in 2024 even though she is a citizen and has her documentation.

She got all her paperwork together “because information is power and it is another way to add a layer of protection for yourself.”  She appreciated the monthly meetings Luce held in 2024 and 2025 because he provided both expertise and reassurance at an uncertain time. Luce also helped Hanson submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain her adoption records after she was unsuccessful in getting them on her own.

Luce briefed the audience of mostly Korean adoptees and their family members, friends and allies on why some adult intercountry adoptees are still not citizens, and some of the legal remedies to correct that.

 In recent years, he has taken on more adoptee immigration issues because of greater demand. At the same time, there was less demand for his records access services for domestic adoptees. Getting adoption record has become easier in most states, and more would-be clients can navigate obtaining records on their own, he said.

In part, he said, the impetus to expand citizenship-related legal help was motivated by a rule change by the the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to exempt adoptees from the $1,200 filing fee for the citizenship application. Adoptees can apply free now, and “we thought that if we remove the cost of legal, then we have removed the financial barrier to adoptees gaining citizenship.”

There were very few citizenship clients at first, but after November 4, 2024 (the day Trump was elected for a second term) “there were a skyrocketing number of clients very concerned about not having the right immigration documents, especially the citizenship certificate.” Fortunately, he said, at Adoptees United, they had also been anticipating a higher influx of non-citizen adoptees, and had put the Citizenship Clinic structure in place to screen potential clients and efficiently receive them if the applicants’ needs fit the services they can offer.

The role of states in supporting adoptee rights

There are still many states where adoptees have difficulty obtaining their own records. Luce, who is licensed to practice in Minnesota, has been advocating for a Minnesota bill to allow adoptees to get their own adoption records upon request, without a court order.

The Adoptees United website urges voter support for the bill. This bill died in committee during the recent legislative session, but will be reintroduced in the 2027-2028 session.  The bill, which Luce wrote, revises an existing law.  Adoptees often need to obtain their records, he said, and the requirement for a court order serves no purpose, and is slow.  In particular, non-citizen intercountry adoptees routinely need their adoption records to apply for permanent residency or citizenship, Luce explained.

Immigration law and adoptee numbers

Luce trained himself in immigration law, which he calls “one of the most complex law specialties,” realizing quickly that there were “many gaps in the law that leave intercountry adoptees without citizenship.”  

When he first started working in adoptee citizenship, Luce said, he researched how many U.S. intercountry adoptees there are, both for his own use in the law practice and to provide documentation to Adoptees United for future grants or lobbying. There was no single source of reliable data. He began with a paper database of U.S. entry visas for intercountry adoptees from 1972 to 1999. Later, he was able to add other data from before 1972 and after 1999, and up to 2023 for some countries.

South Korea, with (at least) 114,472  U.S. intercountry adoptees (by Luce’s estimate), sent the most adoptees to the U.S. in total. The other main sending countries include Russia, China, Russia, Guatemala, Ethiopia and Columbia.

Luce’s total comes to 503,596 intercountry adoptees admitted to the U.S. from 15 countries, which is “probably fewer than the real number, because it counts only those with entry visas.  A lot of adoptees also came with tourist visas,” he said.

Why some adoptees are not citizens

Luce detailed why some intercountry adoptees don’t have citizenship. The main reason is inadequate laws. Despite some efforts over the years, the accumulated web of laws and policies related to intercountry adoptee citizenship still does not ensure that all adoptees are citizens.  

An existing bill, when passed, would supersede current law and make all intercountry adoptees citizens. However, Congress has delayed for many years passing such a bill. This bill, formerly called the Adoptee Citizenship Act, now known as the Protect Adoptees and American Families (PAAF) Act, would provide automatic citizenship for all intercountry adoptees (in the future and retroactively), including those who have  been deported.

Luce pointed out that adoptee citizenship is a much simpler issue than the larger immigration reform agenda, but the debate around immigration has muddied it, causing the bill that would correct adoptee citizenship to be delayed many times. Intercountry adoptees are not just another immigrant group; they are a unique group of people who were children when they legally entered the U.S., whose new families intended them to be citizens, he explained.  A clearer, and less political categorization of adoptee citizenship would be to re-brand it more neutrally as “a family policy issue,” Luce added.

Luce also detailed the Child Citizenship Act (CCA), a confusing stopgap bill that became law in 2001. The law gave automatic citizenship to intercountry adoptees who were younger than 18 as of February 27, 2001. “That means Child Citizenship Act has given thousands of adoptees citizenship, but also denies thousands citizenship,” he explained.

The CCA leaves out an estimated 75,000 intercountry adoptees who were age 18 or older on February 27, 2001. “These people are vulnerable to not being a U.S. citizen and may just have a green card,” he said.  (Most intercountry adoptees who have been deported were permanent residency (green card) holders who had also been convicted of a felony crime.)   

In all his digging to find statistics on the demographics and numbers of intercountry adoptees, there is still no count of how many are not citizens. Organizations lobbying for adoptee citizenship have guessed at around 10 percent. 

A legal loophole

There is another “huge loophole” in the CCA, “that shows how problematic current immigration law is for intercountry adoptees, is that if you are not in custody of your U.S. citizen parents after February 27, 2001, you did not receive automatic citizenship,” Luce said. 

Luce related that one of his clients was removed from the home in the late ‘90s because of abuse by the adoptive parents. That client lost the chance for citizenship because of the CCA, he pointed out.  “These are very complex cases, and there are not many of them, but this is just to show that there are other reasons beyond age that are preventing people from becoming citizens,” he said.

Exceptions to the rule

Most clients of the Adoptee Rights Law Center are intercountry adoptees who have documentation of admission to the U.S., and proof of their legal adoption.  There are some exceptions. Luce explained a few unique citizenship situations he has encountered.

One adoptee was admitted on a humanitarian visa after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, but the adoptive parents never secured a green card through the Help Haiti Act. Another client arrived from Iran on a visitor visa (which expires after a few months), and was adopted in state court. One arrived on a tourist visa with a missionary family after being adopted in a South American country.  A Mexican adoptee was admitted to the U.S. when the family was “waved through” the car checkpoint between Mexico to the U.S. Luce said he also had one client for whom there were no records of the person ever being admitted into the U.S. and no record of legal adoption.

One memorable client, originally from Haiti, arrived in 1993 for medical treatment on a humanitarian visa, Luce recalled.  “She was later adopted by citizen parents, the parents did not take care of [her citizenship process], and therefore she does not have lawful status,” he said. “We got her temporary protective status and they [the Trump Administration] are in the process of terminating that now.”

“Even with lots of advice from me and other attorneys,” Luce said, “she is the main plaintiff in the case going before the Supreme Court to force Trump to maintain temporary protected status. The courage for her to go out there and do that is amazing.”

That plaintiff contends that the U.S. government should not be able to cancel temporary protective status, since that status is intended for groups who, by definition, have already demonstrated that it would be dangerous for them to return to their country of origin. The woman does not have any known family there and has not been back to Haiti since she was removed from the country at age three, he added.  

“They [theTrump administration] have her information and would be able to retaliate against her, obviously,” he said. The outcome of this case could have a significant ripple effect on Trump’s attempts to revoke temporary protected status of other immigrant groups.

Older intercountry adoptees are at the most risk

Since the CCA became law, intercountry adoptees who were adopted in the U.S.  (rather than in their country of origin by U.S. parents) become citizens automatically when their adoption is finalized.  Therefore, the most vulnerable intercountry adoptee group are those who were age 18 and older on February 26, 2001. Before that date, the citizenship filing was a separate court process, and if adoptive parents were ignorant of it, forgot about it, lost legal custody of their child, or became incapacitated or died during the adoptee’s childhood, their child may have become a legal adult without citizenship.

Another vulnerable group is any intercountry adoptee whose adoption was never finalized, since the CCA specifies that citizenship is conferred only on those whose adoptions were final before they were age 18. “These are very complex, because you can’t fix that – you can’t fix the fact that they were never adopted,” he remarked.

The specter of denaturalization

Trump and his DHS officials have talked publicly of “denaturalization” (stripping citizens of their citizenship) as a deportation tactic.  Luce said some intercountry adoptees have asked about it, and told him they are worried about being deported through denaturalization.  

While acknowledging the fear, Luce said he does not think that denaturalization is a risk for citizen adoptees at this time.  “I just don’t see the government using its resources to denaturalize someone whose parents naturalized them as a child,” he said.

“There’s got to be a pretty high [legal] bar to find fraud, so typically what they are looking for is people who had serious criminal convictions or proceedings they did not disclose in their citizenship petition. So, I am worried about how a broad effort could include intercountry adoptees who had to naturalize as an adult,” he said. “They could take a fine-tooth comb to everything.”

At the moment, Luce said, there has been no such action against any adoptee, and he believes denaturalization action against intercountry adoptees is “unlikely but we are keeping an eye on it.”

Luce said a larger law firm is working pro bono for him to research how any federal efforts to denaturalize immigrant citizens could impact intercountry adoptees. Once he obtains this information, Luce said, he will be able to better assess his individual clients’ risks. He also wants to post general information about the findings on the Adoptees United website “in plain English” he said, so that adoptees will have reliable information about it.

Reasons to chill out

The Trump Administration has been scrutinizing immigrants seeking citizenship, prompting Luce to be cautious about recommending citizenship to certain clients.

Children who are made citizens by their adoptive parents get a certificate of citizenship through their (citizen) adoptive parents.  However, “If you are an adult when you are naturalizing, you have to prove you have everything that you need in order to be a good citizen – that has become a very political issue as well under the new administration.”  Submitting the application opens up the applicant to extra scrutiny, something certain clients should avoid, he explained.

For example, he said, “I have clients who have a green card and could get citizenship, but they have voted in the past, or registered to vote, or filled out an employment form in the past saying that they are a U.S. citizen.”  All of these clients were filling out forms  in good faith, he pointed out, believing they were citizens. 

The law covers this, he explained, and makes exceptions for intercountry adoptees, or any person who has a good faith reason to believe they have been conferred automatic citizenship, such as through their parents. 

Despite this exception in the law, Luce is cautious about the risks, due to the current unpredictability of the immigration enforcement process. “Right now, I don’t want to push that at the naturalization step,” he said, “I know they are looking for people to put into removal proceedings. So, for some, I am just recommending that we renew the green card. And just bide our time.”

Fear management – all in a day’s work

Along with professional representation and expertise, Luce understands that part of his job is empathy.  “I don’t try to diminish the fear,” he said. “But part of my job is to handle that fear, try to reduce it, and help people feel more comfortable and safer. It is a chaotic and unpredictable time, and sometimes it feels like the administration does not even know what it is doing. I feel like we have to hunker down and get through the next two or three years, then hopefully things will start to return to normal.”

Adoptees United has a website at this link.  Specific information on proposed adoptee rights-related legislation is here, and information on the Citizenship Clinic’s free and low-cost legal services for adoptees is here.

The post A fighter in their corner appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

It is the first day of school, and it is hot.  

My hand is sticky as its palm presses closely to my mother’s. My body is slick with sweat, and the bottoms of my feet suction slightly to the soles of my flip-flops before they release, hitting the ground with a smack.  

I always walked to school. It was just across the street.  

Approaching the door, my mother tries to let go of my hand, but I keep my palm glued to hers. I am sad to leave her, but she insists I let go.  

I let go.  

Her skin is replaced by soft cotton and loose, silk thread.  

I am holding a bojagi, something to hold when my mother’s hands can’t reach me.  

I walk into school. It is the first day of kindergarten.  

Bojagis are Korean quilts. They are patchwork, often square, and it doesn’t really matter the fabrics you use to make one or the thread you use to stitch it.  

A bojagi is good fortune, it is warmth, it exists no matter social class, it is vibrant, it is strong, it has no right or wrong side, it is.  

Growing up, I always had to look twice before I sat down anywhere, because my mother used the arms of our chairs and couches, the plush surfaces of our pillows and blankets, as pincushions for her sewing needles.  

Loose threads clung to my clothing and scraps of fabric littered the floor.  

And I never minded, and you would never notice, because instead 

You’d see the beauty of my mother’s bojagis draped over furniture, lining the dining room table, stacked up in a disheveled pile next to the television.  

To grow up with my mother was to always feel as if you were amidst profound creation,  

And that in that process, you too were constantly being created.  

As an only child, I always loved to talk about myself.  

And so when adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would proudly say I want to sew.  

And I knew that, through this, I could, and, more importantly, I would, be carrying my mother and my Korean halmonis with me,  

Every fiber of their being,  

In my palm 

Every stitch 

An honor. 

But  

Eventually, people will ask you what you want to be, and when you respond earnestly that you want to do something they have prescribed as nothing more than a passion project, something happens where they start to say Well of course, but what do you want to do, really?  

And it gets harder to defend something you love,  

Or maybe not harder, but more embarrassing? Exhausting? How do you justify what you want to do to people that have already decided it is not something meaningful enough to be worth wanting? Anyway, this really means that there came a day where 

I rejected my sewing machine and my spools and my bobbins and  

I threw them into bins and slid them under my bed and  

I forgot about them 

And I decided to tell everyone I wanted to be a lawyer instead. 

But your mind is creative, my mother urged me.  

I did not listen.  

And so 

I started to unravel, and I didn’t even realize it.  

And I frayed, and frayed.  

But when you are lost, the threads of your ancestry, woven deeply within you, will tug at you, and they will call you back.  

Your veins are nothing but blue and red fibers that intertwine in your being to connect you to the women that you will never meet and never know. But they know you. They will guide you.  

I rejected and resisted and fought and tried to ignore 

But, ultimately  

One day,  

After an awful experience at the internship that I killed myself to get,  

My body covered in goosebumps from air conditioning when it should have been covered in sweat under the rays of the sun, 

After realizing that my plans for the future were falling apart because I felt so little satisfaction, so little joy,  

I found the threads of my body whispering to me, come back. 

What you need is often what you push into the corners or under your bed 

And leave in the dark to collect dust. 

6 years of forgetting 

An old machine.  

Blue, white, green thread.  

A handful of buttons.  

I thread a needle 

And get to work.  

The post Silk appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

As a composer with a background in Korean folk music, traditional Christian hymns, classical works, and many modern experimental techniques, Korean American composer Texu Kim has been building a following in Minnesota.

His arrangement of Hong Nan-Pa/Spring in My Hometown was performed at the Minnesota Orchestra’s Lunar New Year concert on February 26. Now he is working on a chamber piece in honor of Kyu-Young Kim (past artistic director and principal violinist of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra). The piece was commissioned by the Schubert Club.

The violinist will perform the new work with his son Orion Kim at the piano and his wife, Minnesota Orchestra cellist Pitnarry Shin, and violist Misha Amory. Their concert opens the Schubert Club’s 2026-27 Music in the Park series, on October 11 at St. Anthony Park United Church of Christ in St. Paul.

Texu Kim also collaborated with cellist Matt Haimovitz on a short, playful cello solo; Haimovitz recently joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota and continues to develop the Primavera Project, a series of 81 commissioned works from diverse North American communities, to which Kim has contributed.

Kim has trod an unusual path to his recent musical composition specialty, contributing works in an avant-garde strain of European art music. As a child in Korea, Kim said he attended daily evangelical church services with his mother and studied piano and violin. After a successful academic career in chemistry, an encounter with internationally-known Korean composer Unsuk Chin opened the door for him in developing a new career in experimental music.

Texu Kim was born in 1980 in Seoul.  His mother was a devoted church member and sang in daily services. He started piano lessons at age four, and almost immediately could pick out  hymn melodies from memory. He started violin lessons at age eight.  In his teens, he served as a church accompanist.

In an interview with Korean Quarterly in late March, Kim described his mother’s religion as Korean Protestantism mixed with shamanism – a combination that has influenced his compositions. His generation grew up admiring international opera star Sumi Jo and other successful Koreans in the classical music world, but he listened mostly to popular music and jazz.

His family was not wealthy, so Kim did not view a musical career as a practical choice. He was a successful student, especially in science, and won a spot in a science magnet school. In 1998, as a high school senior, he won a silver medal at the International Chemistry Olympiad in Melbourne, Australia.

Kim enrolled at Seoul National University (SNU) to study chemistry, but since he had taken accelerated studies in high school, he had time to continue pursuing music on the side.

He was still playing piano; his idol at that time was French jazz pianist and composer Claude Bolling, whose music he transcribed and played. For a time, he devoted himself to Christian worship, even studying to be a minister. He created albums in the “praise and worship” vein of the early 2000s.

He studied Spanish and considered going to Mexico, but his mother objected, so instead, he took an opportunity to live in Paris. To pay his way, he taught Korean teenagers living there who needed extra classes in order to pass the strenuous standardized exams required by the South Korean academic system. He connected with other expats there, became involved in the European music scene, and began to consider that he could “make an impact” as a musician, he said.

Back at SNU, he enrolled for a second undergraduate degree, this time in music composition. That is where he met composer Unsuk Chin. “I was very lucky that I got to meet her,” Kim said. “She’s a very strict teacher. But she gave me a few critical opportunities in career advancement.” He continued on for a master’s in music at SNU.

Kim considered going back to Europe for doctoral studies but decided instead to explore music in the U.S.  He landed a teaching assistant post at Indiana University and earned a Doctor of Music (DM) degree, a specialized degree focusing on composition, conducting, performance and music literature.

Kim has composed for solo instruments, symphony orchestras, keyboard, choruses, and traditional Korean ensembles. His uses a wide range of musical genres, from Korean folk songs to Western modern-era tonal chord progressions; he adds in some wildly experimental techniques played on traditional instruments. “I am an omnivore when it comes to styles,” Kim said.

This flexibility shows up in Kim’s variation on America the Polarized, which starts off like a classical piano sonata, wanders into jazz territory, and as a solo piano piece leaves a pleasantly melancholic echo. Overlaid with the strings, the eerie avant-garde dissonance sounds more like a war is brewing. The score includes a piano part that seems conventional and string parts full of unconventional sliding harmonics and hand slaps. Performers have recorded both versions, to very different effect. “I think that piece represents me fairly well,” Kim said. 

Composers live by commissions, and Kim, who is also an associate professor at San Diego State University in California, has drawn a steady stream of projects in recent years. He said the commissioner often requests melodic material or a stylistic tradition that may require him to do some research.

For Sumi Jo’s Libera album released in 2011, Kim arranged themes from George Bizet’s famous opera Carmen into an 11-minute solo backed by orchestra and chorus.

A commission from the PyeongChang Music Festival and School in 2017 resulted in Fanfare for PyeongChang, a spirited mashup of popular song rhythms, traditional Korean melodic material, and brass fanfares, woven together for a symphony orchestra. Kim said that when he draws on Korean folk music, he tends to use abstractions from it rather than quoting directly, in the manner of composer Béla Bartók, who integrated Eastern European folk melodies and structures into his classical compositions.

Kim’s most innovative works tend to be short, compressed, virtuosic, and challenging to the ear of anyone steeped in the tradition of Western classical music. He falls in with the avant-garde tradition that reaches back at least a century, to when Erik Satie and Claude Debussy were looking for pathways out of the maxed-out harmonic world of late Romantic compositions. The avant-garde tradition (or anti-tradition) has produced everything from an exercise in complete silence, by John Cage, to countless exercises in shattering noise involving experimental techniques and modified or electrified instruments.

Avant-garde composition has in turn produced networks of instrumentalists who use classical instruments – sometimes modified with new parts or electronics – to produce unconventional sounds based on unconventional notations. Many classical compositions use these techniques occasionally, but the avant-garde world makes entire works out of an expanded range of orchestral timbres.

Following Unsuk Chin’s lead, Kim found himself among these instrumentalists, mainly in Europe. “Our time requires a different type of sound,” he said. Word of his composing began to spread, and as it turned out, he said, “I was good at it.”

Kim explained that the typical avant-garde ensemble looks like a slimmed-down symphony orchestra, with only one or two representatives of each string instrument instead of the conventional sections. String techniques include complex harmonics (in which a player touches a string lightly to produce extremely high pitches), glissandi (a technique of fingers sliding up and down the fingerboard), bows or hands slapping strings or wood, and variations on pizzicato (plucking strings). Wind players might blow into their instruments, click their keys, or slide around on a pitch. Percussion is more varied and prominent than in earlier eras of composition.

Avant-garde music has also taken advantage of the Internet for production and distribution, sometimes mixing a variety of art forms and including live and even participatory music sessions in connection with a project. Matt Haimovitz, the Grammy-nominated cellist, commissioned a short work from Texu Kim to fit with his Primavera Project, a collection of 81 short compositions from different composers inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s famous painting titled Primavera, and further interpreted by Texas artist Charline Von Heyl’s painting Primavera 2020.  

Kim’s contribution, Beseeching, was written for four cellos; during the pandemic of 2020-21, Haimovitz recorded all four tracks by himself.  Beseeching is in Primavera Part II: The Rabbits. The Primavera Project was featured in the 59^th Venice Biennale Arte and also includes live theatrical events. The project will culminate in a box set of recordings while unfolding in many directions online.

So, what can we expect from the Schubert Club commission premiering next fall?

As of late March, Kim said, he had sketched out a piano quartet in three movements and had a preliminary plan for a fourth. “It was clear that this piece should be something about the family,” he said. He asked the family about their formation as the Shin-Kim Trio during the pandemic, and what they were working on then. A “theme song” for them was the slow movement of the Schumann piano quartet that will also be on the program in October.

Texu Kim said the first movement evokes feelings from the pandemic; the second movement is about the son going away to college and the parents missing him but also wishing the best for him.

Kim was working on the third movement out in California when he began to hear the news about the Operation Metro Surge immigration enforcement action going on in Minnesota. He said he called to check on the family, then shifted his composition approach to reflect on the trauma playing out in the Twin Cities.

He said the fourth movement will be “happier,” and that all four movements will be played attacca (a presentation technique of no breaks between movements).

Kim said that while he’s comfortable with avant-garde sounds, he remains rooted in his childhood experience of listening to hymns, pop and jazz. “Even though my personal taste is quite avant-garde,” he said, “there should be something for everyone to enjoy.”

Editor’s note: Below are some links to hear Kim’s compositions, and a link to news of the Shin-Kim piano quartet performance:

Texu Kim’s website, with extensive performance links: https://www.texukim.com/

America the Polarized  piano solo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHTQ2jUmCro

America the Polarized piano quartet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHLqOZUIfEY

Fanfare for PyeongChang https://www.texukim.com/works/fanfare-for-pyeongchang

Primavera Project (Matt Haimovitz) https://www.theprimaveraproject.com/

Sumi Jo, Gypsy Carmen  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1i4SDWDV6HA

Schubert Club Music in the Park series https://schubert.org/event/shin-kim-piano-trio-with-misha-amory-viola/

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The Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis is hosting artist Christine Sun Kim’s first exhibit reviewing her work-to-date in a variety of media and inviting communication about being deaf and Korean American.  The exhibition, Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, will run through August 30.

Kim communicates using what is at hand – with everything from small pencil drawings to gallery-size installations. The exhibition reaches out to exhibit-goers of many abilities with tools like a digital braille guide and an audio book with visual descriptions.  She describes her perspectives using musical notation, infographics, English writing or text, and visual depictions of American Sign Language.

With this artistically-generous and interesting approach, Kim invites the viewer to see the world from a different perspective.

Kim creates in multiple media, including billboards, murals, videos, performances and audio installations. According to a Smithsonian Museum biography, she has used her artwork and public platforms to depict the complexities of Deaf culture, how it relates to sound and language, and how it perceives the social hierarchies within communication systems. Her works often makes bold statements, but just as often, she uses humor to playfully encourage the viewer to enter her world and begin to understand.  

Kim, who grew up in Orange County, California, studied painting at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and later pursued a degree in sound and music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She worked as a museum guide and interpreter at the Whitney Museum (New York), where the first iteration of All Day All Night was exhibited.

In a video recording in which she explains a few of pieces as displayed at the Whitney, she goes into her own reflection on trauma, showing how she depicts it in an artwork. The ASL sign for “trauma” which is an index-finger scratching motion across the forehead, indicating a “scratch on the mind,” she said. It is sometimes accompanied by the other index finger doing a scratch on the chest, indicating a bigger trauma of both mind and heart.  It can also be depicted as a 10-finger scratch for the biggest trauma, she said.  One of the trauma pieces she explains, entitled Trauma, LOL is a drawing created with words forming a smiley face.  The words “trauma upon trauma” repeat and create the never-ending circle shape.

In her artist’s talk at the Walker, she shows other examples on slides of how she depicts the deaf experience in representational art, in musical, or, like the trauma example, by borrowing from the depth and creativity of the ASL language.  

Kim has performed and exhibited globally in international exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum in New York, in the Gwangju (South Korea) Biennales, and the Manchester (England) International Festival of original new art. She is a TED Senior Fellow, and a Disability Future Fellow through the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2020, she made history as the first deaf Asian American to sign the national anthem at the Super Bowl.

The Walker Museum’s opening day artist talk with Kim is at this link. An interesting walk-through of Kim’s exhibit as it was staged at the Whitney Museum of Art is on Youtube at this link.

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The Twin Cities Asian Fair, one of the largest and most vibrant cultural festivals in the region, returns to the Hilde Performance Center in Plymouth on Saturday, May 30, 2026, bringing together thousands for a full day of food, performances, and cultural celebration.

Event highlights include: A Cultural Parade, showcasing traditional attire and community pride; live performances on an outdoor stage throughout the day; a K-pop Dance Experiences, with audience participation invited; the Watermelon Eating Contest (a crowd favorite); authentic Asian cuisine from a variety of food vendors, and many family-friendly activities and games for all ages.

Now in its fourth year, more than 12,000 attendees are expected. The event will feature representation by more than 80 organizations and small businesses and representing 20-plus Asian cultures. The fair has quickly become a cornerstone event in Minnesota’s West Metro area.

The festival will be held from 11 a.m. through 7 p.m., with a special evening extension, the AF Music Night from 7 to 9 p.m. featuring live entertainment and food vendors staying open late.

In addition to the festivities, the Asian Fair continues its commitment to the next generation through the Asian Fair Scholarship Program, recognizing local high school students who demonstrate leadership, service, and dedication to the community.

“The Asian Fair is more than just a festival — it’s a celebration of belonging,” said Chen Zhou, organizer of the Twin Cities Asian Fair. “We are proud to create a space where cultures come together, stories are shared, and the community grows stronger each year.”

The event is free and open to the public. Attendees are encouraged to bring family and friends to experience a day filled with culture, connection, and celebration.

For more information, exhibitor opportunities, or sponsorship inquiries, please visit: https://tcasianfair.org/

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How a holy trinity of Kim the father, his son Jong Il Kim, and the spirit of Kimilsungism became the anchor of a personality cult

(Knopf/Doubleday Publishing Group, New York, 2026, ISBN #978-1-5247-3349-0)

Review by John Feffer (Spring 2026)

In the summer of 1998, I traveled to the northeast region of China to visit a unique educational institution. The Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST), founded six years before, was the first private and the first foreign university to emerge under Chinese communism. Located in a region populated by many Korean-Chinese, YUST trained the children of the elite in computers, engineering, and architecture, among other specialties. It was also the forerunner of an affiliate that opened in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang a few years later.

YUST was also remarkable because it was established by evangelical Christians from the U.S., something the Chinese government tolerated in exchange for high-quality vocational training. The staff I talked with, all Korean Americans, were happy enough to be working in China, where they were careful to conceal their religious sympathies except in one-on-one interactions with the students. But the hope of most of the faculty, I was told confidentially, was to work in North Korea. Although it was exciting to proselytize covertly in China, the teachers had their hopes pinned on doing God’s work among North Koreans.

Those teachers were oriented toward the mecca of North Korea in part because that region of the world had once witnessed one of the most extraordinary upsurges in conversion to Christianity in the modern era. That upsurge had been suppressed during the period of Japanese rule in the first half of the 20th century before being eliminated altogether in 1945 when communist North Korea began to actively suppress all official religions. The teachers were eager to restore Christianity to its former home in Korea.

At the time, I knew that Pyongyang had once been the “Jerusalem of the East,” that the country’s founder Il Sung Kim had a Christian background, and that some elements of Kim’s ideology drew on religious sources. This was common knowledge among North Korea watchers.

But it was only after reading Jonathan Cheng’s voluminous new account, Korean Messiah, that I can now connect all the dots between the rapid spread of Christianity in 19th-century Korea and the rapid consolidation of Il Sung Kim’s rule in the latter half of the 20th-century.

Journalists rarely have the luxury of digging deep into a topic and then developing an argument across multiple articles. As a former Korea bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, Cheng relishes this opportunity to dig very deeply into the Christian history of Korea and then develop the connections between Kim and the religion that birthed him across nearly 550 pages (excluding footnotes). It’s not really until more than 200 pages in that young Il Sung Kim even enters the picture. At times, I would have preferred a more journalistic condensation of the subject. But overall, Cheng’s deep dive is an excellent addition to the literature on North Korea.

In that first pre-Kim part of the book, Cheng explores the way missionaries brought Christianity to Korea, braving inauspicious conditions and even, in some cases, courting martyrdom. It was a tumultuous time for Korea, which found itself caught up in the jockeying for geopolitical power among Russia, Japan, and China. Christianity spread quickly in part because it provided a hopeful vision of the meek inheriting the earth. Koreans weren’t exactly meek, but they were collectively weak in the face of their neighboring empires. Many Koreans also found a fighting spirit in Christianity — that of Jesus angrily sweeping the moneychangers out of the temple — which translated into a revolutionary determination in the early 1900s to expel the Japanese occupiers. Several assassins of Japanese officials, for instance, were Christian converts.

Christianity, as Cheng points out, also flourished because it offered a path to modernity, a way around the strict hierarchies of Korean culture that kept women locked away at home and certain castes locked away in poverty. Christian women began to leave their houses and, contrary to centuries of tradition, to eat dinner with their families. The poor also found advocates among the ministers. “When, during one church service in 1895, the noblemen threatened to leave the church unless the butchers were expelled,” Cheng writes.  “Rev. Moore let them walk, leading the butchers and the other remaining congregants in a singing of ‘Jesus Loves Me, This I know.’”

In the latter part of the 19th century, missionaries transformed the face of northern Korea. Pyongyang had previously been notorious for its saloons and brothels. A door-to-door campaign in 1905 to convert the city’s residents discovered that 40 percent were already Christians. By that point, the houses of ill repute had largely vanished.

When the Japanese occupation authority tried to impose Shintoism on the population, many Christians fled to neighboring Manchuria in northeast China so that they could continue practicing their religion. Many decades later, some of the descendants of those fleeing Christians would send their children to study at YUST.  

The young Il Sung Kim was part of that exodus, and it was in Manchuria where his Christian consciousness and revolutionary mindset developed in tandem. Later, when he returned to North Korea with the victorious Russian army in 1945, Kim would virtually erase his Christian upbringing and wildly exaggerate his revolutionary credentials. As the new Kim-led regime closed churches and expropriated religious properties, Christians fled in droves to the South. Between 1945 and 1950, Cheng reports, a million Christians moved south. In 1950 alone, those religious refugees were responsible for 90 percent of the 2,000 new churches established in South Korea.

Despite Kim’s official anti-Christian doctrine, Cheng points out that revolution and religion continued to intermingle in Kim’s thinking. The particular version of communism that Il Sung Kim would impose on North Korea drew on Christian dogma. A holy trinity of Kim the father, his son Jong Il Kim, and the spirit of Kimilsungism became the anchor of a personality cult. The Ten Commandments became the “Ten Principles of the Monolithic Ideology.” Kim performed miracles, he offered narratives of redemption for the Korean people, and he even displaced Marxism-Leninism with his own Chuch’e (sometimes spelled Juche) ideology of self-reliance. Major edifices devoted to the new state replaced what had been church complexes, with the Kim Il Sung Library rising up where the main Methodist church had been and the huge statue of Kim erected where the Central Presbyterian Church once stood.

Though Cheng doesn’t mention it, Kim’s approach was very similar to the way Christianity took root in Europe, with the cult of Mary replacing earlier sects devoted to female deities, and with churches built on the same sites as pre-Christian sites of worship. The New Testament drew heavily on the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament can be glimpsed remnants of earlier religions (for instance, in all the names of Yahweh).

Perhaps the most interesting part of Cheng’s book, however, comes later in the elder Kim’s life, when he experiences an apparent change of heart about the Christianity that he ruthlessly suppressed on taking power. In the memoirs he wrote in his final decades, Kim was “not merely acknowledging his family’s ties with the Christian faith but describing, in anecdote after anecdote, for hundreds of pages, his deep immersion in the church and his gratitude to the Christians in his life — tales told with an unmistakable sense of wistfulness,” Cheng writes. At the same time, Kim was meeting with various representatives of the Christian community, authorizing the construction of churches to satisfy outside religious institutions, and even mending fences with previous religious adversaries like the deeply anti-communist Rev. Moon of the Unification Church.

Pyongyang engaged with religious figures even further on the fringes. In Guyana, for instance, cult leader Jim Jones established a compound for his followers called Jonestown where he “read aloud from North Korean publications extolling the Great Leader, screened propaganda films from Pyongyang for his followers and even invited North Korean agents to preach the virtues of Kimilsungism.”

Jonestown, of course, self-destructed. The Kim dynasty, meanwhile, lives on in North Korea, in part because the state continues to exercise tyrannical control over the population. Kim also managed, through his skillful and syncretic adaptation of Christianity, to instill in North Koreans that his regime was also a belief system. “More than half of North Koreans in a 2011 survey of more than 100 North Koreans resettled in the South said they still feel pride in Chuch’e ideology and supported Kim family rule,” Cheng points out.

Although anecdotal evidence suggests that substantially fewer North Koreans — inside or outside the country — feel the same way about Kim’s grandson, Jong Un Kim, the endurance of the Kim dynasty across three generations cannot be attributed solely to brute force. Cheng’s book is an indispensable guide to understanding the methods by which the North Korean regime captured at least some of the hearts and minds of the residents of what had once been one of the most rapidly Christianized parts of the world.

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April 16, 2014, was the day that changed everything for everyone in South Korea.

On that day, I was 10 years old and was practicing taekwondo with my peers, wearing a big, loose uniform that barely fit me. Through the noise of kids’ belts flapping in the air and the sound of their feet brushing against the mat, I heard something like a news report, and turned around to see my taekwondo master watching a live news broadcast.

On the phone that he held tightly was a ship, painted blue and white, partly submerged into the cold, blue ocean as helicopters and police boats maneuvered around it. On the side of the ferry was its name, “Sewol.”

At first, I thought he was watching a movie. “Guys, this ship just sank with hundreds of people on board.” said my taekwondo master in a high-pitched tone. Later that day, I came home exhausted from practice.

That tragic scene did not live in my head for more than five minutes after seeing it on TV. But later, as I realized its significance, I felt the opposite, like that image would forever live in my consciousness.

My mother, while on the phone talking to her friend about the incident the same day, reminded me of what I had seen, but not quite believed. “Did you hear what happened? Kids are dead. They drowned.” she said.

The revelations that followed in the news were shocking. Students from Danwon High School in Ansan, 18-year-olds in their second year of high school, were on their school field trip from Incheon to Jeju Island. The trip that was meant to become an unforgettable memory became a tragic last day for many, and a life-altering trauma for the survivors and their families.

On top of the initial disaster of the ship, which capsized in deep, turbulent water, the poorly-executed rescue attempt by the crew, the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the government exacerbated the tragedy.

According to Foreign Policy in Focus, the Coast Guard on scene failed to rescue the passengers and prioritized rescuing the Sewol crew, who told the students to stay on board, and most did so as the ship sank. Sewol’s captain, who abandoned his passengers, later got a life sentence for murder.

According to the April 16th Coalition, established to commemorate the victims, 304 of the 476 passengers died or were missing, and only 75 of the 325 students on board survived the accident. The survivors still carry the guilt and trauma today.

Grieving families and a lack of humanity

Months after the tragedy, the families of the passengers started to live in makeshift tents at Gwanghwamun Square, in a kind of long-term ongoing demonstration to demand that the government launch a more in-depth investigation into the accident.

There was a political backlash to the occupation and other actions by survivors and victims’ families, from right-wing reactionaries who claimed that the majority of the families were left-leaning. The reactionaries organized their own protests, including one where they ate fried chicken and pizza in front of the grieving families who were on a hunger strike, apathetically saying, “Enough is enough.”

The government’s botched response

The government’s response prompted fury from the families of the victims and survivors of the accident. There was evidence showing that the government evaded its responsibility for crisis management and was slow to respond to the Sewol’s sinking. According to Foreign Policy in Focus, there was no command structure among the government units responding to the emergency, which meant that the responders squandered a golden window of time during which passengers could have been rescued.

On the day of the accident, President Geun-hye Park disappeared for seven hours. According to a Hankyoreh report, the president’s office falsified legal documents with the intent to avoid the blame for the failed rescue. There were accusations that the President’s office was ultimately responsible for the rescue response and that it should have acted as “the control tower” following the accident.  Later court hearings ruled that the government could not be held accountable for its inadequate response to the accident, although the government was ordered to financially compensate the survivors and victims’ families.

The reports submitted to President Park during the seven hours of her absence were sealed for a decade. This April, the Korean court decided to disclose the records, coincidentally ahead of the 12th anniversary of the Sewol disaster.

April 16th Coalition reported on its website that, less than a month into the incident, that the Defense Security Command of South Korea (DSC) – which was decommissioned in 2018 – was ordered to gather personal information of the families, including copies of their bankbooks, photos of their government-issued IDs (referred to as a resident registration card), and their social media activities.  Directed by the government, the DSC tried to divert the blame away from President Park’s response to the incident.

In December 2023, Yonhap News reported that two former high-ranking DSC officials were prosecuted and sentenced to two years in prison for abusing their authority by illegally spying on the families.

Journalism’s big fail

On top of the government’s misdeeds, journalism in South Korea failed its readers because of its immoral and unethical behavior related to the competitive information-gathering for the Sewol story.  Journalists’ long list of mistakes included taking pictures of the grieving families up close without their consent, and reportedly going through students’ belongings at the school after getting into the building. 

According to a Korea Herald report, mainstream broadcasters relayed the government’s inconsistent claims about the accident without fact-checking them. The misinformation caused further confusion about the disaster, particularly during the days the botched rescue attempt was ongoing.

For example, at the time of the accident, a broadcasters for the Korean news network MBC, MBN and YTN  initially reported “all passengers and students are safe” without verifying it, after getting a comment to that effect from an apparently uninformed individual at school, as Hankyoreh reported in a later analysis.

Along with YTN, MBC reported with some charts and graphs a purported estimate of how much insurance money the families would get if the (then-missing) passengers were declared dead. In a 2014 interview with the Korea Herald, Chong-ryul Park, then-president of the Journalists Association of Korea and a veteran reporter, questioned the actions of fellow journalists.

“We need to ask ourselves whether that kind of distorted yellow journalism and an extreme competition for breaking news were really necessary at that time when the entire nation was holding on to a faint hope for a miracle.” Park told the Korea Herald.

The Journalists Association of Korea reported that a third-year high school student from Danwon High School wrote a letter to the Korean reporters that was read aloud at a press conference. The letter said that, out of disappointment and frustration at the unethical actions of journalists during and after the Sewol tragedy, she was giving up on her dream of becoming a reporter.

“In fact, my dream for the future has changed this year. I originally wanted to become a journalist like all of you.” the student wrote. “However, the biggest reason my dream changed is that you abandoned the basic conscience and convictions that journalists should uphold as human beings, and instead brought great disappointment and anger to the bereaved families and families of the missing — people already suffering enough — as well as to the entire nation anxiously waiting.”

12 years later

Twelve years have passed since I saw the news broadcast about the Sewol. Much has changed in my life. I left South Korea, came to Canada, and went to journalism school. I am writing this article as the 12th anniversary of Sewol is just days away.

Although researching a big story like Sewol was challenging, other recent reporting I did, such as the Tumbler Ridge shooting in British Columbia, gave me the courage to write about this topic, and the knowledge that it is worth covering, since there are still many families grieving for their lost loved ones more than a decade after the Sewol disaster. 

At one point, I also disliked reporters and, like the Danwon High School student who wrote the letter, it was due to the reporting of misinformation and other unethical behavior linked to the Sewol reporting. I did not have much interest, let alone a passion, to become one.

However, I had an encounter with a well-known journalist that changed my mind. He became known for his investigation of the sinking of Sewol. His work on the story started as soon as the accident happened. But he stayed with it. Even years after the incident, he continued to dig deeper into the political and social causes of the tragedy.

Inspired by his efforts to uncover and report the truth, I was introduced to him through a teacher. A day after I called him on the phone, we met at a small cafe in the Gyeonggi province countryside. In our conversations, he told me his view of the truth – that there is always a subjective element.  “Truth is what lies beyond the facts. Every report will have the reporter’s perspective incorporated into it.”

In a text message he sent me later on, he gave me some advice that I carry in my heart as I continue to pursue journalism as a career: “Be discerning how you consume the news. If you follow the facts, that will lead you to the truth. Just because a news outlet says something does not mean it delivers the absolute truth.”

What now moving forward?

Marking 12 years since the tragedy that took the lives of the students, teachers, and other passengers, the city center of Seoul was recently decorated with waves of yellow flags, ribbons, and people wearing yellow.

On April 11, media outlets in Korea reported that the April 16th Coalition hosted a public rally near Seoul City Hall to highlight the importance of public safety. There were exhibitions on the Sewol and some craft sessions to make the looped yellow ribbon symbol that came to represent the nation’s hope for justice for the families of victims and survivors.

Members of the Itaewon Families Association, founded after the deadly (October 2022) stampede in Seoul, and the families of the (December 2024) Muan plane crash victims also gathered to show their sorrow and stand in solidarity with the April 16^th Coalition and in support of better response by the government agencies to crises and disasters. 

During the rally, Soon-Gil Kim, a member of the 4.16 Families Association, who lost her daughter in the Sewol disaster, walked up to the podium to express her gratitude to the demonstrators.  “What might have been preserved as an ordinary memory became the children’s final moments for us Sewol ferry families — a scene we can never go back to,” she said, referring to the videos many of the students took of fireworks that happened in the hours just before the ship sank. 

“After sending their children away, the faces of the mothers and fathers left behind have been helplessly marked by the passage of time, yet our children’s time remains at the radiant age of 18,” Kim said.

Ahead of April 16,  which was designated a national day of safety in Korea, President Jae Myeong Lee announced that it will create a new national committee to oversee and create safety policies, the Korea Times reported.

Across the Pacific Ocean, the trail of solidarity continues. A Vancouver-based Facebook group called “Vancouverites Who Remember Sewol” posted on Facebook that a documentary film made by a father who lost his daughter during Sewol will be screened at three venues in Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto from April 18 to 25. 

In its wake, lessons learned

Beyond the tragic sacrifice of young lives, there are other reasons why the Sewol tragedy marks a turning point in Korean history.  Politically, it was a wake-up call. The horrific failure of the Park administration and associated agencies involved in the disorganized and inept rescue attempt, and the delayed response to the affected families and the public, was an alarm bell in the minds of  South Korean people.

Park was ousted from office in 2017, three years after the accident, through an impeachment by the Constitutional Court. She was also successfully prosecuted for abuse of power and fraud. Her ouster was fueled by a people’s movement, and the Sewol mishandling was the beginning of Park’s political demise.

The Sewol tragedy was also a time that unified South Koreans in a collective moral reflection, a kind of national “never again” moment. The fact that so many joyful students were wiped out in one ferry accident kindled a fire in South Korean hearts to prioritize transportation safety. Designating the day of the Sewol tragedy as a national day of safety in Korea speaks to this sentiment.

After journalists were called out for their lack of compassion and basic human decency, journalism in South Korea also got a reset to prevent itself from making the same mistakes in the future. The Journalists Association of Korea drafted rules for reporting on disasters like Sewol, advising the use of compassion and refraining from controversial reportage.

It also emphasized the importance of reporting on verifiable facts with proper attribution to its sources to ensure the public’s right to be properly informed and prevent the spread of misinformation during crises. The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper ran a full-page apology for its “incorrect, misleading, and sometimes provocative coverage” of the Sewol disaster, and other media sources followed suit, according to a May 2014 Wall Street Journal report.

Even with all this strenuous effort, after 12 years, time has not erased the trauma of that day. Among South Koreans, these memories still stir up remorse and sorrow, and affect the physical health of the bereaved families. On the website of the April 16th Foundation, there is a headline in a big yellow Korean font. It reads: 

“12th Spring. The memories never fade away.”

The post 12 years after Sewol appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

I met Gyeong-seon Kim about a decade ago. It was dark. I was sleeping like a tramp just outside the entrance to his village of Daegang-myeon, deep in Jeollabuk-do, with a big plastic bottle of makgeolli by my side. He found me there. He was older than me, with surprisingly good English.

The next morning, we met again and went for a long, brutal hike along the ridge behind his house. For a portly man, he moved well. Afterward, we got properly slammed in a local sikdang (restaurant).

We kept in touch over the years. He’s got a good sense of humor, but he’s also what Koreans call a geon-dae, (spelled 꼰대 , a word for someone who clings to old ideas). In his case, that’s reinforced by a fairly right-wing political outlook, which makes him something of an oddity in a region dominated by left-leaning politics. Back when he was a civil servant, he aligned himself with the Minjudang Democratic Party. The irony isn’t lost on him, or on me.

Like a lot of married men I’ve met, there’s a quiet heaviness to him. Perhaps it is retirement, routine, a sense of things narrowing. Men need purpose more than stability. We will grind ourselves down chasing it if we have to.

He uses the word “nonsense” a lot. It is one of his favorites, deployed to dismiss an idea or cut through bullshit. There are plenty of ways to say that in English. So today, I asked him what the best Korean equivalent was. He thought for a moment, then gave me one: ut-gyeo (spelled 웃겨). After our day together, I got home and found out that it doesn’t literally mean “nonsense.” But when used well it certainly can. Depending on tone, ut-gyeo can mean: “That’s ridiculous,” “What a joke,” “Yeah, right,” “Don’t make me laugh.”

He used to be a vice-mayor in a district of Jeollabuk-do, a serious position. When he speaks to locals, slipping into his thick Jeolla dialect, people open up to him almost instantly. Years ago, I realized how useful that could be. So, I started taking him on missions.

We would walk into rural government offices and ask for permission to let 20 high school students pitch tents in a war memorial park. No problem. We would talk our way into booking accommodation for 40 students and teachers, bypassing strict online systems. Also, no problem. Once, he joined me and an American client for a long haul on the Baekdu-daegan mountain trail ~ over Amak Fortress and down to Bokseongijae. I gotta admit, that one totally fucked him, but he did it.

We’ve done a lot together. Enough that the details blur.

Coming back to today, we hiked up Ongseongsan, a quiet, forgotten peak tucked away in Hwasun-gun. I made a point of using this new word ut-geo whenever I could, just to test it out. Like a lot of Korean words, it is when you use it and how you say it that makes it sparkle.

After the hike, he wanted soju. I told him we had one more stop. We drove to a campsite in Nochi where I was planning to bring a group the next week. I know the owners, a good couple. As we were about to leave, they handed me a box of local goro-swae (spelled 고로쇠) a maple tree sap. Then Kim went to work, chatting, and within minutes he had them hooked, rolling through a friendly conversation in the local dialect, drawing them in. Next thing, we’re sitting at a table with homemade fruit liquor in front of us. They bring out a fresh bottle for him. I buy one myself, partly out of politeness, partly out of embarrassment at the generosity. Then a handmade pizza appears.

He’s in his element, holding court, smiling, connecting. A good-hearted geon-dae, doing what he does best. Koreans love funny old bastards in a way.

We leave with two bottles of liquor and head to Baekasan Garden for kimchi-jigae (kimchi stew) where he proceeds to charm the Vietnamese waitress without even trying.

I drive him back to his small haeng jung sa (행정사, or government administrative attorney) office in Gokseong. He likes it there. It’s away from home, a place of his own. By now he’s pleasantly drunk. He tells me he will sleep in the back of his van, which is fitted out just for that purpose. Another quiet escape.

As I pull away, I roll down the window and make a slow U-turn into the shadowed side of the street. He is standing outside his little office, lit by the low spring sun. Calm. Slightly glowing.

I point at him and shout: “Nam-Buk Tongil!” It means “North and South Unite!”

He barely moves. Just looks at me, a smirk forming, and fires back:

“Ut-gyeo ”

Perfect usage.

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