July Issue: Arrest of U.S. Journalists Was Planned Spy Operation
Photo credit: Mark Edward Harris
When journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling were arrested by North Korean authorities for illegally entering the isolated country in March 2009, many wondered who betrayed them and how had they been caught so easily.
A recent report from the Chosun Ilbo revealed that it was a carefully orchestrated operation masterminded by North Korea’s State Security Department deputy chief Ryu Kyong.
Using a well-established network of China-based operatives, Ryu obtained intelligence that Ling and Lee, journalists working for Current TV, were doing a story on North Korean refugees and planned to make a trip to the China-North Korea border.
Ryu then instructed his spies to bribe a Korean-Chinese guide to lead the two women into a trap on the banks of the Tumen River, where they were caught by North Korean guards. The Chosun Ilbo reported that Ryu was then “hailed as a national hero” for prompting former President Bill Clinton to make a face-losing diplomatic trip to secure the release of Ling and Lee.
The celebration apparently didn’t last long, however, as Ryu was reportedly executed earlier this year in what is being deemed by North Korea experts as a Pyongyang power struggle. Some have speculated that Ryu was getting too powerful, while others suspected him of being a double agent for South Korea, according to the Chosun Ilbo.
This article appeared in the July 2011 issue of KoreAm.
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In this 1997 photo, students and residents plant rice in a newly rebuilt rice patty over flood-ravaged farmland in Sugu village, Kujang County, about 90 minutes north of Pyongyang. One local resident at the time admitted to eating plant porridge while trying to overcome the country’s food shortage. Photo credit: Hyungwon Kang
The Food Dilemma
How hungry is North Korea, and how conditional should food aid be? Korea specialist David C. Kang provides an overview of the North Korean food aid quandary.
How bad is the food situation in North Korea?
There is considerable debate about just how bad the situation is. The United Nations’ World Food Program, along with two other U.N. agencies, have released a study concluding that potentially 6 million North Koreans, a quarter of the population, need urgent food aid, citing a harsh winter in which some crops were down 44 percent from expected levels. But even as the World Food Program has launched an international appeal for aid, there are those who oppose such assistance for a variety of reasons. Some argue that the North Korean regime’s behavior should change before any aid is given, while others contend the situation is not so dire, citing evidence that the North Korean military has stockpiled up to 1 million tons of rice, much of it possibly diverted from aid organizations. And still others believe that the regime is simply saving up its food for 2012, when it plans a major celebration for the 100th anniversary of Kim Il-Sung’s birth.
There is, however, evidence that food prices are rising in North Korea and are rising faster than world food prices. This is not only a sign that demand is outstripping supply, but also that the situation in North Korea is not simply a reflection of global food prices. That is, although North Korean elites and the military are unlikely to suffer, some ordinary citizens may be facing severe shortages. In late May, the U.S. sent a fact-finding team to North Korea to assess the situation, and the team’s report is being prepared at this time.
What is the current South Korean and U.S. government stance on providing food aid?
The overall stance of the U.S. government has been one of “strategic patience,” which means ignoring and containing North Korea until it first makes concrete steps to back down from the belligerent behavior of the past few years and to show measures intended to rein in the nuclear weapons program. The U.S. has also not yet made any decision about the humanitarian situation. South Korea’s approach is generally the same: President Lee Myung-bak has eliminated most economic and aid programs to the North until it apologizes for attacking South Korean naval vessel Cheonan and shelling Yeonpyeong Island last year. Within this overall approach, however, there is a willingness to potentially provide humanitarian aid to the North if the situation is dire enough and if the North meets certain preconditions.
In this 1995 photo, residents wait at a Pyongyang bus stop. Photo credit: Hyungwon Kang
Will denying North Korea food aid lead to popular unrest against the government?
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Photos courtesy of Young-Shin Kim.
For the Children
Psychiatrist Young-Shin Kim talks about her headline-making autism study in South Korea and the stigma that still surrounds the disorder
by Rebecca U. Cho
A landmark study on autism conducted over six years in a middle-class South Korean suburb recorded the largest incidence of autism ever measured in a general population. Researchers found 2.6 percent of the children aged 7 to 12 in the Ilsan district of Korea showed symptoms of an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), a rate that is more than twice what has been the estimated prevalence in the developing world. That is the equivalent of 1 in 38 children.
The headline-making findings, which suggest that autism in any population in the world is more common than previously thought, stunned autism experts when they were published this past spring and may improve the way the disorder is studied.
Leading the groundbreaking research was Young-Shin Kim, a Yale University researcher who is fighting to elevate the awareness of autism in South Korea, her native country, where a diagnosis of the developmental disorder is still considered shameful.
ASDs are complex neurobiological disorders that inhibit a person’s ability to communicate and develop social relationships, and can range in severity. In the U.S., there has been considerable public discussion about the disorder and high-profile campaigns to raise awareness of autism, but in Korea, parents often react to an ASD diagnosis like it’s a fatal blow, said Kim.
A Yonsei University-educated medical doctor, Kim left Korea for the U.S. in 1994 seeking training in child psychiatry research. Korea lacked the structure and funding for this level of training, as well as for meaningful research studies. Now, based at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center, where the 46-year-old serves as an assistant professor of psychiatry, Kim has been at the forefront of important studies affecting children. One of her other research projects involves investigating whether there is a connection between being bullied and suicide among children. Her interest in bullying arose during a visit several years ago to Korea, where she heard new slang terms for bullies and their victims. Kim often splits her time between the U.S. and South Korea, where she not only conducts research, but, as with the autism issue, also goes a step further. Knowing that the best outcomes for children with ASD come from the earliest possible diagnosis and intervention, she is currently working with South Korean school officials and the government to advance such initiatives. There has been some progress: Goyang City, where the district of Ilsan is located, has begun to provide assessment and intervention services for all first-graders entering the school system.
But, despite such promise, Kim says roadblocks remain in a country where the general population and government largely ignore the condition.
The professor spoke with KoreAm about what led to her interest in childhood psychiatry and the impact she hopes to make with her research.
Did you always want to be a doctor?
[As a child] I was pretty weak and went to the hospital often. I hated doctors [because] they poked me with needles. Originally, I wanted to be a nurse. Then my mother asked me why I wanted to be nurse. I told her because they’re helping sick kids. And my mother told me actually doctors do more things to help sick kids than nurses. She was very convincing. [But] I had never seen a woman doctor then. It was the 1960s and 1970s. I asked my mom, “Is it really possible—a girl doctor? My mom convinced me, and since then I wanted to become a doctor to help sick kids. That became my dream.
I’m the first doctor in my family.
How did you come to translate your desire to help children into psychiatry?
When I did a rotation in child psychiatry, … I saw a lot of kids who were suffering. It was not physical pain, but psychologically, they were suffering. I wanted to do something for those children.
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A Breath of Fresh Air
Eight out of the 10 smoggiest cities in the nation are in California, with Los Angeles topping that list. Environmental activist Joe Lyou is fighting to clear the air.
by Namju Cho
photographs by Eric Sueyoshi
THE 1970S. Vietnam. Watergate. Joe Lyou was a high school student during one of the most tumultuous times in American history. By the time President Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974, Lyou’s political consciousness had been awakened.
“Watching a leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world [step down] … and seeing a government be so fundamentally corrupt” served as glaring evidence of the need for the American people to hold the government accountable, he said.
Lyou took up the call to arms, and he has spent the last 20 years playing the role of watchdog over the government’s environmental policy. Now, as president and CEO of the Coalition for Clean Air (CCA), he fights to keep California’s atmosphere breathable. The organization, founded in 1971, has helped push the state to the vanguard of the country’s global warming policy. Lyou has only headed the organization since last year, but he’s been at the center of several high-profile battles himself—and won many of them.
“We often take for granted the opportunities we have to engage our government,” said Lyou. “But we see people … who are willing to die for those rights,” he added, referring to recent democracy uprisings in the Middle East.
Lyou didn’t always aspire to be an environmental champion. His intellectual curiosity drew him initially to a career in academia, and he entered a Ph.D. program in social psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As he dug deeper into the field, however, he learned about the disturbing power of authority over obedience. The infamous Milgram experiment showed how people were capable of inflicting severe pain on others if merely instructed to do so by someone perceived to be an authority figure. Similarly, the Stanford University prison experiment showed the abusive lengths students would go when given power over their peers. The two seminal experiments were “very powerful demonstrations of the influence of social factors on behavior,” Lyou said.
At the same time, you might say social activism runs in Lyou’s blood. His grandfather fled his native Korea in 1905, five years before the annexation by Japan, and participated in demonstrations against Japanese occupation. He was among the first immigrants to arrive in Los Angeles.
Lyou, often mistaken for Filipino or “nearly every race on the planet,” notes that his Korean American father and English-Irish-Scottish mother faced discrimination in Los Angeles as a biracial couple, even having difficulty finding someone willing to officiate their wedding. But that did not keep
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In Bloom
South Korean superstar GIANNA JUN, starring in this month’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, hopes to bring her special brand of sassy to American audiences
by Jaeki Cho
photographs by Peter Ash Lee
IF YOU WERE AMONG THE millions who saw My Sassy Girl (2001), the highest-grossing romantic comedy in South Korean box office history, or have been exposed to the TV commercials selling cell phones, fried chicken, jeans and cosmetics during a trip to the motherland, you’ve likely been enchanted by the addictive—and highly marketable— charm of superstar Jun Ji-hyun.
At 29, and a decade following the film that propelled her to stardom, the actress/model continues to top the Korean celebrity hierarchy. Adopting the Western name Gianna in recent years, she’s also trying to work that same magic in Hollywood with her second full-length feature film in English, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, released this month. The film, adapted from the critically acclaimed novel of the same name by Lisa See, has no shortage of star power, with Wayne Wang of The Joy Luck Club fame directing, popular Chinese actress Li Bing Bing co-starring, and Asian American media mogul spouses Wendi Deng Murdoch and Florence Sloan producing. (Murdoch is married to Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp., and Sloan to Harry Sloan, former CEO of MGM, who now heads Global Eagle Acquisition Corp.)
Jun plays Snow Flower, a character matched to Li’s Lily as laotong, that is, an arranged sisterhood from youth. They communicate secretly by writing notes between the folds of a white silk fan. In a parallel story in present-day Shanghai, the sisters’ descendants, Sophia (also played by Jun) and Nina (played by Li), struggle to maintain their close friendship while confronting the modern-day demands
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Photos by John Solano Photography
Kiss and Tell
In her new memoir, actress/writer Diane Farr talks openly about her interracial courtship with a Korean American man and the challenges they encountered in their quest to make their own “happily ever after.”
Many may recognize Diane Farr from her TV roles on Numb3rs, Rescue Me and Californication, or even farther back, as the sizzling young sidekick on Loveline alongside Dr. Drew Pinsky and Adam Carolla. Farr was 27 when she co-hosted Loveline, often dispensing cheeky love and sex advice. But more than a decade later, she has emerged as a thoughtful and seasoned voice on, of all things, race relations and interracial love. It’s a topic close to her heart, as Farr, of Irish and Italian heritage, fell in love with Seung Chung, a Korean American who immigrated to the States at age 3, after the two met at an engagement party. They married in 2006 and have three beautiful children.
But before this idyllic multicultural picture could emerge, Farr and Chung confronted a number of challenges as a mixed-race couple, including prejudice from both sides of their families. In her new book, Kissing Outside the Lines: A True Story of Love and Race and Happily Ever After (Seal Press), the actress and writer provides an earnestly candid look at how she and other mixed-race couples navigate these choppy, often intimately painful waters, and contends America is hardly post-racial. But though Farr’s memoir of her own difficulties in “winning” over Chung’s family is honest and often humorous, she’s careful not to demonize anyone—even those who worked as impediments to their interracial union. She explains that it’s often fear and not hate that are the source of parents’ opposition to their child’s interracial match. But she also posits that love is the last prejudice parents openly teach at home, even as they preach the Golden Rule and principles of equity.
And, now Farr has even more of a stake in challenging this incongruity. She told KoreAm recently, “As a mother to Korean American children, I spend a great deal of time trying to find the balance between teaching my kids the important traditions of all their heritages—without making them exclusionary, so that love and race will not ignite like lightning for them, too, someday.”
In the following excerpt from Kissing Outside the Lines, Farr describes the tense confrontation between Chung and his father over her, the white girlfriend, and then the big test: Farr’s inaugural encounter with her future in-laws.
–Julie Ha
***
Dad did not laugh. Seung stopped laughing and respectfully said he didn’t understand the question. “She” is Caucasian, obviously, so what else did he want to know. Seung’s dad asked if I was Polish or of some other European descent. Seung explained that I was Irish and Italian and then raised his shoulders, sort of saying—what is the difference?
I fantasize that Seung raised “a shoulder” at his father—taunting him, almost daring him to say the thing that was really bothering him. That everyone in the family knew was a problem but everyone was now trying not to say. But having read the rules of this family and every family like them who almost lost their language, customs, holidays and beliefs within these parents’ lifetime—I know this was not the case. No matter how much Seung loves me, he would never goad his father because he understands where this fear (dressed as dislike of other races) comes from. Yet, in his own way, raising a shoulder at his father was still out of line because what Seung was actually implying was, “if you have a problem with her race, you should figure out how to say those words because I’m not going to say them for you, in any language.” To which Seung’s father said in English:
“You can’t love one of them.”
Seung shook his head yes, locked eyes with his father and said, “I know.”
After these two words, Seung never let his father’s gaze go. Which was not as much of a challenge as an outsider might imagine—as it was an apology. An apology from a son, who was wholly aware that he was about to fail his father’s greatest wish. But that he was going to do so nonetheless.
***
I’m standing at the door of their D.C. townhouse. Seung’s mother lives here most of the year, as does Seung’s sister. Seung’s father has just flown in from Korea, and so has Seung from Los Angeles. They are all waiting for me on the other side. Several weeks have passed since the father and son face-off and as the door opens, I am peacefully unaware.
I bow when I see them all for the first time. As I stand with my head below my heart, it is Seung’s sister who laughs at me for being “a better Asian” than she is. She reaches out and shakes my hand, pulling me upright and into the house—where she says in a hushed tone that I should not sweat the Korean “mish-i-gosh.”
***
Seung’s dad is so expressive, and clearly funny, that I kind of get an idea of what he’s talking about even before Seung translates for me. He is a charismatic entertainer—which was never what I imagined. I find myself laughing right along with everyone else in this family just from his delivery. Seung’s parents are actually fun—which is an adjective I also never considered I might use for them. Just as I pick up my chopsticks to begin eating, Seung’s mother leans in and whispers something about the meal being made without beef because Seung said I do not eat meat. I think she is justifying why they didn’t utilize the most expensive food for my arrival. I feel very flattered. Ama then whispers to me again:
“And the kimchi very spicy in our house. You pour water on, if too much for you.”
Ama smiles and nods to me many times, like she is doing little bows. I want to jump across the table and hug her. But I’m not actually positive this is what she is saying and I don’t trust myself after failing to let go of sister Eun Yi’s hand earlier. I also think Ama might actually wilt if I touched her at this early stage in our relationship. So instead, I give Seung a prideful yet diminutive smile.
I kind of feel like I’m in a war movie playing the role of the good-girl-American love interest. Seung swallows a laugh when I give him this look. I raise an eyebrow back sort of saying, “What? I’m totally the good-girl love interest!” And I believe I am (although I also laugh out loud when I’m alone in the bathroom as this whole day is a tad surreal). Whoever I am while sitting at this table doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I’m at this table. And no one is yelling or storming out about my being here. Seung shrugs at my role-play and continues talking in Korean with his family. Which, by the way, is hot.
Seung is doing so many sexy things at this table. He is sort of the master of ceremonies: translating, honoring and entertaining everyone. He is
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Featured Event
One of the the biggest Asian cinema events to hit Southern California opens on May 10. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, presented by Visual Communications, features the latest works by established and emerging filmmakers, along with seminars, panel discussions and symposiums on topics relevant to Asian Pacific cinema.
Opening Night features “Shanghai Calling,” directed by Daniel Hsia and starring Korean American Daniel Henney, who plays a Chinese American expat lawyer navigating his way through the mean streets of Shanghai (the picture above also indicates he is a raisin smuggler). But does he take off his shirt? Go watch the movie to find out! read more
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