In Hwan Rheem was born on November 10th, 1928 near Pyongyang, raised in a pastoral family where faith and education were deeply intertwined. Despite a frail childhood that delayed his start in school, he would go on to study at the prestigious Pyongyang High School before attending college and later seminary, honoring his family’s insistence that he complete his college education before entering the ministry. His early years were shaped by the constraints of Japanese occupation—where the Korean language was relegated to a single weekly lesson—and the profound joy of liberation.

Michelle Kim Rogers was born in Seoul in 1961, her early years divided between the discipline of her uncle’s home and the rustic warmth of her grandmother’s farm in Inchon. While her parents worked to establish a foothold in the United States, Michelle spent her childhood in Korea drinking fresh goat milk and wearing hand-knit wool leggings, envisions the United States as a place where “dollar bills were plastered on walls.”

​​Won Yun was born in 1940 in Sariwon, Hwanghae Province, later moving to Pyongyang where his ministerial father was called to serve. He spent a childhood filled with simple joys, like skating on the frozen Daedong River and eating his grandmother’s mung bean pancakes and naengmyeon, foods representative of his locale.

Chung Kun Lim was born in 1944 in Jeonju, her childhood shaped by the displacement of the Korean War and the constant threat of bombings. As the seventh of eight daughters, she was raised under strict discipline in a society that traditionally prioritized male heirs—a reality she felt deeply when her mother’s hard-won educational legacy was eventually inherited by male relatives rather than the daughters who helped build it. A talented soprano, Chung Kun majored in vocal music at Sookmyung Women’s University—she jokes about how all her crying must have trained her vocal chords—before immigrating to the United States in 1966.

Jean Yoon Kwon was born in Seoul, Korea, during the Japanese occupation. Although she was born in Seoul, Jean Yoon spent her early childhood in Pyongyang, where her father worked as a regional manager for a bank; she recalls playing with her siblings by the banks of the Taedong river, as well as accompanying her father on night strolls to Morangbong hill.

David Soon Ho Kwon was born in 1936 in Kyoto, Japan, to a mother who worked as an assistant for a Japanese aristocrat. From his early childhood years, he recalls the day-to-day discrimination faced by Koreans living in Japan, from being denied healthcare at the hospital, to being the first medics which the Japanese Empire shipped off to serve in the treacherous Pacific front.