The Korean immigrant story is over 100 years old, but it remains to be told to the outside world. A singular irony is that its beginning chapter, spanning the first 75 years, is still missing, although its current pages brim with shining tales of one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in the United States.

Our forthcoming book, Lonesome Journey: The Korean American Century; A Trail of Wail: The Lost Tribe of Korean Slaves on Mexico and Cuba (The Korean Oral History Project), is dedicated to capturing whispers from the souls of those departed first immigrants and “picture brides” interred here in foreign soil. It seeks to fill that aching void in the collective memory of an ancient people and their early, solitary passage to America.

This tale is an undying saga of the humblest on earth — unschooled and unmarried standing alone against the world, enduring the unendurable under unrelenting serfdom, and rising to the noblest cause of freedom and independence for their conquered kingdom. It is the story of a lost tribe whose lonesome journey in quest of its dream is yet to be remembered, refreshed and retold for succeeding generations.

This oral history venture has been in the making for the past two decades. It has been an anxious, often faltering attempt to trace the long-gone trails of the original immigrants and recapture the pulse and spirit of their all-too-brief existence through their American-born children and grandchildren.

— K.W. Lee and Dr. Luke and Grace Kim

 

The Lonesome Journey editors have allowed KoreAm to publish abbreviated versions of select oral histories from their forthcoming book. This is the 56th in a continuing series.

This is a classic Confucian tale of three yangban (aristocrat) women — mother, wife and sister — slaving as farmhands for 10 years so that their teenaged man of the house could pursue his lawyerly career in the exclusionary New World.

To their bitter disappointment, they found the door to the bar exam closed to Asians, or “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”

But Young-Sung Kang’s mother Maria, wife Won-Shin and older sister Hei-Won wouldn’t give up. They backed his pursuit of a new career in medicine until he became a pioneer herbalist.

Born to a rich family, Young-Sung’s mother had led a sheltered life before and after her marriage to a high government official who kept a concubine in their home in Pyongyang.

Eventually, she could no longer tolerate her husband’s habit. One fateful day in 1905, she packed all the silk, silver and gold treasures along with her family members (daughter, two sons and daughter-in-law) and left her husband and Korea behind. Young-Sung was just 17, and his bride of a year, Won-Shin, 18.

They boarded a boat off Pyongyang for America unaware of what lay ahead.

Seven decades later in 1975, oral historian Sonia Sunoo, a childhood acquaintance of the Kangs, visited Young-Sung and Won-Shin’s retirement home in Los Angeles for their life story of sufferings, humiliations and sustained strength.