[KS] The Fate of the Kwaks

[Afostercarter at aol.com]

Dear friends and colleagues,
 
Michael Munk has written a fascinating article 
on a Korean musician couple who became victims
of the Cold War. This was completely new to me.
 
Many thanks to Michael for bringing this to  light.
Much to ponder here, none of it comfortable.
 
You can read this at NKNews, or below.
 
Aidan FC
 
 
Aidan  Foster-Carter 
Honorary Senior Research  Fellow in Sociology & Modern Korea, Leeds 
University, UK 
E: _afostercarter at aol.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at aol.com)      
_afostercarter at yahoo.com_ (mailto:afostercarter at yahoo.com)    W: _www.aidanfc.net_ 
(http://www.aidanfc.net/)     
 
 
_http://nknews.org/2011/02/11015/_ (http://nknews.org/2011/02/11015/) 
 
 
_The Fate of the Kwaks_ (http://nknews.org/2011/02/11015/) 
_OPINION_ 
(http://nknews.org/category/featured-content/opinion-featured-content/)  | FEBRUARY 21, 2011 BY _ADMIN_ (http://nknews.org/author/nknews/)  | 
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By  Michael Munk 
Two  years ago, the media hailed the visit of the New York Philharmonic to  
Pyongyang as the great success it surely was. But neither its members  nor 
their press entourage were aware of the disappearance of a Korean  musician 
couple in the DPRK, so were unable to make inquiries of their  hosts. 
Indeed, few anywhere know their story, which lies forgotten in  that notorious “
dustbin of history.” 
Chungsoon  Kwak and Choon Cha Kwak were ardent Korean nationalists who  
avoided deportation to South Korea from the US during the McCarthy era, by  
going to North Korea. They were never heard from again. 
Chungsoon  was born in Pyongyang under Japanese colonial rule. As a child  
prodigy violinist, he became concert master of the Seoul Central Symphony  
orchestra while still in high school and graduated from Chosun Christian  
College in 1934. Already a supporter of the underground Korea resistance to  
Japanese imperialism, he arrived in the US in the late 1930s to study at  the 
Chicago Conservatory of Music from which he graduated in 1940. 
Choon  Cha was born in Seoul and studied music at Ehwa Women’s College, 
where she  was also active in the resistance. In 1938 she received a 
scholarship from  the University of Michigan and earned a degree there in 1941. 
The  couple married in 1942 and moved to New York where Choon Cha  was 
choirmaster of the Korean Church and Chungsoon was chair of its board  of 
trustees. They were prominent in the movement of leftist Koreans  students opposed 
to Sygman Rhee, who was then in US exile. 
With  the US at war with Japan, the couple were recruited by the US Armed 
Forces  Information and Education Division, where Chungsoon became chief of 
the  Korean censorship office and Choon Cha was his assistant. After the  
war, when the US occupation imported Rhee as its chosen anticommunist  dictator 
for South Korea, the Kwaks went on to work at the Voice of America  until 
1949, when Chungsoon was summarily fired and Choon Cha  resigned in protest. 
They lost their jobs not only because of their  continued opposition to the 
US-sponsored Rhee dictatorship, but because  they were radical leftists at a 
time when McCarthyism was putting all  leftists in the US at risk. 
The  Kwaks’ originally arrived in the US on student visas but with their  
wartime government employment, they were issued visitors visas—which made  
them eligible for permanent residence after seven years. They applied for  it 
in 1948, but after they were fired by VOA, their visitor’s visas  were not 
renewed. Instead, in September 1949, they were deported to  South Korea when 
their visas expired –a country whose regime they did not  recognize. 
Deportation  as radical leftists into the hands of their bete  noir Rhee 
meant  certain death at best. So the Kwaks fought the order for almost two 
years,  insisting they were not South Korean citizens.  They were however  
denied permission to leave for another country. And at the height of the  Korea 
War in April, 1951 they were arrested and sent to Ellis Island to  await 
deportation. After theAmerican  Committee for Protection of the Foreign  Born 
organized a “Committee  To Defend Chungsoon and Choon Cha Kwak” to raise 
bail and hire an  attorney, they cited the certainty of “physical persecution” 
as grounds  against deportation and declared themselves citizens of the  “
Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.” As late as 1952, Chungsoon was  
writing for the Los Angeles radical weekly, Korean  Independence.* 
After  several years of unsuccessful court appeals, the Department of 
Justice set  their deportation for April 7, 1954, but deferred implementation 
until a  similar deportation case of another Korean leftist, Los Angeles 
architect  David Hyun*, was settled in the courts (Hyun eventually won in 1967). 
On  March 27, their case finally attracted some public attention when the 
National  Guardian, a leftist weekly,  published a denunciation of the 
government’s deportation effort as part of  the McCarthy era’s suppression of 
dissent. 
After  almost two more years, in January, 1957, their defense campaign 
finally forced  the US government in to allow the Kwaks to leave for 
Czechoslovakia, which  had offered them transit visas, after which they planned to seek 
refuge in  North Korea. Their defense committee, which included W.E.B. 
DuBois, Roger  Baldwin and other prominent Americans, gave the Kwaks a festive  
sendoff when they left New York for Prague in early  February. 
They  received permission to go to North Korea from either its Czech or 
Soviet  Embassy. On their arrival in Moscow, the Embassy arranged seats for 
them at  several concerts and operas, at which they wrote friends that they 
enjoyed  “such beautiful Verdi, such graceful Mozart.” And on Feb 26, the 
Kwaks  wrote Guardian editor James Aronson that they “are  leaving for Pyongyang 
this evening” on the Trans-Siberian railroad  via Vladivostok. They had 
$1500 left from their defense fund which  they intended to contribute to the 
post-war reconstruction effort. They said  they had left the US “with few 
regrets other than leaving so many good friends,”  and looked forward to “
really taste the air of a free world.” 
Those  were the last words their American friends ever heard from them. 
After a year  with not a single letter of the many they had promised to write, 
Aronson  asked his journalist colleagues in Moscow, Prague and Beijing to 
make  inquiries of their Korean contacts. Six more months later in July, 1958 
his  Moscow colleague, Ralph Parker, reported the good news that, according 
to his  Korea contacts, the Kwaks were happily working at the Conservatory 
of Music  in Pyongyang, and that mail would reach them there. 
But  as the Kwaks’ failure to respond to their American friends’ letters 
continued,  Aronson became increasingly worried. His continued efforts to 
smoke out  information resulted in hearing that the Koreans were “fed up with  
questions” about the Kwaks. But finally in April 1959 when the 
Guardianthreatened  to publish an article about the missing couple, they heard again from 
 Moscow that the Kwaks were “just fine,” had a new apartment and that  
Choon Cha was still at the Conservatory of Music while Chungsun was now at  the 
Foreign Languages Publishing House in Pyongyang. At the same time, the  
North Korea Embassy in Prague told the Guardian correspondent there that the  
Kwaks, “like any Korean citizens,” could write him if they wished. The  
correspondent replied that he didn’t believe that. 
Twenty  years later, in 1978, the editors of the National  Guardian finally 
published the Kwaks’ story in  a book,*explaining that they withheld 
publication in the paper because they  had suspicions but no hard facts, and going 
public would only provide  propaganda to “a media world salivating for such 
 [anti-Communist] material.” Still, Aronson admitted, “I have never  been 
easy in my mind about not publishing the story.” 
More  than 40 years later and the breakthrough visit of American musicians, 
the fate  of the Kwaks remains secret, although the suspicion of their 
leftist  friends that North Korea wrongly judged them to be USspies as they did 
Alice  Hyun and probably Diamond Kimm,remains  the most probable end of 
their  story.
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