It’s no accident that Korean America’s pioneer female state lawmaker hails from a family line of women warriors on the Islands of Hawaii.

Unafraid, unfettered and outspoken, Jackie Young, a third-generation Korean American, has thrived on breaking barriers for Asian women in politics. Call it her cultural DNA.

Early on, she grew up in the shadow of outspoken pioneer women on the Islands: “The women had to be an equal partner as they worked very hard behind the scenes to support the family. As a result, many of the women I recall from my childhood were very active and outspoken. I grew up thinking that women naturally spoke out all the time and their voices were heard. In this kind of environment, I didn’t see any problem speaking up.”

Young admires her maternal grandmother, who had adopted her own mother. “They took in children whose families had suffered a tragedy and adopted them: my mother Martha, my aunts Frances and Millicent, and my uncle Joseph,” said Young.

The bad blood between the Korean National Association (KNA) and autocratic Syngman Rhee’s Dongji Hoe exacted a heavy toll on her grandfather, who had headed the KNA. Once Rhee became the president of South Korea, his regime harassed his former political opponents in Hawaii and in the mainland, falsely accusing them of being communists and denying them visas to visit their homeland.

Jackie Young’s maternal grandparents adopted four children, including Young’s mother, shown here circa 1910.

“I heard many times that my grandfather would be assassinated if he went back (to Korea),” Young told local historian Roberta Chang. “It was so sad because he just yearned to return to his homeland.

“Then in 1960, when Syngman Rhee was exiled and came to Hawaii, my grandfather was so happy and said, ‘Now we can go back.’ But a few months before the planned trip, he had a stroke and died.”

Throughout her eventful life, Young was at the vanguard of civil rights activism at state and national levels. Young marched with such feminist luminaries as Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug in the women’s rights movement. She was in charge of Hawaii’s affirmative action program, and in 1999, the American Civil Liberties Union named her the Civil Libertarian of the Year in Hawaii. The same year, the National Education Association honored her with the Futrell Award for her lifetime work in advancing the rights of women and girls in education.

As Hawaii historian Tom Coffman marvels, “Jackie Young is what the public no longer believes to exist — an adept politician and a pillar of unwavering conviction.”

Early in her political career, Young served as vice president of the powerful National Women’s Political Caucus. During that period, she decided to challenge a hard-core conservative incumbent in a predominantly Republican district and defeated him, becoming one of the most prominent Korean American state lawmakers in 1990.

Young would follow her grandfather, Pyung Yo Cho, to meetings of the Korean National Association, for which he was president, and see women being vocal and involved in the community.

When Koreatown was under fiery mob assaults during the 1992 L.A. Riots, cops and politicians, including Asian Americans, stayed away. Shocked and outraged at the chaos in Los Angeles, the lawmaker flew to the city to see what she could do. Along with her lawyer daughter, Paula Daniels, they toured the still smoldering Koreatown. She saw that Koreans had little political clout and dedicated the next few years to traveling around the country, calling on fellow Korean Americans to form a national organization and get involved in mainstream politics.