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Reviewed by:
  • Memory and Honor: Cultural and Generational Ministry with Korean American Communities by Simon C. Kim
  • Franklin Rausch
Memory and Honor: Cultural and Generational Ministry with Korean American Communities. By Simon C. Kim, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2013, 128pp.

Fr. Simon C. Kim’s Memory and Honor: Cultural and Generational Ministry with Korean American Communities is the first monograph on the subject of Korean American Catholics. In this book, Kim focuses on contemporary problems facing this population and what can be done to overcome them. Kim’s preface captures these issues in a metaphor recounted by a young Korean American comparing the members of his community to “crabs trapped in a bucket” who crawl their way over their fellows in order to escape, only to be pulled back down by another crab with the same goal. Kim traces the cause for such behavior to the “foreign occupation of their homeland, wars, poverty, and the immigrant experience of departure, displacement, and resettlement in a new land” (xi) leading to the generational transmission of han, which he identifies as a “debilitating inner spiritual condition” (11).

Kim’s introduction and first chapter therefore focus on discussing the realities faced by Korean American Catholics through a framework of han by examining key events in Korean American history, focusing on the 1992 LA riots. [End Page 124] Kim argues that the riots left “psychological and emotional scars” (13), building up more han and encouraging an already insular Korean American community to become even more so. Korean American Catholics, as a “minority of minorities” (most Korean Americans being Protestants) are particularly vulnerable to such marginalization, and, as members of an already established church, they have not had the opportunity to shape it in ways nineteenth-century European Catholic immigrants did. Moreover, this marginality contrasts with the vital, socially-integrated Catholic community found in Korea, leading to a greater sense of inferiority.

In chapter two, Kim explores the history of Catholicism in Korea, for the most part adhering to a standard narrative of Korean Catholic history that focuses on the martyrs, presents the ghettoization of the church before and during the Japanese colonial period as allowing Protestantism to become the dominant Christian tradition in the peninsula, and explains the indigenization and social engagement made possible by the Second Vatican Council as the cause of contemporary vitality. However, Kim does provide a novel interpretation of the lives of the first two Korean priests. Kim points out that the first, the martyr-saint Andrew Kim Taegŏn, is central to Korean American identity, as seen in the number of parishes named after him, but also symbolizes the desire of Koreans to seek after obtainable goals and thus inflict suffering upon themselves (how can one hope to live up to the example of the first priest, and a martyr no less?). In contrast, Kim argues that the second priest, Thomas Ch’oe Yangŏp, who died of typhoid in 1861 after more than a decade of service to the community, is actually a more relevant and realistic model.

In chapter three, Kim provides an overview of Korean immigration following the reforms to US law in 1965, focusing on the development of a metanarrative among immigrants that they left Korea for better economic opportunities in the US and to give their children better educational opportunities unavailable to them on the peninsula. However, this narrative does not resonate with their children, as they have enjoyed the economic success resulting from their parents’ labor. This desire for more from life, and the failure of economic and educational success to bring lasting fulfillment and peace, is the subject of chapter four, which argues that “a sense of inferiority has become part of the psyche as Koreans constantly compare themselves to others to affirm their [End Page 125] well-being. This reality causing a lack of confidence and discontent within seeks release through various means” particularly “worldly success based on education, material wealth, and political and social status” allowing them to feel “superior to the other” (61). This even affects the faith life of Korean American Catholics, as they are attracted to forms of spirituality which allow them to measure, and therefore compare, spiritual...

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