K. Connie Kang, pioneering Korean American journalist and author, died in August 2019 in Los Angeles. She was 76.
“Connie was a true pioneer of journalism, covering the Korean American community at a time of enormous growth and turmoil,” said Ashley Dunn, 2019 president of the Asian American Journalists Assn., Los Angeles Chapter. “She was a role model for both the young and old, showing how deep knowledge of both Korean and American cultures could produce striking journalism.”
Kang won an AAJA Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.
Born in what is now North Korea, Kang described her harrowing experiences as a war refugee and the joys and challenges of life as an immigrant in Japan and the United States in her 1995 book, “Home Was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family.”
Thought to be America’s first woman reporter of Korean ancestry, Kang got her start with the Democrat & Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 1960s. She went on to work for news organizations including the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times.
Kang devoted much of her career to telling the stories of the unheard and misunderstood and exploring what she called “the duality of being a Korean and an American.”
“I am more American than Korean in my mind,” she explained in her book, “but I am more Korean than American in my soul. As for my heart, it is split in half.”
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LOS ANGELES TIMES
K. Connie Kang, pioneering Korean American journalist, dies at 76
STAFF WRITER
AUG. 18, 2019
9:28 PM
When riots broke out in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992, few local reporters covering the historical unrest were able to interview the Koreans whose neighborhoods were suddenly besieged by violence. They couldn’t speak the language.
In the eyes of the Korean American Journalists Assn., that was a huge problem. So, on the heels of the riots, the organization implored the Los Angeles Times to hire a Korean-speaking reporter who would cover the community with thought and fairness.
That is how K. Connie Kang, who is thought to be the first Korean woman reporter in the United States, came to work at The Times in the fall of 1992.
Kang died last week from pancreatic cancer, according to longtime friends. She was 76.
In the pages of The Times, Kang covered the city’s Asian communities in earnest and with understanding, said Hyungwon Kang, a former photo editor at the paper who was mentored by Kang.
“She would be flooded with calls from Korean Americans who wanted to get their stories out there, because no one else in the mainstream media spoke their language,” Hyungwon Kang said.
Remembering the work of journalist K. Connie Kang
Aug. 18, 2019
When she was a little girl, Connie Kang and her family fled her ancestral homeland in what is now North Korea. She grew up in Okinawa, Japan, and her love for the English language was fostered at an international school there, according to a biography of Kang in “Distinguished Asian Americans: A Biographical Dictionary.” Her father, an English and German teacher, was among the first to embrace Christianity in Korea at the turn of the century.
The family would later settle in San Francisco. “The City by the Bay, where Korean independence fighters raised money to try to free their homeland from Japan’s yoke, gave my parents their home away from home,” Kang wrote in a 2000 column for The Times.
Kang studied journalism at the University of Missouri and Northwestern University, where she received her master’s degree. She was a staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner before her tenure at The Times.
She also wrote a regular column for Koreatown Weekly. The publication’s founder, K.W. Lee, said Kang’s contribution to journalism cannot be overestimated.
“She was almost a saint,” said Lee, believed to be the first Asian immigrant to work for a mainstream daily newspaper in the U.S., the Kingsport Times-News in Tennessee.
“She was doing it because she felt not only an obligation to speak for the second generation of Koreans in America, but also to speak for the voiceless and powerless immigrants who brought them here — most who were monolingual, many who ended up in ghettos.”
Kang was a meticulous, sensitive observer and approached her job like an anthropologist, said Hyungwon Kang.
“Her interviews were much more thorough than most other journalists I’ve worked with,” he added, “and she was super cautious about the words she used. It’s what made her a good writer.”
Connie Kang covered religion in her final years at The Times. After leaving the paper in 2008, the deeply devout Christian decided to become a minister. She graduated from Fuller Theological Seminary in 2017 and shortly after passed the U.S. Presbyterian Church’s ordination exam. Her dream was to build a Christian school in North Korea.
Kapson Yim Lee, a longtime friend of Kang’s, described the writer as “aesthetic-minded.” She was known to wear colorful wide-brimmed hats, and preferred to drive with gloved fingers. She loved to grow flowers, especially orchids.
Kang will be buried next to her parents and younger brother in San Francisco, according to Hyungwon Kang.
In a 2018 email to the photographer, Connie Kang said she purchased additional space on the family plot for a memorial headstone with the names of her ancestors.
“Of course their remains are in North & South — I presume all destroyed by the war & communist takeover of my family’s vast estate,” Kang wrote.
“Let us continue to live with gratitude & hope,” she signed the note. “Life is a gift; the promise of Eternal life with God is the greatest gift of all.”
‘This soft-spoken woman had a spirit of steel’
Rong-Gong Lin II, a Metro reporter for the Los Angeles Times, tweeted a tribute to Kang. Here are some excerpts:
Heartbroken to hear of K. Connie Kang’s passing. … [she] was an inspiration to me as a cub reporter at the @latimes.
This soft-spoken woman had a spirit of steel — riding on the rooftop of the last train out of Seoul, fleeing the incoming Communist invasion in 1951, held by a rope so she didn’t fall off the train. To falling in love with the U.S., becoming a pioneer Asian American journalist.
She opened the Seoul bureau for @sfexaminer, “a dream come true,” where she helped introduce the world to South Korea as the Olympics opened up in 1988.
She later joined the Examiner’s editorial board. She says she was the only nonwhite at the table. And she wrote the editorial apologizing for the Examiner’s past in “campaigning to round up people of Japanese ancestry during World War II and put them in hastily constructed camps.”
She later joined @latimes in the aftermath of the L.A. riots. She gave a voice to Korean immigrants and Korean Americans in Koreatown. “At last, I was fulfilling my goal to introduce and interpret Asians to the non-Asian mainstream on their terms.”
Thank you, K. Connie Kang. Knowing you helped make me know I could make a difference, too.
K.W. Lee (from left), K. Connie Kang and Hyungwon Kang while covering South Korea’s national elections in Seoul in 1988. (Photo courtesy of Hyungwon Kang)
One Pioneer Recognizes Another
K.W. Lee, founder of Koreatown Weekly, founding president of the Korean American Journalists Assn. and former editor of Korea Times’ English edition, nominated K. Connie Kang for AAJA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. These are excerpts from his nominating letter:
“Few journalists of color have excelled in introducing and interpreting Asians and Asian Americans in their full humanity in Shakespeare’s language, as K. Connie Kang throughout her 33-year career as a reporter, editor, editorial writer, columnist, translator-interpreter and author.”
“She has pioneered the way for unfettered coverage of the pan-Asian community amid mounting anti-immigrant sentiment.”
“Hers has been a quiet mission to give a clear voice to those who aren’t heard and can’t speak English. And at home with dual heritage and insightful of the Asian mosaics, she has become an enduring role model for legions of young and aspiring journalists on both sides of the ocean.”
“Three years before AAJA was born, a handful of first-generation Korean Americans working in the mainstream media organized a similar group, as black-Korean relations grew tense with escalating media sensationalism and stereotyping. Its objective: foster fair and accurate media portrayals of the non-English-speaking immigrants and encourage their children to seek journalism careers. Connie Kang has been the driving force …. Without her passion and energy, KAJA, now reaching more than 100 in membership, would be an outfit only in name.”
Lee noted that “for one million Korean Americans in the United States, the 1992 L.A. riot was a defining moment in which their American dream turned into a nightmare.” With Kang’s hiring, he said, “the post-riot L.A. Times Asian coverage changed — like night and day.”
“Five years later, I am still haunted by what ifs — what if L.A. Times honchos had learned a lesson from the 1965 Watts riot, which compelled the paper to hire its first black reporter to cover the black ghetto in uprising, and what if [the] L.A. Times had hired Connie Kang a year before, not after, the 1992 riot, which wrecked over 2,300 Korean and other Asian immigrant businesses.”
“To recognize and honor her life’s work … is an act of validating a precious lesson from Sa-ee-gu [Korean for April 29, the start of the 1992 riot].”
A Bond Shared for More Than 30 Years
Hyungwon Kang, a photojournalist, started his professional journalism career with the Los Angeles Times and has since worked for Time Magazine, the Associated Press and Reuters. He first met K. Connie Kang in 1986 when she spoke at Camp Conifer, a Korean American youth leadership camp. Connie and K.W. Lee, founding officers of the Korean American Journalists Assn., invited Hyungwon to join KAJA and mentored him over the years. These are excerpts from Hyungwon’s remembrance of Connie:
K. Connie’s family and mine shared collective experiences as Korean War refugees and immigrants in the U.S. My grandmother lost her husband and her son went missing in the Korean War. She had to flee her home after the war destroyed her family, eventually immigrating to the U.S. It was in the U.S. where Grandma heard the news that her long-lost son of 41 years was alive in North Korea. Tragically, she never was able to visit him.
Connie’s family had to flee from their home in Tanchon, in what is now North Korea. They moved to Japan and eventually the U.S., never again seeing their home.
Our shared Korean diaspora meant our understanding of family pains needed no explanation. Connie used to visit my Grandma and tape interviews with her. It was only natural for her to deliver a eulogy at my grandmother’s funeral in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 1991. (My uncle was able to attend the service, the first civilian from North Korea to make such a trip to the U.S.)
Connie used to travel with her suitcases containing a collection of treasured personal items – “a habit,” she said, “from having been a war refugee.” Annie Nakao, one of her former colleagues at the San Francisco Examiner, remembers her carrying her sizable Rolodex in her purse wherever she went.
Having lived in Korea, Japan and the U.S., Connie was gifted in language skills. Fifteen days before her passing, while I was visiting Connie, a Japanese American nurse walked into her room. Connie’s face lit up as she spoke in fluent Japanese with pleasure and enthusiasm. She loved her languages.
Connie had a commanding presence, no matter where she went. Whether it was speaking in Korean, challenging a police officer who had pulled us over or questioning a prominent political figure, Connie always commanded and received respect. She did so while treating others with respect. For example, when speaking Korean, she always used honorifics — she used them even when addressing me, someone 20 years her junior.
In her trademark soprano voice, Connie would often lament her family’s unrealized wish to return to her hometown, where her mother had wanted to build Christian schools. Connie’s family was one of the early Christian families in Korea. Her great-grandfather, Bong-Ho Kang, built 17 churches in what is now North Korea.
When Connie passed away, as the last in her family to die, she still had rusty keys to her family home.
Hyungwon Kang spoke at K. Connie Kang’s graveside service in San Francisco. Here are links to a video of his eulogy and pictures from the funeral.