Archive: Videos
WATCH: Memoir, Trauma, and Healing for the Korean Diaspora with Grace M. Cho and Iris Yi Youn Kim
October 15, 2024
In our third Intergenerational Healing and Learning gathering, author and professor Grace M. Cho and journalist and writer Iris Yi Youn Kim presented their work and discussed how memoir can act as a vessel for unpacking and healing intergenerational trauma, especially for members of the Korean diaspora. In her interview with MOLD, Grace explained that many in the Korean diaspora live under the conditions of “enforced forgetting.” In gathering, we seek to remember and reclaim our histories.
Grace M. Cho’s work sits at the crossroads of creative nonfiction and interdisciplinary scholarship, exploring the ways in which residues of state violence and historical trauma permeate the intimate spaces of the here and now. As a sociologist, she approaches storytelling as an opportunity to broaden the lens through which readers see personal experience. In her memoir, Tastes Like War, Cho chronicles her mother’s struggle with schizophrenia and how her mother’s traumas from the war may have contributed to her mental illness. Iris is currently a 2024 NBCU Academy Storyteller. She was part of the 30 Under 30 Cohort that attended the 2023 Korea Peace Action national mobilization, and is currently working on a collection of essays about the reverberations of immigration and assimilation within Korean American communities.
Grace M. Cho is the author of Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction and the winner of the 2022 Asian Pacific American Literature Award in adult nonfiction. Her first book, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received a 2010 book award from the American Sociological Association. Her writings have appeared in The Nation, Catapult, The New Inquiry, Poem Memoir Story, Contexts, Gastronomica, Feminist Studies, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.
Iris (Yi Youn) Kim is a 2024 NBCU Academy Storyteller. She is also a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow, a 2022 USC Center for Public Diplomacy U.S.-South Korea Creative NextGen Fellow, and a 2023 Gold House Journalism Futures Accelerator Participant. Her work was anthologized in Woodhall Press’ “Nonwhite and Woman” in September 2022. Iris was part of the 30 Under 30 Cohort that attended the 2023 Korea Peace Action national mobilization. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the reverberations of immigration and assimilation within Korean American communities.
WATCH: End the Travel Ban to North Korea! | Ktown Social Club Ep. 43 with Cathi Choi and Christine Ahn
August 5, 2024
WCDMZ Co-Directors Christine Ahn and Cathi Choi sit down with Ktown Social Club’s Michael Kim and Michael Won to discuss ending the US travel ban on North Korea and building a movement for peace in Korea and ending the Korean War.
WATCH: KPNGN Reflections on Unbind Your Heart: Korean Han / Grief Transmutation Ceremony, One Year Later
June 12, 2024
Join us for our second gathering of the Intergenerational Learning and Healing Series! We will hear from Jungwon Kim and Yoon Ra. Both will share their reflections from last year’s Unbind Your Heart: Korean Han / Grief Transmutation Ceremony where participants transmuted collective, generational grief and rage, 한 / Han, into a wellspring of righteous anger and strength to call for an end to the Korean War. Both speakers will discuss the process of blending grassroots community organizing with ritual, performance, and song in order to transform and counter state violence and warmaking. They will also share about their work more broadly and why we must prioritize community, ritual, and spiritual resistance in organizing and narrative building practices.
Jungwon Kim is a multi-disciplinary communications strategist and advocate who has chronicled frontline environmental and human rights movements for the past two decades. She served for nine years as head of the creative & editorial team at the Rainforest Alliance and for eight years as the editor of Amnesty International, a quarterly human rights print magazine (circ. 300,000). She has also worked as a journalist for newspapers, magazines, and nationally syndicated public radio programs Jungwon is the board chair of Peace Is Loud and a board member of the Fund for Public Health NYC. She is a writer, mother, and co-founder of two BIPOC-centered sanghas.
Yoon Ra is a trans, non-binary grassroots documentary filmmaker and cultural organizer creating counter-narrative media with sex worker mutual aid groups: Red Canary Song (New York, Turtle Island) and Scarlet Cha Cha (Paju, Korea). Red Canary Song centers base-building with migrant massage workers and Asian sex workers through a labor rights, migrant justice, and PIC abolitionist framework. Red Canary Song believes that the full decriminalization of sex work is necessary for the safety and survival of massage workers and trafficking survivors. Scarlet Cha Cha has been organizing direct actions to protect the livelihoods and workplaces in Yongjugol, a red light district village first created to service an American military base in Paju, South Korea. Yoon is currently a campaign fellow with U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR), collaborating with BDS Korea to build international pressure against HD Hyundai’s selling of bulldozers and excavators to Israel. They plan on creating the media strategies for the campaign to reach a wider U.S. and English speaking audience.
WATCH: Intergenerational Trauma and the Korean War: Healing Across Generations, Helena Soholm & Joseph Han
May 29, 2024
In our first gathering of Korea Peace Now!’s Intergenerational Learning and Healing Series 2024, we heard from author Joseph Han and psychologist and shaman Helena Choi Soholm on intergenerational trauma, healing, and the Korean War. Both will share their approaches to healing intergenerational trauma and grappling with their families’ histories, the legacies of U.S. imperialism, and the ongoing war in Korea.
Helena Soholm, PhD is a transpersonal psychologist and a Korean shaman. She has been a clinician for the last 18 years, and in her practice, she integrates indigenous healing systems with Western theories of psychology to support the healing and growth process of people navigating the complexities of technologically advanced societies. As a healer and teacher, Helena facilitates soul and ancestral initiations through ceremony and ritual. Clearing and honoring ancestral energy is achieved through the recovery of the indigenous mind, which can deepen a person’s connection to self, others, and land. She collaborates with healers and artists around the world, offering shamanic ceremonies in the United States, Asia, and Europe. The goal of these ceremonies is to ignite collective healing from humanity’s colonial past while simultaneously creating pathways for people to gain awareness of their greater purpose on the planet.
Joseph Han is the author of Nuclear Family, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year by NPR and Time Magazine. He is a 2022 National Book Foundation ‘5 Under 35’ honoree and a Kundiman fellow in fiction. His novel won the 2023 Asian/Pacific American Literature Award Adult Fiction Honor, the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, and was short-listed for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. At Korea Peace Action: National Mobilization to End the Korean War (July 2023), Joseph co-led a grief transmutation ceremony and community healing event focused on addressing collective and generational grief. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Event date: May 29, 2024
Korea Peace Now!’s Intergenerational Healing and Learning Series 2024:
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory,” writes Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Korean War was the “the most brutal war of the 20th century,” according to historian Samuel Moyn, with more than 4 million killed in three years, mostly Korean civilians. Although often referred to as “the Forgotten War,” the conflict continues more than 70 years after a fragile ceasefire was signed, keeping Korean families separated and driving the extreme militarization of the Korean Peninsula and the entire Asia-Pacific. Many Korean War survivors live with trauma, which is then inherited by their descendants, resulting in an ongoing cycle of violence, secrecy, and silence.
Korea Peace Now! is launching an online public educational series featuring activists, artists, and scholars to critically understand the impacts of intergenerational trauma stemming from the Korean War and other U.S. forever wars. Through dialogue, political education, and storytelling, we will empower our community to take action for peace, build bridges across generations, and forge a path toward realizing our collective security and liberation. Our speakers will highlight how intergenerational healing informs their work and efforts to end the ongoing Korean War. We will also discuss how the fate of the Korean War is inextricably intertwined with all movements seeking to end U.S. wars and militarism globally.
WATCH: The Gendered Impact of the Korean War: Past, Present, and Future
March 8, 2024
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