Like many others, my Asian American story begins in war. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, my father was a young man studying in Seoul, and my mother a 13-year-old girl. They both largely insist that they experienced no suffering. Yet a different truth emerges from my mother’s references to using helmets of dead soldiers that littered the ground as cooking vessels, or my father’s stories of being arrested numerous times for his leftist political activity.
It was only in my 30s, when I began interviewing my parents, that I was able to begin piecing together their stories, … Read more “Asian American Reflections on Martin Luther King Day”