Perspectives on Contemporary Korea 2026 | Transpacific Lives in an American Century: Ilhan New as Method

October 29–31, 2026 | University of Michigan | Weiser Hall 1010

All times listed below are U.S. Eastern Standard (Ann Arbor, Michigan) time. 

Thursday, October 29

5:00–6:30 p.m.
Musical Performance (Kerrytown Concert House) Followed by Pre-Conference Dinner (Miss Kim)

Lisa Sung Ensemble 

Friday, October 30

9:00–9:10 a.m.
Opening Remarks

Juhn Ahn (Director, Nam Center for Korean Studies, University of Michigan)

9:10–10:40 a.m. // Panel 1
Missionaries in a Far-away Land: The American Enterprise in Pyongyang

John Grisafi (University of Michigan)

Paul Cha (George Mason University)

Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang (University of Sheffield)

10:55–11:55 a.m. // Panel 2
Revolutionaries in a Far-away Land: Pursuing Korean Independence as the American Dream

Hiroaki Matsusaka (Ritsumeikan University)

Donna Anderson (University of Nebraska) 

1:00–2:30 p.m. // Panel 3
“Willow Weep for Me: The Transpacific Il Han New in Cultural Texts”

Jeehyun Choi (Rutgers University)

Youngju Ryu (University of Michigan) 

Daniel Kim (Brown University)

Saturday, October 31

9:10–10:40 a.m. // Panel 4
Transpacific Markets and Foodways: Il Han New as Method

Sujin Han (Harvard University)

David Mori (University of Michigan)

Hoi-Eun Kim (Texas A&M University)

10:55–1:55 a.m. // Panel 5
Diaspora and Nation in the American Century

Henry Em (Yonsei University)

Robert S. Kim (Independent Scholar)

1:00–2:00 p.m. // Panel 6
The Enterprise of Humanitarianism: A History of Transpacific Care 

Sonja Kim (State University of New York, Binghamton)

Haekyoung Lee (Kookmin University)

2:15–2:45 p.m. // Panel 7
Il Han New and the Education Mission

Won Hae Lee (Daemo Engineering Corp)

2:45–3:10 p.m. 
Closing Remarks

Il Ling New

Core Concepts: How American Protestant Religiosity Shaped Korean Nationalism
John Grisafi (University of Michigan)

This paper examines the historical phenomenon of how Protestant theology and related conceptions of religion taught by American missionaries became key components of evolving notions of Korean religiosity and nationalism in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Though not the first Christians in Korea, American Protestant missionaries were particularly successful in converting Koreans and building institutions, especially in northwestern Korea. The importance of exclusivist monotheism to religious identity in Protestantism in combination with American notions of religious freedom as core concepts carried over into Korean Protestantism. These principles informed Korean responses to Japanese religious and ideological colonialism, including resistance to compulsory Shinto shrine attendance. Expressions of Korean nationalism consequently became intertwined with expressions of religious identity and belief which were previously rejected in Korea. American Protestant ideas became Korean ideas, which have shaped narratives and expressions of Korean independence, national identity, and religiosity in modern South Korea.

John Grisafi is NCKS postdoctoral fellow and scholar of Korea and religion. He received his Ph.D. in religious studies from Yale University. John's research focuses on narratives and concepts of religion in modern and contemporary Korea. He is currently working on his first book project on the shaping of religion as an idea in Korea in response to imperial pressures and influences as well as a paper on teaching Korean religion with KPop Demon Hunters.

Sent to the East, Drawn to the North: Midwestern Missionaries and the “Opening” of Northwestern Korea
Paul Cha (George Mason University)

This presentation examines how the first generation of American Protestant missionaries to Korea, many with roots in the Midwest, established a presence in the peninsula’s northwestern provinces during the late nineteenth century. Initially closed to foreign residence and Christian activity, the region nevertheless attracted missionary attention as Korean interest in the religion generated growing demands for missionary presence. Despite governmental restrictions, political uncertainty, and personal danger, missionaries traveled northward and sought ways to establish themselves in P’yŏngyang and surrounding territories. Tracing their early successes and failures, this paper illuminates the social, political, and diplomatic negotiations that opened the northwestern provinces to missionary activity. Ultimately, this paper argues that this opening was not simply a matter of missionary persistence overcoming Korean resistance, but the product of a complex interplay between missionary ambition and Korean initiative—one that generated a transpacific circulation of ideas, resources, and people linking northwestern Korea with the American Midwest. This circulation constitutes a largely overlooked, distinctly Midwestern strand of Korean-American migration history.

Paul S. Cha is an assistant professor of Korean history and religious studies at George Mason University. He is the author of Balancing Communities: Nation, State, and Protestant Christianity in Korea, 1884–1942 (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2022), which explores how competing communal demands of nation, state, and church have shaped the development of Protestantism in Korea. His forthcoming book, Forging Protestant Allies: How the Cold War Recast South Korea as a Landscape of Christian Vitality (Oxford University Press), turns to the Korean War and the postwar period. It traces how Korean and international Protestant actors forged transnational alliances that helped construct South Korea’s image as a Protestant stronghold. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Korean Studies, Journal of Religious History, and Church History, among others.

Scripting Immanence and Transcendence in Christian Pyongyang: Annie Baird’s Hymns in Ch’ansyŏngsi (1895)
Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang (University of Sheffield)

Scholarship on early Korean Protestant Christianity has been prone to center male American missionaries who worked in Seoul. The focus on the likes of Horace Underwood and Homer Hulbert, while shedding light on the intersection of the mission and reformist nationalism, does not explain the constitution of Korean Protestant piety. The formation of this piety traces back to the graduates of McCormick Seminary in Chicago who worked in Pyongyang from the mid-to-late 1890s, including William Baird, Samuel Moffett, and William Blair. These Presbyterian adherents of premillennial mission theory self-consciously defined Christian Pyongyang against what they saw as the secularization of Christianity in Seoul, where Christianity was embraced by Korean elites as a mechanism for civilization and modern education. They promoted practices that resonated with a proto-fundamentalist evangelicalism that was envisioned in the U.S. Midwest, which underscored spirituality, individual salvation, and fervent devotion. 

Korean hymnody became a crucial instrument in this milieu. Hymns, which taught what Christian believers should say and how, constituted a kind of script as a repertory of performative utterances for the “ostensibly spontaneous oral worship” (Hobbs 1997) that was privileged in Christian Pyongyang. This presentation examines Ch’ansyŏngsi (1895), the Presbyterian hymnal that represented the strategy of the Pyongyang missionaries. In contrast to the Presbyterian hymnal used in Seoul (translated by Horace Underwood),  Ch’ansyŏngsi fashioned Christianity in a more reverent and vernacular register. I focus on the linguistic work of Annie Baird (1864-1916) in Ch’ansyŏngsi. Baird was born in Indiana and educated in Hanover College (Indiana) and  Washburn University (Kansas); in Korea, she was a respected translator although she remains buried in male-centric mission histories. I highlight unique qualities of her work: maximal honorifics in addressing God, invocation of helplessness, avoidance of biblical and North American references, and selection of simple tunes. In her hymnal work, the singers personify humble lives desiring sanctification in this life as well as eventual entry into the celestial city. Her work, while buried in male-centric mission histories, had momentous implications, insofar as her affective strategies became a foundational resource for twentieth-century Korean hymnody. 

Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang is senior lecturer in Korean studies at the University of Sheffield. She is a music historian with research interest in historiography, modernity, and music in East Asia. Her work has appeared in Journal of the American Musicological Society, The Journal of Korean Studies, and Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, among others. Her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Scripting Korean Presence: Hymnal Lives in the Age of Empires, examines how translated Christian hymns animated a new politics of voice, writing, and subjectivity in early-twentieth-century Korea. She co-edited Music and Sound in Transpacific East Asia: Transformations and Trajectories (Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming in autumn 2026).

Radical Learning: The Politics of Korean Students in the Interwar Midwest
Hiroaki Matsusaka (Ritsumeikan University)

This paper explores how Korean international students developed their politics and cultures within American and transpacific contexts during the 1920s and 1930s. As Japanese authorities intensified censorship and surveillance of anticolonial politics in colonial Korea, several cities in Hawai‘i and the continental United States became crucial sites for independence activism. Although ideas of Korean independence took diverse forms, some migrant laborers, exiled activists, and international students envisioned the liberation of the homeland in connection with global working-class movements and decolonial struggles.

This study traces how Korean students in Chicago and the wider Midwest not only engaged with modern social sciences but also drew inspiration from English literature, Black freedom struggles, and global socialist movements. Korean migrants in the Midwest cultivated transnational and cross-racial worldviews distinct from those of the larger ethnic communities in Hawai‘i and California. In Chicago—a center of labor radicalism, Black cultural movements, and Chinese and Filipino communities—college and university campuses provided Korean students with opportunities and inspiration to develop new political ideas and reshape their diasporic, national, and racial consciousness. This paper situates the relatively small yet intellectually dynamic community in the Midwest within the broader transpacific struggles against empire.

Hiroaki Matsusaka is an intellectual and cultural historian and an associate professor in the College of International Relations at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. His research and teaching interests in modern East Asian and U.S. history range from empire and colonialism to the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender, as well as transnational cultural circulation and social movements. He received a bachelor's degree and an M.A. in political science from Waseda University in Tokyo and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan. He was a visiting scholar at the Institute of Korean Studies at Yonsei University, a Terasaki Postdoctoral Fellow in Japanese Studies at UCLA, and an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

“When I Was a Boy” in Nebraska: Ilhan New and the Korean Independence Movement’s Connections to Nebraska
Donna Doan Anderson

When Ilhan New arrived in Kearney, Nebraska, in 1905, he worked as a houseboy for the Tufts family while attending school. Known to his classmates as I.H. Lu, New built a sense of community alongside other young Korean immigrants through football, track and field, and award-winning debate performances. Crucially, during his seven years in central Nebraska, the area also became home to the Young Korean Military School (한인소년병학교/YKMS). Hosted at Hastings College, this summer program was established to train young Korean men in the skills necessary to support Korea’s liberation from Japan.

Anderson’s research traces how students like Ilhan New navigated farm life, domestic work, and academics to advance the early 20th-century Korean independence movement—despite living in a state with a significantly smaller Korean population than coastal hubs. This presentation investigates why the Korean independence movement leaders specifically chose Nebraska to train their future leaders, and how the state’s schools, community, and culture shaped the YKMS curriculum. By arguing that the school’s rural location was a critical feature of its success, Anderson highlights the importance of uncovering Asian American histories in the places we least expect to find them. Donna Doan Anderson is an assistant professor of History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her research examines the intersections of land policy and immigration within rural Asian American communities in the U.S. Midwest during the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries. She is affiliated with UNL’s U.S. Law and Race Initiative, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, and the Institute of Ethnic Studies. She also serves as a program coordinator and consultant for UCSB’s ÉXITO program.

Beyond Statehood, Between Empires: Imagining Liberation in Korean Diasporic Fiction 
Jeehyun Choi, Rutgers University

This paper argues that Korean literary imagination in the U.S. during the Japanese colonial era understood liberation as a political project beyond securing Korean statehood. While Korean overseas nationalism has been read primarily through its institutional forms—church networks and political organizations appealing to U.S. state power for Korea's self-determination, I explore how 1930s diasporic literary production rewrites liberation as cross-racial and transnational community-building grounded in shared conditions of class and colonial oppression. This imagination emerges out of an acute awareness of Koreans as not only stateless aliens, displaced by Japanese colonialism and subjected to Asian exclusion in the U.S., but as disposable labor within a system of racial capitalism. I trace this capacious understanding of liberation beyond statehood through two Korean-language novels by Nak Chung Thun and Chu Yo-Sup that depict Korean diasporic subjects navigating Asian exclusion on the West Coast of North America. I then examine how these authors open new political horizons and offer models of solidarity in their representations of utopian multilingualism and queer kinship. These visions offer a grammar for political struggles well beyond the moment of their writing. 

Jeehyun Choi is assistant professor of English at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, specializing in Asian American and diasporic literature. Her current book project traces shifting visions of liberation in Korean and Korean diasporic writing across the colonial-postcolonial divide, asking what anti-colonial imagination looked like when it was not organized around the struggle for Korean statehood. She is also translating Chu Yosŏp’s novel Kurŭmŭl chapŭryŏgo (1935), on Korean indentured labor in Mexico and the United States.

Lone Star Over Korea: Black-Haired Americans, or When Dealers Become Players 
Youngju Ryu (University of Michigan)

In the early 2000s, with neoliberal globalization in full swing, a Texas-based private equity fund called Lone Star became a household name in South Korea. It had made a successful bid to take over the recently privatized Korea Exchange Bank, one of the very few specialized banks in South Korea that bought and sold foreign currency coinage. Lone Star, unmoored from the rest of the stars and stripes, became a symbol of predatory, aggressive, and acquisitive America out to fleece the world, not assist it, and it incensed a country still reeling from the recent trauma of the “IMF” (as the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998 is called in South Korea). When it was revealed that South Korean regulations were violated in the process of this acquisition, the long legal battle that ensued brought to surface a cast of characters that have been dubbed “black-haired Americans” in South Korean public media. A term referring broadly to heritage Koreans who have U.S. citizenship, it encompasses Korean Americans “proper”: the children of immigrants who have come back to the country of their parents in positions of financial power over the country, decked with Ivy League degrees and Wall Street credentials. Steven Lee (Harvard M.B.A), of Lone Star fame, and Christopher Kyung-joon Kim (Wharton M.B.A), imprisoned for his role in the BBK case involving President Lee Myung-bak, exemplified this figure. More frequently, however, the term has referred to the scion of the Korean power elite--the new Korean aristocracy whose American or dual citizenship is the sign of power, and of impunity. America still functions as the external guarantor of internal authority in South Korea, but this authority no longer pretends to coincide with moral leadership. Black-haired Americans work to benefit their network, not their country, and seek to reproduce the power bloc to which they belong. Once they were dealers in the game of power; they are now the players.

Against the backdrop of Lone Star and BBK scandals, this paper explores both the desire invested in and the bitter critique lodged against the figure of the black-haired American in South Korean television and film. I trace the devolution of this figure from Henry Chang in “Three PM on a Rainy Afternoon” (1959, dir. Pak Chongho) to Billy Park in “Samjin Company English Class” (2020, dir. Lee Jong-pil). Interestingly, in television dramas ranging from “The Heirs” (2013) to “Money Game” (2020), this figure appears more often as a love interest or romantic hero than as a villain proper, so often in fact that it has congealed into a character type. Mapping both the evolution in television and devolution in film of this highly gendered character in relation to an analysis of Korean society in the new millennium, the paper contemplates the question of economic justice as a new measure of U.S.-Korea relations in the neoliberal era.

The Face of Race in Black and Yellow: The Affective Lives of Race in the Photography of Jarod Lew
Daniel Y. Kim, Brown University

This paper focuses on the photography of Jarod Lew, who is from the Detroit suburbs and who has recently achieved a fair amount of recognition in the art world: for example, in February 2025, the University of Michigan Museum of Art hosted his solo exhibition Strange You Never Knew. He is known primarily for his series, “Please Take Off Your Shoes,” which pictures members of the Chinese American community their suburban homes, surrounded by furniture and décor that saturated with the form of Asian American affect that have been theorized by Vivian L. Huang, Summer Kim Lee, Sianne Ngai, and Xine Yao. This paper traces how these images—which traffic in inscrutability, cuteness, and unfeeling —are shadowed by a prior series Lew created,titled “Maybe I’ll See You There,” which has not drawn nearly as much attention. Those photographs feature mainly working-class Black subjects in the areas of downtown Detroit, a community that is being displaced through gentrification, and their faces exhibit the affect that Tina Post has termed deadpan. This paper examines how attending to the shadow of Blackness discernible in Lew’s rendering of Chinese Americanness occasions an uncomfortable reckoning with the histories of race that have shaped the Metro Detroit area.

Daniel Y. Kim is professor of American studies and English at Brown University. He is the author of The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War (NYU Press, 2020) and Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford University Press, 2006). He is also the co-editor (with Crystal Parikh) of The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

American Gardens, Asian Markets: Charting the Local and Transpacific Geographies of Ginseng in the Twentieth Century
Sujin Elisa Han (Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University)

In June 1941, Il Han New submitted a thesis titled “The Importance of Ginseng in Commerce” for his Master of Business Administration degree at the University of Southern California. I demonstrate how reading New’s study closely and critically opens up new avenues for charting the “geography” of ginseng in the twentieth century. Specifically, New’s work offers detailed, bottom-up insights into ginseng cultivation in the United States and the export of American- grown ginseng across the Asia Pacific. They enable us to map both the local economy of cultivated ginseng across the northeastern, midwestern, and southern states in the United States and the transpacific trade in American ginseng exports centered around New York and Hong Kong, spanning North America, East Asia, and the Asia Pacific. In line with the conference’s call to approach New as method, I treat his Master’s thesis as (A) a rich historical source revealing connections between American “ginseng gardens” and export markets in Asia in the twentieth century; (B) a valuable bibliography for future research into the global history of ginseng; and (C) a lens into New’s multifaceted perspective on ginseng as a medicine, plant, and crop that reflects his unique positionality as an individual who grew up across Northeast Asia and the United States, a businessman experienced in international trade, and the founder of a major Korea-based pharmaceutical company operating across East Asia and America. Excavating New’s study of ginseng commerce, in turn, illuminates the ongoing influence of his life on present-day historical research on ginseng.

Sujin Elisa Han is a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She received a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. Her dissertation traces the history of the pharmaceutical market in South Korea to examine changing conceptions and aesthetics of health. Sujin has a B.A. in History from Barnard College and a M.A. from Harvard’s Regional Studies—East Asia. Along with her passion for history, Sujin is invested in interdisciplinary dialogue and digital scholarship.

Branding Asian America: Food, Festivals, and Racial Fluidity in Detroit
David Mori, University of Michigan

This presentation examines Detroit not only as a space where different Asian migration pathways converged, but also as one where divergent Asian histories were collected, compressed, and translated into an interchangeable and politically mobile American identity. It does so by tracing the parallel lives of two Korean immigrants who made their way to Detroit in the first half of the twentieth century: Ilhan New and Harry Whang. The imperial currents that carried them to the United States also shaped the context in which both men came and the conditions into which they entered. Both came from Christian families, received Western education at Midwestern universities (University of Michigan and University of Chicago), and became separated from the place where they were born by the expansion of Japanese imperialism. What distinguishes these two men from other Korean immigrants, however, was their ability to tap into the fluidity of an aestheticized Orientalism to attain economic and social mobility while advancing the Korean nationalist cause. Drawing on his fluency in American business and Asian foodways—and on Orientalism’s racial imprecision—New transformed his ambiguous position within the unsolidified landscape of American racial categories into the foundation of an “authentic Chinese” brand. Whang, meanwhile, worked in Detroit as a department store manager, gaining recognition from local liberal institutions such as the International Institute of Metropolitan Detroit as an authority on both Koreans and Korea.

Through this work, he became not only a representative of Detroit’s small Korean community but also a representative of Asians—or “Far Eastern” Americans—more broadly, gaining civic access before representatives of the city’s older and larger Chinese American community. By using their Western education to attain social, economic, and political mobility, New and Whang built platforms from which they could advocate for Korean nationalism locally and nationally. Yet, the forms of representation through which they gained those platforms also detached the emerging Asian identity they helped construct from the divergent imperial histories of the peoples it was meant to represent. New eventually returned to Korea with the capital he gained in America and used it to help build the nation whose independence he had championed. Whang stayed in Detroit and, in 1971—the year New passed away— served as the Korean representative for the city’s Far Eastern Festival, an event that celebrated Asian Americans' differences by rendering them commodifiable, consumable, and commensurable through food, dress, and spectacle. The relationships forged through the Far Eastern Festival would lay part of the institutional groundwork for the Asian American coalition that would respond to Vincent Chin’s murder a decade later. Yet the same racial interchangeability that made this coalition possible also structured the violence that the coalition responded to: Vincent Chin came from a Chinese American community with a long and unique history in Detroit, but for Ronald Ebens, the Chinese American man he killed was someone he could project his anger towards Japan onto. Ebens may not have known or cared about Chin’s history or the history of Asians in Detroit but, in that moment, Chin was Asian, or “Oriental,” or “Far Eastern” enough to serve as an outlet for his rage.

David Mori is a Ph.D. candidate in the history program at the University of Michigan. His research examines the intersections of Asian American history, activism, and the rise of policing and mass incarceration in the United States, including work that focuses specifically on Michigan. He has conducted research for the Carceral State Project and is currently a researcher for the Bentley Historical Library’s Shared Stewardship project, where he works to connect historical archives with local communities.

Infrastructures of Healing: Medical Marketplace in Colonial Korea
Hoi-eun Kim, Texas A&M University

This presentation sketches out the larger structural conditions under which Il Han New ventured into his business of pharmaceutical manufacturing and marketing, by asking: How did patient-consumers understand and approach medicinal products in colonial Korea? What regulatory and logistical conditions at once facilitated and limited the commercial activities of pharmaceutical manufacturers? I emphasize three factors: the persistent practice of self-medication among consumers; the burgeoning emergence of a professional class of pharmacists and their enmeshed interests with the patent medicine industry; and the efficacy—or lack thereof—of the colonial government's regulatory power.

Hoi-eun Kim is associate professor of history at Texas A&M University. An author of Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan (University of Toronto Press, 2014), Kim is currently writing a book on Japanese doctors in colonial Korea (1910-1945) who worked as transnational agents of empire-building as well as private practitioners of commercialized medicine.

Jeonhyang (轉向) in the American Century: Harold Hakwon Sunoo, White Terror, and Efforts for Historical Meaning
Henry Em (Yonsei University) 

This essay examines the ideological conversion(s) of Harold Hakwon Sunoo (鮮于學源), from a conservative Christian youth in colonial Korea, to a communist activist in the post-1945 United States, to an anti-communist ecumenical Christian straddling the 1960s United States and South Korea, and ultimately to an important figure in the Korean unification movement in the United States in the 1980s. The rhetorical strategies (theological, philosophical, and political) that Sunoo employed in the 1950s and 1960s reveal how a Korean-American intellectual survived McCarthyism by recanting his Marxism-Leninism and how, along with the ecumenical movement in South Korea, he shifted, over time, to liberal-progressive politics.

In 1938, at the age of 20, Harold Hakwon Sunoo entered the United States as a student. The Government-General of Chōsen had issued him a passport because he was a conservative Christian. His radicalization began with the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), when imperial Japan began a full-scale invasion of China. During World War II, Sunoo was a leader in the U.S. branch of the Korean National Revolutionary Party (조선민족혁명당, KNRP). After serving in the U.S. Army Air Force, Sunoo obtained U.S. citizenship in December 1945, and soon thereafter joined the Communist Party USA. In November 1948, Sunoo, along with Rev. Samin Lee (李思民), sent a signed letter, addressed to Kim Il-Sung and Bak Heon-yeong, leaders of the Korean Workers’ Party, via a friend who was able to travel to South Korea. During the Korean War (June 1950–July 1953), when U.S.-led forces crossed north of the 38th parallel and occupied Pyongyang, that letter was found among the documents taken from the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In early 1950, prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, Sunoo was in Czechoslovakia waiting for an entry permit from the DPRK. He would later testify that his time there, in the wake of the February 1948 Communist coup d’état, had shown him what communist rule actually entailed and had disillusioned him. Earlier, the DPRK authorities had granted entry permits to Sunoo’s American comrades Samin Lee and Alice Hyun, and they had gone to North Korea via Moscow. For reasons unknown, however, North Korea denied Sunoo’s visa application, and he returned to the United States. At the 1954 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings held in Seattle, amid the broader White Terror of the McCarthy-era (and Rhee-era) anti-communism, Sunoo cooperated fully. He did not tell the Committee that his visa application had been turned down by the DPRK. Instead, he testified that the people of Czechoslovakia lived in fear and that what the communists “preach in theory and what they practice in real life are two different things.”

When Frank S. Tavenner Jr., chief counsel and lead interrogator of the HUAC, asked Sunoo, “Since your return to this country, you have done the best you can to make known to the people of your original nationality the facts relating to communism, as you observed them” Sunoo replied, “I made the public statement over and over again. I wrote in the papers, both in English and in Korean, my opposition to the Communist view which I held. It is a known fact that, among Korean people, I am against communism now.” By fully cooperating with the FBI and HUAC, naming names, but avowing ignorance about the CPUSA membership of his former Korean-American comrades still in the United States, Sunoo managed to avoid imprisonment for violation of the Smith Act (1940), under which his former CPUSA membership could have been prosecuted.

Aside from such dramatic transitions (both physical and political), this essay will examine Sunoo’s anti-communist books and essays published in South Korea in the 1960s – because they reveal interesting rhetorical strategies (theological, philosophical, and political) that enabled some anti-communist Christians in South Korea to provide normative force for the resistance against the Park Chung Hee dictatorship, and the movement for democracy in South Korea and peaceful reunification of the two Koreas. In time, Sunoo would become known for his efforts for peaceful Korean unification: He was a key Korean American delegate during the landmark 1981 Geneva Conference between overseas Korean Christians and North Korean authorities. In 2016, per his wishes, Sunoo was buried in Sinmiri Patriotic Martyrs’ Cemetery in the Hyongjesan District of Pyongyang, North Korea.

Now retired from university teaching, from 1993-2025 Henry Em taught Korean history in the United States (UCLA, University of Michigan, and NYU) and in South Korea (Korea University and Yonsei University). He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Korea, and Visiting Professor at Centre de Recherches sur la Corée, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He was a member of the editorial collective of positions: asia critique, and at Korea Journal he remains Deputy Editor-in-Chief. His recent publications include “North Korea as Neighbor: Critical Scholarship on North Korea,” Korea Journal, 61:3 (autumn, 2021); “Killer Fables: Yun Ch’i-ho, Bourgeois Enlightenment, and the Free Laborer,” Journal of Korean Studies, 25:1 (March, 2020); and The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea (Duke University Press, 2013). e-mail: henryem@gmail.com

independent.academia.edu/HenryEm

Major Peter Kim and Lieutenant Colonel James Kim: Sons of Dr. Kim Chang Sei (M.D., Yonsei University, 1916)
Robert Kim, Independent Scholar

During and after the Second World War, four sons of Dr. Kim Chang Sei, one of Korea’s first medical doctors, rose to become leaders in the intelligence and military special operations communities of the United States. Two were Major Peter Kim and Lieutenant Colonel James Kim, who each fought in the Pacific Theater against the Empire of Japan.

Dr. Kim Chang Sei was a second generation Christian from Pyongyang who graduated from the medical school of Chosun Christian College (now Yonsei University) as valedictorian of the class of 1916. He and his wife Lee Chung Sil, a sister of law of Ahn Chang Ho, strived to become Americans and raised their family in the U.S. before being forced to leave by the restrictions of the Immigration Act of 1924. Dr. Kim eventually returned to the U.S. to resume the struggle to bring his family to America. In 1932, after the arrest of Ahn Chang Ho by Japan, he lobbied Congress for a resolution against his imprisonment. Dr. Kim died in New York in 1934, leaving his wife and six children in Shanghai.

Raised as Americans in the American community of Shanghai, the children of Kim Chang Sei rose during the Second World War to become staunch defenders of their fellow Americans and the United States, winning the family their place in America that had been denied them for two decades.

Peter, the eldest, struggled to protect Americans in Japanese-occupied Shanghai before escaping the city to join the U.S. Army in China and returning as a leader of the U.S. intelligence mission to rescue American and Allied civilians from Japanese internment camps. In recognition of his outstanding actions, the commanders of the U.S. forces in China arranged to commission him as a U.S. Army officer and lobbied Congress to pass a law granting him U.S. citizenship in 1946. He served as an Army intelligence officer until 1964, retiring as a major. In 2026, he was honored with induction into the Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame.

James, born a U.S. citizen and sent back to America after the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, enlisted in the U.S. Army before Pearl Harbor and became an infantry officer. Fighting in the Pacific Theater, he was made an intelligence officer after outstanding actions in combat in the Philippines. He ended the war with the U.S. forces that liberated and administered Korea. After the war, while an undergraduate at Georgetown University, he successfully lobbied Congress for two further laws granting U.S. permanent residency to the entire family. Called back into the Army for the Korean War in 1950, he was assigned to the CIA. He served in Korea for the duration of the war, starting a 25-year long career in the CIA in which he became the first Asian-American promoted to the agency’s senior leadership ranks during the 1960s.

Transpacific Care, Layered Inequities: Evolution of Nursing in Early 20th Century Korea
Sonja Kim, Binghamton University

This presentation examines the evolution of the nursing profession in Korea at the turn of the twentieth century. Situating nursing within the overlapping contexts of Japanese imperialism, Protestant mission enterprise, and international organizations, this study illuminates how social and professional practices, foreign interests, and government regulations embedded multiple layers of inequities in the profession for both foreign missionaries and Korean nurses. Although the profession developed with the presence and occupations of foreigners, it evolved through the labor and agency of Koreans. Tracing early efforts by two University of Michigan alumnae, Margaret Edmunds and Mary Cutler, and later activities of the Nurses’ Association of Korea, this presentation highlights the emergence of new forms of female leadership and explores the enduring legacy of their transpacific collaboration.

Sonja M. Kim is associate professor of Asian and Asian American studies at Binghamton University. A historian of health and welfare in Korea, she is the author of Imperatives of Care: Women and Medicine in Colonial Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019) and co-editor of Future Yet to Come: Sociotechnical Imaginaries in Modern Korea (University of Hawai’i Press, 2021).

Michigan as a Transpacific Contact Zone: Ilhan New and the Networks of Education, Medicine, and Migration
Hae Kyoung Lee, Professor Emerita, Department of Theatre, College of Arts, Kookmin University

This paper examines the University of Michigan as a transpacific contact zone through which Americans and Koreans moved, formed relationships, and participated in overlapping networks of education, religion, medicine, and professional life during the early twentieth century. Rather than treating Ilhan New’s years at Michigan as an isolated episode in the biography of a prominent Korean entrepreneur, the paper situates his experience within a longer history of Michigan–Korea connections.

Before and during New’s years in Ann Arbor, a number of Michigan-trained missionaries, educators, and medical professionals had already worked in Korea. Figures such as Mary M. Cutler, Margaret J. Edmunds, and Will Carl Rufus illustrate different forms of circulation between Michigan and Korea. Rufus, who taught mathematics and astronomy in Korea before joining the University of Michigan faculty in 1917, later participated in the university’s Barbour Scholarship program for Asian women. At the same time, The Korean Student Bulletin documents a growing community of Korean students at Michigan and their continuing relationships after graduation, including references to Ilhan New’s business career and family life.

The paper asks how these intersecting networks shaped the social and intellectual environment in which New’s transpacific life developed. It pays particular attention to two overlapping formations: a network of Korean students, educators, and mentors centered on the university, and a less visible network of women involved in medicine, nursing, missionary work, and transpacific education. The latter raises a further question concerning Mary Woo, New’s wife and a medical professional: whether her career can be located within, or alongside, the earlier Michigan–Korea networks represented by Cutler and Edmunds.

By reconstructing these connections through university archives, missionary records, student publications, and biographical materials, this study proposes Michigan not simply as a destination for Korean students but as a node within a multidirectional transpacific network. Viewed from this perspective, Ilhan New becomes a method for tracing how education, migration, gender, medicine, and emerging professional identities intersected across Korea and the United States.

Haekyoung Lee is professor emerita of theatre arts at Kookmin University and currently a visiting scholar at the Nam Center for Korean Studies, University of Michigan. A theatre scholar, critic, playwright, and producer, her work focuses on performance, history, and cultural memory, particularly the representation of Korean modern history and historical figures on stage.