A life remembered
Adoption, work, marriage, and an eventual family reconnection shaped Helen Lee Hong's Korean American childhood and adult life. Born in Mountain View in 1911 to the Hur family and adopted informally by the Lees, she grew up through Riverside, the Inland Empire, and Los Angeles without knowing until high school that she had biological siblings. Her story captures both the tenderness of adoptive parents and the shock of discovering a hidden origin.
Helen remembered Korean identity through childhood questions, kimchi embarrassment, Downtown and Bunker Hill Korean community life, department-store work at I. Magnin, wartime anti-Asian suspicion, marriage to Tom Hong, the Larchmont market, children, and later reunion with her sisters and brother. One family cared for her, another reclaimed her, and the habits of family duty she learned in childhood sustained her in old age.
Based on interviews held by the USC Digital Library.
1911-1920s
An Informal Adoption
Helen Lee Hong was born in Mountain View, California, in 1911, into the Hur family. Because her biological family could not manage all the children, her grandmother let it be known that Helen could be adopted. Mr. and Mrs. Lee took her home without a modern legal process, and Helen later had to obtain a delayed birth certificate that recorded the complicated path from Hur to Lee to her adult name.
She grew up believing the Lees were simply her parents. They moved through Riverside, Upland, San Bernardino, Redlands, and Los Angeles as work changed. Helen remembered that they were not wealthy, but she was well cared for, well dressed, and groomed carefully, perhaps in part because she was their only child.
Riverside and the Inland Empire gave her early memories of Korean labor camps, orange work, and families living in wooden shacks while men picked fruit or did manual farm labor. She also remembered Mrs. Stewart, a white woman who taught English, gave medicine, helped Koreans, and remained attached to the community despite disappointments.
The informality of Helen's adoption reveals both trust and vulnerability inside the early Korean community. Families solved crises through word of mouth because formal systems were distant, expensive, or culturally unfamiliar. That arrangement gave Helen loving parents, but it also left gaps in paperwork and identity that followed her into adulthood. Her later delayed birth certificate became a document of belonging after years of lived belonging. The paperwork came late, but the care had come first; both facts belong to Helen's story.
1920s
Korean, but Often Unexplained
Helen knew she was Korean because other people asked whether she was Chinese or Japanese, and she answered Korean even when they did not know what that meant. As a child she felt embarrassed by kimchi smells, a memory she contrasted with later decades when Korean food became widely admired. Her identity was present, but the surrounding society often had no language for it.
Los Angeles placed her near early Korean community centers around Downtown, Bunker Hill, and later Jefferson-area institutions. She remembered addresses, offices, boarding spaces, Hungsadan connections, March First gatherings, and large receptions for Korean athletes during the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. These memories show a community with few casual youth spaces but many formal patriotic and social occasions.
Even with community nearby, Helen described limited social life. Young Korean women attended banquets, dances, and occasional clubs, but everyday friendship was sparse and often constrained by work and family. Her later dinner-and-card gatherings after marriage felt like a modest but real social world.
Her embarrassment over kimchi is one of the account's most revealing memories. It captures a child's wish not to be singled out and an adult's awareness that cultural meanings change. What once marked a household as strange later became restaurant food admired by outsiders. Helen's life spanned that transformation, allowing her to see Korean American identity move from explanation and embarrassment toward public recognition. That change did not erase the childhood embarrassment, but it allowed her to interpret it with gentleness and historical distance.
1928-1940
Polytechnic High and I. Magnin
Helen graduated from John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles in 1928. Around that time her father found steadier work suited to his limited English, including a role at Grauman's Chinese Theatre and later apartment-building work with her mother. Helen, meanwhile, needed to earn money and support her parents.
She found work at I. Magnin, where she began in stock work wearing a Chinese costume intended to make Asian employees appear decorative to customers. Later she learned the switchboard and remained there until about 1940. The work was hard and limited, but at the time it represented a significant opening for Korean American women beyond fruit stands and family businesses.
Helen helped bring other Korean girls into the department store, including women who worked in stock, clerical, wrapping, and backstage roles. They were considered conscientious employees, but they were generally not placed in customer-facing sales work. Her understated memory of simply getting a job reveals a larger shift in Korean American women's employment.
The Chinese costume at I. Magnin also linked Helen's work to the racial theater of the period. Management wanted Asian women visible as atmosphere, but not necessarily as full salespeople with authority. Helen accepted the job because she needed wages, and she performed it well. Her presence then helped open a path for other Korean women, even within limits she did not choose. The contradiction is important: an exploitative display could still become, through workers' competence, a narrow but real employment opening.
Late 1920s-1940s
The Letter from Frances
Just before graduation, Helen was called to the vice principal's office at Polytechnic High School and shown a letter from a sister named Frances. The letter said that Helen was adopted and had a biological family. Helen remembered the shock as devastating, because she had not known any of it.
Her adoptive parents handled the revelation calmly, perhaps relieved that the truth had emerged without them having to say it first. Over time, Helen rebuilt a relationship with her biological siblings: Frances, Sandra or Sunda, Paul, and others. The reconnection became one of the most moving parts of her life story.
After World War II, sisters and their husbands moved to Southern California, and the sibling bond became natural rather than forced. Helen spoke warmly of Jason and Frances Han and of the way sisters re-entered one another's lives. For Helen, adoption did not cleanly replace one family with another; it created layers of belonging.
The reunion also shows the generosity of her adoptive parents. They did not block contact or make Helen choose between families. That mattered because the discovery could have created permanent fracture. Instead, Helen gained sisters and brothers while continuing to honor the Lees who raised her. Her life became a rare example of adoption truth becoming enlargement rather than erasure. That enlargement became one of the grace notes of her life story, making kinship more complex and more generous than secrecy had allowed.
1938-1970s
Tom Hong, Larchmont, and Children
Helen married Tom Hong in 1938 after a courtship connected through friends, hotel work, and Korean community acquaintances. Before marriage she had dated in modest ways, often visiting friends' homes rather than public entertainment venues. Money was limited because wages went toward rent, food, bills, and support for her parents.
Tom made his living through the Larchmont market, especially the fruit stand and delivery business, and Helen helped at times. The market served a good neighborhood and became a stable livelihood for many years. Their son Tommy was born in 1940, and their daughter Barbara followed in 1943.
Helen saw her children's social lives as broader than her own had been. Tommy had sports and a group of Korean American friends, and Barbara had church and school friendships. The Korean Presbyterian Church and youth clubs gave the next generation a social structure that Helen felt she had largely lacked.
The Larchmont market gave Helen and Tom a stable public identity. Customers knew Tom, delivery routes created relationships, and Helen could step in when family needs allowed. It was not glamorous work, but it offered continuity after the uncertainties of her childhood and early employment. Through the market, the household became part of a neighborhood economy as well as Korean family life. At the market, her children learned steady work, customer trust, and family cooperation outside the more formal institutions of church or school. It made stability visible to the next generation.
Later Years
Badges, Food, and Gratitude
World War II sharpened the racial pressures Helen had known more quietly before. She remembered wearing identification that said she was Korean so she would not be treated as Japanese under curfew and suspicion. Department-store policies and public attitudes toward Asian faces changed as anti-Japanese feeling intensified.
In later life, Helen reflected on losses, including her mother in 1955, her son Tommy, and her brother Paul, who died of tuberculosis after hoping to enter military service. Yet she emphasized gratitude for Barbara, Barbara's husband Jim, grandchildren, and family members who cared for her. She described herself as lucky and not homeless, a simple phrase carrying a lifetime of dependency and care.
Helen Lee Hong spoke quietly about the family obligations that shaped her life. She was adopted, supported adoptive parents, reunited with biological siblings, worked steadily, raised children, and was cared for in turn. Her story holds identity, duty, and affection together even where the paper trail is thin and the truth arrived late.
Her gratitude in old age coexisted with pain. Helen had absorbed secrecy, racial confusion, wage limits, wartime suspicion, bereavement, and the loss of a son. Yet she measured her later life through care received and care given. That perspective gives the story its quiet strength: she survived by belonging to people, and she understood belonging as work. Her final reflections read as earned composure, not passivity, the voice of someone who knew how much care costs. That knowledge gives her gratitude its depth.