USC Digital Library Oral Histories

Lives preserved in oral history

Meet 58 people whose interviews are held by USC, with stories of migration, family, work, faith, war, and community memory.

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Cora Oh

58life stories

1collections

1975-1999interview years

273recording parts

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Each page introduces one life through a short overview and six dated sections, with links to the original USC interviews.

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Anne Kim Kido

Anne Kim Kido oral history, 1997

Anne Kim Kido grew up in Los Angeles with the history of her parents, Helen Kim and Kim Longsom, who had come from Korea during Japanese rule. Her account draws on family recollection, her sister Gloria's writing, photographs, church life, and her own memories of school, sport, work, and motherhood. It is a life story shaped by a mother who wrote, sewed, organized, and kept six children together after widowhood. The interview also treats memory itself as a family practice, moving from published accounts to classroom recollections and carefully identified photographs.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1997 · 6 recording parts · English

Arthur Park / Marie Park Fujii / Gilbert Park / Harry Park

Arthur Park / Marie Park Fujii / Gilbert Park / Harry Park oral history, 1997

On the Park family farm in Idaho, every child worked, and each sibling remembered a different part of the household that held them together. Arthur Park, Marie Park Fujii, Gilbert Park, and Harry Park recall a father who had worked on railroads, in Mountain Home as a bartender and bouncer, and later as a farmer who hauled produce to market, repaired shoes, cut hair, wired the house, and expected every child to work.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1997 · 12 recording parts · English

Bethuel Chung

Bethuel Chung oral history, 1996

Bethuel Chung grew up in Dinuba, California, carrying family memories of difficult migration into the agricultural world of the Central Valley. His father, remembered as an orphan who worked in mines before coming through Hawaii and California, became a labor leader and crew boss for Korean workers. His mother, educated in Korea and Shanghai, came as a picture bride after a period of correspondence and support from Bethuel's father. Much of the account is filtered through family memory, and Bethuel repeatedly marks what he knows, what he assumes, and what he heard from others.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1996 · 4 recording parts · English

Byung Uk Rhee

Byung Uk Rhee oral history

Byung Uk Rhee moved through Hawaii, San Francisco, labor camps, railroad work, Korean schools, and the institutions built by early Korean immigrants. It also includes notes about Mrs. Rhee, whose wartime care and religious conviction form a powerful companion story.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Carrie Yoon Kwon

Carrie Yoon Kwon oral history, 1998

Born in Maxwell, California, in 1922, Carrie Yoon Kwon grew up wherever work took her family: rice farms, fruit stands, laundries, boarding houses, and Delano fields. Her parents, Young Ho Yoon and Toyn Kim Yoon, built a life from picture-bride correspondence, produce work, small business experiments, and deep loyalty to Korean patriotic organizations. Her account is also unusually attentive to the work of Korean women, whose labor and social judgment kept households and patriotic networks functioning.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1998 · 7 recording parts · English

Cecilia Lim Woo

Cecilia Lim Woo oral history, 1997

Santa Ana, USC, nursing, family, and the Korean neighborhoods near Jefferson Boulevard anchored Cecilia Lim Woo's California life. Born in 1926 to Charles Lim and Rhoda Cha Lim, she grew up in a household that spoke Korean, valued education, ran small produce and grocery businesses, and moved through the constraints of exclusion laws with resourcefulness. The account is full of place-based memory, from Santa Ana gardens to USC sidewalks, grocery counters, hospital wards, and Monterey Park civic meetings.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1997 · 8 recording parts · English

Choo Eun Yang

Choo Eun Yang oral history

Choo Eun Yang's early immigrant years carried him from Hawaii to San Francisco, where labor organizing, restaurant work, student aid, and nationalist networks often overlapped. He remembered the San Francisco earthquake era, the difficulty of plantation and railroad labor, and the responsibility Koreans felt toward independence and one another.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Cora Oh

Cora Oh oral history

Cora Oh looked back across nearly a century of family memory from the perspective of a Korean American daughter who knew how much had been lost as well as preserved. Born in Colusa, California, the oldest child of Chang Lim Kim and Alice Kim, she carried early impressions of the rice-growing country around Colusa and Willows, the broad porches of a childhood house, and the family reputation attached to her father's agricultural success. Her memories also return to the flood that ended that enterprise and set the family moving through Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and later the Central Valley.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · English

Daniel Bhang / Audrey Bhang Lee

Daniel Bhang / Audrey Bhang Lee oral history, 1999

Daniel Bhang and Audrey Bhang Lee remembered the same restless family from different angles as it moved through Washington, California, Chicago, Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, New York, and Los Angeles. Their father, a Korean immigrant who had worked in Hawaii and traveled as a salesman before becoming a restaurant operator, sought opportunity in places where few Koreans lived. Their mother, Salome Lee Bhang, came as a picture bride in 1916 and raised ten children through constant work and relocation. Because the siblings speak from different emotional positions, their chronology also shows how memory can diverge within one household.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 8 recording parts · English

Daniel Park

Daniel Park oral history, 1996

Riverside and Los Angeles framed Daniel Park's path from Korean church and school into engineering, family life, and community leadership. Born in Riverside around 1930 to Park Young Sub and Doris Kim Park, he carried both his father's Korean immigrant story and his mother's family history from the Korean migration to Mexico's Yucatan region before California. The interview also preserves a family line connected to the Korean Mexican diaspora, making Daniel’s story broader than a conventional California migration account.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1996 · 6 recording parts · English

Dora Soon Yun Kim

Dora Soon Yun Kim oral history

Displacement repeatedly forced Dora Soon Yun Kim to begin again, while art and education gave those new beginnings direction. Born in 1927 in northern Korea, she remembered a childhood connected to Hamgyong province, family construction work, Japanese colonial rule, and the sudden upheaval that came with liberation and Soviet occupation. Her account is especially vivid when she recalls fleeing with her mother, crossing dangerous roads and rail lines, and trying to preserve enough money, clothing, and courage to continue her schooling.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 9 recording parts · Korean and English

Evelyn Charr

Evelyn Charr oral history

Interrupted education, uncertain immigration status, household labor, marriage, and family ambition shaped Evelyn Charr's American life. Born in Korea as Kim Young Chun, she came to the United States in 1928 with hopes for study and self-development, including music and university training. Instead, the practical demands of marriage, children, legal status, and economic survival carried her through San Francisco, Chicago, Nevada, and Portland, Oregon.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · English

Florence Ahn

Florence Ahn oral history, 1996

Florence Ahn pursued music from Honolulu and Los Angeles to New York, Havana, Seattle, Las Vegas, and the touring stage. Born in Honolulu in November 1919 to Won Kiu Ahn and Chung Song Lee, she grew up in a Korean Methodist household where church, Korean language school, YWCA cultural programs, piano lessons, dance, and recitals made performance feel ordinary before it became a profession.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1996 · 3 recording parts · English

Gloria (Kim) Hahn

Gloria (Kim) Hahn oral history

Gloria Kim Hahn left a northern Korean village and built a life through Hawaii, California farm districts, Midwestern restaurant work, and extended-family responsibility. Born in 1901 near Pyongyang, she came across the Pacific as a small child with her parents and grandmother during the Korean labor migration to Hawaiian sugar plantations. Her memories preserve the texture of early immigrant movement: San Francisco, Seattle, railroad work, seasonal farm labor, and the search for communities where Korean families could work, worship, and survive.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 9 recording parts · Korean and English

Gloria Park

Gloria Park oral history

Gloria Park was born in Riverside, California, on February 12, 1921, into one of the Inland Empire's early Korean families. Her father's migration moved through Hawaii and then Riverside, where he worked, farmed, built a wholesale produce business, brought family members from Korea, and became known for church commitment, Sunday gatherings, and community help.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · English

Harold Yoon

Harold Yoon oral history, 1996

Harold Yoon inherited family routes that ran through Korea, Manchuria, Hawaii, Mexico, California farm towns, Los Angeles, and World War II. The oral-history material is difficult in places, but the life arc is clear: Harold was born in California in the 1910s, the son of a father who came through Hawaii and California and a mother whose family endured the Yucatan Korean labor migration before reaching the United States.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1996 · 2 recording parts · English

Harry Park / Rak Soon Lee Park

Harry Park / Rak Soon Lee Park oral history, 1997

Two Korean diasporic journeys met in Oregon after World War II when Harry Park and Rak Soon Lee Park began their life together. Harry was born in Fairview, Oregon, on July 24, 1918, and grew up farming in Oregon and Eagle, Idaho after his mother's early death. Rak Soon, known as Rocky, came from Korea to study at the University of Portland and entered a Korean American farm community whose language, customs, and prejudices she had to learn as an adult immigrant.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1997 · 6 recording parts · English

Hei Kyung Chung

Hei Kyung Chung oral history

When Hei Kyung Chung spoke in Los Angeles on July 29, 1972, she returned to the church disputes, fundraising, property, and women's labor she believed others had misremembered. Speaking in Korean, she corrected institutional memory, recalled names, factions, fundraising, property purchases, Presbyterian and Methodist disputes, and the way small groups of immigrants struggled to make lasting religious institutions with very little money.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Hei Won Kang

Hei Won Kang oral history, 1975

Around ninety years old, Hei Won Kang could still describe the first shock of Hawaii in concrete detail when she began recalling her life in 1975. She said she came to Hawaii in 1905 with her mother, brother, and sister while her father remained in Korea, because her mother believed the children could be educated in America and someday bring honor and help back to the family.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1975 · 4 recording parts · Korean and English

Helen Cho Paik

Helen Cho Paik oral history, 1999

Born in Pyeong, Korea, in 1904, Helen Cho Paik spent the twentieth century moving through Hawaii, California, the Mountain West, and back to Southern California. Her father, Wondu Cho, had been a teacher in Korea; her mother, Hoseon Cho, worked in Hawaii and then in the migrant farm and boarding-house economy that sustained the family.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 7 recording parts · English

Helen Lee Hong

Helen Lee Hong oral history, 1999

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.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 8 recording parts · English

Henry DeYoung

Henry DeYoung oral history, 1979

Korean independence work shaped Henry DeYoung's education, migration, diplomacy, and long separation from the country he left as a young man. He remembered departing Korea in 1904 with a Korean imperial passport, arriving in San Francisco when the Korean population in the continental United States was still very small, and finding guidance through early Korean community figures including An Chang Ho.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1979 · 2 recording parts · English

Henry Lee

Henry Lee oral history

Church life, childhood exclusion, Depression-era labor, and small-business work carried Henry Lee through the making of a Korean American life. His memories move from parents who left Korea for Hawaii and California to Sacramento church gatherings, San Francisco Korean language school, field work, restaurant labor, and the Jefferson Boulevard world of Los Angeles. Family photographs guide much of the account, turning names, siblings, churches, and school groups into a map of early Korean America.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · English

In Hwan Han

In Hwan Han oral history

In Hwan Han remembered Hamhung city, an orchard in Dongcheon-myeon Daedong-ri, Seoul churches, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and the photographs that connected those places to his family. He identified himself as born on May 1, 1914, and returned repeatedly to Hamhung as a landscape of river, mountain, apples, church work, and family separation.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 6 recording parts · Korean and English

Jin Song Kim

Jin Song Kim oral history, 1977

As a teenager, Jin Song Kim escaped Japanese-ruled Korea and entered a life of farm labor, boarding school, delayed education, business, and family in California. He came to the United States in 1916 through Shanghai, traveling as a young man with little money and no secure destination beyond the help of Korean community networks.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1977 · 2 recording parts · English

John Kyudong Han

John Kyudong Han oral history, 1999

Born in Honolulu in 1918, John Kyudong Han grew up mainly in San Francisco and Los Angeles and learned early to make himself useful wherever work appeared. His memories connect his father's Korean National Association work, Chinatown childhood, Los Angeles friendships, print shops, Korean newspapers, wartime technical illustration, and later import and gift-show business.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 5 recording parts · English

Joseph Lyou

Joseph Lyou oral history, 1997

Born in Los Angeles, Joseph Lyou moved from Depression work and church life into wartime service, USC journalism, sports writing, marriage, and fatherhood. Born in 1919 at 106 North Figueroa Street, he connected his birthplace to the Korean community world around the Korean National Association and An Chang Ho's household.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1997 · 5 recording parts · English

Julia Kim Ide / Frank Kim / Betty Chung Kim

Julia Kim Ide / Frank Kim / Betty Chung Kim oral history, 1999

Julia Kim Ide, Frank Kim, and Betty Chung Kim told their family history in several voices, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes correcting one another. Their memories move from Korea to Sonora, Mexico, Los Angeles, Orange County farms, a return to Japanese-occupied Korea, American high school, church life, marriage, work, food, discrimination, and the later reflections of siblings who understood themselves through both Korean and American worlds.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 8 recording parts · English

Julian Park

Julian Park oral history, 1978

Born in San Francisco in 1895, Reverend Julian Park supported himself through school before building a long Presbyterian ministry and family life in the East. The interview is conversational and sometimes uncertain on early family chronology, but it is clear about his faith, ambition, work ethic, and love of memory.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1978 · 3 recording parts · English

Kang-aie Shinn

Kang-aie Shinn oral history

At the kitchen table, Kang-aie Shinn began with detailed instructions for making sirutteok for a Christmas gathering of roughly thirty-five people. From soaked red beans, rice flour, muslin, steam, and chopstick testing, her account opens through the kind of domestic knowledge that held immigrant households and church gatherings together.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 8 recording parts · Korean and English

Katherine Yim

Katherine Yim oral history

Born in San Francisco, Katherine Yim grew up within Methodist faith and Bay Area Korean community before building family stability in Los Angeles. Born on Laguna Street in 1916, she traced her family story through Hawaii sugar plantation labor, Oakland church life, grocery stores, Korean nationalist memory, and her own marriage to Ed in 1942.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1975 · 5 recording parts · English

Ke-man Lee

Ke-man Lee oral history, 1977

Ke-man Lee crossed picture-bride networks, farm households, family crises, and patriotic fundraising during her first decades in the United States. Although some details remain unclear, she consistently remembered migration as marriage, work, obligation, and community-making.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1977 · 3 recording parts · Korean and English

Ke-yul Park

Ke-yul Park oral history, 1977

Ke-yul Park first called her life only sorrowful; then the details came: rural Korea, picture marriage, western farm work, motherhood, and survival. She identified her birth family in Gyeongsangnam-do, Dongnae-gun, Sasang-myeon, Mora-ri, remembered her father as the old-style classical teacher Kim Won-do, and described herself as Kim Gyu-yul before marriage made her Park Gyu-yul.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1977 · 5 recording parts · Korean and English

Kyong Sin Park

Kyong Sin Park oral history, 1975

Kyong Sin Park carried messages for March First organizing, fled through northern routes, and later brought the same resolve to work, education, and women's organizing in the United States. She remembered hearing of Japanese trials of Korean students, helping prepare demonstrations, watching police violence, and escaping through northern routes into Chinese border communities and Shanghai.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1975 · 2 recording parts · Korean

Lester Edward Kim / Pearl Lim Kim

Lester Edward Kim / Pearl Lim Kim oral history, 1999

Migration, church work, education, family memory, and public service brought Lester Edward Kim and Pearl Lim Kim along different paths to Southern California. Lester's family story begins with his father, Kim Kyung Bo, who left northern Korea in 1904 for plantation labor in Hawaii, then worked across the American West before building restaurant and community ties in California. Pearl's family story begins with Methodist education, Korea under Japanese rule, and her father, Reverend Du Hwa Lim, whose ministry carried the family from Korea to Honolulu in 1933.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 10 recording parts · English

Lloyd Hahn

Lloyd Hahn oral history, 1997

Los Angeles community institutions, military service, professional work, and decades of civic involvement shaped Lloyd Hahn's California life. Born in Stockton in 1927 and raised largely in Los Angeles, he remembered parents who connected Korea, Hawaii, farm labor, restaurant work, and Methodist faith to the everyday routines of a second-generation household.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1997 · 5 recording parts · English

Marie Park Fujii

Marie Park Fujii oral history, 1999

Farm work, sibling bonds, nursing, and Hawaii remained vivid in Marie Park Fujii's memory of the discipline that held her family together. Born in 1919 and raised in Eagle, Idaho, among a small cluster of Korean families, she remembered a life where work came first and leisure had to be negotiated almost like a family emergency. Her account moves with the patience of someone honoring both the hardship and the grace inside family memory.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 2 recording parts · English

Mary Lee

Mary Lee oral history

Mary Lee explained Korean American inheritance through memories of her parents, education, discrimination, USC, and social work. The interview moves between family stories of Korea, Hawaii, farm labor, Los Angeles churches, and California agriculture, preserving the force of a daughter trying to explain how much her parents endured for the next generation.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 3 recording parts · Korean and English

Mary Paik Lee

Mary Paik Lee oral history, 1977

Mary Paik Lee belonged to one of the earliest Korean immigrant families on the American mainland and remembered the practical details of how they endured. Born Kwang Son Paik near Pyongyang around 1900, she came from a Presbyterian family shaped by education, faith, and Korea's struggle under Japanese pressure. Her family left Korea in 1905 after soldiers entered their village, traveled through Hawaii under a sugar plantation labor contract, and reached San Francisco in December 1906 before joining other Korean families in Riverside.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1977 · 5 recording parts · English

Mr. Choi

Mr. Choi oral history

Mr. Choi, identified in the account as Cheung Tae Choi, was born in April 1926 in Tachan, in the Pakchun area of Pyeonganbuk-do, northern Korea. His oral history begins in a rice-growing district between Pyongyang and Sinuiju, where his father and grandfather were connected to a large rice mill and where education, family standing, and colonial surveillance shaped a young student's sense of possibility.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Mrs. Choon Ha Kim

Mrs. Choon Ha Kim oral history

Mrs. Choon Ha Kim remembered early migration, farm and household labor, language barriers, marriage, family endurance, and Korean independence work. Several passages are difficult to parse, so uncertain routes, dates, and names remain qualified.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Myong Sun Paik

Myong Sun Paik oral history

Myong Sun Paik, also remembered by the nickname Jim, was born on November 1, 1897, in the Pyongyang area and left Korea as a child with parents who sought freedom and opportunity under Japanese colonial pressure. His oral history begins before his own memory fully forms, with parents who were Presbyterian Christians, resisted Japanese control, and decided in 1904 or 1905 to take their young son and daughter to the Hawaiian Islands.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · English

Phil Kwon Kim

Phil Kwon Kim oral history

Phil Kwon Kim worked, raised a family, taught younger people, and kept Korean cultural practices alive with the materials available to him. The Korean-language account is uneven, but it repeatedly returns to a boyhood in Korea, early migration through Hawaii and California, hotel and farm work, settlement in Stockton and Los Angeles, and a lifelong commitment to Korean dance, music, language, and home instruction.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Rev. Kyong-t'ae Kang

Rev. Kyong-t'ae Kang oral history

Japanese rule, a secret escape from North Korea, war, military service, business, marriage, and immigration repeatedly forced Rev. Kyong-t'ae Kang to rebuild. The account moves out of sequence, but its core is a refugee's account of loss, work, faith, and rebuilding.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 5 recording parts · English

Richard O. Hahn / Julia Kim Hahn

Richard O. Hahn / Julia Kim Hahn oral history, 1999

Family inheritance and missionary vocation converged in the life Richard O. Hahn and Julia Kim Hahn built together. Richard's memories begin with a grandfather who came to California in 1903 and later returned to Korea to establish a school for poor boys; Julia's begin in Hawaii, where Korean plantation families built churches, households, and Christian community.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 7 recording parts · English

Rose Park

Rose Park oral history, 1977 & [s.d.]

Rose Park crossed the Pacific as a small child, grew up in isolated farm country, married through community letters, and raised six children. Born in Seoul in 1911, she came to the United States in 1914 with her mother and older half siblings to join her father in Mountain Home, Idaho. Her memories move from a Japanese colonial-era passport and family photographs to Oregon strawberries, Idaho winters, Utah sugar beets, Delano grapes, Los Angeles noodle work, Korean church, and the quieter pleasures of painting and craft.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1977 · 5 recording parts · English

Sang Ok Har

Sang Ok Har oral history

Only part of Sang Ok Har's recollections survives clearly; a damaged section once contained her discussion of Depression hardship. The recoverable material centers on marriage, wartime anxiety, children, clothing, education, and the emotional labor of motherhood as the family endured scarcity.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Sentai Roh

Sentai Roh oral history

Sentai Roh remembered rent, food, work, migration, housing, and small business with a practical attention to the details of daily survival. She spoke about apartments, hotels or bathhouse-like businesses, cooking, rent, repairs, and the practical management of everyday survival.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Soon Sil Kim

Soon Sil Kim oral history

Colonial rule, national division, war, labor migration, and family separation repeatedly redirected Soon Sil Kim's life. She remembered growing up in Chinnampo in present-day North Korea, in a household that moved between modest stability and deep poverty after her father's death. Her memories return to Catholic schooling, Japanese-language rules, hunger, nursing study in Pyongyang, and the danger that arrived with Soviet-backed communist rule. Its strength lies in the way private memory opens onto larger histories of colonial schooling, North Korean state formation, refugee movement, gendered labor, and family reunification.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 8 recording parts · Korean and English

Stewart Lim

Stewart Lim oral history, 1999

Stewart Lim's life carried him from Korea to Hawaii, wartime military service, postwar Seoul, San Francisco, USC, and a long career in Los Angeles. Born in Kaesong in 1923 to Methodist minister Do Hwa Lim and Blanche Chang Yul Lim, he grew up in church households shaped by missionaries, education, Korean language, Japanese colonial rule, and the transpacific networks that brought the family to Honolulu in 1933. The interview also shows how a minister's son became a careful keeper of family photographs and institutional memory.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1999 · 8 recording parts · English

Sun Hee Shinn

Sun Hee Shinn oral history

USC catalogs Sun Hee Shinn as Lee, Sun Hee (1889-1979), and her memories follow family, faith, migration, work, and children across the early Korean diaspora. She remembered family, Christian faith, migration, marriage, language study, restaurant work, children, and the daily labor that made immigrant family life possible.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · Korean and English

Sunda Hur

Sunda Hur oral history

Sunda Hur remembered an American childhood shaped by the first generation of Korean labor migration. Born in Seattle in 1905 to parents who had left Korea for Hawaii and then the mainland, she remembered a family always moving toward work: plantation labor, railroad labor, land clearing, vegetables, tomatoes, boarding houses, farm labor, restaurants, and Midwestern business attempts. Her recollections are plainspoken, but they carry rare evidence of Korean American childhood before large organized communities existed.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · English

Susan Ahn

Susan Ahn oral history

Susan Ahn grew up in the household of Korean independence leader Ahn Chang Ho, known as Dosan, while becoming fully at home in the United States. She remembered a strong mother who held the family together after her father left for China, a Los Angeles childhood filled with Korean community obligations, church, poverty, athletics, and the expectation that the children should be good Americans without forgetting where they came from. Her testimony gives equal weight to Dosan's public cause and the household discipline that formed his American-born children.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 2 recording parts · English

Warren Kim

Warren Kim oral history, 1976

Recovering from illness in 1976, Warren Kim recalled a Korean independence-era life spent traveling, organizing, and preserving community records. Born in 1896 and arriving in the United States in 1917 as a student-refugee without ordinary papers, he moved through San Francisco, Colorado, Akron, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hawaii, and Korean nationalist circles. Warren described organizational labor that often disappeared behind better-known leaders.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1976 · 3 recording parts · Korean and English

Yin Kim

Yin Kim oral history, 1998

Yin Kim grew up poor in Dinuba and Los Angeles, became a dentist, and spoke about his California life with humor and blunt confidence. Born in Dinuba in 1916 to Korean immigrant parents, he remembered grape work, San Francisco janitorial and sewing labor, a Depression-era fruit stand, his mother's fine needlework, Korean church and independence organizations, and a small community that survived because most families shared the same poverty. His voice is performative and self-aware, but beneath the humor is a sharp social history of race, class, and professional mobility.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1998 · 5 recording parts · English

Young Bok Joo

Young Bok Joo oral history

Young Bok Joo's life crossed Manchuria, the Japanese empire, Soviet-occupied North Korea, the Korean War, a neutral-country resettlement process, India, Brazil, and the United States. Born in 1924 in the Korean communities of Manchuria to parents from Hamhung, he studied in places such as Longjing, Mudanjiang, and Harbin, learned languages because history forced him to, and returned to Korea after liberation believing he was returning to his country. His testimony is also a map of twentieth-century Northeast Asia and Cold War resettlement seen from below.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 6 recording parts · Korean and English

Young Oak Kim

Young Oak Kim oral history

Young Oak Kim moved from Los Angeles community life into military service and later devoted himself to civic work. Born in January 1919 to Soon Kwan Kim and a highly educated mother whose intended studies in Chicago were redirected into immigrant family life, Kim grew up around Temple Street, Korean churches, small businesses, and independence politics. His memories place his family inside an early Korean Los Angeles where church, language, political loyalty, and survival were tightly connected.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: Undated · 14 recording parts · English

Zona DeYoung

Zona DeYoung oral history, 1979

Marriage to Henry DeYoung drew Zona DeYoung into a household shaped by Korean independence commitments, adoption, domestic work, and long partnership. Born Zona Church and raised in the central United States, she married Henry in 1932 after meeting him through a mutual friend in Kansas City. Her account is especially valuable because it describes the family side of public work: absences, children, gardens, budgets, and the emotional discipline required when a husband's political duties repeatedly drew him away.

Collection: Korean American Museum Oral History Series
Recorded: 1979 · 2 recording parts · English