This video montage of the Legacy Project was created for KoreanAmericanStory.org's 2013 Annual Benefit.
If you are interested in preserving the oral history of your family by participating in the Legacy Project, please CLICK HERE.
LGBTQ Korean American Voices: Stories from the Dari Project
Beginning with Mark Ro Beyersdorf’s piece on "My Korean American Story" section of our web site, KoreanAmericanStory.org will be publishing monthly essays and artwork from a compilation of works that comprised the Dari Project. The Dari Project is a first of its kind collection of bi-lingual works that share the unique experiences of the LGBTQ who live across the United States and South Korea.
It is our hope that by sharing these stories of coming out to immigrant parents or grappling with homophobia and transphobia in the Korean American community, we hope to help Dari Project in its mission of increasing acceptance and awareness of LGBTQ Korean Americans within the broader Korean American community.
The mission of KoreanAmericanStory.org is to document the stories of ALL Korean Americans, regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
Read Mark Ro Beyersdorf's story
KoreanAmericanStory.org's Third Annual Benefit "Live Storytelling", took place on Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 at the Central Park Boathouse. Our special Storytellers Eugenia Kim and Milton Washington, wowed the audience with their captivating storytelling performances. The evening was filled with inspirational and emotional stories and the power of authentic narrative was evident.
We thank all the planning committee members: Yoon Lee Perera, John Limb, Julie Young, Mark Lee, John Kwon, Helen Lee, Jayne Hopps, Yuliana Kim-Grant and Theresa Choh-Lee. We extend our sincere thanks to all attendees, donors and those who participated in the auctions. A special thanks to our Live Auction donors: Jayne Hopps, Yuliana & Jay Grant, Stephanie Lee and our special surprise guest, Marja Vongerichten, who donated 2 packages of a night out with Marja, which was a huge hit with the auction crowd!
Thank you Nathan Hale Williams for lending your considerable personality and talent to be our auctioneer once again! To all the auction winners: Thank you for bidding generously! Finally to Jayne Hopps, John Limb, Agnes Ahn, Marja Vongerichten, John C. Kim, JW Lee and John Kwon who together donated over $10,000 to enable us to purchase new video recording and editing equipment: Thank you!
We also extend a warm thanks to JuJu Chang, who was gracious enough to make time in her busy schedule to join us and introduced our storytellers!
CLICK HERE to see the all the photos on our Facebook page
Tickets are now on Sale!
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AUCTION ITEMS
Legacy Project video of Dr. Haeng Soon Park, a professor of Bio-Chemistry who retired from a university in Korea, then went on to teach in Nepal. She shares the stories of her life and the lessons she learned with her son Terry Kim in New York.
If you are interested in preserving the oral history of your family by participating in the Legacy Project, please CLICK HERE.
In June 1986, my husband, our four-year-old son and I were strolling through the Sinchon market in Seoul. In my arms, I carried our seven-month-old daughter, whom we'd met for the first time four days before. An ajumoni grinned up at us from where she squatted beside her bins of fresh vegetables and called out in Korean, "She looks just like her mother!"
As the brand-new white American mother of a Korean baby, I couldn't have been more thrilled. The experience was the fulfillment of a dream born in the heart of a nine-year-old girl who spent after-school hours playing with the babies in the orphans' wing of the Korean hospital where my missionary doctor father worked. Twenty-five years later, I finally got to bring a Korean baby home.
Adopting Yunhee was one journey; raising her was another. My own passion for Korea, which became my second homeland and the source of my second culture and second language, made me determined to give Yunhee a sense of her birth legacy. But how does a white American, even one who grew up in Korea, raise a Korean American - on an island in Maine?
Legacy Project video of Yong-Hee Silver interviewed by her son, Adrian Silver in New York. Ms. Silver is a daughter of a Korean Diplomat and their family immigrated to the US in 1961. She shares the stories of her parents and the struggles they faced, lessons she learned from her parents, as well as her own personal struggle to bear children and what her children now mean to her.
If you are interested in preserving the oral history of your family by participating in the Legacy Project, please CLICK HERE.
We will be Celebrating the Art of Storytelling at our 2013 Annual Benefit. Here are some details to help you plan.
Open bar cocktail reception with pass hors d'oeuvres, pasta, cheese and carving stations. Live and silent auctions.
You will also be part of a live recording session of storytelling performances!
More details to follow shortly, so please check back.
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It was during the first few days of 2009, and I was moving to Washington, D.C. to start a job on Capitol Hill. The holidays had been tense. While I was home, my mother had begun aggressively asking if I was gay. I wasn’t sure what had aroused her suspicions, but I had indeed come out to myself the previous summer, just after graduating from Yale and just before moving to Ohio to join the Obama campaign. Dispatched to rural Darke County, I had thrown myself into training volunteers and knocking on doors, putting the emotional aftermath of coming out on hold. But, once Obama won the election, it didn’t take long for those pent-up emotions to explode. A close friend had romantically rejected me. Coming out at twenty-two felt embarrassingly late. I didn’t know how my family would react. By the time I went home for the holidays, I was still fragile and figuring myself out. I wasn’t emotionally ready to hold my mother’s hand through the process of coming to terms with having a gay son. Somehow I made it through Christmas and New Year’s without being pinned down by her relentless interrogations. But, when my parents drove me to the airport to send me off, she angrily refused to hug me, and snapped, “why won’t you be honest with me?” I didn’t know what I could say, so I just walked away and slipped into the security line. Out of habit, I turned around to wave. She wasn’t there. |
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True Love is Not Sexy The tenderness between a son and his dying father is not something one is always privileged to witness. It's not something I thought I'd see anytime soon. My father-in-law was only 60 when he died on January 21, 2013. We found out, or rather it was confirmed, that my father-in-law was very sick with stage four liver cancer which had spread to his lungs, a few days after Christmas. Just a few days after that, my husband's grandmother, his father's mother, fell and broke her hip. I watched, helplessly, as my husband went into overdrive, an only son, tending to his father and grandmother; calling doctors and having hope. My husband was fueled by adrenaline as he visited two different hospitals, in two different boroughs, almost everyday for a couple of weeks until his father was finally transferred to Mt. Sinai, the same hospital his grandmother was in. The hope was that my husband's grandmother, whom I call Miss Young, would get to see her dying son, one last time. Sadly, she never did. Miss Young is 81 and never thought she would have to attend the funeral of her only child. The day before my father-in-law's funeral, Miss Young came home from the hospital. Actually, she came to our home. In the chaos that was the month of late December into most of January, the fact that Miss Young would live with us, was the silver lining to the sadness of my husband losing his father. |
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The Will to Win
Profile of Will Demps
by Julie Young
"I have to say - and I say this with a record of unblemished heterosexuality - Will Demps is smokin' hot." This hilarious quote, written by a straight man, which was found on an Australian blog called Eurasian Sensation (http://eurasian-sensation.blogspot.com/), pretty much sums up every human beings reaction to a photo of Will Demps. Even my four year old daughter’s reaction to a photo of Will was, “Oooo la la, he’s handsome!” (Thank goodness she has good taste! But geez are we in trouble!) It’s a fact that Will Demps, former NFL player for the Ravens, Giants and Texans respectively, has been blessed with astoundingly good looks. One could easily assume that such an attractive, former professional athlete would be quite full of himself. The reality, however, is that Will Demps is a man who is humbled by the many blessings in his life. He is guided by his Christian faith and he recognizes the importance of giving back to the community. As I waited for Will in the lobby of his hotel, I didn’t know what to expect. We’d spoken on the phone to arrange the interview but I wondered, what would this man, whom legions of women (and men) adore, be like in person? He arrived to the lobby looking like a West coast celebrity. Decked out in Ray Bans, expensive jeans, tan blazer with a light pink scarf and a knit cap, there was no doubt this man was used to the limelight. Yet, he beamed with his freakishly perfect smile, apologized for being late and gave me a big hug, as if we were longtime friends. |
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KoreanAmericanStory.org, Inc. is an IRS approved 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization funded by supporters like you. If you've enjoyed reading a short story, or if you want to encourage more film makers to create entertaining and meaningful videos that document the legacy of Korean-Americans, please make a tax-deductible donation and help us to support these artists.
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