LONESOME JOURNEY: THE KOREAN AMERICAN CENTURY
[ED. After two decades of research and several years in writing, a monumental work in the history of
the Korean American century will come to its fruition sometime in 2005 when the finished project, the
Korean Oral History Project, will appear as a single book.
Written by Mr. K. W. Lee of Los Angeles, the dean of Korean American journalists, and Dr. Luke
and Grace Kim of Sacramento, portions of the book have been serially published in the KoreAm
magazine for over two years now, running from January 2003 every month, the 25th in the
continuing series having appeared in the January, 2005 issue.
Both K. W. Lee and Luke Kim are members of OKSPN. Related to this, we have just published
the Annotated Chronology of Korean Immigration to the United States, 1882-1952, by Professors
Yong-Ho Choe of Hawaii, Ilpyong Kim of Connecticut and Moo-Young Han of Duke. The
Chronology is posted in the Korean-American Forum.
What follows below is an introduction to the Korean
Oral History Project written by K. W. Lee. It eloquently describes the 'lonesome journey' of the
first wave of
Korean immigrants to the United States.]
PRE-PUBLICATION INTRODUCTION
Lonesome Journey: the Korean American Century, The Korean Oral History project
by K. W. Lee
The history of organized Korean immigration, more aptly of surrogate slave passage to North America, is
100 years old, but its hidden story remains to be told to the outside world and new waves of immigrants.
It's an undying saga of the humblest on earth - enduring the unendurable in the New World markets of cheap
labor in the Islands of Hawaii, the American West, south of the border in Mexico and the Islands of Cuba -
rising to the noblest cause of freedom and independence for their conquered kingdom.
It is the
story of a lost tribe whose lonesome journey in quest of its dream is
yet to be remembered, refreshed
and retold
for succeeding generations. It's haunted by countless ghosts
crying out for fulfillment of their
unrequited longing for a homeland, free and whole, as a nation.
In the
Korean ethos, it is the history of people of "haan" (the
everlasting woes) from the land of "haan"
- of separations, departures, and wrongs imposed by unending draconian quirks of fate across the ages. It's
a yet-to-be heard account of a forgotten people whose spirit refuses to die until their "haan" is assuaged,
until they are released from the limbo of anonymity.
A singular irony is that its beginning chapter in the United States, spanning the first 75 years, is still
missing, although its current pages in this nation of immigrants brim with shining tales of one of the
fastest growing and most achieving ethnic groups.
At the dawn of the last century, 65 boatloads of thousands of contract laborers, mostly unschooled and
unmarried, from the dying Hermit Kingdom were dumped on the sugar plantations of Hawaii. The years
were 1903-05.
[ED. This is the so-called "first wave" of Korean immigrants. The large scale Korean immigration
of today, the "third wave," would not begin until the 1970s. See the chronology by Choe, Kim and
Han.]
Encouraged by American missionaries and lured by plantation owners, they had fled wretched misery and
wars waged on their plundered kingdom by covetous powers. As they toiled in stoop labor in Hawaii and
on the mainland, their homeland - under Japanese occupation - vanished from the world's map and
consciousness.
In Hawaii and the mainland, while waging their twilight struggle for independence, they refused to
succumb to serfdom by providing the crucial cocoon for their American-born children's upward mobility
through a dogged ascent of the educational ladder.
A trickle of political exiles from Japan's brutal rule - coupled with arrivals of "picture brides" to marry
single men - helped develop tiny but cohesive, church-based ethnic settlements both in Hawaii and on the
West Coast.
The early sojourners were a patriotic lot, giving generously of themselves to the cause of Korean
independence. Money bought with their blood and sweat (a dollar for a long day's labor) went to finance
a government in exile. Women warriors sewed, fed and marched. Many brave souls joined anti-
Japanese guerrilla forces in China and Manchuria. Others trained as independence fighters.
On this
vast and indifferent continent, they harvested discrimination,
isolation and the indignities reserved
for people without a country. Neither Chinese nor Japanese, they led an obscure existence; lost in the
shuffle they didn't count. In frustration, they bickered and slandered each other until at last Pearl
Harbor rallied them behind a common cause.
They greeted the Allied victory in World War II only to witness their "liberated" homeland divided and
plunged into a fratricidal civil war. And they died in nameless farm camps and rooming houses as birds of
passage that couldn't go home again.
By the time the larger wave of newcomers from the south of a now divided Korea began arriving in the late
1970s, most remnants of the first wave had vanished from the scene.
But in that
first wave there were others who were lucky enough to grow the families
that provided the crucial
cocoon for the American-born children's upward mobility through a dogged ascent of the educational ladder.
Today, only a few vestiges of the early Korean community survive in anonymous cemeteries and left-over
churches across the farming belts of the Western coastal states.
Descendants of the first wave, citizens by birth and largely estranged from their lost ancestral land, have
made a great leap into the mainstream, thanks to the sacrifice of their education-obsessed parent generation.
As has been true of most ethnic immigrant experience, that first generation born in America chose rather to
forget than
to remember the land their parents had lef behind and loved with
such passion. Only a handful
among
these scattered thousands of American-born children maintains
contacts with the newly burgeoning
Koreatowns.
These two waves - more than a half century apart in their coming to America - are like two ships passing
each other on a starless night without exchanging signals. Nevertheless, these children and grandchildren
of the assimilated tribe make up a fragile but precious link tothe source of our common Korean past.
This oral history is dedicated not only to capturing whispers from the souls of those departed first
immigrants through their American-born descendants but to filling that aching void in the collective memory
of an ancient people of their early, solitary passage to the New World.
This oral
history has been in the making for the past 25 years - an arduous,
often faltering journey to trace
the long-gone trails of the original immigrants and recapture the pulse and spirit of their all-too-brief
existence through their American-born children already in their 70s and 80s and grandchildren in their 50s
and 60s.
Memories, along with artifacts and family records, lean to forgetfulness. Old age and scattered lives are
discouraging factors in collecting oral histories. To the dismay and sorrow of editors K. W. Lee and Dr.
Luke and Grace Kim, many simply voiced disinterest or aversion to their own ethnic heritage.
Bluntly
put, there's little continuity from the first to the second coming of
Koreans to the shores of America.
The Korean American community, like Korea itself, is not complete, estranged from its own unkind fate.
There exists a genuine gaping flaw in the Korean American collective memory and character which cries
out for mending.
That's why it's all the more compelling and critical that the American-born offspring from the Land of
Morning Calm record their eye witness accounts of their lives with their parents from Korea. They are
the legacy the first Koreans in America have left behind. Their memories are a precious gift from our
century-old American passage.
If this oral history succeeds in capturing a glimpse of their lonesome journey for succeeding generations,
the Korean Oral History Project's editors believe, its mission is more than accomplished.