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/

The post “Avante garde” in music and life appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

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.

The post Deafness heard, seen, and understood appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

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/

The post Twin Cities Asian Fair to be held May 30 appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

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)

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.

The post Christian dogma meets Kimilsungism appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

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.

The post Say “nonsense” like you mean it appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

I don’t know if it’s the numbing lies and inconsistencies of the Trump administration, still feeling the raw trauma after Operation Metro Surge, or learning more over time about the Truth and Reconciliation (TRC) investigation of Korean adoptee records in South Korea. But I feel more than ever, the annoyance of small acts of injustice that are temporary, and also the crushing load of global injustices that seem to have no remedies.

There was one tiny bright spot recently.

One woman, Alison Hoagland, is named as the plaintiff in a lawsuit against Donald Trump, along with a whole lot of federal departments including the National Park Service.  She is on the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a non-profit organization that guides decisions on changes to national landmark buildings.

The building in question is, of course, the White House. A judge issued a preliminary injunction on March 31 ordering construction to stop on the new White House ballroom, a Trump pet project. Carol Quillen, the president of the National Trust, issued a statement in response to the injunction, stating “This is a win for the American people on a project that forever impacts one of the most beloved and iconic places in our nation.”

At first, I thought, “Well, that’s good at least.”  My second thought was “Is it, though?”

The National Trust guides the conservation of buildings that are historic and irreplaceable.  The White House East Wing was demolished way back in October, 2025. Apparently, nobody could stop it.  Trump ignored all the laws and policies concerning historic structures, and took a wrecking ball to it. What can the National Trust do at this point?  What is the win?

The original colonnades (covered walkways) to the east and west wings were designed in 1805 by the architect who designed the Capitol and other famous Washington, D.C. buildings. There is (or was) a classical symmetry to both identical wings. The East Wing building was designed in 1902, and redesigned in the ‘40s under Franklin Roosevelt to include an underground bunker.  The East Wing demolition also destroyed the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden.

After the demolition began, many news organizations put together nostalgic photo collections of historical events that happened in the East Wing. There are many moments.

The footprint of the new building will be three times that of the White House. The finished ballroom could make the White House look like a fancy middle school that needed a new wing for the gym.

The preliminary injunction is not useless.  It gives the granting authorities some time to figure out whether the new ballroom building can be modified in size or style or both, to match with the rest of the historical building. Or, perhaps, whether it should not be built at all. 

However, is hardly “a win” for the American people.  It is undoubtedly a tragic loss, from a historical perspective.

So much has been happening, from October 2025 to the present, that the fiasco of the illegal East Wing demolition has been barely a blip on the radar of the pointless waste of money, time and human capital visited on our country by the Trump administration.

Personally, I only had a few passing thoughts about the stupidity of it, until reading the slightly good news about the temporary injunction today.

It stands out though – if only as symbolic of how the Trump administration operates. It’s a representation of the general overall disaster that we can barely imagine.  It is physical proof of the vacuum – or hole in the ground – where the role of Congress used to be.

The injunction shows us that the judiciary is at least still operating.  But it has a small part in preventing lawless action; the court system’s job mainly kicks into gear after the fact. 

The East Wing demolition is particularly insulting because of its permanence.  No court case can undo it. The ugly scar on the landscape is an example of how attempts at reparations, even sincere ones, usually fail.

Another recent event was a lawsuit by six Twin Citians, all people of color, who charged that household members were arrested and detained after illegal warrantless home searches by ICE. It’s a pleading of  “can’t someone at least enforce the existing laws?”  ICE broke down the front door of one couple’s house with a battering ram and took away the man in front of his school-age daughter and niece. Two of the men who were detained after the warrantless search were sent to detention centers. One of them, detained for 17 days, was denied access to his medication.

None of the plaintiffs were wanted for a crime. An administrative warrant was used as a pretense for entering the homes by force.

Tiny law lesson – In case you missed it, or like me, have trouble remember the normal days any more – in the scenario of normal police procedures under normal laws, an administrative warrant is legally insufficient for police to enter a home to search for a person without the resident’s permission. Only a judge can sign off on a judicial warrant, and the law enforcement branch requesting the search has to show a cause for the home search.

Like the East Wing example – except more serious –  this suit may accomplish something, but not a lot.  It would uphold current law and potentially stop DHS from violating people’s Fourth Amendment (protection from illegal search and seizure) rights in the future.  But it will not restore justice to those who were held at gunpoint, kidnapped by masked thugs, thrown into vans, subjected to the uncertainty and trauma of detention, missed work, were denied their medicine, etc.   

But will it elicit a public heartfelt apology and anything like reparations from the federal government for the disruption, terror, stress and pain?  Again, probably not. Governments generally do not apologize. Even when they do, they do it so poorly.

Case in point, back in South Korea, an official government investigation commission, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), started its third consecutive investigation of fraud and mismanagement of Korean adoptees’ adoption records; this phase could be going on for two or three years.

In a public demonstration in Seoul on February 26, including a colorful display of signs and flags from many nations, Korean adoptees brought 311 voluntarily-submitted files to the TRC on the first day of its third investigation.

This official inquiry into human rights violations by the government began with a group of Korean adoptees from Denmark, the Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG), whose human rights complaint against the South Korean government was then referred to the TRC in 2022. Adoptees from other countries also submitted their files to the TRC for investigation. The TRC’s (second) investigation ended with a published report in March 2025, concluding that there is enough proof of fraud to be considered a human rights crime under South Korean law.

A large group of adoptees have been harmed by struggling with fraudulent adoption records that make it difficult or impossible to find birth family. There is evidence that some adoptees were placed for adoption without permission of their families. There are allegations of human trafficking, particularly during the era of speeded-up adoption processing in the 1970s and ‘80s.

It is unlikely that this reality can be remedied in a way that can repair the essential problem, but Korean adoptee leaders have some ideas for policies that would approach reparations.  In a letter to the new president, the U.S. Korean Rights Group (USKRG), one of the newer, country-specific groups formed to represent Americans in this ongoing dialogue, made various suggestions on specific reparations that would help Korean adoptees. So far, the letter has not been formally answered.

Many of the suggestions relate to records access, for example, giving Korean adoptees free access to their records through South Korea’s National Archives portal database. Another request was to expand access to adoptee records to other birth family members of the adoptee (siblings, cousins, and birth descendants of adoptees) instead of limiting searching to the birth parents and birth child. A related suggestion was to promote the DNA database with a national campaign so that Korean parents who once placed a child for adoption would be encouraged to register, and could find their adult child through a DNA match.

Other suggestions have to do with staffing of a government office to help Korean adoptees with their birth searches. One of the logistical problems right now is the lack of staffing to handle the inquiries of adoptees asking to access their own records (last count was that six staff have been assigned to bring order to the records, and assist adoptee applicants. There are 170,000 or more records). The USKRG asked specifically about “services such as translation, transportation guidance within Korea, procedural assistance, and explanation of information contained in adoption records.”  They also asked about language help, that all staff should be English speakers and that there also be some workers who are fluent in French and German.

Columnist Anders Riel Mueller, in his opinion piece Adoption as banishment, was one of 56 adoptees whose cases were reviewed and found to be human rights violations in the 2025 TRC report.  The issues of the last TRC investigation, Mueller said, makes him cautious about the capacity of the TRC to deliver meaningful reconciliation to Korean adoptees. 

During that almost three-year period of investigation, rife with prevarications and delays by the TRC, which was under the now-indicted and convicted former president Yoon-Seok Yeol, Mueller got an up-close and personal look at the inadequacy of any law-based organization to deliver something like a reparation.

Korean adoptees have tried various legal paths – lawsuits, and financial compensation claims – in their quest to create something fair, Mueller writes. “We are still waiting for the decisions on these claims. This uncertainty around the consequences of the TRC decision shows the limitations of its recommendations,” he pointed out.

Laws and policies versus justice and reconciliation – they are just two different concepts although they are often passed off as the same.

We can all feel what Mueller writes so incisively and says out loud, that “legal action or financial compensation do not equal justice.”  We all know this, but we cannot resist hoping for the opposite.  It’s kind of like hoping for the East Wing to reappear.

We cannot “restore the years lost to disorientation, cultural isolation and the expenditure of labor spent on reconstructing a history that the state itself worked to erase. They are tiny bandages on thousands of gaping wounds,” Mueller wrote. 

All our legalistic and policy-tweaking methods can only do some things – just as a court order to stop the new Capitol ballroom can only bring attention to it, and possibly prevent future damage to the White House or other national historic buildings – but it can’t bring back the East Wing.

There will just have to be a gaping wound in the ground for awhile, and everyone at the White House will have to look at it.  But that’s OK.

Even though real justice often seems to be a thing of our imaginations, or something sort of real, but just out of reach, we can find a lot of like-minded people thinking the same thoughts, like the eight million or more folks who went one of more than 3,000 locations for the third No Kings demonstration last week, as writer Brook Mallak pointed out in her personal essay The quiet strength of community.

I felt it too. Immersed in that community, practically squished flat against the Transportation Building at the Capitol Mall on March 28, there was a roar beginning to build from the bottom up that assured me that seeking justice is very popular right now.  There is safety in numbers. We can follow, we can lead, we can rest in the middle, sitting in a lawn chair with our little sign. We can feel like we might be able to go on for awhile.  Even if we have been intimidated, we can find the courage to speak out. Even if we have been discouraged, we can begin to take heart.

The post Reparations appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Six films made by Korean and Korean American directors will be part of the more than 200 recent films to be screened as part of the 45^th annual Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF), to be held April 9 through 18, with five locations in the Twin Cities, and two in Rochester.  

The Korean Institute of Minnesota is partnering with the MSPIFF to offer new films from a Korean perspective. One of the six films is a full-length feature What Does That Nature Say to You, by director Sangsoo Han, to be screened Wednesday, April 15, as part of the Asian Frontiers program.

What Does that Nature Say to You is a comedy drama by a famous and prolific South Korean director about a poet/photographer, Dong-hwa, who goes with his girlfriend Jun-hee to meet her parents. He is enraptured by the family home in a beautiful mountain setting, and Jun-hee’s father and Dong-hwa seem to bond.  The situation begins to unravel when Dong-hwa is outed by Jun-hee’ sister as a spoiled and pompous poser with a privileged background, not the impoverished but principled artist he presents himself to be.

A new film short by (Korean American adoptee) director Dahee Kim, Rehearsal for an Encounter, depicts a young man getting ready to meet his birth mother for the first time in Korea.  It is one of five shorts to be shown in a short film collection Oh, the Places We Will Go, to be shown Saturday, April 11 at the Main Cinema in Minneapolis

Other shorts by Korean/Korean American directors to be shown during the festival include : Follower, directed by Ryan Park (Tuesday, April 14 , as part of the Shorts 5: Chills program); Allergy, directed by Seyoung Kim (Sunday, April 19, as part of the Shorts 10: Meeting in the Middle program); Tiny Little Journey, directed by Jinwoo Lee (Saturday, April 18, as part of the Shorts 8: Animation Roundup program);  and Sun and Wind, directed by Soyeon Kim and Todd Hemker, (Saturday, April 18, also part of the Shorts 8: Animation Roundup program).

Tickets for any of the MSPIFF films can be purchased here.

The post Shorts, features and animations by Korean directors appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

While the national headlines debated the logistics of policy, my reality had become a fractured existence. I found myself living simultaneously in two conflicting worlds. In one camp, I was a “U.S. citizen with nothing to fear” — a person with no criminal history and a deep respect for the institutions I serve as an attorney. In the other camp, I was a “U.S. citizen with everything to fear,” watching a growing movement aimed at racially and ethnically cleansing the country I call home.

I began staying home more, the walls of my house becoming both a sanctuary and a cage. I watched the news of Alex Pretti’s murder and felt the shadow of the ICE Goon Squad lengthening over my own neighborhood. I wondered if the administration’s mission to overturn birthright citizenship would eventually come for my naturalized status.

This wasn’t just political theory anymore. It was personal. It was physical. And then, the hypothetical threat finally sat down at the end of my driveway.

The trip to the store was only a mile, but by the time I pulled back into my driveway on the morning of January 24, the world had shifted. A running SUV sat idling just around the corner, one house away. To anyone else, it was a neighbor waiting for a friend or a delivery driver checking a map. To me, a Korean-born U.S. citizen in the era of Operation Metro Surge, it was a predator. 

I scurried inside, my heart hammering a rhythm I can only describe as anxiety terror. I am an attorney; I have spent my career navigating the intricacies of the law, believing in the structural integrity of citizenship. But as I drew the shades and retreated to my basement to watch my security cameras on the television, that professional shield felt like wet paper. 

I sat in the dark, mentally triaging all the if/then scenarios. If they kick down the front door, do I go willingly? Do I trust the protections my citizenship is supposed to provide?  The bitter truth hit me then: While the law says I am a citizen, the rhetoric of the day says I am an enemy. I am a fighter by nature, but that morning, the only plan I could formulate was to flee.

The fear I felt in that basement wasn’t born in a vacuum; it was the culmination of a lifetime of what I call “quiet exclusions.” Growing up as a Korean adoptee in greater Minnesota, my citizenship was a fact, but my belonging was always a question.

I have spent decades navigating the derogatory aggressions that define the life of any person who, for reason of race, religion or ethnicity, feels like an outsider in their own home. It is the blunt trauma of slurs like “chink” or “gook,” but more often, it is the death by a thousand cuts found in the overtly polite curiosity of my neighbors.

“Where are you from?” “No, where are you really from?” “Your English is so good.”

These comments are usually wrapped in insulating layers of language like “I didn’t mean it that way,” but the subtext is always the same: You are something else. You are a guest whose stay is conditional. When people tell me I shouldn’t be offended because their intent wasn’t malicious, they strip away my agency. They are saying that because I am not Caucasian, I don’t have the right to define my own pain.

For years, I used my citizenship as a shield against those stares and whispers. I told myself I was a “Real American,” with the papers to prove it. But when the rhetoric of the current administration changed its immigration policy to what amounts to ethnic cleansing, that shield shattered. The “Where are you from?” of my childhood has evolved into the “Why are you still here?” of my adulthood.

By January 29, the fighter in me had been temporarily silenced by the refugee. I boarded a plane with a one-way ticket to Maui to stay with my sister, carrying a heavy shroud of guilt. As a lawyer, I felt I should be staying to fight for my fellow victims; as a human, I just wanted to breathe without checking a security feed.

But as the Pacific stretched out beneath me, a new kind of feeling, what I call “anxiety terror,” took root. I began to wonder: Should I ever return? Should I become an ex-pat?

The realization was a cold one. I felt “not American enough” for the current administration, but not nearly “Korean enough” to find a home in my country of birth. To be a transracial adoptee in this moment is to live in a permanent state of mid-air exile. You are a person without a port, watching the country that raised you — the only home you’ve ever known — treat you like a foreign contagion.

I looked at the blue water and realized the true cost of the rhetoric back home. It doesn’t just threaten your physical safety; it robs you of your sense of place. If I returned to Minnesota, would my neighbors turn me in? Would my presence put my friends at risk? When you aren’t truly accepted anywhere, trust becomes a luxury you can no longer afford.

I returned to Minnesota on February 21, trying to acclimate to a “normal” that no longer existed. As the March 28 No Kings protest approached, I hesitated. My family was facing health crises, and I had already marched in last year’s (June 2025) No Kings protest. But the “anxiety terror” was still there, a low hum in the back of my mind that wouldn’t quiet down.

Ultimately, a friend and I joined the 100,000 people (editor’s note: actual attendance numbers, at time of publication are estimated to be closer to 200,000) at the State Capitol. As a lawyer, I am supposed to be a master of language, but standing in that crowd, words failed me.

It felt like the best hug I’ve ever had — the kind full of love, understanding, and a peace that passes understanding. We were there for reasons of grave seriousness, but the flames of my internal rage were quelled by a sudden, overwhelming sense of solidarity.

I knew, logically, that 100,000 people weren’t there specifically for me. But as a Korean-born citizen who has spent a lifetime trying to assimilate, it felt like they were. For the first time in weeks, the “duct tape” the administration tried to use to silence me was peeled away. In its place was the roar of a country refusing to let its neighbors be turned into enemies.

As a former distance runner, I used to rely on the cheers of strangers along the race route to keep me moving when I wanted to quit. The St. Paul protesters were those strangers. They reminded me that while the toddler tantrums and lies of the current leadership are loud, the quiet strength of community is louder.

I am an attorney. I am a runner. I am a Korean-born American. And after that day at the Capitol, I am no longer hiding in the basement. I am here, I survived the tyranny of the moment, and I am ready for the future.

More images from the March 28 rally in St. Paul (photos by Stephen Wunrow):

The post The quiet strength of community appeared first on Korean Quarterly.

Two Korean Americans from the Midwest, one from Minnesota and one from Chicago, are leading up a small organization with a big job.  The newly-formed U.S. Korean Rights Group (USKRG) is a group of Korean American adoptees who will dialogue with South Korean government as part of a global coalition of Korean adoptees from many countries.

The coalition has a common goal, to seek reconciliation and restitution from the South Korean government for widespread international adoption records fraud, and to change policies and laws in both the U.S. and South Korea that will streamline Korean adoptees’ access to their own adoption records in the future. 

A formal statement about South Korean records fraud was contained in a report of an official government investigation, published March 2025.  It stated that the level of fraud discovered in (voluntarily submitted) Korean adoptees’ records constitutes a human rights crime under South Korean law.

The official investigatory body, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), published the March 2025 report after a second investigation into allegations of adoption fraud (known as TRC2) through the adoption files of individuals who submitted them.  It began its third consecutive investigation (known as TRC3)  into the records issue on February 26. On that day, 311 more Korean adoptees submitted their adoption files for investigation.  Some showed up to submit their requests for file investigation in person, and the enthusiastic response hit the headlines.  

The systemic fraud potentially affects tens of thousands of Korean adoptees in several European countries, Canada, Australia, and especially the U.S., where the largest population of Korean adoptees live.  Fraud has been detected primarily in the files of a large group of adoptees who were placed for adoption in the 1970s and ‘80s.

In recent years, Korean adoptees have formed their own country-specific groups to ensure all Korean adoptees, no matter where they live, will be represented by fellow adoptees from their own country.  

USKRG leadership

The new USKRG’s president is Yuh Koppel, from Chicago. The vice-president is Rob Anderson, a  Twin Cities resident.

Koppel said that, in 2024, the USKRG formed and its members were able to attend meetings of the second TRC investigation (TRC2). The group also held open Zoom meetings in 2024 and 2025 to inform Korean adoptees in the U.S. about the investigation progress and how they can participate.

Koppel was adopted to a family in Denmark. She has also lived “all over Europe” as a kid, she said, and went to boarding school in England. Her step-father is from Canada and he now lives in Canada. She has lived in the U.S. for 23 years, and is now a U.S. citizen, married with adult children. When in the U.S., she lives in Chicago but also spends the cold months in Panama.

In terms of working with the other country-specific groups, Yuh said “I do have the advantage that I speak Danish, so that means I can read the documents and can understand the [Danish] leadership group.” The leaders of the various country groups are working together and participating with one another’s groups, she said. The groups want to deliver a unified message to the South Korean government about what Korean adoptees are asking for.  

Korean adoptees’ experiences and context differ according to their country of residence, Koppel said.  Each country-specific organization wants to build community and support around their own members’ needs. They also want to reach out through their own newsletters and virtual or in-person events.  It is particularly important to hold Zoom seminars in local time zones about the progress of the ongoing investigation, Yuh said.  

Vice-president Rob Anderson said that on February 26, the number of Korean American adoptees submitting their files for investigation increased greatly compared to the number in 2022. He believes this is largely due to the outreach work by the USKRG, that he has been concentrating on.  Another opportunity for Korean adoptees to submit their files will be May 11, which is National Adoption Day in South Korea, he said.

Anderson was adopted as a two-year-old to a couple in Thief River Falls in northwestern Minnesota, and went to college in both Michigan and in Duluth, Minnesota. As a young adult he assisted in leading two groups of Korean adoptee children on trips to Korea with the Institute of Light Finders’ program called Kids to Korea.

In 2000, he lived in South Korea for a year as an adult. While there, he was exposed to the adoption records falsification issue while volunteering with the newly-formed Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (GOA’L), founded by fellow Minnesotan Ami Nafzger.  After that experience, he lived and worked in the United Kingdom for 20 years before returning to live in Minnesota. Back in the Twin Cities in recent years, he has volunteered as a board member for the Twin Cities service and advocacy organization Adoptee Hub. He submitted his adoption file as one of the initial 367 handed over to the TRC in 2022.

Anderson has been working on increasing outreach and education, including running the Zoom meetings to inform adoptees about TRC and how to submit their own adoption information for investigation. An informational Zoom session was recently held on March 19 concerning the start of the TRC3. In addition to Anderson and Koppel, there are three other Korean American adoptees on the core team.

USKRG, the new kid

Until 2024, the U.S. did not have an official group to represent Korean American adoptees, who comprise more than half of all the 170,000 (or more) Korean adoptees globally.  In the past, Korean adoptees’ representation has come heavily from Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark, which brought a human rights violation complaint against the South Korean government several years ago. The claims were eventually referred to the TRC for investigation.

The new USKRG is still in the process of getting its U.S. non-profit status. Its leadership is now managing a process that is like flying the plane while building it. They first organized in September 2024, Koppel said, and are still in the process of forming their U.S. group, which was recently approved for non-profit 501c3 status, and completing other start-up tasks. 

While following the TRC3 investigation, the group is doing internal coordination to decide on group priorities and goals, and external coordination in coalition with the other country-specific groups. It is also concentrating on providing resources on its website, and doing outreach, education, and disseminating investigation progress information through its email newsletter.

In 2026, Koppel said, USKRG, in coalition with the country-specific rights groups, will lobby for a dialogue with the South Korean government about how it can support Korean adoptees’ rights in the future, particularly in making access their own adoption files easier. They are advocating for law and policy changes that will streamline the process adoptees undertake to research their own birth families and potentially reunite with them.  They also want to make an easier path for adoptees who want to return to Korea to live and work.

The Path Toward Healing letter to President Lee

As an attempt to start a dialogue with the new South Korean leadership, in December, the USKRG and the Canadian KRG in coalition, sent an open letter to the new South Korean President Jae Myung Lee entitled The Path Toward Healing.

The letter proposes a list of new policies to help Korean adoptees with birth family searches and reunions in Korea.  The Path Toward Healing letter also articulates the expectations of the Korean rights groups for the TRC3 process. It goes into other law and policy recommendations to help Korean adoptees in Korea, including an easier path to obtaining Korean citizenship.

The letter was in response to the October public apology by the newly-elected President Jae Myung Lee for the nation’s failure to protect its international adoptees’ human rights in the adoption process.

In addition to going to the President’s office, The Path Toward Healing statement has also been circulated broadly. No official reply has been received yet, according to Koppel.

Adoptees refuse new president’s general meeting

The Path Toward Healing letter was prompted because two Korean adoptee groups who were invitees to an official general meeting about the TRC2 report announced they would not participate in the meeting with President Lee and other officials.  The meeting was a general one, with adoption agencies, and other non-profit and for-profit organizations and businesses also invited.

There is a strategic reason that the two invited adoptee groups (the Danish Korean Rights Group (DKRG)  and the non-profit adoptee human rights organization KoRoot) declined the meeting, Koppel explained. The two organizations “decided not to participate because some of the invitees have directly worked against the TRC.  They said they don’t want to be in a room with people working directly against adoptees’ rights,” Koppel said. “We [the USKRG]  very much agree with that stance,” but it meant that a meeting took place with no Korean rights groups present, she observed. 

Some of the invitees to the general meeting were for-profit businesses and non-profit groups “who were asking us not to go forward with a human rights case with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and were saying that we did not even have a human rights case,” she added.  That these groups would get a seat at the table while other adoptee groups were excluded was not right, she explained. “We feel that [the government] should sit and listen to us, the people who brought this case forward, first and foremost,” she said.

The Korean Rights groups are asserting that adoptees are the actual injured parties in this proven human rights offense, Koppel explained, and should be the only official negotiators with the South Korean government concerning their own civil rights. They want a meeting that will include only the government officials with Korean adoptee representatives from the various country-specific groups.

Koppel qualified her statement, adding “He [President Lee] has the right to listen to anybody, and we really believe he has very good intentions, and we have seen very good communication coming out of the president’s office. And we are not angry with him, but we do think there should be space for the Korean rights movement as well.”

Changes in adoption records storage and preservation

There is concern among Korean adoptees about how, in 2025, the South Korean government, through its National Center for the Rights of the Child, changed how adoption records of transnational adoptees are to be stored and preserved for the future.  Combined with that, there is concern about how adoptees’ rights to those records will be secured.

Until recently, adoptees’ records were the responsibility of the individual agencies. This policy led to individual agencies being the gatekeepers to all the information. There were inconsistent rules among the agencies about how adoptees could access and use their own records. There was little or no assurance that adoptee records would be preserved. Some adoptees have charged that, when adoptees were told that records had been accidentally destroyed or lost, it may have been that they were routinely destroyed by agencies.  

During the past two years, the South Korean government directed that all adoption records be collected and consolidated into a national repository.

The South Korean government’s effort to reform records access and preservation is consistent with rules set by Hague Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Hague Convention is an international treaty among countries that protects the human rights of children (including the rights of adults who were adopted as children). South Korea is a signatory of this agreement, along with about 120 other nations. The South Korean government wishes to finalize its signatory status with the Hague Convention, and was on a 2025 deadline to meet certain requirements, including government control of the records.

Part of the concern among adoptees about the change in record-keeping is the lack of funding and staff support to administer the new system.  Adoptee groups have expressed concern that the paper records of all Korean adoptees were transferred to a storage facility that is a former refrigerated storage building, not a secure archival facility.  There has been concern that number of staff is inadequate to deal with the huge quantity of records, and that there is no apparent funding or plan in place for digitizing the records, some of which are very old and deteriorating.

In late 2024, the National Center on the Rights of the Child (NCRC) which is responsible for the data consolidation and digitization, reported there had been a data breach and that a large quantity of records have been compromised or lost. Since then, Koppel reported, the Korean rights groups coalition has filed complaints to through law enforcement and has been advocating for the government to investigate and resolve the issue. A notification of the data breach appears on the front page of the NCRC website.

A series of news reports by Associated Press investigative reporters Claire Garofalo and Tong-hyung Kim and a film documentary created from their research  (as part of the PBS news TV show Frontline, titled South Korea’s Adoption Reckoning) in 2024 broke the adoption fraud story ahead of the TRC2 report, and recorded former staff saying they did not know how the huge records project could be accomplished with the meager resources available.

The Korean adoptees rights groups from all the receiving countries are now positioned to dialogue with the South Korean government about stepping up the effort to preserve the records, and ensure that adoptees will be able to use them for their own birth family searches in the future. So far, there has been no official dialogue with the new government.

Knowledge of fraud goes back many years

Suspicion about falsification of adoption records goes back many years. Anecdotally, Korean adoptees have found, by comparing birth search discoveries with one another, that records often contained false information. The March 2025 TRC report supported this suspicion.  

The TRC2  investigation turned up falsified information in the majority of adoptees’ files under review, including their names, place of birth, date of birth, birth family information and other key details adoptees need to track down their birth families. There is evidence that some children who were placed for adoption had living families who did not give permission for their child to be adopted.

The TRC, which has investigated a wide range of past government-involved human rights violations, works by being assigned a project by the South Korean government, researching that topic with an appropriate team, and completing each assignment during a specific time period with a deadline for reporting out.  That is why the investigations are divided into phases, such as TRC2 and TRC3.  

The TRC2 and the former President Yoon

The TRC2 investigation was a slow process, according to Koppel.  Only 56 of the files voluntarily submitted to the TRC were thoroughly reviewed, and the group ran out of time for the 311 other files submitted in 2022.

The last session of the TRC was politically charged, according to an NPR news feature. The president of the TRC2 investigation was Sun Young Park, who was appointed by the former President Suk Yeol Yoon, just days after he declared martial law, which led to the president’s impeachment. Yoon was recently handed a life sentence for his attempted military takeover of the government.

The political nature of the TRC2 may explain why there were committee delays, cancelled meetings, and other ways the work seemed to have been held up.  Many Korean adoptees who have submitted their files are now in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and are worried about the pace, Koppel said. “Fifty-six cases in two or three years’ time is too few. At that rate, most Korean adoptees are not going to be heard.” 

Time is running out for many adoptees

Many applicants are feeling like “’we don’t want our files to be in that pile again. We don’t want it to be like TRC2.’  Because a lot of us adoptees – we are getting older,” Koppel said.  “Our parents are dying. We risk it getting too late by the time they [the TRC] can come to its conclusions. We hope to be alive when they come to conclusion in all the cases, but to give us a fair chance that everybody can get their cases heard before we are all dead, they need to ramp up TRC and they need to have a mandate to do that, and to ensure they are all working effectively.”

Another idea for birth search policy reform is to “extend the mandate to allow Korean adoptees to search for their siblings so we have a chance of finding the truth,” rather than only being allowed to search for birth mother and birth father, she said. In DNA databases, nieces and nephews will also cross-match with Korean adoptees, she said. “There should be an effort to promote that this is a way for families to reunite.”

 Signing up allies from families of Korean adoptees

The burden of grief over adoption fraud is shared by many, not only adoptees, and parents, children, siblings and other allies.  The affected population is hundreds of thousands of people globally. 

Adoptees are capable of speaking up for themselves, and want to do so, Koppel said.  But allies can key in helping to demand a timely and honest response from governments to Korean adoptees who are stymied by fraudulent files.  

One of the groups is the birth families, most of whom are still invisible, due to societal pressures.  “We know now that many people who were listed as orphans, they have families who have been searching for them for 30 or 40 years. That’s huge – as a mother, I cannot imagine how, if one of my children were lost like that  – I cannot imagine the burden of that grief of not know what happened to your child,” Koppel said.

Similarly, adoptive parents can be powerful allies as a stakeholder population.  “What they saw in Denmark was that things really started moving when 200 adoptive parents showed up [at a public event] in Denmark to say ‘our kids need to know,’” Koppel recalled.  

Because of the actions of governments and agencies “a lot of agencies have made millions in assets because of adoptive parents who wanted to do the right thing, and who wanted children,” she said.

“The adoptive parents have been misled,” Koppel said. “And the same with our children and descendants.”  Other affected populations include the spouses, siblings and other family members of adoptees.

Allies in the cause are growing due to many loved ones turning their grief into action in support of the adoptees’ cause for justice. That is why the USKRG’s outreach, including the informational zoom meetings, are open to allies as well as affected adoptees, Koppel said.

Keeping up with TRC3

Koppel said her group is looking at the TRC3 as a chance for a fresh start, and they are hoping the pace of investigation will be faster, and the dialogue will be more transparent during this third investigation.  The USKRG is keeping track of TRC3 through its website and email newsletter.  More information is available at the USKRG website:   https://www.uskrg.org.  The email newsletter is available by request:  in**@***RG.org.

Editor’s note:  Link to A Path Toward Healing letter from North American Coalition to President Jae Myung Lee.

2025 report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Human Rights Violation in Intercountry Adoption

The post Small organization, big job appeared first on Korean Quarterly.