KOREAM JOURNAL

Storytime

By Serena Kim

Kids these days have it all, don’t they? Most Korean Americans who grew up in the ’70s and ’80s didn’t have many children’s books with images or themes that reflected their identity or experiences. Besides the few offerings by Frances Carpenter or Pearl S. Buck, few juvenile narratives reflected the Korean American immigrant experience or the odyssey of transnational adoption or the ins and outs of being bi-racial. Fast forward to the new millennium and the choices in Korean American-centric children’s literature are bountiful. KoreAm turned to resident expert Sarah Park, a graduate student in library science who specializes in Korean American children’s literature, for some help in compiling a list of exceptional KA authors and their books.

Sister Act
FRANCES PARK and GINGER PARK are sisters who have written several books for adults and children. The award-winning authors grew up in Virginia and now live in Washington D.C., where they also own a boutique called Chocolate Chocolate.
Books: To Swim Across the World (Miramax Books, 2002), When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon (Miramax Books, 2001), The Have a Good Day Café (Lee and Low Books, 2005), Where on Earth is My Bagel? (Lee and Low Books, 2001), My Freedom Trip (Boyd Mills Press, 1998), The Royal Bee (Boyd Mills Press, 2000), Good-bye, 382 Shin Dang Dong (National Geographic Children’s Books, 2002)
The Have a Good Day Café is about a working-class Korean American family who survives on the meager earnings of a fast food cart. When the boy’s grandmother can’t stop thinking about the food from the motherland, they think of a great way to revamp the cart’s culinary offerings. “In the kitchen Grandma opens the refrigerator,” writes the Parks. “She takes out a big piece of beef, two heads of cabbage, and all the carrots and zucchini she can find.” (Ages 5-9)
Sarah Says: “Though they are co-authors, they actually work separately. One of them will sit down and start writing, and then the other one will either revise or continue writing the story.”

History Buff
LINDA SUE PARK, a Newbery Medalist, is a giant in children’s literature. She was born in Illinois and grew up near Chicago. As a child, she won several poetry competitions and was first published at age 9. After studying English at Stanford, Park worked as a public relations writer, journalist and teacher. She now lives in upstate New York with her husband and two kids.
Books: Seesaw Girl (1999), The Kite Fighters (2000), A Single Shard (2001), When My Name Was Keoko (2002), The Firekeeper’s Son (Clarion Books, 2004), Project Mulberry (Yearling, 2007), Bee-bim Bop (Clarion Books, 2005), Tap Dancing on the Roof: Sijo (Poems) (Clarion Books, 2007), Archer’s Quest (Clarion Books, 2006), Yum! Yuck! A Fold-out Book of People Sounds (Charlesbridge Publishing, 2005), Mung-Mung: A Fold-out Book of Animal Sounds (Charlesbridge Publishing, 2004), What Does Bunny See: A Book of Colors and Flowers (Clarion Books, 2005)
The Firekeeper’s Son is about a fire signal system used in 19th-century Korea to warn the king of invasions by sea. A boy’s father climbs the mountain near their village every evening to light a fire, which signals to the next firekeeper that all is well in the land. “He picked up one coal with the tongs — and dropped it,” writes Park. “It broke into a hundred red jewels that glowed for a moment, then died.” (Ages 5-8)
Sarah Says: “Linda Sue Park fills a very important gap in providing well-researched Korean history to contemporary children’s audiences.”

Coloring Outside the Lines
YANGSOOK CHOI is an award-winning author, illustrator and painter. She grew up in Korea and studied at Sangmyung Women’s University in Seoul. She earned her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, where she now lives.
Books: Behind the Mask (Frances Foster Books/ FSG, 2006), Peach Heaven (FSG, 2005), The Sun Girl and The Moon Boy (Knopf, 1997), The Name Jar (Knopf, 2001), New Cat (FSG, 2001)
Peach Heaven is about a young girl in the peach-growing community of Puchon, Korea, who helps out the farmers after one potentially devastating storm. “The road was muddy and the cart was heavy,” writes Choi. “But we pushed and pulled it up the mountain.” (For ages 4-8.)
Sarah Says: “Yangook Choi is a prolific writer and illustrator. Her colors are rich and lively, and she’s a good storyteller.”

Woman of Letters
SOYUNG PAK was born in Seoul, but immigrated to America at the age of two. She grew up in the suburbs of South New Jersey. She went to college at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and earned her master’s degree at the University of Chicago. Now the writer lives in the Windy City, but she also loves to travel the world.
Books: A Place to Grow (Arthur Levine Books, 2002), Dear Juno (Viking, 1999), Sumi’s First Day of School (co-written with Joung Un Kim, Viking, 2003)
Dear Juno is about a Korean American boy who communicates with his Halmeoni in Korea through a series of letters. This picture book won the prestigious Ezra Jack Keats Award, which honors new writers and illustrators in the field of multicultural children’s books. Pak writes, “he wondered if any of the planes came from a little town near Seoul where his grandmother lived, and where she ate persimmons every evening before going to bed.” (For ages 4-8.)
Sarah Says: “Park’s A Place to Grow — illustrated by Marcelino Truong, a Vietnamese English Frenchman — is my personal favorite. Pak wrote it with the concept that war, particularly the Korean War, uproots and displaces families. The synergy of the text and illustrations is absolutely stunning.”

Juggling Identities
SUN YUNG SHIN is a poet, essayist and children’s book author. Shin was born in Seoul in 1974 and adopted by white American parents at the age of one. She grew up in Brookfield, Illinois, a working suburb of Chicago. Now she creates, mentors and lives in the Twin Cities. She and her husband have a daughter and son who are of mixed heritage.
Books: Cooper’s Lesson (Children’s Book Press, 2004), Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press, 2007), Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption (South End Press, 2006), Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers (Borealis Books, 2008)
Cooper’s Lesson is about a young bi-racial boy who feels left out of both the Korean and white world. He looks to a Korean greengrocer for answers. “Cooper sighed,” writes Shin. “His mom always insisted on speaking Korean to Mr. Lee, even though Cooper could barely follow along.” The book is in both Korean and English. (For ages 4-8.)
Sarah Says: “It’s one of a few children’s books to broach the topic of biraciality, and Sung Yung Shin does it with nuance and believability.”

Diving into History
PAULA YOO has known she was going to tell stories for a living since she learned how to read in kindergarten. Yoo got her B.A. from Yale, a journalism degree from Columbia and an MFA from the Warren Wilson College in South Carolina. She’s worked as a journalist for People magazine and the Seattle Times and also as a TV writer. She writes, camps, plays violin and lives with her husband in L.A.
Books: Good Enough (Harper Collins, 2008), Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds: The Sammy Lee Story (Lee and Low, 2005)
Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds: The Sammy Lee Story is about the first Korean American to win a gold medal in 1932. The diver was not admitted to the public pool because of the color of his skin. But he overcame these obstacles to make his athletic dreams come true. “Sammy would have to wait until Wednesday when people of color were allowed to go inside,” writes Yoo. “In the meantime, he would get no relief from the blazing California summer sun.” (Ages 5-10)
Sarah Says: “[Paula Yoo] is definitely up and coming, and [illustrator] Dom Lee is just, well, awesome.”

Translating Cultures
MIN PAEK is an activist and children’s book author who lives in San Francisco. Her 1979 book Aekyung’s Dream was the first bilingual Korean/English book published in the U.S. In 1994, Paek organized the Inter-cultural Youth Program after working with Korean Americans who had lost their businesses in the L.A. Riots. She is also the founder and executive editor of the Korean American Women Artists and Writers Association in San Francisco, where she lives.
Aekyung’s Dream (Children’s Book Press) is about a Korean girl who has lived in the U.S. for only six months. She overcomes her fears of the strange new land, with the help of a dream about King Sejong, the 19th-century Korean monarch who invented the phonetic Hangul alphabet. He inspires her to persevere. “It was almost time for school,” writes Paek, “but Aekyung was still lying in bed listening to the song of the birds.” (For ages 5-9.)
Sarah Says: “[Aekyung’s Dream] is an earlier picture book that seems to top a lot of people’s ‘favorite books’ lists.”

For the Big Kids

Those who have grown out of the storytime phase can check out these KA authors who write for the young adult market.

By Sook Nyul Choi:
Year of Impossible Goodbyes (first in a trilogy)
Echoes of the White Giraffe
Gathering of Pearls

By Maria G. Lee:
If It Hadn’t Been For Yoon-Jun
F is For Fabuloso
Necessary Roughness’
Finding My Voice
Night of the Chupacabra
New Year, New Love

By An Na:
Wait For Me
A Step From Heaven

In Sickness and Health

Though their baby faces a mystery illness that keeps him on a ventilator 24/7, the parents of Donovan Yoo try to make every breath count

By Serena Kim

Donovan Yoo is a beautiful and energetic baby boy with big brown eyes and a flirty smile. He has strong, pudgy arms and chunky, little baby feet. He is 19 months old, so understandably he wants to explore his world. He crawls very carefully on the hardwood floors of his family’s three-bedroom house in Walnut, Calif. A light beige ventilator pumps air rhythmically in the center of the room. Donovan feels that familiar tug at his throat. He knows that the tracheotomy tube that connects him to his ventilator is about to pop off. Once he feels it disconnect, he giggles and makes a run for it — crawling twice as fast as normal. But within one minute, the toddler gasps, he has run out of breath.

His father, Richard Yoo, 30, calmly reattaches it, and Donovan takes another breath.

Donovan has Congenital Central Hypoventilation Syndrome (CCHS). CCHS is a very rare and serious nervous system disorder in which the automatic control of breathing is impaired or absent. There are an estimated 500 reported cases in the U.S. of the condition, which is caused by a genetic mutation. There is a 50 percent chance that one of Donovan’s parents carries this gene, but it’s also possible neither does.

In the past, the disease has been referred to as “Ondine’s curse,” based on the mythical story of Ondine, a water nymph who discovers that her mortal lover is unfaithful. The king of the nymphs puts a curse on the man that causes him to forget to perform all bodily functions, including breathing. So when the mortal falls asleep, he “forgets” to breathe and dies. The medical community today generally tries to avoid the term “Ondine’s curse” because children with it do not “forget” to breathe.

CCHS is a severe form of sleep apnea. Anytime while asleep, a CCHS infant may stop breathing and possibly die. Some scientists believe that there may be a connection between CCHS and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
Dr. Anchalee Yuengsrigul, a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospital Orange County, says healthy people have a breathing control center that regulates the body’s response to carbon dioxide levels in the body. With CCHS patients, the breathing control center fails to work properly, meaning they are at risk of having toxic levels of carbon dioxide in their body without a ventilator.

Typically, a CCHS child only needs a ventilator at night or occasionally throughout the day, but because Donovan’s condition is severe, he requires 24-hour ventilation. Three hoses go into a band around his neck. His 27-year-old mother, Caroline, keeps a small, soft blue receiving blanket over his throat — a gentle touch for a little boy who has endured some not so gentle procedures in his less than two years of life.

Because CCHS is often associated with other diseases, Donovan has already had several surgeries and other medical procedures. Doctors removed part of his colon when he was less than a month old to treat a bowel disorder called Hirschprung’s Disease. Donovan has also had a tracheotomy surgery, an ear-tube procedure and a feeding tube procedure. He has had a tumor in his arm, also related to his CCHS, removed.

He undergoes physical therapy, feeding therapy and speech therapy sessions every week, and the variety of medical supplies used to keep him breathing need to be regularly cleaned, maintained and reordered. A toddler his age usually is able to walk, but Donovan’s physical development is closer to that of a six-month-old, says Caroline.

Most expectant parents wish for healthy children. The Yoos didn’t get that. It has been a long journey just getting their son to this point — still three months short of his 2-year birthday. But, remarkably, the couple manages to feel gratitude and hope, not self-pity.

Breathe And Stop

Caroline Yoo had a fairly routine pregnancy. She lost a little bit of weight before the birth and sustained an infection with a fever during her 18-hour labor, which was anesthetized with an epidural. Donovan Yoo was born, kicking and screaming at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, Calif. on March 2, 2006. He weighed a little over six pounds and measured 19 inches long.

“But once they took the baby out to clean him out and put him under the warmer, they noticed that he would breathe once and then not breathe and then all of his limbs would just go flat,” says Caroline. “They would try to stimulate him, but then he would go flat.”

Within 30 minutes, the doctors decided that he needed to be transferred to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). When Donovan’s father, Richard, first saw his tiny newborn son, he was in a clear plastic incubator bassinet with tubes coming out of his belly button, his nose and his mouth.
Donovan’s parents were confused and frightened. At first doctors told them not to worry, that many babies are born this way, and that it was possible that he would snap out of it in a few days. Dr. John D. Madden (now deceased neonatalogist at Children’s Hospital of Orange County) suspected that Donovan had CCHS. He told her that he was very sorry and heartbroken that there was not yet a definitive diagnosis for his condition. He said that the last time he saw CCHS was 30 years ago, at the beginning of his medical career.

Caroline crumpled to the floor and sobbed. The hospital held a small medical conference about the mystery to discuss the tests that were conducted and the stats of Caroline’s labor. She had to fight to attend, and she got to sit in the corner.

In the months that followed, Donovan’s parents endured a profoundly traumatic time — financially, emotionally, spiritually and physically. His mother spent every waking moment at the hospital, while his father worked as an accountant and studied at night for his second bachelor’s degree — all the while worrying about the mounting hospital bills, which would initially total more than $1 million.

“When this happened, it put a lot of stress on the marriage,” says Richard, now 30. The newlyweds rarely saw each other and when they did, they fought. But one day, Richard read a story on the wall of the NICU that gave him new perspective: “A woman gives birth to a handicapped child. She prays to God, what have I done wrong? Why have you condemned me to this life? God says, I gave you the handicapped child, not because I don’t love you, but because you have the strength to take care of him.”

At first, Caroline says, she felt overwhelmed with bitterness about the situation. She found herself weeping in the NICU after Donovan had just undergone his second surgery: a tracheostomy tube surgery in the spring of 2006. “But in a private room next to us, there was a preemie and she went into cardiac arrest,” Caroline recalls. “She died. I’m seeing the parents in the corner and I’m like, why am I crying?” That’s when she told God: “You can make me go through hell every day until the day that I die. I really don’t care. Just don’t take [Donovan] from me. Let me bring him home.”

HOMECOMING

On June 29, 2006, after four months of hospitalization, Donovan was finally ready to leave Healthbridge, a sub-acute facility in Orange County, where his parents received training on how to care for him at home. Mom arranged her maternity leave and dad arranged his. Caroline and the baby’s doctors convinced their insurance carrier to allow him to be discharged with two ultra-lightweight, portable ventilators, one for home use and another one as a backup.

They call the ventilator “his first expensive, electronic toy.” Caroline wrapped its five rolling metal casters in five diapers to protect him from bumps and scrapes.

Donovan was happy to be home. “He was smiling more. He was sleeping. Every little noise didn’t wake him up,” says Richard.

The baby would still need round-the-clock nursing, however. His parents initially liked the idea of free childcare because their health insurance covered the nursing fees. Because of his rare condition, the nurses would refer to medical books before doing anything — even things considered routine for healthy children — on Donovan. They would even second-guess Caroline if she tried to use over-the-counter diaper rash cream on her son. After constant observance, the Yoos started to feel like strangers in their own home.

“That held us back a lot as being parents. It wasn’t a good life,” recalls Caroline. “As a parent, I don’t care what the hell that book says; I’m going to do what I need to do.”

Beyond the larger trauma of Donovan’s health condition, Caroline and Richard have had to battle a multitude of smaller, banal skirmishes with the state’s health care bureaucracy and their private insurance carrier. They complained about the government’s endless Scantron forms that never seemed to have a box for CCHS, which causes delays and rejections.

“Thank God for insurance,” says Richard, noting that their private health insurance covered the cost for Donovan’s many procedures and care. But he adds, “Like with health insurance, you can’t be passive, like they’re going to take care of it. It doesn’t work that way. That’s why my wife can get so many things done because she’s constantly on the phone with them.”
In September, Caroline quit her job as a wage garnisher for the security company ADP so she could st ay home with her son full time.

THE FUTURE

Now that Donovan is a big, strapping toddler, his parents look back on those initial months of confusion and fear with the clarity of hindsight. They believe that Donovan will have a reasonably happy and healthy quality of life.

According to Dr. Yuengsrigul, “His quality of life may be limited due to the amount of ventilation that he needs. But overall, his development and all that should be able to improve up to the normal capacity.”

Because knowledge of this disease, the first reported case of which was in the 1970s, is still limited, neither Donovan’s doctor nor his parents can say for sure what the future holds for him. He may be on the ventilator for the rest of his life, or or he could be taken off of it in as soon as a month, says Caroline. “You never know.”

But with advances in health care technology, such as portable respirators, CCHS is now considered a treatable disorder. “Our hope is that just for his sake that when he goes to school that he’ll be off of the ventilator in the afternoon,” says Caroline, “so he can play with the kids and not have limitations, like if his group of friends say, ‘Oh let’s quickly move over to that table or run from one end of the field to the other.’”

The Yoos are committed to making his life as normal as possible. But, certainly, Donovan’s illness is foremost on their minds and sometimes fuels their desire to expose him to certain childhood enjoyments earlier than if he were healthy. He’s already been to Disneyland. “My philosophy has always been that for my son, I would rather him live five or six years to the fullest than live to be 40 or 50 and be bedridden the whole time,” Richard says. “So we take him [on outings] six days a week.”

The Yoos also hope that society will not just look at their son — whom they know for his determination, joy for life and fascination with girls — as handicapped.

Just a month ago, Donovan was at a golf driving range with his grandfather, who was throwing him in the air. A Korean woman saw him attached to his portable respirator and asked, “What’s wrong with him? Is he sick?” Caroline worried how her father-in-law would respond. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, .. is he bitter?’ But he just literally looked at her, looked at [Donovan], and said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just fine. See, look at him smiling and laughing.’”

Caroline was put at ease. She says her family’s goal is to make sure that, “as [Donovan] gets older, other people see him and not the machine.”

For more information on CCHS, visit CCHSnetwork.org.

LAND OF THE LOST by Serena Kim

LOS ANGELES — When you first walk in, Koffea looks like a bustling bakery. Korean boys with fashionably shaggy haircuts and whiskered
jeans are like human shuttles bearing outrageously priced coffee
drinks and pastries. The patrons they serve are mostly ajeossis in their 40s and 50s, accompanied by their middle-aged female companions.

Daniel Dae Kim rushes in and sincerely apologizes for being 10 minutes
late. He’s wearing a gray T-shirt and khaki-colored shorts, scrunched
grayish socks and running shoes. His hair is wet and slicked back — he
looks like he just came from the gym. Maybe that’s why nobody here
seems to recognize him, even though he plays the character “Jin” on
the hit ABC television series “Lost,” an Emmy Award-winning show that
airs in more than 200 territories around the globe.

We’re in the middle of a July heat wave, but I try to persuade him to
go to the steamy backyard garden where there’s more atmospheric color,
which I feel I might need for my story. Instead, he wants to sit
inside a small alcove where it’s cooler. Next to us, red-faced
businessmen are laughing and talking at the top of their lungs. I
fight to hear Daniel who speaks in complete, seemingly scripted
sentences, doused with a liberal usage of well-worn clichés: “Love
will make you do crazy things,” or “Everyone in L.A. is caught up in
show business.”

He’s a cautious guy. Not the type who would rashly get a tattoo, and
definitely not the type to catch, let alone spread, an STD. He has
nightmares about his sons falling off a balcony. I can tell he wants
this interview to go right and doesn’t want me to misinterpret
anything he’s saying, which is probably why he asks that I stop
taping, rewind and press “record” again in the middle of an empty
discourse about Marx.

Fine. But I won’t do it again.

Peeved, I say to him, “If you don’t want something to be reported,
just say, ‘That’s off the record.’ But try not to do that because,
remember, you’re talking to a journalist. I’m not your therapist.”
His response is dry and even-keeled: “That’s a great way to start the
interview.”

I ask him the first questions that pop into my head no matter how
outrageous. He doesn’t really want to talk about politics (he’s a
liberal) or tell me the names of his two sons, but he will say that
his favorite cartoon character is Bugs Bunny. His five favorite rock
bands are: Death Cab for Cutie, U2, New Order, Lloyd Cole and the
Commotions and REM. The goal for me is to sift through the trivia and
artifice and find out who Daniel Dae Kim is beyond the chiseled
profile that appears on IMDb.com.

It isn’t surprising to find that Daniel’s story is that of the filial
Korean American son who is just trying to do the right thing.
“As the oldest son, first-generation, all of those qualities that
shape his experience, he wrestles with being a good son, a good
person, a good citizen, a good provider and father,” says Jason
Donovan, who knows Daniel from a philosophy class at Haverford College.

Though he was born in Busan, South Korea, in 1969, Daniel immigrated
with his family to the predominantly white, blue-collar town of
Easton, Penn. Daniel’s mother, Jung Woon, is a homemaker and his
father, Doo Tae Kim, is a retired anesthesiologist who worked at a
hospital. “He worked so tirelessly to support his family first,” says
Daniel. “Saving was paramount to his way of thinking.”

Childhood friend Patty Kim remembers Daniel assimilating well and
fitting in with the white kids, but knew he was different and was
fiercely proud of being Korean. She describes the boy Daniel as
fearless, handsome and charismatic. “Athletic, outgoing, the girls
liked him, the boys liked him,” Patty says via telephone. “He was
really popular in elementary school.”

In high school he played tennis, studied hard and, in 1986, served as
class president. “I did all those things that a model-minority student
was supposed to do,” remembers Daniel.

And then one summer, when he was enrolled at Yonsei University in
Seoul, he met Mia, a Korean American girl from Connecticut who was
also enrolled in the summer program.

“I fell madly in love with her just from the first day I met her. She
has such a grace about her. She’s incredibly elegant without trying to
be.” By 1993, they were married and now have two sons. “She supported
me when I was going to be a lawyer. She supported me when I was
unemployed. She supported me when I chose to be an actor,” says
Daniel. “And I don’t mean supporting in a financial sense, although
that was part of it. She was supportive here and here.”

He points to his heart and his head. Then he looks at my notebook, and
says, “You have to write that there’s incredibly sappy music playing.”
Indeed there is. Backed by sweeping violins, a Korean power
balladeer’s emotional tenor swells into an orchestral crescendo that
can only evoke the rending of a broken heart.

When Daniel reached college, he was conflicted about his love for
acting and his father’s expectations for his son to follow in his
footsteps and head toward medical school.

“It was really difficult for a number of years,” says Daniel. “He had
ideas for our future. Being an actor wasn’t one of those ideas,
especially given the choices my father had made growing up. He did
everything for his family. And I think that ultimately acting is
something of a selfish profession.”

But the call of the stage ultimately won over his father’s wishes, and
Daniel chose to become a thespian.

In 1996, Daniel graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the
Arts with a master’s degree in acting only to face the formidable
challenge of making a living in Hollywood. Eventually he won parts on
“Seinfeld” and some commercials, and then moved on to larger sci-fi
and action roles, like “24″ and “Angel.”

“Whichever role you can find that will get you to the path you want to
be on is a good thing,” says Daniel. “Mine just happened to be science
fiction and comic-book heroes. That’s great because if that means
Asian American men only exist in the future and in deep space, I’ll
take it.”

His plum role on the last two seasons of “Lost” has afforded him a
hefty salary and tremendous exposure. He has become one of the few
Asian Americans who appear on primetime TV. Millions of people here
and around the world see “Jin” as a strong, attractive Asian man.
We start to talk about when such an image was nonexistent.
“Even Bruce Lee, who I consider an icon now,” says Daniel, “when I was
younger, he was a source of so much ridicule for me that I wasn’t
allowed to like him.”

I mention Pat Morita and Daniel’s eyes light up.

“People don’t consider that in Pat Morita’s case, he was in millions
of households every Tuesday night on ‘Happy Days,’” says Daniel.
“People were not looking at him as that funny Asian guy, beyond the
first few times they saw him. He became part of the fabric of that
show, and you just accepted it. That’s a huge statement about the
power of media and his role in it.”

Daniel hopes that his role is remembered for what it accomplishes and
not its shortcomings. The role is also a double-edged sword because as
“Jin,” who cannot speak English, he is in many ways segregated from
the cast because of the language barrier. When he does speak English,
he’s required to mimic a heavy Korean accent, which was difficult for
him to execute, and emotionally challenging.

“There was a moment, I have to say, when I felt a little shame. I
think I associate [an accent] with not being American, or not being
able to speak the language well,” says Daniel. “But I realize that’s
part of my history. We made that transition, and we should own that as
much as anything else.”

It’s clear by his nuanced answers that he spends a lot of time
agonizing over the cultural consequences of his highly visible role.
He’s both proud of the fact that the cast of “Lost” is racially
diverse and that the show is widely viewed, yet yearns for more.

“Is it ideal in every single way? No. I would love for further
character development for the Korean characters. I would love my
character to integrate himself more into the fabric of the show’s
society. And one of the means that could happen is by speaking
English.”

The language thing is a touchy subject for Daniel who says that he is
proficient in that he can speak “household” Korean. His accent, he
explains, is from Gyeongsang Province. For Seoulites, who speak in
measured cadences, Daniel’s accent from the southern region of Korea
sounds thick with sing-song intonation.

“Because my parents are from Korea, 50 years ago, the language itself
has changed,” Daniel tries to explain. “So it’s not just a
Gyeongsang-do accent, it’s an old-school Gyeongsang-do accent. I’m
completely messed up.”

But apparently that explanation just doesn’t fly for everyone.
He was particularly wounded when he learned about one message board
posting on ABC’s “Lost” site that referenced his ability — or
according to some, inability — to speak Korean. “I saw Daniel Dae Kim
at Café Bleu and he walked in like he owned the place,” Daniel recites
the post from memory. “I thought he was pretty cool from the
interviews that I had read about him, but when I saw him, he was
really cocky and arrogant. My friends and I started making fun of him
in Korean, which of course he wouldn’t understand.”

Ouch.

“The harshest criticism I’ve received for my work is from Asian
Americans. Their criticism seems to sting the most,” says Daniel,
sounding genuinely hurt. “It just makes me at times question why I
feel beholden to a group that is so quick to show their displeasure.”
Ironically, he has to worry about American producers who assume he
can’t speak English well enough to play a role. “The biggest
typecasting hurdle I’m going to have to face is, ‘Does he speak
English?’” says Daniel. “I faced that a number of times already. I get
asked that on a regular basis by people in the industry who’ve seen my
work for years.”

Still the perks of being one of America’s few Asian male sex symbols
remain. He loves it when women approach him in New York and tell him
that he was the first Asian guy they thought was hot. Last year,
People magazine named him one of TV’s sexiest men. So he’s learning to live with the good and the bad.

We’ve been chatting for more than an hour, and Daniel is scheduled for
a photo shoot on the rooftop of the 34-story EquitableBuilding located
around the corner. He hops in his brother’s late-model Infiniti SUV
and pays for my valet parking.

When I arrive on the rooftop set, I find Daniel pacing around, talking
on his cell phone. The wind is hot and dry, whipping his hair, which
now looks surprisingly curly, into an Asian ‘fro. “I think my hair’s
going to be a challenge,” he says smiling, teeth gleaming, perfect
TV-star sunglasses in place.

Far below, Wilshire Boulevard stretches like a silvery snake, west
toward the Pacific Ocean. To the east, the downtown skyline looms in
the smog.

As the crew sets up lighting and prepares Daniel’s wardrobe, a few of
Daniel’s admirers appear and request photos. The building’s assistant
manager, a lanky, young Korean American guy, leans over and asks me,
“Can he speak Korean? I heard he can’t speak Korean.”

I smile and say, “Yes, he can.”

And then for an instant I can see how things might seem to Daniel. He
married a Korean American girl. Loves his sundubu. And brings the Korean language to millions of viewers on primetime.

For some it will never be enough.

But for Daniel, who now stands atop the highest building in Koreatown
for his own photo shoot, the queries and criticism only mean that he’s
become visible in an industry where so many hopefuls easily get lost.
Reminds me of an old show-business maxim: It’s lonely at the top.

June, 2007
The “Joy” of cooking a Korean feast
When an aspiring Korean food traditionalist can’t take the heat in the
kitchen, she ends up calling in backup
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
By Serena Kim

In 48 hours, my newborn daughter Plum would turn 100 days old. Back in
the day in Korea, infant mortality was so high that it was considered
a great achievement for the baby to survive this long. My father and
his wife were flying into Los Angeles all the way from Illinois for
this “joyous occasion.”
I didn’t have a Baegil (100 days celebration) myself, but I wanted to
have one for Plum because we had tried for so long to have a baby.
Plum’s father is Filipino and Mexican so the culture of our home is
mixed, but my mission was to throw a Baegil feast for Plum that
adhered to the books as much as possible.
I envisioned myself gracefully preparing the traditional foods of the
Baegil, like seaweed soup, jellyfish mustard salad, shikhye (sweet
rice drink), and baeksolgi (the majestic steamed rice cakes specific
to the event). My parents will be so proud, I thought, with a glazed
look in my eyes, oblivious to the ridiculous amount of kitchen work
that awaited me.
Admittedly, I was functioning on only a few hours of sleep because I
had stayed out late attending a rap concert on Sunset Boulevard the
night before for my job as a music critic. And I still had to haul ass
to the market in Koreatown Galleria, buy all of the ingredients, chop
great quantities of pungent ginger and garlic to marinate the meats,
prepare beef stock out of brisket, and wash untold bunches of earthy
green vegetables in several rinses of water. Time was running out.
The art of Korean cooking can be painful. Just making the side dish
japchae requires the peeling and slicing of zucchini and carrots into
perfectly uniformed slivers. Then you are supposed to cook the glass
noodles, and the sliced ribeye steak separately, only to toss
everything together at the end with sesame oil.
No wonder Korean women of my grandmother’s generation lived a life as
sequestered and oppressed as that of many women in the Islamic world.
My halmeoni’s entire existence took place in the kitchen, bless her
soul. During her long life, she spent every waking moment either
praying with her rosary beads or fermenting beans for stinky soybean
paste. She usually had a simmering stockpot with dried anchovies
going, too.
She didn’t have a career or any agenda for personal fulfillment. She
didn’t need the “48 Laws of Power” or “Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People” to find her salvation; her only goal was making sure
our stomachs were full. When I came home from school, she’d have
salted egg-shaped rice balls sprinkled with sesame seeds waiting for
me. I can still hear her continuous refrain: “Eat some rice, eat some
rice.”
The kitchen was undeniably a Korean woman’s prison, but it was also
the hearth where she raised and showed her bottomless love for her
children. The Korean kitchen’s nourishment begins before birth. When I
was pregnant, I frequently craved spicy, burbling clay pots of sundubu
jjigae to the point of tearful desperation.
Then after Plum was born, I slurped miyeokguk in the delivery room at
the hospital. Koreans believe that new mothers should eat lots of
seaweed soup. You’re actually supposed to eat five bowls of it a day
for 21 days. The seaweed is high in iron, which is essential for
replenishing blood and effective in producing really great breast
milk.
As my daughter starts eating solid foods, I plan on making her
soothing rice porridge (juk) when she gets tummy aches and rewarding
her with sweet rice treats and persimmon punch, like my halmeoni and
mother would make for me. Maybe, when she’s all grown up, she might
even pass these traditions on to her kids, too. For me, maintaining
this Korean culinary heritage is critical in a time when store bought
banchan and jjigae are sadly becoming the norm.
As a militant make-it-from-scratch foodie, I have been studying a
cookbook called A Korean Mother’s Cooking Notes by Chang Sun-Young
(1997, Ewha University Press) with the zeal of a fundamentalist. Along
with the English-language recipes and descriptive photos, she
describes how she makes fresh homemade tofu out of soaked beans and
fries fish fillets in egg batter to place on the offering table for
her ancestor’s memorial rites. I took careful note when she said
Koreans celebrated the Baegil with rice cakes made from pearly white
grains donated by 100 houses.
I lovingly pored over all of the traditional recipes for fancy dishes
like the “Nine-Section Dish” and “Stuffed Cucumbers” that I longed to
try. The cookbook felt like a connection to all of my female ancestors
and the things that mattered to them, like the freshness of pale
daikon turnips for pickling.
My mother, who hails from the same Gaesung region as the author,
prepares her dishes from rough measurements in her head — a pinch
here, a handful there. Chang’s meticulous instructions were invaluable
to me, because I was accustomed to cooking from recipes American
style.
Thanks to the book, I had successfully recreated the homey Korean
dishes I grew up eating, like a fiery beef stew called yukgyejang.
Brazen with my newfound confidence, I felt ready for the Baegil
challenge, like it was some kind of reality show. I had, however,
glossed over the fact that preparing all those labor-intensive dishes
in such massive quantities wasn’t going to be that interesting or
stimulating. It was just plain old drudgery.
I guess when I was planning this Korean food feast, I had pictured a
compound of hanbok-wearing women with leathery brown hands making a
happy hum in the kitchen along with me. But there were no halmeonis
making doenjang from scratch. There were no aunts and neighbors
pounding out steamed sweet rice to make ddeok. Nobody to soak the
mountain roots and the fiddlehead ferns.
As my mom would say, making this stuff “requires many hands.”
And we didn’t have many hands. Just hers and mine.
My mother, Soraya, is a skilled Korean cook who still makes kimchi at
home with salted Napa cabbage, flaming red pepper powder, and
succulent oysters for that irresistible fishy taste.
As for the other hanbok-clad women of the family? No dice. Plum’s
aunties were busy with their own distinctly modern lives. My sister
Mirena, a fashion designer, was busy working out patterns for tunics
and leggings in her downtown L.A. studio. My other sister Elaine, a
mother of two, had prior commitments planning a fundraising event for
her kids’ school.
This crazy Baegil feast was my idea, they reasoned. I made my bed, and
now I had to get in it. My dad had already checked into the hotel near
my apartment. There was no turning back.
Fortunately, my mom had the brilliant idea of mixing catered foods
with a few homemade dishes. Like any snobby Korean food purist worth
her roasted sea salt, I demurred at the suggestion. But the thought of
frantically scrambling dozens of eggs and slicing them into paper-thin
strips while a stovetop full of boiling pots screamed for my attention
made me shudder. I relented and reached for the car keys and the
credit card.
We spent the entire afternoon zipping around K-town, knocking items
off my to-do list. My mom ordered a foot-tall baeksolgi from a ddeok
store on Vermont Avenue and Seventh Street. It was a towering white
cake, still warm from the steaming, topped with sweet, bloated raisins
that spelled out “100 days” in Hangeul. We cruised by Gaesung Kimchi
to score a few pounds of Korea’s national dish, made with the regional
flavoring of my mother’s hometown. Our final stop was Nagwon Catering
to order namul, a variety of vegetable dishes in three eye-popping
colors, a giant jug of the shikhye, and a big aluminum tray of the
ever-popular japchae.
Despite all of our flagrant cheating, I still had to make kalbi and
bulgogi, miyeokguk, and vats of fluffy steamed white rice, the
requisite grain for the Baegil, which was most definitely not going to
be made from rice donated by 100 houses.
We set out the kimchi and red bean paste just in time for the guests
who started to arrive at 5 p.m. They oohed and aahed over the various
colorful dishes, lavishing me with undeserved praise. They downed
bottles of Hite and gobbled up plates of piping hot pork bulgogi. They
drank seaweed soup in porcelain bowls. We took pictures next to the
baeksolgi. When the last of the shikhye had been consumed, I brought
out the Asian pears, which I peeled and carved into boat-shaped wedges
until my fingers curled up into little arthritic knots. Like a good
Korean girl, I made sure to serve the elders first.
As you’d expect, the dishes I made from scratch tasted better to me
than the catered ones. But after washing a pile of dishes higher than
Pektu Mountain in a soju-induced stupor, not for one second did I
regret mixing modern solutions with traditional culinary arts to
survive Plum’s Baegil.
You see, it’s all about the mix.

Here’s my recipe for miyeokguk:
INGREDIENTS
• 1/2 pound of beef brisket (the more sinews and ligaments, the better
flavor stock you’ll get)
• 3 handfuls of dried seaweed (miyeok, which is a thicker, leafier
kind of seaweed than the paper-thin nori which is used for sushi)
• sesame oil
• soy sauce (specifically guk ganjang for soup stock)
• black pepper
• garlic

• Making the beef stock is the most time consuming part. I make mine
the night before. Boil the brisket in about 10 cups of water until it
has reduced by half. Will take about two hours. Along the way, make
sure you skim the foam off the top because those are the impurities
that you don’t want to feed your kids. When the stock comes to room
temperature, refrigerate it overnight. The next morning, skim the
hardened fat off the top with a slotted spoon.
• Take out the beef and shred it with your hands into small bite size
pieces. Then add one tablespoon of sesame oil, two tablespoons of soy
sauce, two cloves of crushed garlic, and a few generous twists of
freshly ground black powder. Massage thoroughly with your hands and
set aside for a bit so the flavors can mingle.
• In the meantime, soak the seaweed in hot tap water for at least 10
minutes, though it can sit for longer. Once the seaweed is pliable and
delicious, cut into one-inch bite size pieces. Kitchen shears make
quick work of this task.
• Heat up a stockpot to medium-high heat. Sauté the beef with the
seaweed until both are completely blended together and you can smell
the garlic cooking. Then add your five cups of beef stock and boil for
10 minutes. Add more soy sauce and black pepper if it’s too bland.
• This is nice accompanied with white rice that has been steamed with
a few green peas. The trick I discovered was to add the peas at the
very end of the steaming process, rather than at the beginning of the
cooking, so that they are perfectly green and al dente and not soggy
and gray.

September, 2004
High Wire Act
Lesbian sex symbol, spoken word poet, mother and wife. Sonja Sohn,
star of the HBO series, “The Wire,” manages to balance elegance with
grit no matter what role she is playing.
> By Serena Kim >Photographs by Marlon Corvera

NEW YORK CITY — Sonja Sohn strides into a dingy one-bedroom apartment
on the Lower East Side, her big voice booming into a gold cell phone.
She’s just arrived from Baltimore, where she lives and where the
critically acclaimed HBO series she stars in, “The Wire,” is filmed.
But she’s made the journey back to her old stomping ground in New York
to take photos for this article.
We have been waiting for her.
Not too long, mind you. The hair stylist, the photographer and I were
just making small talk regarding a pair of high-heeled silver
sling-backs with “Dior” written in rhinestones across the arches. Were
they really planning on putting these on her? I thought, just moments
before she entered.
On “The Wire,” Sonja plays Shakima Greggs, a lesbian cop whose
demanding job takes a toll on her commitment to her woman (which,
incidentally, doesn’t bother her husband, music producer Adam Plack,
who she just married last year). She might not get dolled up much for
the part, except for the occasional episode where she gets to go
undercover to bust a strip club operation. But it’s a culturally
significant role because Greggs is one of the few African American
lesbian characters to appear on a regular television series.
“The Wire” chronicles a labyrinthine network of cops, informants and
drug dealers locked in a largely ineffective drug war, and it has been
hailed by critics for depicting some of the most subtle and nuanced
representations of African Americans on television. “‘The Wire’ does
better for blacks than ‘The Sopranos’ does for Italians,” says
Ta-Nehisi Coates, staff writer at the Village Voice. The show has
developed a cult following and won the 2003 Peabody Award, the most
prestigious award in electronic media.
All that to say, I couldn’t imagine Sonja in something quite as
frivolous as these platinum stilettos.
But in these surroundings, her star presence is cast into full relief.
Her charisma fills the room. And she’s certainly more beautiful in
person than on TV. Her skin is flawless. Her hair, long and black,
falls in curls around her shoulders.
Her face is a subtle mélange of her Korean mother and her African
American father. She is petite, long-waisted and no taller than 5 feet
5 inches, dressed in a T-shirt, jeans and a belt festooned with
mud-flap girl silhouettes.
“Are y’all going to try and play up my Korean features or something?”
she asks right off the bat. Nobody really has an answer for her, but
the unspoken message from the crew is that they just want her to be
herself.
“I’m a very simple girl,” she says, just before she proceeds to peruse
the expensive clothes that Avie, the stylist, has pulled from a
boutique called Jeffrey in Manhattan. One black blouse has giant
pilgrim collars, and she protests, “Oh hell no!” with a good-natured
guffaw. Finally they convince her to try on a feminine pastel green
Ungaro dress. It’s very fitted, but she loves it. She even wants to
wear it to the show’s third-season premiere.
It is this directness and spunk that endears Sonja to her co-stars and
fans. Wendell Pierce, who plays Detective Moreland on “The Wire,” is
nothing short of effusive in his praise. “Sonja’s curious, very
inventive, a bon vivant, a lover of life, and spirited. She’s the sort
of person that goes all out whether it’s researching a role or having
fun partying, or sitting together with just a group of us trying to
figure out something in the story line. She’s a person who takes
charge in a good way and just tries to mine all the good things out of
situations.”
“Wait! There’s no mirror?” Sonja jokes. “I’m gonna have to shoot
somebody!” Bo, our hairstylist, manages to rustle up a 3-by-3-foot
mirror from the bathroom. It’s not a full-length, but it will do.
Sonja gleefully does a little shimmy at the sight of her reflection.
***
It smells like rain outside, but inside, the building stinks of cat
feces and rotting meat. The apartment, though charming and flooded
with light, is permeated with a questionable odor as well. As an
explanation, the owner, a recovered crystal meth
addict-turned-born-again Christian, tells us that he lets his homeless
friends come up and take showers when need be. But Sonja is unfazed by
it all. Seems that she is accustomed to working in conditions that are
sometimes less than desirable.
“We’re in the ‘hood in Baltimore in 100-degree humidity dodging rats,”
says Dominic West, one of Sonja’s co-stars on “The Wire.” “Then, we’ll
go back to our trailer and watch things like ‘Entourage’ and wish we
were doing a TV show in L.A. with lots of swimming pools.”
Nevertheless, this afternoon, the apartment has been transformed into
a high-fashion studio, and the crew has surrounded Sonja. Make-up
artist Kim artfully applies gloss on Sonja’s lips, while Bo gives her
hair the Diana Ross treatment. And Avie runs in and out of the
dressing room-slash-bedroom with outfits and garment bags in hand.
Through it all, Sonja makes self-deprecating jokes — “On the show, I’m
usually in baggy clothes, so I don’t have to worry about it,” she says
while patting her stomach and ruing the lapses in her low-carb diet.
Once we have her settled in Bo’s chair, she seems comfortable enough
to talk, though she had regarded me with a degree of caution earlier.
She felt burned by her first newspaper profile. She said it
misrepresented her, like her alleged drug abuse. “The drug thing was
blown out of proportion. It’s more like you grow up in the ghetto.
Drugs are all around you. But it’s not the only thing around you,” she
says. “It was hard because that article came out in my hometown, so
people who I went to high school with read it.” And as for the
reported “sexual abuse,” she says, it was absolutely not true. “It was
about just growing up and being dogged by guys,” she says. “You’re
thinking you’re in a relationship, and he’s thinking something else.
Or doesn’t care. But, no, I wasn’t molested by sexual predators.”
Back then, Sonja Sohn was Sonja Williams. Years before she took on her
mother’s maiden name, she grew up in Newsome Park, a housing project
in Newport News, the historically black harbor city in Virginia that
birthed legends like Pearl Bailey and Ella Fitzgerald. After serving
20 years in the U.S. Army, her father retired and “bumbled around,”
she says. He held radical views, was suspicious of the CIA and the
FBI, and befriended Black Panthers. He later became a devout Southern
Pentecostal holy roller and disapproved of Sonja’s chosen vocation. In
response, she changed her last name.
Her mother, who died from cancer in 1998, left Korea at age 20,
severing all connections with her family. “She had problems with her
family long before she met my father,” Sonja says. Her parents met
while he was stationed in Korea. Once in the United States, Sonja’s
mother worked as a seamstress and later became one of the first women
to clear brush for the National Parks Service in the historic
Jamestown area.
“Korean people bust their ass,” Sonja says as wisps of steam escape
from Bo’s curling iron. “That woman was like a horse. Little, but
strong as sh-t!”
Though her mother tried hard to disassociate herself from the
motherland, Sonja’s oldest daughter, Sakira, 17, hopes to get a tattoo
on her back that says “Made In Korea.” Even though she wasn’t born
there and largely identifies with being African American and white,
Sakira’s desire for a tattoo represents the connection she had with
her grandmother before she died.
“She feels the Korean part more than my younger daughter, Sophia (age
13), though both of them do include it in their description of
themselves,” Sonja says. “My older daughter was special to my mother.
She was the first grandchild. I was a new mom, and she was my first
child, so my mother always thought I was a little hard on her. She
really understood my oldest daughter in a way that I didn’t.”
Sonja loves to talk. And it’s nice to listen to her, too. Her voice
resonates in a deep, full alto. When she gets excited, she’ll rasp
emphatically. She’s not one for shy or terse one-word answers. Her
stories require much background. She likes to set the scene in detail,
so you really get a sense of where she’s coming from.
“I grew up in a black neighborhood,” she says, “but I was always
different. We were accepted. But that difference would come up.
“If somebody was mad at you, the first thing they would go to is your
Chinese mama and your flat ass, your chinky eyes. But I didn’t look at
it that way because Thelma Riley had buckteeth, and Latonya Warren was
like this big! The b-tch was 6 feet tall. Everybody had their thing to
get picked on, and that was mine.”
Her older brother, Roger, who was born in Korea and is five years her
senior, defended their mother at all costs. “In general, nobody wants
their mother talked about, but you know how black people are,” Sonja
says. “My brother got into many a fight. He kicked some ass over my
mother.”
Despite the occasional name-calling, Sonja was popular enough to
become a cheerleader at Warwick High School, as well as its homecoming
queen. Her class elected her “most popular” and “most
school-spirited.”
After graduation, she made her way to New York in 1984, tried out the
School of Visual Arts but didn’t stick with it, and married a Jewish
man (they eventually split in 1996). They had two little girls, and
she settled into a comfortable middle-class housewife role in
Brooklyn.
“Time was ticking,” she says, “and I knew I was supposed to do
something instead of just sitting around, drinking a bottle of wine
and making dinner. I would wake up in the morning, take the kids to
school, smoke a joint, vacuum the rug. It does seem just great, but I
wasn’t supposed to be doing that.”
In 1991, she enrolled at Brooklyn College to become an English
teacher. It was in a creative writing class that the instructor told
her to write her first poem. “We were reading Henry Miller, and he
just got on my f-cking nerves,” she says. “He thought he was God’s
gift to women, so sexually pompous. I was so pissed off that I wrote a
poem about how I would wreck a man sexually, almost as if I were a
female Henry Miller. But underneath it, I could see my own psychic
pain. And I realized that I was doing something very cathartic.”
By 27, she was performing spoken-word poetry, a development that
ultimately led to acting. During her spoken-word performances, she
would often be asked if she had acted before, but she initially
dismissed the idea of acting as being vain.
“But after a while, [acting] kept coming into my path, so it chose
me,” she says. In 1996, she appeared in “Work,” her first film (she
played a lesbian). Around the same time, Sonja began studying with
acting coach, Susan Batson (Sean “P. Diddy” Combs studied with Batson
to prepare for his Broadway role in “A Raisin in the Sun”). Sonja
struggled through a few low-paying gigs as new actors do. Batson
encouraged her to stick to the stage, and eventually, the right people
would find her.
And they did. At one of Sonja’s spoken-word performances, a
grey-haired documentary filmmaker named Marc Levin approached her with
an exciting idea for a feature film called “Slam,” which was released
in 1998. The plot was about an intensely creative, young black D.C.
poet, played by Saul Williams, who made one wrong decision and ended
up in jail. Sonja jumped at the opportunity to portray Williams’
creative writing teacher in prison and based her character on her own
real-life experiences teaching a poetry class at Riker’s Island in New
York. The film received the Sundance Grand Jury Award for best feature
film. The New York Times called it “a vivid marriage of ideas usually
seen as contradictions: documentary and fiction, action and poetry,
black and white.” Sonja became one of the film’s break-out actors. Bo
had seen “Slam” five times precisely because he had loved Sonja’s
character so much.
Although Sonja works on screenplays and says that writing will be the
next chapter of her life, she no longer writes or performs her poetry.
***
The year before her mother died, she and Sonja traveled to Korea to
find their estranged family. Sonja returned to seek out the missing
pieces of her identity.
“There are certain things that I learned about Korean society at
large, and one thing is that they frown upon people of mixed racial
heritage in a major way,” she says. “Especially if you’re black.”
She recounts the time when she visited an orphanage that cared for
multiracial Korean kids. She met a mixed Korean and black man who
worked with the missionaries, who told her about how their parents
abandoned them in hopes they would some day be adopted by Americans
because their prospects were so dim in Korea. “They’re spat upon,” she
says vehemently.
“I saw this little girl running around, and she reminded me of me. I
just had one of those moments where I could see where I would have
been if I had grown up in Korea,” she says. “And I was so sad, I
cried.”
Sonja’s mother was able to find her sisters and brothers in Busan.
Sonja met her cousins and received their warm welcome, but not without
some suspicion that they regarded her as less because she was also
black.
As tough as Korea was for her, is there anything from the culture that
she wanted to take back and incorporate into her life? Sonja responds
candidly.
“No. Though I always tell people my mother’s Korean, I did realize
that I am culturally black,” she says. “There is no getting around
that. I wanted to be so sure in that other half. Because I wasn’t. My
mother never wanted to talk about her family. She didn’t speak Korean
to me. So when I came back from Korea, I understood that I was black.
How can I be Korean if [had I grown] up there, I would be less than a
person?”
***
Sonja Sohn is ready for her close-up. She folds her arms and leans
against a painted brick wall. Marlon, the photographer, coos to her in
his soft Filipino-accented English. The bright studio lamp is
reflected in her lip gloss. Her expression changes ever so subtly with
every click of the camera shutter: first vacant, sultry, then stern,
and at times, vulnerable. And when the photographer puts his camera
down, Sonja breaks into a wide grin, looking every bit a whole person.

March, 2005
Hustle and Flow
Ted Chung and his cousin Seung are hard at work behind the scenes of the hip-hop industry
By Serena Kim
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi

Ted Chung (left) and Seung Chung
You wanna talk about dream jobs? Ted Chung has the ultimate dream job.
He travels the world with rapper Snoop Dogg. He hangs out in the
studio with recording artists as he envisions the direction of their
albums. He throws lavish premieres for cool movies. And he figures out
how to market video games and which film scripts to develop.
As head of A&R at Doggy Style Records, Chung, 28, essentially
executive produces (takes from concept to execution) Snoop Dogg’s
albums and any other artists the label might be releasing. But that’s
not his only gig. He also runs a full-service marketing firm with his
cousin Seung Chung called Chung & Associates.
When you try to get the two to talk about what exactly a marketing
company does, you’ll get a lot of catch phrases like “conceptual brand
work” and “infrastructure and integration.” But really what they do
boils down to making media — like music, movies, video games and ring
tones — irresistible to the kids. They’ve done deals with EA Sports,
created original music with the Neptunes, devised a T-shirt campaign
for singer John Legend, promoted mix-tapes for Smirnoff Ice and even
worked their magic on the Jet Li vehicle “Hero.”
“We did the national street team marketing for it,” says Ted. “We did
the talent coordination, a lot of the creative consulting involved in
their youth strategies. Making sure Redman and Method Man did drops on
the radio for different markets. Getting certain types of press at the
premieres. Really a multilevel effort to bring young eyes and
attention to the ‘Hero’ film.”
Ted’s love for urban culture made him a natural for this line of work.
He had the requisite flavor and hip-hop sensibility, while Seung, 34,
brought the corporate know-how, like how to get Fortune 500 companies
to understand how to market themselves to the hip-hop generation.
“My background is on the business side, from working with Ernst &
Young, wearing suits five days a week,” says Seung. “Now I’m just
applying those concepts and structure to what we are doing today with
our businesses and then scaling that up.”
If you’re a Nelly fan, it’s like this: Ted is the sweat and Seung is the suit.
Back In The Day
Ted’s parents own PJ Casters, a Compton, Calif.-based manufacturing
company that makes high-quality industrial casters and wheels. They
came to the United States to attend college in the 1960s. His father
went to Oklahoma State University and his mother attended George
Washington University.
“That allowed them to be a little more open-minded than other
immigrants who came for business purposes after already being
professionals because they got to experience a lot of American youth
culture while they were still in school,” says Ted.
So they were supportive of their son’s fascination with hip-hop
culture, as long as it provided a living for him.
When Ted began rapping, DJing and graffiti writing in high school (at
the elite, private Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, Calif., where
President Reagan’s children attended), he was just doing it out of
love for hip-hop. But somewhere along the way, he figured out how to
exploit his passion into a sexy and lucrative career.
Well, actually not just somewhere. It was someplace very specific —
Dorchester, a crime-ridden community near Boston.
It was 1993. And Ted was 16 years old, attending summer school at
Harvard University during his junior year in high school. A West Coast
native, Ted didn’t think much of his surroundings.
“I was a hater at first. I didn’t like East Coast music and people and
their ways,” says Ted. Reader, bear in mind that hip-hop is very
regional. West Coast hip-hop has it’s own sound and history, as does
the East Coast.
“I was so West Coast-centric. It was either about the Hieroglyphics,
Snoop, Pharcyde or Too Short.”
But as a temporarily transplanted young hip-hop head, he was yearning
for a musical community and decided to enter a talent show in
Dorchester organized by the now-defunct rap group Ill Al Skratch and
Mercury Records.
“At that time, you didn’t have like an Eminem. Now hip-hop is so
multicultural and cool. But it really wasn’t like that then,” he says,
describing an all African American audience and the racial taunts he
and his Malaysian homeboy Keith Lee endured.
When Ted showed up at the pre-trials, the show organizers tried to bar
him from entering based on his race. But Ill Al Skratch’s road manager
was a Filipino American DJ named Brian Samson, who told the venue, “If
you guys don’t let this guy into the contest, I’m pulling the band
out.”
Ted ended up winning the show. By the time the contest was over, his
Asian American buddy was getting congratulated for knowing the winner.
And Ted made an important business contact that would change his life.
“Because a lot of West Coast Pinoys were involved in DJing, they got
these low-tier promotional jobs at record labels that were starting
record pools and promotions departments,” says Ted. “The Filipinos
were pioneers, and they supported everyone else. This is how Asians
permeated the modern-day music business.”
When Ted finished up his Harvard summer school, he returned to Los
Angeles to become Samson’s intern at Mercury Records.
Paying Dues
Since then, Ted has attended the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania and excelled in the cutthroat music industry, combining
old-fashioned entrepreneurialism with new-school marketing strategies.
He worked on street teams, which employ guerilla techniques, like
plastering boulevards and avenues with stickers, hanging posters and
snipes on walls and passing out sampler CDs and cassettes to kids at
local hangouts. He DJed at parties and radio stations. This led to
more high-status gigs, like executive producing a rare groove
compilation and eventually landing a coveted A&R position at EMI
Records.
In 2000, Ted met Snoop and the two hit it off. They bonded over movies
and music. Snoop appreciated Ted’s West Coast pedigree, his
professionalism and accountability, and hired him. Then when Seung
moved out a couple years later, the cousins decided to combine forces
and start Chung & Associates. They struggled in the beginning,
gritting their teeth and logging many work hours.
“We always had this saying to each other, ‘nothing is ever easy,’”
says Seung. “You can’t take things for granted. You got to make sure
you follow through and persevere. Things aren’t going to be handed to
you. As far as a work ethic, I think that galvanized our mentality and
our approach to business.”
Now with exciting and influential projects on their plate, Ted and
Seung are able to run a profitable business while Ted still works for
Doggy Style Records.
Strictly Business
Snoop Dogg isn’t exactly a poster boy for political correctness and
has been criticized for misogynistic lyrics, like “You gotta put a
b-tch in her place/Even if that means slappin’ her in her face.”
When I ask Ted if he ever took the Snooperstar to task for these
rhymes, he defends hip-hop as a creative expression similar to movies.
“An album is like a movie to me,” Ted says. “If you look at a movie
like ‘Casino,’ it was a great movie, but there were some misogynistic
scenes in that movie, too, like when Joe Pesci walks a showgirl
straight into his Cadillac and pushes her head down into his lap.
Sometimes Snoop does songs where he feels like that because all of us
feel like that sometimes as men. And on the other hand, most of the
time, we feel like we want to praise women.”
Like misogyny, complicated attitudes about race are prevalent in the
hip-hop industry. If you’re Asian American, you might be on the
receiving end of insidious stereotypes on a regular basis. But Ted
doesn’t lose a lot of sleep over the race question. His business is
entertainment, not politics.
“When you go into a conversation or a relationship with a business
partner or a potential artist or producer that you want to do work
with, I don’t think you can bring that baggage to the table,” says
Ted. “That’s really the way we deal with it. I think that’s the reason
why myself and Seung have been able to do business with so many
different people.”
Ted’s come a long way from that nervous night in Dorchester. But he’s
still winning over the crowd in the fiercely competitive entertainment
industry. It’s inevitable that one day in the very near future, he’ll
be looked at as a new kind of pioneer for another generation of Asian
American kids who are looking to leave their mark on hip-hop.
“It would be great to know that because we’ve done what we’ve done,”
Ted says, “our business partners can look at other Korean Americans
down the line and not have to question their ability, or what values
they bring to the table.”

June, 2007
Abstract Poetic
Pioneering Korean American modern artist lives on, but in obscurity
Photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
By Serena Kim

My mother, Soraya, and her painter husband, Young-Il Ahn, live in the
smoggy, gray, industrial wasteland of downtown L.A. But they have a
cool oasis: a breezy, high-ceilinged artist’s loft flooded with light.
Ahn’s paintings are thickly layered, and richly hued prisms of vibrant
vermilion, azure, and emerald pulsate from every wall. Flamboyant
tropical fish float in their aquariums, while a riot of lovebirds,
parakeets, and red-eared finches pierce the air with their frantic
twittering. A skylight illuminates the long white dining table where
my stepfather and I eat lunch, as my mom flips haemul pajeon on the
stove.
And this is when I learn that my stepfather is one of the first Korean
artists to thrive in America.
I had always known that my mom’s husband was a talented artist, but I
wasn’t aware of his pioneering role in art history until today.
“Korea has a very short history of contemporary art like Westernized
painting,” says Ahn, who was born in 1934. “I’m a part of the first
generation of artists who painted in the Western way in Korea. Before
that it was mostly water-based Oriental painting.”
He tells me that he was the first Korean artist to show in America,
when he had an invitational exhibition in New York at the World House
Gallery in 1957. In those days, the American Abstract Expressionism
movement, which included artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko,
made New York an important center of art.
He adamantly denies membership to any formal movement, but Ahn’s
paintings share many attributes of Abstract Expressionism. Some are
textured blocks of shimmering color and others are roughly hewn forms
of classical musicians, fish or birds rendered in thickly layered oil
paint slathered with a palette knife.
Ahn had his early training in Impressionist art by attempting to make
exact copies of the works of Degas and Monet — as a toddler. He was
born in Gaesung in the North, but lived in Japan for 10 years, and
moved to Seoul where he was educated at Seoul National University,
graduating in 1958. The country was still recovering from the Korean
War and was very poor. “Now I have such nice paints and art supplies,”
he says, “but in Korea there was nothing.”
Ahn was so poor he couldn’t afford to buy even one canvas to enter a
prestigious national art contest when he was a teenager. He stole his
father’s award-winning painting of a nude, covered it with gesso, and
rendered an image of the rabbit hutch in his front yard in the
Impressionist style on the stolen canvas. “He’s so bad, right?” says
my mom from the kitchen, eavesdropping on our conversation.
Ahn won the contest and access to patronage and prestige among Seoul’s
upper crust. Suddenly, the poor young artist became close friends with
Walter C. Dowling, the American ambassador to Korea, and President
Syngman Rhee’s wife, Francesca. Both were wild about his paintings.
“In the ’50s and ’60s very few artists could support themselves on
their art alone in Korea,” says Chung Sook Hee, the editor of special
sections at the Korea Times. “But Ahn was outstanding. In those days,
he was invited to American galleries, which was unheard of. Hardly any
Koreans were showing in Korea because there were no galleries.”
Ninety percent of his paintings were sold to U.S. collectors, so he
assumed he would find freedom, opportunity and financial independence
if he immigrated. He chose Los Angeles, where he could gather
inspiration from the ocean.
Since that first exhibition in New York, he’s shown his art in Los
Angeles, London, and Seoul nearly every year.
He sells his paintings to businesses like Daewoo and Hyundai and
patrons in the Korean American community. In 2001, the U.S. State
Department formally invited Ahn to show two of his paintings, “Sunset
C” and “Space,” in their embassy in Vienna for four years.
“The State Department hired a fancy art moving service from New York
to pick up my paintings,” he says. “It drove all the way
cross-country. They kept calling, ‘We are here!’ When I went outside,
I saw a huge white truck parked in front of my studio. It came all the
way to the West Coast to pick up only my two paintings. I was
touched.”
My stepfather is a quiet man who churns out painting after painting.
He’s never had to work a day job, but he and my mother live an ascetic
lifestyle with few luxuries, save for the sumptuous art hanging on the
walls. With some reflection he jokes that it might not have been so
bad to stay in Korea after all. “Now it’s booming with art in Seoul,”
he says, with a laugh. “If I stayed there, I would have been rich!”
Somehow I feel America is richer because of him.

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