Her father never tired of telling the stories about how American GIs in Korea shared their rations with him when he was a shoeshine boy, recalls Dr. Grace J. Yoo, a professor of Asian-American studies at San Francisco State University. He would recount how they gave him chocolate bars and cans of corned beef that yielded enough soup to feed his family for a week
Those memories fueled his desire to come to the homeland of those kind soldiers and pursue a dream that most immigrants share, a vision of a better life for him and, most importantly, for his children, Yoo said. Arriving in 1963, he got a job as a dishwasher and brought his wife to America two years later. He studied to become a chiropractor and raised three daughters, instilling in them the desire to study and succeed. Yoo fulfilled the dream by earning a Ph.D. in medical sociology from the University of California, San Francisco.
Her father’s story is only one of those that could be told by the 1.7 million Korean-Americans who, according to U.S. census data, live in the United States. Nearly 80 percent of them arrived since 1965, when immigration laws were liberalized, in the third wave of Koreans to arrive on U.S. shores over a century, Yoo said.
For the professor, who has taught a course on Koreans in America at SFSU for 15 years, it is clear that too little of their collective story has been told.
“Although this community has been here for over 100 years, it really wasn’t until the ’80s that you see memoirs, novels, children’s literature or autobiographies really about the Korean-American experience,” she said. “It is a community that hasn’t had a lot of literature done on it.”
That began to change when the children of those who migrated in the post-1965 era came of age, she said, but Yoo had not found a suitable textbook to use in her classes. To address that, she has compiled and edited one, Koreans in America: History, Identity, and Community (Cognella, 2012). She had previously relied on “a hodgepodge of different readings” for her students, but decided the time had come to have a comprehensive text. She estimates that about 10 other universities offer similar courses that could use the book.
“The Korean-American community has really increased dramatically over the past 50 years, and I felt that it was time to have a textbook, and there were enough scholars out there to put one together,” she said.
