By Allen Kim   Illustration by Kyungduk Kim

The popularized images of Korean fathers in high-profile news articles over the last several years, or even anecdotally, paint a picture of men who are disconnected from their families, emotionally closed, focused solely on their breadwinning duties or, in some cases, even prone to violence. At one extreme, who could forget the horrifying story of the Korean immigrant father who shot his wife, son and daughter before turning the gun on himself in 2006. His daughter, Binna, lived to tell of the traumatic experience, her solitary photo against a black background appearing on the cover of Los Angeles Times’ West magazine the same year. Even abroad fathers are not immune to the negative image: A recent Korea Times article reported that South Korean fathers spend the least amount of time with their families, compared with other dads in East Asia.

But these highlighted “failures” of Korean fathers do not tell the whole story. Across the United States, a growing number of Korean immigrant men are actively searching for the answer to the fundamental question: What does it mean to be a man and a father today?

Since its introduction to U.S. shores from South Korea in 2000, thousands of dads have participated in what’s known as Father School—a religiously inspired movement that seeks to turn the hearts of men toward their families.

Founded in 1995, Duranno Father School developed in South Korea as an evangelical response to concerns over uninvolved fathers, broken families, materialism and other issues considered contradictory to biblical values. Men were viewed as the weak link in their families often because they were emotionally and/or physically absent. Today, as a non-profit organization, Father School sponsors various men’s ministries, both religious and secular, that squarely address men’s responsibility within the family. Their goal is to promote involved and positive fathering.

“We feel that men are disconnected from their purpose, and that positive father involvement is a learned behavior,” said Hyun Kyu In, director of USA Father School in Los Angeles. “The father’s influence cannot be understated. Men must show their love in front of their children, to touch and even kiss their wives publicly, to be reconciled with their own fathers. All of these things translate to the likelihood of better relations with their own children.”

To date, Father School has sponsored more than 2,400 educational sessions in 37 countries, with over 140,000 graduates worldwide, according to statistics provided by USA Father School. In North America, it has operated in 46 cities with over 14,000 graduates and counting. Although it primarily caters to Korean immigrants, it is increasingly taking hold in Latino communities as well.

Conferences are organized as four-day seminars replete with small group activities, testimonials, lectures and writing assignments. Men spend a total of 20 hours at Father School events, with between 55 to 170 men attending a single session. As a grassroots operation, the organization relies on volunteers—graduates of the program—to help run the seminars, recruit and serve as small group facilitators. Members come from a variety of backgrounds and religious perspectives, and, while informed by Christian spirituality, do not advocate a particular faith organization.

Kyu Bae Choi, vice president of USA Father School, said that every year there are several cases of divorces being cancelled as a result of men’s participation in the program.

As a graduate student of sociology researching this movement since 2006, I secured permission to attend three Father School conferences at various churches in Los Angeles, and also conducted several site visits to the USA Father School headquarters in L.A.’s Koreatown to interview organization leaders and volunteers. I was given access to speak with Father School participants and to read their personal letters during these conferences, with the agreement that I would keep their identities anonymous. I use pseudonyms for school participants and volunteers in this article, and their comments published here have been translated from Korean.

With this access, I uncovered a unique world inhabited by Korean fathers that many would be surprised by—even moved by. It was a world shaped by discomfort, despair, tears, regrets, healing, hope and renewed motivation. Here is a glimpse into that hidden world.

Building the Family Builder

It’s 2:00 on a Saturday afternoon, and volunteers wearing the unmistakable blue-and-white-striped Father School T-shirts greet Korean men outside of the entrance to the main conference room. Attendees, who paid a $100 entrance fee, will receive among other items, nametags, an advice manual, evening meals and stationery for homework assignments. Men are then directed to assigned tables separated by age groups. Decorating the room are large banners declaring in Korean, “As the father lives, so the family lives!” and “Lord, I am a Father”—clues that the organization seeks to squarely address men’s role as fathers and husbands.

Meetings are scheduled to run from 2 p.m. until 9 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday over two weekends. During the four compacted days, these men will learn about what it means to be a “family builder.” Toward that end, all the activities men will participate in are designed to help them open up emotionally and express themselves in more loving ways, which explains exercises like having men hug each other and homework assignments to go on dates with family members.

Of course, such activities cause some participants to feel uncomfortable. I’ve even witnessed some men walk out of the conferences. Despite the “money-back guarantee” of satisfaction promised by Father School leaders, when largely first-generation Korean men, from ages 29 to 75, first enter the seminar room, they appear unsure of what they got themselves into. The look of restlessness among the younger fathers was more apparent, perhaps given the business of their lives and the leisure activities they like to pursue on weekends. Not surprisingly, a majority of the men in attendance didn’t come out of their own volition. In one conference survey I conducted, 75 percent of men indicated that their participation was prompted by the prodding of their wives or persuasion of a friend or pastor.

After a general introduction by school leaders, the men are assigned their first group exercise: creating a team name and chant, and then drawing pictures distilling their experience as husbands and fathers. Armed with colored markers and crayons, men draw images that signify such things as golf, smoking, alcohol, American and Korean flags, money signs plastered on houses and the Christian symbol of the cross.

Representing a group of six men in their 40s, Jiwon describes their drawings to the audience. “We wrote down, ‘Come here quickly, Dad’ because our group all shared a number of obstacles keeping us from our families, including work, drinking with friends, golfing, billiards, even church obligations,” said Jiwon, 41. “We know our families miss our presence as seen by the sad face of this child.”

Another poster proclaimed more boldly: “Children! We will become better fathers!”  I will not forget one picture that prominently displayed a cartoon depiction of an angry red face with fumes coming out of the top of his head. “At times the image of an angry father may be in the minds of our family,” Jim explained. “This is not the image we wish to leave for our families.” When asked to elaborate on the image of the angry face, the 42-year-old added that many of the men themselves grew up with overbearing, sometimes abusive fathers and that, despite wanting to parent differently, ended up following in the same footsteps.

“Korean dads confront a new environment in America,” said Sangil, a 37-year-old Father School volunteer. “[They] risk greater estrangement from their kids because … they simply do not know how to father in a positive way.”

Later in the day, men watch two videos that demonstrate contrasting father images: the first shows a man stressed out from work, drinking alcohol and smoking with coworkers, and then arriving home late and irritable to his family. Meanwhile his children have grown up quickly and are left only with images of an authoritarian, emotionally distant father whose sole role was as breadwinner. The Korean man’s legacy, says the narrator, leaves deep pain and regret.

The second image shows a Korean father arriving home early from work with a smile and going on dates with his eager children. He is openly affectionate and encouraging.

The men are encouraged to discuss these contrasting representations, but getting stoic Korean men to share their feelings is no easy task. A combination of guest speakers and testimonials by Father School volunteers, who are themselves former students, facilitate this effort. A volunteer at one conference I attended, for example, shared with the audience how, in an overzealous attempt to impart the lesson of poverty and the importance of studying, he once left his son on a street corner in a poor neighborhood and shouted in outrage whether he wanted to end up like the people there. With tears, the guest speaker expressed deep regret recalling the tears that had appeared on his son’s face that day. He realized there is a “better way” to impart lessons to a child.

While sitting at the table of 40-year-old fathers, I heard several men raise a number of issues related to generational conflict with their Americanized children. Many expressed frustration over their children’s disrespect for their authority, with one even revealing that his child called the police to report the dad’s use of physical discipline. As I listened to these men, I, the son of a Korean immigrant, started to recall my own dad’s use of “tools” like a pool stick or the pulling of a cheek to reprimand the two boys in the family.  The linkage between Korean fatherhood and physical violence is an unfortunate stereotype, but at the same time, corporal punishment was long considered an acceptable practice in Korean society, whether within the family, school or military.

And yet, as I sat with these older men, I observed an uncommon scene: fathers choked up with tears and regrets about their past behavior. ”For several years, I was against the person my daughter loved and caused her considerable pain,” said Woojin, 57. Other dads confessed it was difficult to imagine their fathering role beyond breadwinning and scolding their children.

No Handshaking Allowed

In a strange and uncomfortable moment during the conference, two male volunteers walk to a center stage and demonstrate how participants are to hug one other, chest to chest (no macho back patting). Handshaking is not allowed at the school. Many men are noticeably feeling awkward, as nervous laughter can be heard.

The hugging requirement is supposed to underscore the point that positive fathering involves open expression, both physical and verbal. It is also intended to help bring participants closer together. The men are encouraged to hug upon first greeting each other and also when the need to comfort each other arises. After all, a key feature of the Father School organization is emphasis on accountability groups, similar to the 12-step program used by Alcoholics Anonymous. School volunteers told me that, in their experience, participants will form friendships that endure long after the conference ends and turn to each other for emotional support.

Similar to transforming men’s body language, the school also promotes language guidelines that are more egalitarian and affectionate than what many traditional Korean dads are used to. Within the Korean language, certain pronouns are used to locate the individual within a Confucian social hierarchy. But here, men are instructed to address one another generically as “hyeongjeanim” (brother), instead of using honorific titles, despite the presence of pastors and elders. I found that abandoning hierarchical formalities did allow the men to share with each other more freely.

The more egalitarian language also extends to their spouses. Among many Korean immigrant men, a common way to refer to one’s wife is as “jip saram” (house person) or “an saram” (inside person), which some perceive as degrading toward women. Instead, the men were told to refer to their wives as “anea” (wife) or “saranghanun anea” (beloved wife) when addressing them in the presence of other men. When some men accidentally revert to the traditional references, volunteers jokingly tell them they will be fined for each verbal slip.

Fathers are not asked, however, to modify their language when it comes to their children, who are still expected to maintain the verb conjugations that denote respect of elders. But by moving away from some of the sexist references toward their spouses, Father School seems to embrace the idea that women and men are partners in raising their children, versus it being the sole domain of the mother.

And the school further promotes a more nurturing role for the father, different from the more rigid, Confucian-  modeled patriarchal one many grew up with in Korea. One homework assignment for the dads is to go home and lay their hands on all family members to “bless them.”

Letters Home

If Father School can be boiled down to one signature activity, it would be the writing of letters to family members, something the majority of the men have never done before. Taking a page from Western self-help culture, Father School leaders encourage the men to share good as well as painful memories, regrets and expressions of love in the various letters they are asked to write.

“Writing letters is the most important aspect of the conference to get men to communicate with family members from the heart,” explained group leader Chul. “As you know it is very difficult for Korean men to do this.”

Kyu Bae Choi, vice president of USA Father School, also described the countless instances of Korean American children who were never told they were loved until their fathers expressed themselves in their letters.

Although it may have been difficult, many of the men—often seen frantically working on the missives during free moments throughout the conference—end up expressing themselves quite openly, as with this message from Paul, 57, written to his adult daughter:

Writing this letter to you, I feel a little awkward. I feel sorry that I couldn’t do much for you, but demanded a lot of you instead. Especially since for a few years I was against the person you love and caused you a lot of pain. Even now, please forgive me. However, from now on, I’ll take the things I couldn’t do for you and do doubly better. I’m happy, thankful, and proud that you are doing well and keeping the dream of being a newlywed. …I love you, my daughter.

In addition to writing to their children, the men are instructed to pen letters to their fathers, even if they are deceased. In fact, this letter is considered a key activity because it allows the participant to address his own “father wound”—the psychic pain of being abandoned emotionally and/or physically by his own father. At times, these letters reveal painful pasts, such as with this one from Frank, 43:

But father, there is something you should apologize to me for. When I was a freshmen in college, do you remember the huge fight with mother? I know that mom was the one to blame; however, it was wrong that you hit her.

Another student, Song, 44, appeared to forgive his own father after realizing how difficult it must have been          balancing work and family, as the son now struggles to do:

Father, whom I love … it has been a while since I have called out to you. You didn’t speak much at home, right? Maybe because of that reason, I can’t really recall much of anything special. But at times, my wife tells me that I’m just like you. During winter, you wouldn’t return home from work until 10 at night, and maybe because of that, you did not have much time to spend with us. It has been 15 years since I last saw you. Please forgive this undutiful son who hasn’t been visiting your grave. I shall visit you when I go to Korea next time.

Graduation Day

On the final seminar day, the wives of participants are invited to attend what’s a climactic event. Women have in a sense been on a parallel journey with their spouses, as the men’s homework assignments often involve their wives. They include the couple going out on a date and the husband presenting a list of 20 things he loves about her. One husband, John, shared his wife’s reaction to this list: “She felt surprised and touched,” the 46-year-old said. “With tears she promised to [write] 20 things that she liked about me. That night, before going to bed, I read to my wife a letter of appreciation and blessed her with prayer. My wife was so touched that she cried. I cried because I was touched too. I now realize what is needed in marriage can arise from more honest expression.”

While women listen to a sermon in the main hall, men enter a separate room and are given the navy blue Father School T-shirts worn by volunteers. Men dramatically put on their new shirts, signifying their embrace of the Father School identity. The whole room is transformed into an army of men in blue and white stripes. They form a single line and, armed with a towel and wash basin, march out to their wives to wash their feet. The feet washing is meant to signify devotion and service to their families, in the same vein as Jesus’ action for his disciples. Every wife I observed was in tears during this cathartic ceremony.

The frailties of men’s own past mistakes and their spoken desire to become more caring and relevant fathers strikes a chord with all in the room—including myself. Spouses share intimate conversations and prayers as music from a praise band plays in the background. During the final meeting, the men are given diplomas. Leaders are quick to point out that they never really “graduate” in the sense of mastering fatherhood, but emphasize the lifelong journey ahead. Graduates will take home a booklet with the names and contact information of their group members so they can continue to serve as sources of mutual support.

I have not not followed men who have completed the Father School seminar nor have I yet interviewed their wives or children. But confessional letters men wrote toward the end of their schooling suggests an awakening.

“Thus far, I lived to just make money. I thought that was enough for my family,” wrote participant Yoojin, 38. “Through this conference, I learned that as a father, I am head of the family. I [learned] that there are many good things I could do without money, specifically through words and activities. From now on, I will offer encouragement instead of reprimands to my wife and children.”

Another graduate, Jinro, 46, wrote, “Before, I was the ruler of my family. I was not able to be a model to my children and was not able to become a generous friend…I thank Father School for clearly showing my misguided path and deficiencies like a mirror. The knowledge I have earned from Father School will transform me into a new father.”

I am weary of saying that Father School serves as a magic bullet for creating the loving, involved father. The issue is far more complex. But after attending hours of seminars, watching grown men cry over their regrets and reading personal letters full of deep self-reflection, what I can say with some degree of confidence is that thousands of Korean dads across the country are longing for better relationships with their children, and oftentimes, their spouses, too. Whether they will be successful in reforming their roles within their families, only time will tell, but clearly, the Father School movement is resonating with immigrant men who want to take that first step.

“Korean men in America often have no outlet for their despair or an opportunity … to reflect on their family life,” said Father School director In. “Even among the younger fathers in our program who have grown up with the norm of being friends to their children, many of them still have much to learn. One father I met shared in a small group meeting how he regretted missing out on the opportunity to play catch with his son. When his son had asked him to play, this father explained that he was too busy and promised to purchase a baseball set so that [his son] could play with his friends. He realized he missed the chance to engage with his son. Instead of giving himself, the father offered something else. This was a painful memory for him.

“The biggest contribution of Father School is that men are able to improve their communication, they are able to match the eye level and heart level of their family members.”

Allen Kim is continuing his research on Father School. If family members of participants are open to speaking with him, email him at oneallenkim@gmail.com.

By Helin Jung   Photograph by David C. Lee

There are a few things about David Chang we already know.

1. He is built like a house.

2. He has an inhuman ability to split infinitives with the word “fuck.”

3. With his fleet of Momofuku restaurants—Noodle Bar, Ssäm Bar, Milk Bar and Ko—he has taken New York City and whipped it into a frenzy.

It’s only been six years (“Not that long in the real world, but in dog years, that’s like 100 years, man”), and in those six years, he went from being an anonymous line cook to one of the most fêted, recognizable personalities in the culinary world.

David Chang. Dave, DC, Chang, the Changster, the Changbang, ruler of the Momofuku empire, or the Momoverse, or whatever. The guy’s such a big deal that an entire lexicon has been created in his honor. The man is a myth, and most of us are all too happy to keep it stoked.

The trouble is, whatever it is we are doing to Chang (which, to him, amounts to a lot of nonsensical fetishizing) is burdensome.

“I don’t give a shit,” the 31-year-old will say about the heaps of awards, the praise, the television appearances, the requests to participate in every food-related event in the city and elsewhere. “I would just rather not be a public figure. It’s just the struggle with dealing with the fact that, I guess I am.”

It’s strange to him that he has become a celebrity, because basically, he’s just a guy who runs a few restaurants. Right?

***

Let’s take it back to the beginning. 2003. An immovable purpose and a 600-square-foot space in the East Village the size of a “two-car garage.”

It was going to be a restaurant, a ramen noodle joint. Not a terribly complicated idea. It wasn’t supposed to amount to anything, because it wasn’t intended to be anything more than a proof.

“I needed to test myself to see if I could actually put a restaurant together, and I didn’t even think about the food,” says Chang, sitting atop a stool in that space. “I was 26 and it was like, “OK, I’ve cooked for four years, I don’t know that much, I should be cooking more, I should be working at other restaurants, but maybe if I went to graduate school or something, that would cost a whole lot more than opening up a restaurant. I’d rather learn in the school of hard knocks.”

He says he would never do it again, not like that, because it was the hardest thing he has ever done in his life.

Success did not come immediately, but it did come eventually, in a downpour—with an unabated rain of buzz, press and constant, unreasonable wait times. Noodle Bar was an irrefutable hit, which led Chang and his then co-chef and partner Joaquin Baca to open Ssäm Bar, followed by Ko and Milk Bar.

“It was like a single-cell organism, now it’s this massive, Leviathan-like entity,” he says. “To see it grow very rapidly like that, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’ I guess I’m proud of that? It’s been a lot of people, a lot of hard work, a lot of sacrifice to make that happen.”

***

“He’s as neurotic as he comes across, that’s definitely true,” says Peter Meehan. “I say that in a loving way. He is probably harder on himself in private than he is in public, but I think he’s incredibly hard on himself in public, too.”

Meehan used to write the “$25 and Under” column for the New York Times, profiling affordable finds from the New York City food scene. He reviewed Noodle Bar in 2005, calling it a “plywood-walled diamond in the rough.”

Soon afterward, the critic and restaurateur ran into each other at a Hold Steady concert in Brooklyn.

“I felt this meaty hand slap me on the back. I turn around and it’s Dave Chang,” Meehan says. “He handed me a beer and said, ‘Are we going to pretend like we don’t know each other?’ And that’s how we got to know each other.”

As Chang’s renown swelled and the brand expanded, the cookbook offers started coming. Only if Meehan does it with me, Chang declared (and in typical fashion, he is still conflicted about it—“Nobody thinks that they’re going to do a cookbook one day, you know?”). Meehan accepted the co-authorship, the two friends came up with a proposal and started working on a book.

The cookbook, titled Momofuku, which comes out in October, will serve as a record of the past six years. It will likely be a blockbuster, if internet chatter is any indicator of success. It will include recipes, but it will also be about the stories from the restaurant—the people behind them, the challenges they faced in getting the restaurants off the ground, the philosophies that serve as cornerstones of the food.

The first proposal started out differently. It was going to be Momofuku via David Chang, the origin story, “starting in Virginia with his family, jajangmyeon, galbi, and all that O.G. Korean shit that he grew up on.”

Meehan sees the book’s evolution as having happened in the same way that every other David Chang project has evolved.

“For Dave, there’s always a malleability from the outset,” Meehan said. “Noodle Bar was supposed to be a Japanese-style ramen bar and it turned into the fusional weirdness that it is now—vaguely American, vaguely Asian. Ssäm Bar was supposed to be burritos, and now it’s the 31st best restaurant in the world. There’s always flexibility in terms of design and outcome, as long as you’ve got your eyes on the goal.”

***

The goal, as Chang will say to you time and again, was never to be famous, or to be dripping in James Beard awards. The goal was just to make good food and do it with integrity. He scrolls through the who-knows-how-many messages on his Blackberry, that LED light just won’t stop flashing for a goddamn second, and lets out a haggard sigh.

“I can’t work the line anymore because I get so fucking worked up that I literally just can’t,” he says, rapping anxiously on the countertop at Ko (which eventually took over that two-car garage that used to house Noodle Bar). “I want things to be right all the time, even though it’s not an environment that’s set up to have these expectations.”

One of the commis is taking off too much on a head of lettuce. “Yo, dude, don’t throw out so much of that end,” Chang chides affectionately. “Look how much you threw away, dude.” I still love you, but try to get it right.

“Do I want us to be successful? Do I want us to be busy? Do I want us to have great food? Do I want us to take care of our cooks? Yes.” Rat-tat-tat go his fingers. “I was not aware that it came with all the baggage and the clichés and the bullshit.”

A huge part of the bullshit, for Chang, is the internet. The chatter on blogs gives him agita. Take, for instance, the news that the actor Alan Cumming had been kicked out of Ssäm Bar. Cumming blogged about it himself. “f you momofuku,” he wrote, after describing a scene that involved him and his mother joining a few friends who were already seated and eating.

Chang, who was not present during the incident, is still pissed off about this.

“He fucking cheated,” he says. “Who cares about some movie star? Is he going to impact your life, my life? No. What he did was he fucking cut in line, so he can get the fuck out.”

There he goes again, he thinks the internet is saying. Mr. Dickhead throws a fit. It bugs him. He says he doesn’t give a shit, but he does, because the only thing he’s doing (and it wasn’t really him, anyway) is staying consistent.

“Regardless of who you are, this is how it is. We’ve made it abundantly clear: The only people we’ll take care of are cooks and chefs, that’s it.”

***

Growing up Korean seems to have done quite a number on Chang. To start, there are the overwhelming insecurities and expectations that spasm occasionally, uncontrollably. “I wasn’t destined for this” is one of his mantras.

“Who gives a shit about the fact that I grew up Korean? There are expectations, sure, but I didn’t live up to any of them.”

Since he won’t really talk about his family or his childhood, you only get tiny bits of information. Chang is the youngest of four siblings (“I was an accident”). He played golf when he was younger, football in high school. He wasn’t an exceptional student, and didn’t go to an Ivy League school. His parents were immigrants. His mother still speaks to him in Korean, which he doesn’t speak very well. His father was a businessman and one-time restaurant owner himself, and as a result, was hardly ever around.

“My parents have guilted me so much,” he’ll say when he talks about his last remaining duty as a filial Korean son: marrying a Korean. “I’m so brainwashed that I have a feeling that if I married a Korean girl and had a Korean child, my parents would die. They would be like, ‘OK, we can die now.’

“There are certain things about Korean culture in America that I find disagreeable,” he says, though he does his best to avoid and ignore any explicit associations with his Koreanness. “I avoid Koreans like the plague.”

Chang emphasizes that his restaurants—the food, the philosophy—are American, not Korean, not Asian, not “Fusion.” It’s a sign of the times that the public has accepted his categorization as such, that a menu which includes kimchi, pork belly, ramen and rice cakes is digested unquestioningly as American, or not even categorized at all.

Wylie Dufresne, the chef/owner of wd~50, another one of this city’s inventive and touted restaurants, is one among Chang’s many admirers, colleagues and friends.

“Dave’s importance is that he serves delicious, really well-executed food at a great price point,” Dufresne wrote in an email. “A lot of people espouse locally-sourced American ingredients, but Dave is doing it in an unpretentious and approachable way. He doesn’t hit you over the head with it, which makes the whole idea more attractive.”

***

“I consider David a brother,” says Cory Lane, a partner and general manager of Ssäm Bar and beverage director for all of Momofuku. “I would do anything for him. I know that he would do the same for me.”

This is the kind of loyalty that Chang cultivates. As a Trinity College classmate of his would tell it, “Over the years, he has gotten more famous and met lots of interesting people, but he’s just collected more friends, more good friends, and hasn’t abandoned any of the old ones. He doesn’t forget where he came from.”

He is a guy’s guy who is passionate and funny and blunt, and not incidentally, really into the Redskins. He drinks and he cusses and will likely call you a lying sack of shit, but only if he likes you. He knows how to cook and knows how to run a business. You’d be stupid not to want to be his friend.

As a boss, he will take care of you. He will provide health care, pay you more in wages, make you part-owner and give you a platform to do whatever your heart desires (as long as it’s not embarrassing).

That, you’ll find, is the thing he’s most likely to accept. Your friendship, your loyalty, your devotion. The thing he’s still working on, though, is the success bit.

“I finally understand what it’s like to be an A+ student, when in the past, I only understood from having known or dated girls that were always the best,” he says. “I never understood the pressure of success. How does one cope with that?”

The cookbook is coming out in a few months. Those pesky press inquiries are banging down the door. Meetings, appearances, Copenhagen, and then the question of whether or not there will be more expansion, or a television show, or who knows what else?

Mark Bittman, most recently the author of Food Matters, was one of Chang’s earliest supporters.

“There are a lot of very smart, very good chefs out there who don’t get to the point that David’s at now,” Bittman says. “He could probably find backers and support for doing pretty much whatever he wants, and I’m sure he’s capable of doing whatever he wants. It really just has to be defined by where he wants to go.”

Chang’s answer to that is most often, “I don’t know.” He will sometimes expand that to say that he wants to throw away his Blackberry and travel for a year. Go to Costa Rica, his safe place and retreat, and read some Hindu texts or books about the Civil War.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he says. “I would much rather be working with food, and that’s becoming more and more difficult because I have to wear a hat as the face of this company. We have something that works. I’m proud that we have a place for people to express themselves. It’s been one hell of a ride, and if it all ended tomorrow, I think I’d be pretty stoked about what happened.

“But I don’t see that end in sight.”

By Grace Suh

The eight stories in Paul Yoon’s first book, Once the Shore, have in common something you may not expect from Korean American fiction: They are set in Korea.

With some exceptions, Korean American writers have taken as their primary subject the lives of ethnic Koreans in America. No surprise there. After all, this dual identity—the geographical dislocation and cultural juxtaposition—is the conundrum we share, and has borne fruitful exploration.

So in a peculiar sense, by returning to the land of our parents, Yoon has boldly gone off the reservation of Korean American literature. Even more interesting, these stories are contained to a tiny corner of Korea, a large island off the coast of Korea which—with its tropical fruits, mainland tourists, women divers (haenyo) and network of caves, all centered around a volcano-crater mountain—is a clear literary analog for the popular holiday destination of Jeju.

Shuttling back and forth in time, from the period immediately following World War II to the present day, these stories work and re-work variations on repeated images and motifs: death and loss, orphanhood, disfigurement, betrayal, escape, absence and return. Taken together, they weave a tapestry of an unusual population, removed from the mainland—and by extension, the world at large—by both geography and temperament. Uniquely isolated and backward, the Solla of Paul Yoon’s imagination is a Korean-like Appalachia, peopled by the illiterate, oppressed, crippled, violent and impoverished. In strikingly resonant detail, several characters from different stories have never seen a photograph, or see one for the first time. Although they are surrounded by ocean, so limited are these people’s lives that some have never seen the shore.

With few options, often lacking the means to advance in life or get off the island, most stagnate in inchoate desperation, while a few manage escape, but at great cost.

If most have never managed to leave, they live with the signs of those who have come to them, invaders past and present—the ponies brought by the Mongols in the pre-Joseon era, the Japanese occupiers, the American military, and finally, the tourist hordes who flock from the mainland.

In particular, the American presence plays crucial inciting roles in several of these stories. In “Once the Shore,” based in part on a true story, the protagonist’s fisherman brother is killed when his ship is shattered by a surfacing U.S. submarine. In “Among the Wreckage,” also inspired by a historical event, an elderly couple head to sea to try to find their only son, who was on a remote island used by the U.S. for bombing practice. And in “The Woodcarver’s Daughter,” a village finds itself divided over whether to shelter a runaway American soldier from his unit.

The American soldier is one of several runaways in the book, running away being one of the only means of escape. In “Faces to the Fire,” a girl lends her orphan friend money to run away to the mainland and then faithfully waits years for him to return. When at last he does, it’s to brutally betray and disappoint her. An orphan also runs away in “And We Will Be There,” but his return is hoped for in vain.

The main characters in “So That They Do Not Hear Us” are also orphans of a kind. The elderly diving woman has no family, and so she befriends the Japanese boy next door, who is bullied by the boys at school for being foreign and disfigured, and essentially abandoned by his parents, who have themselves run away from their homeland, perhaps to escape the shame of the accident that took their son’s arm.

In “The Woodcarver’s Daughter,” Haemi’s parents also feel shame for their crippled child, and despair for the inevitably limited prospects for her future. She is but one of the unlucky women in the book. There is little chivalry on Solla. Girls stand up for their boys and are beaten for it. They care tenderly for younger brothers or brother stand-ins, only to have them run away. They wait for loved ones to return, often to be disappointed. And they are deceived and betrayed by the ones who do.

But if these fates seem harsh, Yoon writes of them with compassion and a kind of careful attention. His voice is muted and atmospheric, the pace hypnotic. This is a book of internalities, of unvoiced moments, contemplation, yearning and waiting. The cadences of the stories echo this quietude, speaking with deliberation, the language taking flight mostly in descriptions of nature.

There is action, to be sure, much of it harrowing—deadly fires, drownings, war wounds, mutilations, beatings—but as in Chekhov’s plays (of which Yoon counts himself a grea ….

Story and Photographs by Kathleen Richards

From the moment you step inside the sparse, fluorescent-lit classroom, it’s clear that this isn’t your typical college history class. And it’s not just because it’s housed deep inside a heavily fortressed state prison and that all the students are inmates.

Well, that’s part of the reason. San Quentin State Prison, which sits overlooking the north side of the San Francisco Bay, is best known for notorious residents like Richard Allen Davis, Scott Peterson and Richard Ramirez. But on a Monday evening in April, instructor Christine Hong is leading a discussion on North Korea within its walls. About 20 men sit a few to a table with their pens and notebooks open. Dressed in blue button-down shirts and jeans, the students look thoroughly engaged.

A mixed group including African Americans, Vietnamese and whites, the men are enrolled in a course titled “History, Memory and Culture in Modern Korea.” The class is offered through the Prison University Project, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to provide higher education to inmates. San Quentin may seem like an unlikely place to learn about Korea, but Hong— the course’s brainchild and a post-doc at the University of California, Berkeley, soon to be teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz—would beg to differ.

The intensive, 15-week course, which meets for two hours twice a week, pays particular attention to marginalized voices—a position many of its students could relate to. The class, for example, examines the experiences of the zainichi, ethnic Koreans living in Japan who confronted discrimination, as well as the “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery during World War II and the North Koreans imprisoned in South Korea in the 1950s and ‘60s who were tortured in order to get them to renounce their communist loyalties. Required readings include the works of late North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung and former Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Even for a course at a mainstream college, the class’s approach would be considered radical, as it embraces the histories of both South and North Korea.

“What’s unusual about our syllabus … is that we don’t neglect North Korean history,” explains Hong, who co-teaches the course with Taejin Hwang, a Ph.D. candidate also at Berkeley. “And we also emphasize the problem of historiography from the outset, which is a question of not only what is Korean history in the 20th century, but what perspectives are privileged and what sort of ideological vantage points are favored. So, in other words, it’s not only what is Korean history, but who’s telling it and why.”

Back in the classroom, Hong reads from Kim Il Sung’s 1993 declaration, the 10-Point Programme of the Great Unity of the Whole Nation for the Reunification of the Country: “’All those who are concerned about the destiny of the nation, whether they be in the north, or in the south or overseas…’” Listen how capacious this is,” Hong says, addressing the students. “Even diasporic Koreans — what’s surprising about this?”

She calls on a student, James.

“Sounds like they want to keep the same government,” he says.

“That’s right,” Hong concurs. “But what’s striking about this notion of all Koreans—both on the peninsula and overseas, Koreans of all political stripes? This is Kim Il Sung, you guys. There are certain kinds of notions about this man, his political ideology, the narrow constraints of his political ideology. So what’s surprising about this?”

Rodney, a loquacious student sitting in the back of the classroom, pipes up. “Throughout the paper he uses the term ‘unify’ or ‘reunify’ over and over and over…, so [Kim] is pretty much calling to reunify. Let them know that they were divided by powers that had nothing to do with them. Let’s come back together.”

“Right,” said Hong. “It’s addressing that the original state of Korea was not divided, so … let’s regain that lost state, right?” After further discussion, Hong adds: “This letter has the gentle feeling and conciliatory feeling of a kind of open appeal. It’s taking advantage of the moment in which the Cold War bipolar politics of the Korean peninsula are thawing. It’s an incredibly rich symbolic moment.”

The level of engagement in the class—in its seventh week at the time of this report—is stunning, especially considering the fact that few knew anything about Korea prior to taking the class. Student Gregory Sanders said that just a few months ago, the extent of his knowledge of Korea was “I could find it on a map.” Today, the 57-year-old wants to discuss with this reporter how the recent missile launch by North Korea will impact the feasibility of reunification with its southern neighbor.

The class marks the first time that any course on Korean history or culture has been taught in the 13-year existence of the prison education program, which gets volunteers—many of whom are graduate students, instructors and faculty members from San Francisco Bay Area colleges and universities—to teach the classes. San Quentin has the only on-site college degree-granting program in California’s entire prison system. “It’s just been real exciting,” said Jody Lewen, the Prison University Project’s executive director, of the Korean history course. “It’s not a typical situation.”

And Hong is not your typical college instructor. The focus of her professional work, according to her, is “the U.S. military ‘peace’ that settled the Asia-Pacific region after Japan’s Pacific War defeat, and the Cold War emergence of Afro-Asian human rights cultural production as an extra-juridical mode of appeal, grievance, and critique.” Most recently, she has been instrumental in the campaign to save the Korean language program at Berkeley from budget cuts.

Before teaching the Korean history course at San Quentin, she also previously taught two literature classes at the prison. She lobbied for the Korean class, which originally was supposed to be a Cuban, Middle Eastern or Vietnamese history course, because she thought some of the themes would resonate with the students.

“The nature of contemporary Korean history … is profoundly international,” explains Hong. “There are so many periods of incredible difficulty and human drama, from colonialism to the war to authoritarianism. And all throughout there’s profound struggle of the Korean people for justice. And so I felt that in its own right, Korean history is so moving and complicated and so rich that students would be very interested.”

Her hunch appears to have been right. During a 10-minute break from class, inmates take turns answering this reporter’s questions. Will Packer, sitting in the back, says learning about Korea’s history has given him a greater understanding of his own culture. “Me being an African American, our histories have a lot in common,” observes Packer, who has previously taken Hong’s literature class. “The fact that we’re both colonized people, oppressed people by imperialist forces. Our suffering, our struggles, are similar.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by other students as well. “It’s very interesting to see … the Japanese colonization in Korea, and in my country it’s the French [colonizer],” says Vu Phan, who is of Vietnamese descent.

Marvin Andrews, an African American, connects Korea’s history to the civil rights movement in the United States. “W.E.B. Du Bois had addressed some of the same stuff that was going on in Korea at the hands of the Japanese in the same time African Americans was going through the same thing in the United States,” Andrews says. “You find people that have [been through] what you been through, so it’s like you’re not alone, [and] you want to study more and get to know more about it. That way you can better understand yourself, too.”

In many ways, Hong and Hwang say, teaching students at San Quentin has had an equally profound effect on them. “This is not to romanticize our students at all, but there’s something about the quality of experience, of just lived experience, even the experience of having confronted and still daily confronting adversity that makes our students bring a very thoughtful and profound analytical lens to the subject matter of Korean history,” says Hong. “And it really makes for stark contrast for us, even though we have some really wonderful students at UC Berkeley where we both have the opportunity to teach quite frequently. There’s something qualitatively different about this experience teaching here at San Quentin.”

Hwang, who is currently finishing up her dissertation on late 20th-century U.S.-Korea relations, notes the startling questions her students often ask have forced her to reassess her own presumptions about Korean history and culture.

Both instructors acknowledge that some of their students have no possibility of parole, which begs the question: What will these inmates ultimately take from such a course?

Hwang answers this way: “One of my [undergraduate] history professors said to me, ‘The purpose of my job is not to turn out a bunch of scholars, but the most important thing about history is [teaching] critical thinking,’ And I think that skill is so valuable for anybody, and I think Korean history is a vehicle.”

By Rebecca U. Cho

John Cullison likes to call Dr. Tai-June Yoo “father,” to Yoo’s great discomfort.

“He said doctor, I want to call you father because you gave me my life back. But I don’t like a 60-year-old man calling me father,” Yoo, 74, jokes.

Yoo, a professor and immunologist at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine, met Cullison last year at a stem cell therapy reception in Naples, Fla. The 59-year-old artist from Maui had been suffering from arthritis in his hands so severe that they had formed into claws and he was no longer able to work.

Yoo examined Cullison and recommended him to RNL Bio, a Seoul, South Korea-based stem cell research company that is using adult stem cells to treat degenerative diseases through methods not yet approved in the U.S. In February, Cullison flew to South Korea and then China to receive doses of stem cells from his fat tissues, including injections directly into the affected joints, in order to repair his damaged tissues.

“I woke up the next morning and all of a sudden there was no pain in my hands and my flexibility was totally there,” Cullison said in an interview three months after his treatment. “I feel better every day.”

Cullison gained full use of his hands just a week after the injections and no longer walks with a cane. He has returned to his artwork. Symptoms from his other chronic conditions, including kidney stones and ulcers, have also receded, he says.

Cullison’s recovery amazed even Yoo.

“He was my inspiration,” Yoo says.

Now Yoo, who has been the company’s medical consultant since March 2008, is advising RNL Bio as the company opens a medical tourism business in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, the second U.S. office for the company.

The Los Angeles branch, called RNL Life Science, opened in March and offers stem cell treatments similar to Cullison’s by having patients travel outside of the U.S. for treatments in their offices in South Korea and China. The treatment developed by RNL Bio involves taking a patient’s own stem cells from fat tissue, multiplying them into millions outside the body and infusing high doses of the stem cells back into the person. The stem cells from fat tissue can form new tissues and treat diseases such as Parkinson’s and spinal cord injuries, according to the company.

The company’s  stem cell treatments involving injections into the body are not yet approved in the U.S. due to Food and Drug Administration regulations.

“This is a dream come true,” says Yoo, who received his medical degree from the Seoul National University in 1959 before coming to the U.S. in the 1960s to earn a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. “We’ve got a lot of potential.”

Stem cells are unspecialized cells with the unique abilities to replenish themselves and become different cell types, thus possessing the potential for the treatment of a variety of medical conditions. These cells often serve as an internal repair system to replace degenerative cells in the body.

RNL Bio strictly deals with a person’s own adult stem cells, according to company representatives, rather than embryonic stem cells, which are derived from human embryos and thus have been the source of heated ethical debates.

RNL Bio operates a facility in Yanji, China, a city made up mostly of Korean-Chinese where Cullison received his injections. The Chinese government is less restrictive than South Korea and the U.S. in allowing such therapy.

Jin Han Hong, a director of strategic planning for RNL Bio who is heading its operations in Los Angeles, says his company plans to begin human trials in the states. in order to gain FDA approval for their treatments. But federal approval, which must be gained for each type of stem cell use, will most likely take years.

“Some countries’ health authorities don’t allow us to treat people with extended stem cells,” Hong says. “Before all the regulatory issues are cleared, many people want to experience stem cell therapeutics.”

Cullison’s story is not the first to bring RNL Bio into the public’s eye. In August 2008, the biotechnology company cloned a California woman’s beloved pitbull, Booger, and claimed to be the first to clone dogs for commercial use. Pet cloning will be one of the services offered through the Los Angeles branch.

The South Korean company opened its first U.S. office, a research and development facility called RNL Biostar, in Rockville, Maryland, in 2006. In South korea, the company has already treated 800 patients through infusions of their own stem cells for a variety of conditions.

Stem cell research is underway in the U.S. to treat a host of diseases and conditions including Lou Gehrig’s, multiple sclerosis, spinal chord injury and strokes. But therapies involving stem cells are “largely new and there is a lot that we still need to learn,” according to the handbook for stem cell therapies from the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

Yoo says RNL is probably just two years ahead of the U.S., where he believes stem cell reserach has been suppressed under the Bush administration, in its ability to offer stem cell therapies. He hopes to take advantage of the window to help RNL Bio and South Korea become leaders in the rapidly developing field.

“It’s a funny feeling. I came here 50 years ago to study in the U.S.A.,” Yoo says. “Now I have to go back to Korea.”

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