If you think jumping out of the trunk of a car naked was revealing, Ken Jeong, co-star of The Hangover 2, gives perhaps his most intimate interview to date. In this profile by Oliver Saria, the actor, comedian and M.D. talks about the mentor that changed his life, why he hearts his Ho (don’t worry, that’s his wife) and politely addresses the haters.

by Oliver Saria

IT WAS THE WINTER OF 2005, and I had just moved to Los Angeles to pursue a writing career. Prior to that I had dabbled in stand-up comedy and my friend Amy Anderson had asked me to perform for the “Chop-SCHTICK” showcase she was producing at the Friars Club of Beverly Hills. At that point, I was debating whether or not to trade in the trauma of bombing on stage for the relative ease of bombing on paper. That night, I had a decent set, certainly no better or no worse than I had performed in the past. For a second I thought, “Hey, maybe I ain’t so bad at this after all.” Then Dr. Ken hit the stage—by all appearances your standard, somewhat nerdy middle-aged Asian professional, an actual doctor irreverently posturing as a thug. He was a rising comic at that point, and it was immediately apparent why.

He killed it that night. He knew how to balance smarts and vulgarity—at turns throwing up the “West Coast” sign and razzing his patients. He deftly worked stereotypes while simultaneously turning them on their heads, adding unexpected turns to his punchlines.

He giddily lampooned his wife Tran’s last name, Ho (she’s also a doctor)—a joke she probably heard before:

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By Michelle Woo   Photographs by Elizabeth Kim

Euna Lee and Laura Ling were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in North Korea. Back home, their anguished families plead for their return.

She loves movies.

Michael Saldate recalled the first movie he saw with Euna Lee, a woman he met at church.

“It was Shall We Dance?” he said with a smile.

That was five years ago. Lee was a young film editor, a graduate of the Academy of Art in San Francisco. Saldate was an actor. They fell in love quickly and married. “I just knew she was the right one,” he says. “There was something about her. And in a weird way, she felt the same about me.”

Saldate spoke of his wife at a candlelight vigil in Santa Monica, Calif., an event held last month in her honor. It was one of Saldate’s first public appearances since Lee and her colleague Laura Ling were captured and imprisoned in North Korea on March 17. The two journalists were working on a story in the border region of China and North Korea, Lee as an editor, Ling as a reporter. On June 7, after two and a half months of solitary confinement, they were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for illegally stepping foot into the communist state and an unspecified “grave crime.” Their fate remains unclear as the U.S. government works strategically for their freedom.

Political pawns, bargaining chips, a propaganda victory. Such jargon rolls off the tongues of media-savvy experts as they attempt to explain how these women are in a situation much bigger than themselves, a situation that has little to do with the crime they may or may not have committed and everything to do with Washington’s ongoing standoff with Pyongyang. With tensions rising around North Korea’s recent missile tests and apparent succession process, the capture of these two Americans, experts say, couldn’t have come at a worse time.

While the next steps remain uncertain, a clearer portrait of Lee and Ling surfaces back home.

“My sister is strong, but there is nothing hostile about her,” a visibly worn Lisa Ling said to a crowd of several hundred at the Santa Monica vigil, referring to the unspecified “hostile acts” the pair was tried for.

Lisa is a former host on ABC’s The View and the older sister of Ling. In the initial months after the detainment, the families remained quiet due to the extreme sensitivity of the situation, but are now speaking out. On stage, Lisa fought back tears as she talked about her sister and their daily phone chats, going on to recount the call she’d been waiting so desperately for. Just days before the vigil, Lisa picked up the phone to hear Ling’s trembling voice. “She said, ‘Hi, Li, it’s me.’”

Laura Ling, 32, began her journalism career as associate producer at Channel One in 1999, after graduating from UCLA with a degree in communication studies, and then went on to produce a documentary series for MTV. She later joined Current TV, a media venture led by Al Gore, where she covered hard-hitting stories everywhere from the streets of Los Angeles to Indonesia, Haiti and the Amazon rainforest.

Ling was passionate about her work. On her Current TV profile page, she wrote: “Is the media broken? I’m rarely inspired by what I see in the media. Television is supposed to be the most powerful medium—but TV news seems to be anything but powerful.” She declared she wanted to change that.

On June 26, instead of celebrating her fifth wedding anniversary with her husband Iain Clayton, Ling remained at an undisclosed location in Pyongyang.

Seung-eun “Euna” Lee, 36, was born and raised in South Korea and moved to the United States to attend college. She married Saldate and gave birth to a baby girl, Hana, who is now 4.

Lee worked as an editor on a variety of projects in the Bay Area, including the Emmy-nominated Asian American TV show Stir. In 2005, she joined Current TV. Early this year, she and Ling were to produce a story about North Korean refugees and human trafficking along the border of China. It was Lee’s first overseas assignment.

“She wanted to tell stories about the plight of the people, the people who were oppressed and without a voice,” Saldate said.

When asked if he feared the possible dangers of his wife traveling to that region, he responded, “That wasn’t even a thought.”

Saldate described the first time he was able to speak on the phone with his wife since her capture “We were both in tears,” he said. “It was the hardest thing.”

His voice broke.

“I told her that Hana and I loved her and missed her and needed her to be strong for us,” he said. “I could hear in her voice that she was so scared. Terrified.”

Recently, at a vigil in San Francisco, Saldate told a crowd of supporters that Lee was able to record a voice message for Hana. That message has given them both strength. “[Hana] said, ‘Daddy don’t cry. Mommy will be home very soon.’”

By Kai Ma   Photos by Mark Edward Harris

ONE of the few memories I have of my father has to do, strangely, with North Korea. We were on an airplane together; I was a child, much too young  to know where we were going or where we’d gone. But I do remember what he’d told me: “You are lucky to be able to fly like this, and go wherever you wish.” His Korean was peppered with heavily-accented English, and when he glanced down at me he smiled.

“In North Korea,” he said, as he pointed out our tiny window, “this is impossible.”

Growing up in the United States, this was all I knew—or cared to know—about North Korea. That it was a place, like East Germany or the Soviet Union, where the people could not leave. But during the 1990s, that began to change. I was in my teens, and aware of the shocking, bold headlines: the 1994 death of Kim Il Sung, a famine that was spiraling out of control. Then in 2000, the momentous summit that brought leaders from the North and South, Kim Jong Il and Kim Dae Jung, face-to-face for the very first time.

The now iconic image of the two Korean leaders shaking hands was disseminated throughout the globe as the most promising sign of peace on the divided peninsula in 50 years. “One small step for reconciliation, one giant leap for reunification,” stated the Korea Times, an English-language daily. That summer, 200 families reunited with relatives in the Korean capitals of Seoul and Pyongyang. With a group of Korean American friends, I watched these highly-publicized, emotional reunions from a television in a noodle bar in Seoul. It was impossible to peel my eyes from the screen, as Korean people—some very old, in hanboksor in wheelchairs—clutched relatives they’d not seen in decades.

I was a 23-year-old Baltimore-born Korean American visiting Seoul for the first time on my own. But despite never having lived on Korean soil, like many other Korean Americans, I felt more than just sympathy for these reunited family members. My reaction was visceral. During these televised reunions, the Koreans bowing to their parents recalled memories of aunts and uncles paying their respects to my grandparents on New Year’s Day. The faces, even the words in Korean that I could only partly understand, felt familiar. The only aspect more devastating than their initial separation was how an aging Cold War embroilment would force entire families to break apart once again.

Fast forward to 2009. Korea, still separated at the 38th parallel with some 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in the South, is dominating the headlines once more. Yet the news is not as hopeful as it once was. North Korea, after launching what it called a satellite into orbit, is again deemed a threat by the United States, South Korea, Japan and other nations. At the time of this writing, an American Navy destroyer was shadowing a 2,000 ton North Korean freighter that Pentagon officials believed contained missile components. News had also broke that some 100,000 North Koreans packed Pyongyang’s main square for an anti-U.S. rally, denouncing expanded international sanctions the United Nations implemented to punish the regime for its recent missile launches.

Meanwhile, two American journalists, including one Korean American, were found guilty of “hostile acts” and illegal entry into North Korea and sentenced to 12 years of hard labor.

With North Korea seemingly in the news almost daily, I am reminded of my younger self in 2000, trying to make sense of what’s happening with this troubled peninsula. And I am shaken by these recent developments, not just as a person of the world who is alarmed by the threat of war, but as an ethnic Korean who feels linked somehow to the events unfolding an ocean away. North Korea—a distant, mysterious place I mainly know through books, often-sensational news reports about its dictator Kim Jong Il, and personal family tales—matters to me.

I am not alone.

“The pain is still fresh for many Koreans because the division of our ancestral land only occurred two generations ago,” says Sean Chung, who emigrated from South Korea to the United States at age 4.

The 39-year-old physician adds, “North Korea’s bellicosity is a destabilizing force in a place where I still have relatives. Plus, I’m concerned about any country that acquires nuclear weapons and has a stated desire to use them.”

For John Choi, 28, a recent law school graduate in Los Angeles, there’s a worry that the communist state’s behavior could influence how Koreans are treated in the United States. “Perceptions about North Korea as a terrorist state and part of the ‘axis of evil’ (a designation coined by former President George W. Bush) can directly lead to discrimination and questioning of [Korean Americans’] patriotism and loyalty,” he says. Furthermore, “we’re citizens of a country that had a direct role in dividing the country.”

In highlighting the human rights crises surrounding famine and refugees, others note that North Korea isn’t just an issue that pertains to ethnic Koreans. “North Korea should matter to all of us as human beings,” says Carolyn Scholl, 39, of San Diego. “There is so much suffering, injustice and unfathomable atrocities occurring there…that we should all be appalled.”

After living as a Korean American expatriate in Seoul the last four years, Charse Yun says he was surprised by the apathy of many South Koreans regarding their northern brethren. “Realizing this, I feel it’s urgent for Korean Americans to care [about North Korea],” the 37-year-old copy editor says. “If we don’t, who will?”

And some Korea experts say this is a responsibility that we must accept, especially now, as tensions rise between the United States and the North. “Korean Americans have to know and understand North Korean issues,” says professor Suh Bok Hyuk of the Center for Peace Studies at Seoul’s Ewha Womans University, “[so they can act] as a mediator between Washington and Pyongyang.”

But more than a matter of responsibility, this issue is deeply personal.

***

I did not learn that my family hailed from the north until I was an adult. In 1952, a year before Korea was split into two permanently armed camps, my grandparents left what is now known as North Korea. With my infant mother and then-7-year old uncle, they fled Kaesong for the southern capital of Seoul. For the next 20 years, they lived a mere 37 miles from the Demilitarized Zone, not knowing if their relatives who’d remained in the north—including my grandmother’s own mother—were dead or alive.

My family crossed borders again in the 1970s—this time, to the United States, where I, along with my brother and more than a dozen cousins, was born.

I embraced the discovery of my family’s northern roots and even romanticized it.

I was told only these stories: How my grandmother’s uncle risked his life to illegally cross back into North Korea to find his wife and children. How my grandmother spent the remainder of her life, in Seoul and Los Angeles, crying for her own mother and obsessively dreaming about her. How my Korean American grandfather, who after being diagnosed with cancer and choosing against chemotherapy, returned to South Korea and ventured as north as possible to bow to his parents’ graves for the last time.

The pain and anguish that Korea’s division has caused is something that I will never truly understand; yet, these politics have shaped my own life in significant ways. As a young adult, I became curious about grassroots activism in modern South Korea—and this was years before I’d learned I had blood ties in the famine-stricken North. But after my mother discovered some Korean-language literature in my bedroom on unification politics, she accused me of affiliating with communist and North Korean sympathizers.

I was floored by her accusations. She even threatened to disown me for traveling to Seoul in 2000 to learn about the reunification movement, at one point, taking down the framed photos of me in the house and saying, “I no longer have a daughter.”

Fortunately, her words had no literal meaning. My trip, however, did come with costs. It created, to my shock and confusion, a subtle rift with my mom. And to this day, reunification is an off-limits topic in our home.

The trip also changed my life. I felt personally and politically invested in the politics of Korea’s division; exposure to this history brought me closer to understanding my now-American family.

And in many respects, the mystique surrounding North Korea is what eventually influenced me to become a reporter. I was forced to remain outside, peering in. And that wasn’t close enough.

So, I traveled as close as my guts (and funding) would allow: to the home of a North Korean family living in Seoul. It was the winter of 2006, and with the aid of a translator, I reported on North Korean defectors and their adjustment into capitalist South Korea. Together, we shared meals and conversations.

I remember in particular sharing a laugh with one defector, a former geologist in the North, about being “Korean foreigners” in Seoul; for example, we commonly found that our accents—my American one and his North Korean one—turned heads on the streets and subway.

When I asked the geologist to describe what he missed about home, he said, “North Koreans share everything. If we had only one slice of apple, we would cut it, however small, until everyone had a piece. [My son] still comes home with his snacks in his pocket. He knows he cannot share it with all his classmates, so he chooses to not eat it at all.” He glanced at his son, then 9, who was connecting a cord to the family computer. “I don’t want him to lose that part of North Korea,” the geologist lamented. “But, he will.”

This is a conversation that I’ve kept hidden from my mother, even though my desire to learn her history, and therefore mine, is the reason I knocked on this defector’s door to begin with. Sometimes, the more Korean immigrants try to protect us from Korea, the more we want to go back.

Surely, not all Korean Americans feel the urge to converse with North Koreans, or even identify as Korean, but it is not uncommon for the peninsula’s division to actively shape and inform the experience of ethnic Koreans born or reared in the United States, whether we acknowledge it or not. From being labeled a “North Korean spy” for criticizing Washington’s policies toward Pyongyang, to growing up with family members traumatized by civil war, Korean Americans continue to feel the reverberations of a decades-long clash that literally sliced their motherland in half.

Indeed, the conflict, from 1950 to 1953, produced more than two million civilian casualties and separated 10 million family members, not to mention, resulted in the physical devastation of the country. We cannot deny that the war, with the resulting poverty of Korea as well as the U.S. image in the South largely as a heroic savior, influenced many to immigrate to the perceived nation of plenty, the source of the delectable chewing gum, chocolate bars and oranges that American soldiers often handed out to Korean children.

And, yet, while scholars have studied and written articles and books about the politics of the Korean War, little attention has been paid to the event’s personal meanings for Korean Americans—an omission that led Ramsay Liem, a Boston College psychology professor, to embark on an oral history project delving into this legacy.

“My own sense is that for a lot of second-generation Korean Americans, there is a big gap in knowledge about their family histories, and part of that gap is the period of the Korean War,” says Liem, who has so far interviewed about three dozen people for the project, which was also adapted for a multimedia exhibit titled Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the Forgotten War. “I had always been concerned about how political repression and other historical traumas influence [what] people feel comfortable talking about and how silence can be a harmful burden. Those kinds of experiences made me feel that at some point, Korean Americans should have the option to explore our history of war and bring it much more into the public eye, both for our own sakes, and also for the larger agenda of achieving peace and unity on the Korean peninsula.”

In fact, Liem’s work in this regard also represents a legacy inherited from his own immigrant parents. “They came to the United States in the 1930s before Korea was divided, but devoted their lives to Korea’s struggle for independence, an end to military dictatorships and reunification,” says the second-generation Korean American. “The most profound legacy they passed on to me and other members of my family is the conviction that Korea must be reunified and its Cold War divisions healed.” Technically, the North and South are still at war because only an armistice was signed to stop the conflict, but not a peace treaty to end the war. Liem notes that the United States and China were the actual signatories of that armistice with North Korea, meaning, “The U.S., as much as South Korea, is still at war with the D.P.R.K.”

And recent statements by Washington and Seoul seem to highlight the lingering hostilities. In June, during Obama’s meeting with South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, the U.S. president called North Korea’s nuclear ambitions a “grave threat” to the world, and criticized the statements the Pyongyang government has made in retaliation to sanctions from the United Nations. He vowed that “under no circumstance are we going to allow North Korea to possess nuclear weapons.”

During a White House press conference with the two leaders, a reporter asked Lee whether he believed his country was under threat of attack from the North. Lee responded, “They will think twice about taking any measures that they will regret. North Korea may wish to do so, but of course they will not be able to.”

As the U.S. military tracks a North Korean cargo freighter that is reportedly heading towards Myanmar with prohibited materials, the global community is becoming increasingly anxious over what may happen if the ship is intercepted. North Korea, according to new reports, has already announced that such an encounter would be interpreted as “an act of war.”

The delicate dance between Seoul, Pyongyang and Washington has been inherited and passed on, from generation to generation, from Korea to the States. Now that an increasingly-frail-looking Kim Jong Il, who suffered a stroke last year, is 68, and power maybe transferred to his son, North Korea will not only matter. It may radically transform the lives of the millions of Koreans who live on the peninsula and beyond—especially if the regime does collapse or if the states do reunify.

The prospect of an unstable North Korea, or an outbreak of war between the two states or with the United States, is disturbing to many, but a source of anxiety that Koreans and Korean Americans have harbored for more than five decades. And though the generation that lived through the war is getting older and dying off, many Korean Americans of a new generation—distant from the actual historical event but armed with this inherited legacy—can play a unique role.

“We have an opportunity to help Americans understand the Korean side of the issue, and to help our Korean families understand the American side of the issue in a way that an arms control wonk from D.C. can never do,” says David Kang, professor of international relations and business, and director of the Korean Studies Institute, at the University of Southern California. Kang, born in the United States but whose father lived through the Korean War, was a frequent interview guest last month when U.S. media outlets sought expert opinions on North Korea.

He says, “As Korean Americans, we really do have the ability to help change, shape and form this very important issue.”

Let’s hope we live up to our inheritance.

-Additional reporting by Kathleen Richards

By Hyungwon Kang

North Korea has long been a subject of my curiosity, but also represented a place of inaccessibility for journalists like myself. However, in the mid-1990s, a number of Americans and other foreigners were being granted permission to visit, so with my then Los Angeles Times editors’ blessings, I journeyed there in 1995 to cover the famine.

As I documented the people and land of North Korea (accompanied by guides whose responsibility included informing local authorities of my presence in their town, so that my camera and I wouldn’t set off any “alarms”), I couldn’t help but notice the size of people, being about 10 to 20 percent smaller than the South Koreans I had photographed numerous times before. I also noticed that North Koreans tended not only to make eye contact, but to sustain it throughout conversations. “We don’t dislike American people,” several North Koreans told me. The country was mostly absent of trash. People didn’t wear fancy garb, but were usually neatly dressed in clean clothes.

I also returned in 1997 to cover the food shortage and recall seeing hundreds of barefoot young students along with villagers stooping over freshly prepared fields for the annual spring rice planting. On both visits, no one prevented me from photographing anything in particular, so I tried to document North Korea and its people as accurately and thoroughly as I could—realizing that such images have the power to reveal important truths and inspire understanding.

A school teacher on a bus is illuminated by the late afternoon sun after a visit to Myohyangsan (“Mysterious Fragrant Mountain”) in North Korea. The mountain is named after the mystic shapes and fragrances found in the area, and is a North Korea tourist attraction.

Residents on a sidewalk in Pyongyang.

Despite rain, students and residents plant rice in a newly rebuilt rice patty over 1996 flood-damaged farmland in Sugu village, Kujang Country, about 90 minutes by car north of Pyongyang. A local resident admitted to eating puljuk (plant porridge) while trying to overcome the country’s food shortage.

North Korean artists outside Koryo Museum in Kaesong, the ancient capital of the Koryo dynasty.

A youth band entertains Pyongyang residents during the morning commute.

What drives the North Korean economy?

David Kang, professor of international relations and business, and director of the Korean Studies Institute, at the University of Southern California, and co-author of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies (2003):

Overall, the economy is crumbling. But at the same time, this has driven individual North Koreans to take matters into their own hands. There is approval for private markets in the farmlands, allowing many individuals to cross the border to sell or trade goods with China. What the government doesn’t like is North Koreans leaving [permanently], but because of the economic collapse, they’ve been forced to tolerate individual initiative. Farmers are allowed to sell their own products, free markets are allowed, and the government will turn a blind eye to it so long as they’re coming back.

As for food, the solution is hardly good. People are quite hungry. The “great famine of the ‘90s” is over and North Korea is no longer in starvation mode. But they remain in survival mode. Everybody has to scramble every year for food. And it’s because there’s no way for the country to produce enough for its people, which is not unique because most countries can’t. But in North Korea’s case, they don’t have anything else they can build and sell in order to buy food.

What does the anticipated transfer of power in North Korea mean for the peninsula’s future?

Marcus Noland, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and author of Korea After Kim Jong-il (2004) and Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas (2000):

Kim Jong Il came up through the system. He was the designated successor in the 1970s and effectively ran the country as a prime minister before his father’s death. It was a transfer of power that unfolded over 20 years. Due to Kim’s Jong Il’s health, Kim Jong Un will not have anything near that kind of prep. When Kim Il Sung died in 1994, there were predictions that North Korea would collapse in weeks. Those predictions were wrong. Yet for the first time in my career, this feels different and I cannot articulate why.

This is not 1994. This transfer of power will be much more challenging. These transitional trajectories are highly complex and hard to predict but the death of Kim Jong Il is likely to create a range of possible outcomes. One of which may be reunification. Another one: a transformation of North Korea’s political landscape that would look less repressive and would deliver a higher standard of living for the people. In the next years, North Korea will change in much greater ways.

How real is the possibility of war?

David Straub, associate director of Korean studies at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a former State Department Korean affairs director. He played a key working-level role in the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program as the State Department’s Korea country desk director from 2002 to 2004:

The second test of a nuclear device seems to have persuaded most North Korea watchers in the U.S. that North Korea is probably not serious about giving up its nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. That has resulted in Obama taking a tougher approach. He’s pressed for the international community to condemn North Korea’s actions.

Essentially, the administration’s policy is that we’re always ready for dialogue, bilaterally with North Korea or through the six-party talks, and in exchange for giving up the nuclear weapons, we’ll normalize relations and even provide economic assistance. But we won’t enter negotiations on the premise that North Korea will remain a nuclear power.

The bottom line is that the threat of war remains very small. The North Korean leadership knows well that their military is far weaker than not only that of the U.S., but also of South Korea. Launching an actual war would inevitably mean utter defeat and the end of their regime. They know that. Their primary goal is survival, not suicide.

What is one of the biggest myths about North Korea?

Ramsay Liem, professor of psychology at Boston College, who conducted oral history research exploring the legacy of the Korean War for Korean Americans:

Many Americans think that North Korea is irrationally paranoid and hostile towards the U.S. and, therefore, an irreconcilable enemy. Those who follow the media are also frequently reminded that North and South Korea are technically still at war because the Korean War ended in an armistice agreement, not a peace treaty. What this picture leaves out is the fact that the un-ended Korean War also includes the U.S. who, along with China, was the actual signatory to the armistice agreement with North Korea.

Serious tension remains on the Korean peninsula, but the U.S. and North Korea have also been locked in a hostile standoff for nearly six decades. This unresolved animosity has been the breeding ground for repeated crises. Fortunately, some knowledgeable observers have begun to call for an end to this state of war as a precondition for resolving current differences. North Korean hostility toward the U.S. is real, but not irrational or irreconcilable. A crucial first step to ending it is to acknowledge its origins in the Korean War and to replace the half-century truce with a peace agreement.

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