Perhaps Helen Sun Hee Kim Griffin is a case of an especially quick wit and an extra sharp tongue. Or perhaps history is also at work.

Helen’s mother was a picture bride who was determined to recoup the family’s security and status in a new land. While her mother counted pennies and worked herself to the bone, Helen endured whispers that her mother was a miser, too little concerned with the church and with Korea itself. Even in the small military town of Wahiawa, Oahu, near Schofield Barracks, Koreans systematically divided against one another. What better target for wagging tongues than a picture bride who was rolling up a small fortune in real estate?

After Helen’s father died in 1936, her mother had to support and raise six children on her own. The Kim women were strong. All three daughters attended college, while their brothers did not. Helen and her two sisters — and indeed many offspring of the Korean community — were pressured to be competitive from the outset. Told constantly that they were the brightest young people in diverse Hawaii, they rose to the top of their classes. Told that Koreans were nothing if not brave, they made their way to the front of the room in the arts of speaking and performing.

Helen had the audacity to be impractical. She studied literature. She obtained degrees from the University of Hawaii and Boston University. Eventually she became the first Asian American Fulbright scholar from Hawaii and did post-graduate work as a Fulbright scholar in Romantic literature at Britain’s Bristol University.

In 1951, she married former Associated Press newsman John Griffin, with whom she had three children, who in turn have had three children. Her oldest daughter is a Hindi scholar in India. Her oldest son is an art director married to a Latina, and her younger son is a high school teacher married to an Irish girl.

A longtime friend of hers, Hawaii historian Tom Coffman describes her as “a political activist, community leader of the League of Women Voters and an elegant presence in the island’s cultural life.” In 2002 he shot an interview with her for his documentary film “Arirang” and came away believing, “Helen is a walking paradox: at once proud of her Korean heritage and caustic about the Korean American experience. But who speaks with a more pungent intimacy about the foibles of growing up Korean in the 1930s? She puts us there, close to unburnished reality.”

Helen, featured in the documentary “Arirang,” is the daughter of a picture bride who came to Hawaii.

The following oral history was compiled by Christine Lee from two separate 2002 interviews with Tom Coffman and K.W. Lee at Griffin’s Honolulu home.

HERE IS HELEN SUN HEE KIM GRIFFIN’S STORY, IN HER OWN WORDS:

The three girls in my family went to college, but my brothers did not. My oldest brother Sang Ok, from my mom’s previous marriage in Korea, became a merchant seaman, and my second brother Chia Ok fought in the U.S. Army during World War II and settled in Japan after marrying a Japanese girl.