When my mom was three years old, she went with her parents from Korea to Japan and they didn’t know how long they would be gone. Thinking that it wouldn’t be permanent, her two brothers stayed behind with their grandmother. Her mother left to do the laundry at the laundromat. She told her not to leave the house. She'll be right back but she was three and after a little while she left the house to look for her. Once she was outside she sat on the ground and started crying. Then a passerby saw her and asked her what was wrong but she did not know how to speak Japanese so she kept crying. So she took her to the police station and she sat there crying for hours until her mother finally found her there. Her parents were very worried. For years they told the story of house she got lost in front of her own house 

My grandpa was a journalist during the Regime of South Korean Park Chung Hee. Although he was one of the most influential figures in South Korean politics and the economy, he was very critical of the press being able to denounce the government. My grandpa was given the option to press for the government, go to jail, or leave the country. (“Freedom of the press in South Korea”)

He left the country and took his family to Japan. At the time, Japanese people were very discriminating against Korean people (University et al.). My mom went to elementary school for a couple years in Japan. She was ostracized by the Japanese children because she was Korean. One time, her dad traveled to the US and brought back a friend of his who was a white man with his blonde daughter. She took the little girl with her to the playground. Usually she had nobody to play with but this day all the children swarmed in on the little American girl. She also felt alienated because she moved schools almost every year. When you’re a new student you have to stand in front of the class and be introduced to the class by the teacher. It was always a painful experience because she was very shy and she knew they wouldn’t like her because of her experiences at past schools.

After my grandpa got his masters degree at Waseda University, he got accepted into a PhD program at University of Hawaii. He got a student visa from this and was able to move his family to Hawaii. He could not keep doing the PhD program and work for his family so he dropped out. Because he dropped the program, his student visa expired. This meant that they were living in America illegally for some time.

They all eventually did acquire legal citizenship. My mom completed her middle and high school in Hawaii. (She went to the same highschool as Barack Obama although they missed each other by a couple years.) After high school, she went to Brown where she got her bachelors, then she went to Yale for graduate school and got her PhD in musicology (Yang, Mina).

“Freedom of the Press in South Korea.” Wikipedia, 31 Jan. 2023, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_press_in_South_Korea#:~:text=Park%20was%20highly%20critical%20of. Accessed 3 Nov. 2023.

University, Stanford, et al. “Koreans in Japan.” Spice.fsi.stanford.edu, spice.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/koreans_in_japan#:~:text=Ethnic%20Discrimination%20of%20Koreans%20in%20Japan&text=By%20December%201945%2C%20Koreans%20lost. Accessed 3 Nov. 2023.

Yang, Mina. Personal interview. 22 October 2023.