A life remembered
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.
Zona remembered an interracial marriage with candor and warmth, explaining that her own parents accepted the match and that she had been raised to think skin color should not determine human worth. She spoke about children, prejudice, work as an occupational therapist, Korean relatives and names, adoption, aging, feminism, astronomy, and the wish to remain curious as long as she lived. Her story portrays a resilient home executive, working woman, and witness to a Korean American family made across race, distance, and changing American ideas about women.
Based on interviews held by the USC Digital Library.
Early Life
Zona Church and a Small-Town Formation
Zona DeYoung was born Zona Church, a name she carefully spelled in the account because it was uncommon even to her. She explained that a half-sister had named her after a friend, giving her a first name that made people pause and ask about its origin. The account places her childhood in the central United States, with memories connected to Kansas City, Kansas, Missouri, small towns, and country life, though the oral-history material does not always make every place name clear.
She did not describe her family as farmers, even though she knew rural life and later took naturally to gardening. Her father was a printer, part of a world in which many little towns had local newspapers and print shops. That background helps explain Zona's mixture of practical skill and lively curiosity: she grew up around work that required hands, tools, words, and attention to the wider public world.
Zona remembered poverty plainly. She said she grew up with little money and learned to manage carefully, a habit that later mattered during the Depression and during periods when Henry's public obligations stretched the household. She had an older sister, brothers, and a half-sister, and she spoke from the perspective of someone who understood family as both affection and daily responsibility.
Her education led her toward occupational therapy. She attended school in Missouri and trained in a program at St. Joseph, later returning as an older adult for a refresher course in St. Louis. In the account, she treated that later study with quiet pride. It was proof that she could sit down, study, and reenter a professional field after decades of changing family needs.
1932
An Interracial Marriage in the Middle of America
Zona met Henry DeYoung through a mutual friend in Kansas City. She emphasized the accidental quality of the meeting: no plan, no search for an exotic life, only two people encountering one another near the middle of the United States. They married in 1932, at a time when interracial marriage laws and social suspicion still shaped where and how couples could marry. She recalled that they married in Arkansas, apparently because local laws elsewhere made the marriage more difficult.
Henry was considerably older than Zona and had already lived a long public life as a Korean student, advocate, writer, and independence worker. Zona did not present his Korean background as a barrier inside her own family. She said her parents had raised her to believe that color of skin did not matter, and she remembered their acceptance as natural, even while recognizing that neighbors or strangers may have thought differently.
The marriage made Zona part of Korean American history without making her Korean by birth. People sometimes asked whether she had met Henry in Korea or had gone there as a teacher, and she answered that she had not. The point mattered to her: this was an American meeting and an American marriage, even though it joined her to Korea's political struggle and to an immigrant life shaped by loss, language, and memory.
Her reflections on their children show both affection and awareness. She believed their mixed heritage gave them a distinct beauty, but she also knew they may have experienced comments or discomfort that they did not fully report to their parents. When people asked whether the children were Chinese, or when strangers worried about so-called American blood, Zona answered from a strongly inclusive idea of America. To her, American blood was already a mixture from everywhere.
1930s-1940s
Patriotism, Absence, and Children
Marriage to Henry meant sharing a life with a man whose obligations often reached beyond the household. Zona described him as an intense Korean patriot and said that, when he believed he had to act for Korea, she accepted that he had to go. His work took him to Washington, D.C., for long stretches during the war years and again during moments when Korean independence seemed newly possible.
Zona did not romanticize those absences. She remembered one long separation of roughly sixteen months as especially hard, particularly around holidays and because the children were old enough to know that the absence was difficult. Still, she tried to shape the children's understanding so they did not resent their father. In her telling, the household learned to treat his going away as duty rather than abandonment.
The family included Henry's older child from before the marriage and the children Zona and Henry raised together. The interview names or refers to children in different places, including Frances, David, Gordon, and Lee, but some details are difficult to hear with certainty. Zona spoke with particular warmth about Lee, a Korean boy who came to the United States in the 1950s and whom the family later adopted. By 1979 he worked out of Denver as a Braniff flight attendant and visited when his schedule allowed.
Zona also reflected on what Henry did not pass down. She said he did not make strong efforts to teach the children Korean, and she connected that choice to the bleak years after earlier independence hopes collapsed. From her perspective, Henry thought the children would be American citizens and that this was simply their reality. The comment is important because it shows assimilation not as indifference, but as a decision made under the pressure of political disappointment.
1940s-1950s
Gardens, Budgets, and Occupational Therapy
Zona's account gives unusual dignity to the work that kept a public man's family going. During difficult years she used household reserves, gardened heavily, canned food, and used freezer storage. She liked gardening, but the garden was more than a hobby. It was a practical system for feeding children, stretching money, and maintaining stability when Henry's income or presence could not be taken for granted.
She did not work away from home during the early decades of marriage, but she was explicit that this did not mean she did not work. The household required constant labor, from food preservation to childcare to managing the emotional weather of Henry's absences. Her later phrase for herself, 'home executive,' captures the seriousness with which she regarded that work, though she used the phrase with humor.
In 1951, Zona returned to paid work under Social Security as an occupational therapist. She remembered hospital work during the early years of American spaceflight, moving from patient room to patient room while televisions carried coverage she could hardly tear herself away from. This detail reveals both her professional responsibility and the breadth of her curiosity; even in work routines, the new scientific age seized her imagination.
Her occupational therapy career also complicates any simple division between homemaker and professional woman. Zona belonged to a generation trained to expect wives to stay home when children needed them, yet she had professional skills, went back for further training, and took pride in useful work. She did not reject household labor, but she refused to let it be treated as nothing.
1950s-1970s
Colorado Springs, Korean Connections, and Names
By the time of the 1979 account, Zona and Henry were living in Colorado Springs, a place she described through house, garden, mountains, and the difficulty of maintaining a large property as they aged. Their life there was not centered in a large Korean community. Zona observed that outside California there had often been little Korean community available to them, though by the late 1970s there was a Korean church and a younger Korean population in the area.
She and Henry had met some Koreans in Colorado, including professional people and families, but she described those relationships as occasional rather than deeply communal. The age gap mattered. Many newer Korean immigrants belonged to another generation, and Zona sensed that there was not always an easy link between Henry's early-twentieth-century independence world and the lives of younger Koreans in Colorado.
Names carried history in her account. She explained that some people knew Henry by an older passport spelling that sounded like Chung or Chum in English spelling, while DeYoung was a more Americanized way of approximating the Korean sound. She also said she had a Korean name that she rendered in English as Sonia or Sonja, chosen because it sounded close and was easier for others to pronounce.
These naming details show the family's movement between languages and publics. Henry's name had passed through passports, books, legal change, and American misunderstanding. Zona's adopted Korean name marked affection and belonging without pretending that her background had changed. Together, the names reveal a marriage lived through translation: not only between Korean and English, but between private identity, public record, and the ways strangers tried to classify them.
1979
Feminism, Age, and a Mind Still Reaching Outward
Zona called herself a feminist while also acknowledging that she had been raised in a different era. She knew the habits of that era: wives waited on husbands, hotel registers reduced married women to 'and wife,' and domestic work was often treated as invisible. Yet she pushed back. She remembered objecting when Henry signed a hotel register in a way that made her only an appendage, and she wanted women who kept homes and raised children to be recognized as Social Security earners.
Her feminism was practical rather than slogan-driven. She joked that after decades of marriage Henry was finally trying hard to help around the house after her fall, and she teased that she should have trained him forty years earlier. Beneath the humor was a clear claim: women were persons with qualifications, judgment, and labor that deserved recognition. She could love a long marriage and still name the unfairness built into its generation.
Aging sharpened that independence. Zona had fallen the previous summer and was using a cane, which frustrated her because she still imagined doing more in the house and garden than her body allowed. She spoke frankly about not wanting to become helpless or a burden. If she could remain aware and able to move, she said in effect, she would gladly keep living far longer, because there was always more to know.
That appetite for life shines through her memories of astronomy, flight, and travel. Her father had woken the children at night to see stars, and one of her sons became an astrophysicist. She watched moon flights, loved the idea of space exploration, defended it against those who called it wasteful, and said she would have gone to the moon if given the chance. She had loved roller coasters, barnstorming airplane rides, and the idea of seeing any place once. In the account's final impression, Zona DeYoung appears as a woman formed by household duty but never confined by it: practical, liberal, humorous, and still looking outward.