On April 15, 2005, the Korean American community lost one of its pioneers. Though his name may not be recognizable to some, Bong Youn Choy (born May 25, 1914) was instrumental in recording history and teaching generations of Korean Americans their mother tongue.

Bong Youn Choy (or BY, as he was known) was one of the few Korean immigrants who came here between 1910 and 1945, when Korean immigration to America was officially banned, as the United States recognized Japan’s jurisdiction over Korea. Choy emigrated from Japan, where he graduated from Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. Having grown up during Japanese occupation, Choy was a passionate nationalist and a strong supporter of Korean independence and sovereignty, and his studies reflected that.

In 1938, he arrived in Los Angeles to study at Chatman City College. In 1942, he was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, as a lecturer of Japanese in the Oriental Languages Department, since anti-Japanese sentiment following the bombing of Pearl Harbor opposed the hiring of a teacher of Japanese ancestry. Soon thereafter, Choy enrolled as a graduate student in political science and earned his master’s degree in 1945.

Choy quickly discovered that UC Berkeley also offered courses in Chinese and Mongolian, but not Korean; Choy volunteered to change that. Without a budget, he recruited 17 students from his Japanese class and wrote his own Korean textbook. It was one of the first Korean language programs at an American university. Over 60 years later, Berkeley’s Korean language program now teaches some 500 students each year.

As one of the early Korean settlers in California, Choy faced discrimination and was forced to live in San Francisco’s Chinatown. During this same period, he served as a language expert for the Office of War Information in San Francisco. He later returned to South Korea to help with the post-war reconstruction and worked as a political education specialist and deputy director with the Department of Public Information. Choy also had teaching stints in political science at the University of Seattle and at Seoul National University.

Choy’s scholarly research focused on recording Korean and Korean American history in great detail, and for that reason is considered an important source of hard-to-find information. His books, Korea: A History (1971), Koreans in America (1979) and A History of the Korean Reunification Movement (1984), are still taught in classrooms today and are often cited in academic papers and books on Korean and Asian American history.

“Bong Youn Choy [was] a meticulous researcher and graceful writer,” reflected Elaine Kim, an ethnic studies professor at Berkeley. “[He] has served as a model scholar for generations of Korean Americans.”

According to Yong-Ho Choe, professor emeritus of Korean history at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Choy’s research also helped unify the Korean American community. “I regard Mr. Choy as an important person who played a crucial role as an intermediary between two groups of Korean Americans,” said Choe. “Namely, those who migrated as part of the first wave … between 1903 and 1924, and the second wave of Korean immigrants who came to the United States after 1965. There was a large gap between these two groups, and professor Choy acted as a bridge connecting these old and new generations of Korean Americans through his writings and lectures.”