A PART OF ME WAS LEFT WITH MORE QUESTIONS THAN BEFORE I TOOK KIRN’S oral history. For one, I thought Saigu, what Koreans call the 1992 L.A. uprising, would play a much greater role in the story. But Kirn’s memories didn’t corroborate the devastation I understood to have beset Koreatown in the nineties. “I personally wasn’t impacted at all,” he told me, “because of the fact that our lives were all in Orange County.” And because of the timing—he was incarcerated at sixteen only months after Saigu, then spent the next twenty years away from home—he never saw firsthand how the Korean community reconciled this pain.
Kirn was a rare figure in the U.S. justice system. A Korean American doctor’s son from Orange County who began a life sentence as a juvenile before paroling and coming home two decades later: a combination of words that existed possibly never. I wanted to see how his story broke the homogeneity of the Korean American experience. I wanted to know why the Korean Americans who didn’t fit the mold were so invisible.
Kirn’s perspective did not align neatly with what the research had primed me for, I learned quickly. His mother came to the United States in the seventies as part of President Park Chunghee’s “worker export,” he recalled, but I found no information on such a program that brought Korean laborers to the United States in that period. Latin America and West Germany, yes—that was documented—but I couldn’t find evidence of a government-backed pipeline from South Korea to here under the Park administration.
What was correct? I did not care to discount Kirn’s statements just because I—who entered the picture long after, equipped with only Google, the university library database, and an incomplete awareness of Korean and Korean American history—saw no written proof. What I was seeing instead was how often personal memory defied the document. And what could then be discovered from that.
Oral histories are not necessarily concerned with verifiable “facts.” Ronald Grele observed that an oral history instead reveals “what people thought happened and how they have internalised and interpreted what happened.” It struck me whenever Kirn preceded his thoughts with, “I don’t know this for a fact because I’m not a sociologist,” or “I’m completely guessing here,” because every Korean American I knew—the ones who talked about any of this—said the same thing. We were all piecing together our lives from what we saw, yet found it difficult to lay out their precise origins. Kirn was extremely knowledgeable about what specifically within the justice system had ensnared him: the bills that passed, the political underpinnings, the peculiarities of California law, the cause and effect of each on his life. But in terms of being Korean American—it wasn’t like there were laws being passed every couple years that explicitly dictated what happened to our entire community. It was more discreet. The effects of 1965—and before 1965, and in the homeland—passed through generations, mutated, and absorbed us into its hegemony.
Two things were becoming clear to me. One, Korean Americans struggled with a fragmented understanding of themselves. Two, their experiences repeated time after time. I thought the Korean Americans of my generation were the most apathetic, partly because of our distance from a radicalization point. But Kirn had the same idea of his generation, the Saigu generation. And a Korean American woman named Kathy Kyong Sook Kim, fourteen years older than Kirn, presented the very same opinion in an oral history of her own in 1994. She said: “The Koreans in L.A. in our generation are…just very ignorant about what’s going on in the rest of the world, in L.A., in South Central. There are some people…who are aware of what’s going on, and they might get angry at some injustice, but they are too selfish to do anything about it.”
A third point of clarity surfaced: most Korean Americans were either incredibly critical of themselves or not critical enough. This discontent with the Korean American community came through from Kirn during his oral history. From me, too; I was the one asking the questions after all.
I wondered whether we weren’t too critical. It felt almost like self-flagellation, like we had made internalized racism woke. Korean Americans struggled, too. This was an obvious, glaring, and pressing reality that got lost in Korean American prosperity and its criticism. “Something that someone pointed out to me was,” Kirn said, “the few Koreans who do work in advocacy, they end up working in advocacy helping other ethnic groups.” So some of us had a serious problem of turning away from our own needs. Why? I knew why I did, but I was suddenly ashamed, hearing it like this. “The Korean community, I think, has grown too successful,” he suggested.
Maybe we were falling into a mirrored version of the model minority trap—scoffing about our problems and neglecting our abilities. This kind of framing was limiting. Korean Americans had a long history of activism, of coalition-building, of accountability, of resistance and resilience. Of love. We had always had this. We were doing it now. Maybe the less visible Korean Americans—like Kirn, like Kathy Kyong Sook Kim, like me—had a hard time seeing it because we had been pushed out of our community and didn’t know how to invite ourselves back. And that’s why we didn’t have answers. We were looking for them in places removed from the source.
I would like to credit ourselves, though, for our persistence. Kirn mentioned he had “very few friends” and connections within the Korean community. And yet the reason we met at all, at an organizing program in Koreatown two years ago, was because he continued to dedicate time to the Korean community. I have clung to my (small and exclusively queer) network of Korean American friends. In our own ways, we were always searching for each other. It is often in these margins that Korean Americans have built an intersectional, collaborative, critical consciousness.
Revisiting the oral history in the process of interpretation, I reflected on what Michelle Caswell and Anna Robinson-Sweet describes as “symmetrical intersubjectivity,” or the effect of common positionalities between narrator and interviewer. Kirn and I were very different. Aside from differences in gender, age, citizenship and residency status, sexuality, geographic familiarity, and family dynamics, he had been incarcerated and I had not.
Kirn’s narration of his incarceration experience may have been more beneficial to me than him. He has told this story many times; it is doubtful my responses led to deeper revelation. Instead, what was probably more helpful for Kirn was contextualizing his story alongside someone else figuring out the Korean American experience on their own terms. Knowledge-sharing, as Caswell and Robinson-Sweet put it. Finding answers from laying out our stories side by side. Realizing this, I do wish I had offered more of my own hypotheses, insights, and vulnerabilities in our oral history session. But I am grateful to have given Kirn pieces of my life-puzzle, and to have received some of his.
The picture is not complete, but it is fuller. Listening to Kirn, I’m able to better locate where we come from. I did not grow up around Koreans with the same identity markers that outlined my life; we weren’t in a Korean enclave in general, so my family felt flung out of space. But my dad’s decision to uproot his family and settle in California was simply one of the decisions made by over a million households to become part of the diaspora. It was not atypical that he began his own business here. It was not even outlandish that he didn’t understand the consequences of not having green cards. “Lots of people just didn’t think that it was a big deal that they didn’t get their citizenship,” Kirn said, laughing ironically. “Because back then immigration didn’t care.”
There are aspects of our respective upbringings that are relatively abnormal, and why we turned out the way we did. But Kirn’s life and mine—while unique, they are not the result of totally individual choices. They are part of a bigger story of Korean American migration, and of mass incarceration, and of a racialized and oppressed existence, all of which are part of a bigger story of the United States. Our experiences can be found in the framework. Everything is becoming more visible, and I know where Kirn and I can keep looking. It is helpful to see the blueprint of the master’s house, so to say. Then we can devise our way out.