One distressing feature of the century-old Korean passage to North America is the great divide or disconnect between the first-wave pioneers’ descendants and the post-liberation second wave of newcomers. Like two alien planets orbiting far apart from each other. 

At my twilight year of 80 as an observer and chronicler of the latter-day diaspora, I am smitten with the melancholy bug. Over the past half century, I’ve encountered but a handful of first-wave descendants engaged in the struggling and often stumbling immigrant community. Such is our predicament in stark contrast with our more established and cohesive Chinese and Japanese American communities.

Only a few vestiges of the early Korean passage survive in anonymous cemeteries and leftover churches across the farming belts of the Western coastal states. First-wave descendants, citizens by birth and largely estranged from the culture of their ancestors, have melted into the mainstream as “model minority.”

Bluntly put, there’s little continuity from the first to the second wave of Korean passage to the Hawaii islands and the mainland United States.

In this nation of immigrants, it’s said that their American-born, second-generation children (isae) would rather forget than remember the land their parents had left behind and loved with such passion. But their third-generation grandchildren (samsae) tend to return to their ethnic roots.

Samsae Hawaii native Howard Lee Halm, long a towering figure among American trial lawyers and a national leader among major Asian American bars, has never forgotten where he came from: the humblest on earth and orphans of history.

Born into a pioneer family line of surrogate slaves and picture brides in harsh Hawaii and Yucatan territory plantations, Halm belongs to the handful of samsae bridge-builders determined to reach out to the second wave of immigrants.

Indeed, Halm represents a fragile but precious link to and a living legacy of the early Korean diaspora.

One gloriously halcyon January morning in Hawaii in 2003, Halm led me on a tour of his ancestral gravesites. The veteran trial lawyer based in Los Angeles had returned to the island on the occasion of the centennial year commemoration to preside over the KAC national convention.

The community advocacy organization with 15 branches across the nation is the Korean American equivalent to the century-old National Association for Advancement of Colored People.

We first visited Punchbowl National Cemetery where his father, Capt. Gilbert Halm, a World War II veteran, is buried, and Oahu Cemetery, just across from St. Luke’s Church, the family’s church since 1909, where his grandparents are resting.

“They were young adventurers who left Incheon Harbor a century ago to establish new lives in a strange country,” Halm says of his grandparents. “They found back-breaking, hazardous stooped labor from which they were able to eke pennies each day. After finishing their indentured service, they took their meager savings and left the plantations to work hard for their children who, in turn, worked hard for their children, to afford the best possible education to prepare them for a good life in this country.”