Growing up 교포 (gyopo / “ethnic Korean living outside of the homeland”)
Throughout my life, I’d witnessed behaviors growing up within my Korean-American community in Atlanta that seemed like symptoms of deep trauma. Johnny from church hanged himself from a tree in his backyard when he was in high school and I was in junior high. Our pastor’s son also killed himself. My friend’s grandmother also killed herself a few years ago after telling her family members for some time that she planned to.
In my own family, a half-uncle killed himself some years ago. And I’d watched both my parents explode regularly in rage-filled episodes that terrified my brothers and me growing up.
Immigration, assimilation, and trying to make it in a country – especially one where the primary language is nothing like your native tongue – can be traumatizing. But I had suspicions that there were other reasons for all the trauma.
Obviously, there’d been the Korean War where a ghastly three to four million people had been killed, and before that the callous Japanese occupation, but what exactly had taken place during these events?
So I moved to Korea in 2007, about a year after I’d graduated from university. I needed to understand the origins of the trauma of the Korean diaspora. I initially naively thought I could figure it all out in just a year, at which point I’d planned to return to the States. Instead, I ended up staying for nearly five years until late 2011 and continue to return to what is now one of my forever homes.
A 교포 (gyopo) in Korea
One of the first things that caught my attention after arriving in Korea was that just two years before, in 2005, the government had launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Under the liberal president Roh Moo-hyun, the commission was investigating – among several issues – atrocities that the South Korean government had committed against its own people, most notably mass killings of civilians carried out before and during the Korean War.
For the first time, the government had started digging up some of a suspected 160 mass graves throughout the country believed to contain the remains of a shocking number of victims: approximately 100,000-200,000.
Well before I’d arrived in South Korea, North Korea’s reputation as a brutal regime had, of course, preceded it. But it had never occurred to me that the South Korean government could ever have done such a thing — but, of course, I’d never known much about my homeland or its history prior to moving there.
Once there, through working in journalism, talking to a wide range of people from locals to academics, and reading a variety of sources, including the Truth and Reconciliation report released in 2009, I started to better understand the nuances of the trauma of my diasporic community.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report published in 2009. (Source: Author)
As I learned more about the war, I learned how the front line continually moved backward and forward throughout the peninsula as pro-North Korean and pro-South Korean forces pushed back and forth. I was then able to understand the context under which both sides carried out mass killings.
Concerning the people the South Korean forces killed, it wasn’t as if they’d simply all been communists — if that had been the case, some might even justify the killings. The sad reality is that many innocent civilians were actually killed simply as a preventive measure so that they wouldn’t be able to provide any type of support, such as food or intel, to incoming North Korean forces.
In After The Korean War, anthropologist Heonik Kwon writes how it was paradoxical that each side expected ideological purity from citizens as the prerequisite for having their lives spared. He explains how it was impossible for residents to ever meet these expectations due to the ever-shifting frontiers of the chaotic war.
To this point, my friend Woobin*, a gyopo from New Zealand whom I befriended while living in Seoul, once told me, “My father…was three and in Seoul when [the war] began, and he had to go to the refugee camps in Daegu with my grandmother and my uncles and aunts. My grandfather was an artist and a calligrapher, and he was captured and forced by North Koreans to make propaganda. After the UN retook Seoul, he was almost executed by the South for ‘colluding with the enemy’ but was saved by a friend who was a general and vouched for my grandfather's character.”
In interviews with the Legacies of the Korean War project, Insook Lee and Joanna Kim-Selby also explain this complicated reality during the war.
Joanna Kim-Selby was an Ewha University freshman in Seoul when the war broke out. She became a subject of threats by both North and South Korean forces as they alternately moved through her region and was imprisoned for a time. (Source: Legacies of the Korean War project/YouTube)
Relatedly, Kwon also writes in his book how it’s too simplistic to claim that a North Korean’s moving southward was necessarily due to loyalties to South Korea — as some fled primarily from the fear of the US’ aerial bombing campaigns. Similarly, fleeing northward didn’t automatically constitute a belief in communist ideology; some were simply afraid they’d be killed amidst incoming violence if they stayed put.
World War II ends, and state-sponsored mass killings begin
One of the largest mass killings took place on Korea’s southernmost region of Jeju Island between 1947 and 1954 during which 30,000 Koreans were killed, or about 10% of the island’s population.
Leading up to that point, starting in 1910, Korea had suffered under violent Japanese colonial rule. The rise of communism and socialism in Korea can be traced back to this time as a response to the Japanese occupation.
In 1919, two million Koreans took to the streets in what today is a famously revered protest, the March First Movement, demanding Korean independence from Japan. The Japanese authorities killed approximately 7,000 protesters and arrested tens of thousands.
In Korea’s Grievous War, historian Su-kyoung Hwang writes about how in the wake of this incident, the Japanese sought out Korean collaborators to try to avoid a similar recurrence – because they felt they’d been caught off guard. Some of the Koreans who rejected this invitation continued to work toward independence instead and became interested in socialism or communism.
In 1925, the Korean Communist Party was formed, which the Japanese authorities immediately disbanded. Over the next several years, the Japanese regularly suppressed communist and socialist activities.
In the ‘30s, Japan’s anti-communist policies continued to become more and more severe. According to Hwang, during this time, “most Korean communists were imprisoned, renounced their beliefs, or fled abroad. … Those who stayed in Korea went underground, waiting out the end of Japanese rule.”
Then, in 1945, as World War II was coming to an end, the US was preparing to negotiate with the Soviet Union over how Korea would be administered after Japan's surrender.
US Army Colonel (and future Secretary of State) Dean Rusk and Colonel Charles Bonesteel were tasked with identifying a line of demarcation that both the US and the USSR could agree on. Using a National Geographic map, they decided on the 38th parallel.
In his 1991 memoir As I Saw It, Rusk said, “Neither [Bonesteel] nor I was a Korea expert, but it seemed to us that Seoul, the capital, should be in the American sector. … [Our commanders] accepted it without too much haggling, and surprisingly, so did the Soviets.”
In September, the US Army Military Government in Korea was established and took control of everything south of the 38th parallel, while the Soviet Civil Administration governed the northern half of the peninsula starting in August.
In The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947, historian Bruce Cumings writes about how the decisions made by the USAMGIK in the first three months of its occupation “shaped the conditions in which a rightist autocracy could emerge triumphant more than two years later.”
One of the most significant mistakes made early on by the Americans was keeping the Japanese colonial system in place — and even retaining some Japanese officials as advisors. Then, for newly available positions due to the Japanese exodus, the Americans generally promoted the Koreans who were left still working in those offices. According to Cumings, these Koreans “were, for the most part, either former Japanese Government-General employees or members of the Korean Democratic Party,” a right-wing anti-communist political party.
The political leaders of southern Korea at the end of World War II. From left to right: Syngman Rhee, Kim Koo, Kim Kyu-sik, Lyuh Woon-hyung, and Pak Hon-yong. (Source: Author @ Jeju 4.3 Peace Park Museum, June 13, 2023)
The USAMGIK also refused to recognize locally-organized groups, asserting themselves as the “only government” in Korea. They disbanded the People’s Republic of Korea, which had begun forming in August with the input of 145 branches around the country. They also declined to acknowledge the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, who’d been the government-in-exile operating since 1919 first from Shanghai and then Chungking, and whose members were now returning to Korea.
All over the country, frustrations swelled due to the back-to-back occupation by the US military right on the heels of Japanese colonization.
The coast of Seogwipo on southern Jeju Island. (Source: Author, June 12, 2023)
Specifically on Jeju Island, tensions boiled over on March 1, 1947. A group of residents celebrating the anniversary of the March 1, 1919 Independence Movement Day were fired upon by police, killing six of them.
Exacerbating the strain was the United Nations’ announcement that it would hold elections only south of the 38th parallel. Everyone understood that this would effectively separate Korea into two countries.
While Syngman Rhee supported the separate UN elections south of the 38th parallel, other leaders, including Kim Kyu-sik and Kim Koo opposed this resolution. They traveled to Pyongyang in April 1948 to meet with other leaders to discuss how to maintain a unified Korea but were unable to make anything happen before the UN elections created two separate nations.
Kim Kyu-sik and Kim Koo (second and third from left) in Pyongyang in April 1948 meeting with other leaders about how to maintain a unified Korea. (Source: Author @ Jeju 4.3 Peace Park Museum, June 13, 2023)
On April 3, 1948, tensions exploded, which is why the South Korean government refers to the conflict as the Jeju April 3rd Incident (while others refer to it as the Jeju Massacre, Jeju Uprising, or Jeju April 3rd Uprising and Massacre).
Syngman Rhee won the election in May 1948, becoming South Korea’s first president, and took office in July. His government distorted the Jeju protest as merely a communist uprising, justifying the massacre of some 30,000 people.
The massacre set off the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion in October on the mainland. The 6th and 14th Regiments of the Korean Army stationed in those two cities refused to be deployed to Jeju to put down protesters, sympathizing with them instead. Local citizens also joined in with the rebelling soldiers. Thousands were rounded up and either executed extrajudicially or imprisoned.
Meanwhile on Jeju Island, until 1954, villages were set on fire, some victims were shot to death, some were clubbed to death, some were lined up along cliffs and shot, sending them plummeting into the ocean. Hundreds of the bodies that fell into the sea even ended up on the shores of Tsushima, the Japanese island 160 miles east, where they were gathered up by locals. These days a memorial festival is held there in remembrance of the victims.
In The Magical Language of Others, EJ Koh writes about how her great-grandfather was stoned to death during the Jeju Massacre by fellow islanders. When her grandmother goes looking for her father after he’s disappeared, an old woman – one of many who’d carried out the murder together as a group – explains that “Many of us stoned him to prove our innocence. We stoned our own, again and again.” Koh’s grandmother looks down at the ground and realizes that what she initially thought was bark and other debris is actually pulverized flesh and bone.
In 2022, the Korean government announced that it will compensate approximately 4,000 survivors of the Jeju Massacre and victims’ family members by 2026. Some survivors are still seeking an apology from the US for what happened.
To feel the air there
Thoughts of these mass killings had stayed closed to me since I’d first learned of them when I’d moved to Korea. So on a recent trip back to Korea in June 2023, I made a plan to drive around Jeju Island as well as through the mainland to visit some sites and think about all that had happened.
My hand-drawn map of the mainland marking some destinations for my week-long drive from Busan to Seoul. (Source: Author)
On the third week of my month-long trip, I flew to Busan, South Korea’s second largest city located in the country’s southeastern corner. There, I rented a car and drove back to Seoul over the course of a week, stopping at historical sites throughout the countryside along the way.
One of the most important stops on my itinerary was in the city of Daejeon in an area called 골령골 (Golryeonggol / “Golryeong Valley”), where the horrific Daejeon Massacre took place in July 1950, just after the start of the Korean War and about two years after the start of the Jeju Massacre.
When you arrive at the Golryeonggol massacre site in Daejeon, you see two memorial stones, a shed, and banners hung by social justice organizations. (Source: Author @ Daejeon Massacre site, June 25, 2023)
The Daejeon Massacre was just one mass killing carried out in 1950 by the South Korean authorities under US supervision. The larger, systematic killing is referred to as the Bodo League Massacre. (The Bodo League [국민보도연맹 / Gukmin Bodo Yeonmaeng] is also referred to as the National Guidance League, the National Guidance Alliance, and the National Rehabilitation and Guidance League, among other names.)
I’d learned about the Bodo League Massacre while living in Seoul and from reading the Truth and Reconciliation report. The report explains that specifically pertaining to the Daejeon Massacre, the victims “were inmates of Daejeon Penitentiary, members of the Bodo League, and victims of preventive detention. According to US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) estimates, approximately 1,800 people were killed in the massacres.” Some estimates claim closer to 7,000 people were killed.
Jeju 4.3 Peace Park Museum’s Tombstone Park for the Missing, which consists of 3,891 tombstones for victims who went missing all over the country after being arrested by military and police. (Source: Author @ Jeju 4.3 Peace Park Museum, June 13, 2023)
The Bodo League had been organized by the South Korean government in June 1949 as a re-education organization for leftists. However, government-mandated quotas resulted in the membership of many who were not leftists but had been forced, often at gunpoint, to provide food and other aid to communists hiding in the hills. Others who joined included uneducated peasants and others of the working class who learned they’d be able to “eat barley” if they joined at a time of food scarcity. Membership reached an estimated 300,000 people.
Then, when the Korean War broke out in 1950, according to the Truth and Reconciliation report, “the government began arresting and killing Bodo League members, fearing that they may collaborate with the North. The Bodo League massacres were the largest mass killings during the Korean War period.”
In Korea’s Grievous War, Hwang writes, “Through my research, I learned that a surprising number of Koreans had lost family members in this way. It was a personal history that many carried in silence. Often, people were oblivious of their close connections to the dead, as their parents or grandparents had told them nothing about what had happened.”
Knowledge of the killings reached the highest levels of the US State Department and Pentagon, where it was classified as “secret.” And meanwhile, US Gen. Douglas MacArthur merely referred the matter to the US Ambassador John J. Muccio, who urged South Korean officials to carry out executions humanely after due process of law, though that advice was not followed.
Photos from the Daejeon Massacre were some of the first evidence of US-backed civilian killings by South Korean forces to become public in the ‘90s. This happened when the US government started declassifying such photos at that time – particularly due to pressure from a man in New York, Do-Young Lee, whose father had been murdered by South Korean authorities in August 1950.
One of the photos found on the side of the shed at the Golryeonggol massacre site, which was taken by US Army Major Abbott in 1950 and declassified by the US in 1999. (Source: Author @ Daejeon Massacre site, June 25, 2023)
In one of the photos from the massacre – taken by a US Army Major Abbott – a man on the ground turns and looks straight into the camera before being shot dead. The US Army, in fact, took many photos of the killings, which were then filed away as classified.
So many times my mind had played to me the image of the man in the photo – a man who could’ve been my own kin, friend, or perhaps a lover if I’d been born into a different Korean body. So as I planned my trip back to Korea, I’d felt the need to go see where these killings had taken place and feel the air there.
After pulling into the main lot at Golryeonggol, I noticed two memorial stones, a shed with posters affixed to it, and banners hung between trees by social justice organizations. One banner by the nonprofit group National Security Law Abolition Education Center read, “We will not forget the pain of the heroic souls of Golryeonggol Valley and achieve the abolition of the National Security Law.”
A poster affixed to the left-hand side of the shed featuring a classified US military letter signed by Lt. Col. Bob Edwards documenting the executions, which included the photos seen here. (Source: Author @ Daejeon Massacre site, June 25, 2023)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission carried out exhumations at Golryeonggol in 2007, uncovering 34 sets of remains, a .45 caliber handgun, M1 bullets and cartridges. But then in 2008, the conservative president Lee Myung-bak came into office and disbanded the commission in 2010, halting the dig.
Then, in 2015, a private organization resumed the unearthings. During that second excavation, 20 more sets of remains were discovered. Then, after the liberal president Moon Jae-in came into office in 2017, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was relaunched in 2020. That same year, exhumations resumed, and 234 sets of remains were uncovered.
Since 2021, more exhumations have been ongoing, and in December 2024, the Forest of Truth and Reconciliation Museum is set to open at this site.
The Guilt-by-Association Law + National Security Act + Anti-Communist Act
According to Kim Dong-Choon, the Truth and Reconciliation’s Standing Commissioner from its first incarnation from 2005-2010, anyone who was simply related to these massacre victims became social outcasts due to the law of “guilt by association” (연좌제 / yeon-jwa-je).
Under this law, victims’ families became surveillance targets and were watched by the KCIA. In some cases, their property was confiscated, and educational opportunities were blocked. In other cases, they were visited at home and work by police, barred from gaining employment in public service, military, or police, and couldn’t travel abroad. As a result, some fell into a life of poverty after becoming unable to access needed resources.
The Wilson Center conference, “US-Korea Relations: Retrospective on the Jeju April 3 Incident, Human Rights, and Alliance,” from Dec. 8, 2022. (Source: Wilson Center/YouTube)
In December 2022, the DC-based public-policy think tank, Wilson Center, hosted the conference “US-Korea Relations: Retrospective on the Jeju April 3 Incident, Human Rights, and Alliance.” One of the panelists, Suyeon Yang, a third-generation survivor of the Jeju Massacre, told the story of how her grandfather was taken away by soldiers one day in January 1949 and killed alongside other villagers. Then, both of her father’s brothers were also taken away and never seen again; it’s assumed that they were also killed without due process. She said, “One day, my younger brother said he wanted to become a civil servant. … my father said it would be impossible because of the guilt-by-association principle.”
Another panelist, Kathleen Stephens, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in South Korea in the ‘70s, a foreign service officer in the US Embassy in Seoul in the ‘80s, and the US Ambassador to South Korea from 2008 to 2011. She said, “When I lived in Korea…in the 1970s and the 1980s…the notion of ‘guilt by association’ was written into the law. …When I [returned] there as Ambassador…in 2010…at the ambassador's residence…I hosted a former prime minister who had held many senior positions in the South Korean government in the ‘70s and ‘80s. … I asked him, ‘What are you most proud of?’ And he said, ‘...that during my tenure we got rid of the guilt-by-association law’ [in] the 1980s.”
The introduction of Article 13 (3) into South Korea’s Constitution declaring that “No citizen shall suffer unfavorable treatment on account of an act not of his/her own doing but committed by a relative” is what finally deemed the guilt-by-association law to be unlawful.
In The Making of Minjung, historian Namhee Lee writes how the indiscriminate application of the National Security Act (which some refer to as the National Security Law) and, later, the Anti-Communist Act (sometimes referred to as the Anti-Communist Law) was “one of the principal mechanisms through which the authoritarian regimes controlled and disciplined society.” She mentions how the National Security Act was even “applied broadly to those who expressed views on inequality in a capitalist economy, the lack of political freedom in South Korea, South Korea’s relations with the United States, Korean reunification, and so forth.”
A banner stating, “We will not forget the pain of the heroic souls of Golryeonggol Valley and achieve the abolition of the National Security Law,” by the nonprofit group National Security Law Abolition Education Center (Source: Author @ Daejeon Massacre site, June 25, 2023)
The National Security Act was first issued by Syngman Rhee in 1948 shortly after taking office and was the pretext under which he carried out extrajudicial mass killings around the country.
Later, in 1960, Syngman Rhee was chased out of the country – to Hawaii, where he eventually died in exile – after winning his fourth consecutive presidential election only through years of intimidating voters and suppressing (and sometimes murdering) political opponents.
Then, in 1961, the military dictator Park Chung-hee introduced the Anti-Communist Act soon after executing his military coup. This law continued to make it so that Koreans could not speak out about what had happened to them. In 1980, the Anti-Communist Act was abrogated, and most of its provisions were incorporated into the National Security Act.
For years, the National Security Act has been criticized as a human rights violation by legal scholars and such organizations as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. In recent years, the law has finally become a subject of open debate in South Korea itself. The Korean Bar Association, the Democratic Party, legal scholars, and human rights groups have called for the National Security Act to be abolished or amended.
요즘에 (yo-jeum-e / “These days”)
Those who speak Korean and have lived in South Korea in recent years can see how politically polarized it’s become – like so many other countries. But would this have been the outcome if Korea’s transition at the end of World War II had been handled properly?
How would things have turned out if, when the Americans entered the region in 1945, they hadn’t revived the Japanese colonial system? If they’d properly dealt with those Koreans who’d worked closely with the Japanese instead of promoting them?
Some Koreans feel that many of those who’d collaborated with the Japanese were able to stay in power through the post-colonization period by rebranding themselves as anti-communists – while their descendants continued to occupy prominent positions under a successive lineup of conservative presidents.
Fast forward to now, almost 80 years after the end of World War II. That’s several intergenerational wealth transfers and an accumulation of social capital for those who benefitted from the choices that were made, and compounded pain and disenfranchisement for those who didn’t.
Whenever such on-the-surface comments are uttered at me about what a “success” South Korea is, I might secretly be thinking about the time in 2019 when I had to ask my aunt from Seoul to stop yelling “Yeah, get those commies!” at her news stream so that I could sleep. An arrest warrant had been issued for the wife of left-wing former Justice Minister Cho Kuk concerning falsifying documents for their children to advance their educational opportunities. (I might have understood if she’d yelled something like, “Yeah, get those rich assholes!” but “...commies”?)
Or I might be thinking about the time in 2009, two years into living in Seoul, my father mentioned communists (빨갱이들 / bbal-gaeng-i-deul) to me for the first time while we were having dinner one night when he’d come into town to visit. He’d asked me what stories we’d covered lately at my news anchoring job, and I told him about the KORAIL (Korea Railroad Corporation) worker strike where 16,000 union workers were protesting plans to cut jobs and wages and reduce welfare benefits.
My father leaned in and whispered, “You know the union leaders are communists.” I laughed until I realized he wasn’t kidding. He continued, “North Korea sends spies to work in factories like Hyundai, and then they round up others, so first there are 10 communists, and then, suddenly, Korea’s 50 percent communist, and then, the whole country.” I rebutted, “Dad, union leaders are just people trying to make sure they get proper pay and work hours,” to which he said, “No, that’s not true.”
I changed the subject, and our conversation went back to normal, but I was shaken and disturbed. He’d been serious, and the way he’d gone into a hushed tone when talking about “the communists” had freaked me out.
After that, I’d asked native Korean and gyopo friends if their parents had ever exhibited such behavior. Some said no, some said yes. One of my friends, Haejin*, who I’d befriended in Seoul and who grew up near Chicago, said that before she moved to Korea, her parents had, in fact, warned her of 빨갱이들 (bbal-gaeng-i-deul). She said, “My mom used to always be paranoid that North Koreans would kidnap me in South Korea. They said to me, ‘빨갱이들은 어디가도 있어. 조심해야되.’ (Bbal-gaeng-i-deul-eun eo-di-ga-do iss-eo. Jo-sim-hae-ya-doe. / “Commies can be found everywhere you go. You have to be careful.”) It wasn’t in a belligerent tone of voice, though. It was always matter-of-factly.”
When she told me that story, I felt so comforted that I wasn’t alone.
For me, at the very least, there is some strange relief I feel after having begun to understand the roots of the deep trauma that my people have gone through and continue to go through. I now understand all the times my right-wing parents called – and continue to call – someone a 빨갱이 (bbal-gaeng-i / “commie”) just because those people are not right-wing like they are. I now understand that it doesn’t necessarily mean the person is literally a communist, and I now understand the historical backstory.
Also, can South Korea really be considered such a miracle when it has the highest suicide rate of OECD countries? Are all the Koreans who struggle with their traumas every day or commit suicide simply supposed to be shrugged off as acceptable collateral damage – just part of the package deal of the end-game of the global spread of Western-style “democratic” capitalism? Which started with murdering people who didn’t agree with some shitty plan?
This is why National Security Council report 68 (often referred to as “NSC 68”) from 1950 is infamous. According to historian Andrew Bacevich, “In NSC 68 is…a wildly exaggerated depiction of the military threat posed by the Soviet Union.” It starts off claiming that the Soviets would cause the “destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself,” and, therefore, proposed a policy of “containment.” It also proposed quadrupling defense spending, and, in fact, while Truman had proposed a $13 billion defense budget for 1951, it ballooned to $58 billion. It was the fulcrum upon which the US became a global military superpower.
It’s important to note that Korea wasn’t the only place during the Cold War era where anti-communist terror was unleashed on the population.
In Korea’s Grievous War, Hwang points out how specifically in 1948, Malaya and Indonesia also erupted in socialist uprisings. The counterinsurgency campaigns deployed against these populations, she writes, “were aimed at preempting Soviet involvement, [but] the US did not regard the insurrections as homegrown and so ignored their indigenous origins. … however, the unrest that wracked postcolonial Asia during this period should be understood within the context of local history, anti-colonial nationalism, popular grievances, and the revolutionary method of the postwar era rather than singling out the influence of the Soviet Union.”
In The Jakarta Method, journalist Vincent Bevins writes, “in the years 1945-1990, a loose network of US-backed anti-communist extermination programs emerged around the world, and they carried out mass murder in at least 23 countries. … the extermination programs in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, East Timor, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Taiwan, Thailand, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Vietnam should be seen as interconnected, and a crucial part of the US victory in the Cold War.”
Today, as we continue living through this global post-colonial era, there are those of us who speak other languages and can actually communicate with our native counterparts still living in our homelands. We live with the awareness of how our societies were ravaged by and continue to pay the price for poor foreign policy decisions – even if it doesn’t seem obvious to some people. Behind closed doors – and sometimes in public – we watch the ripple effects of the repercussions play out in real time as our loved ones struggle with their mental health decades later.
And as the US continues making its foreign policy decisions today, we’re forced yet again to watch the consequences of our government’s sometimes painful choices. Will it ever learn from its mistakes. Will it ever end.
*Name has been changed
Sara Kim is a second-generation Korean-American writer, musician, and data analyst living in New York City. You can find Sara on Twitter and Instagram at @biopixie.