In the third week of September 1945, a team of 10 men representing every U.S. intelligence organization in China arrived in Japanese-occupied Shanghai to evacuate “the last living remnants of colonialism … and return the city to an independent and free China … one man stood out from the others for an obvious reason: he was the only Asian among them. His name was Peter Kim. … No one could have imagined then that eventually Peter Kim’s name would be acclaimed in the halls of the U.S. Congress and that his actions in Shanghai in August 1945 would help win his entire family’s admission to the United States [and] that the Kims would become a founding family of modern U.S. intelligence and special operations.” Thus begins one of the most fascinating life stories in Korean American history that have come to my attention, a story recounted in Victory in Shanghai, for which author Robert Kim (no relation to the family he describes) mined the personal papers, published and unpublished, of members of the Kim family as well as government and military archives and accounts by residents of Shanghai’s expatriate community during the Japanese occupation.
How was it possible for Peter Kim to achieve so much when almost all his formative years were spent outside the U.S.? Consider these details from those years: born in Pyongyang in 1912 to Korean Christian parents; moved with his parents and younger brother to Shanghai in 1917, the family obtaining documents declaring them to be Chinese; moved with his parents and two younger brothers to Los Angeles in 1924; returned to Korea in 1926 with his family, who, because of the Asian Exclusion Act, part of the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, could no longer remain in the U.S. (even though two of the children had been born there and thus were U.S. citizens); returned with his family to Shanghai in 1928, where his father had become director of an American organization disseminating knowledge of modern medicine throughout China; grew up linguistically and culturally American among the expatriate community in Shanghai; became family head at age 24 when his father died prematurely in the U.S.
Multiply these details and the remainder of Peter Kim’s life story by a factor of seven, representing his parents and five siblings (a seventh child was struck and killed at the age of 4 by a motor vehicle in Los Angeles), and you have an actual family history that rivals any of the family sagas famous among Korean and Korean American fictional narratives past and present. Perhaps ironically, the several uprootings experienced by Peter Kim and his family provided Peter and his brothers, James, Richard, and Arthur, with the language proficiency (Korean, English, and French — the last of these three a medium of communication during the Kim family’s years in the French Concession of the expatriate community in Shanghai) and the cross-cultural experience that proved so valuable to the U.S. military intelligence community during World War II, the Korean War, and the ensuing Cold War. Peter Kim ultimately attained the rank of Major and served as second in command of U.S. forces in Korea after the Korean War. James Kim was assigned to the CIA during the Korean War and spent a quarter century with that organization, earning the Intelligence Medal of Merit, one of the CIA’s most distinguished honors. He is interred in Arlington National Cemetery. Richard Kim — like Peter, a member of the U.S. Army in Shanghai — became a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army Special Forces shortly after its creation in 1952. Arthur Kim became a CIA Operations Officer and was involved in harrowing missions in Vietnam and Laos during the Vietnam War.
Prominent in the evolution of the Kim brothers to their careers in the U.S. Army and the CIA was the kindness and constant support of others. Peter Kim’s service with the Swiss Consulate in Shanghai enabled him to arrange for the evacuation of 639 American citizens from Shanghai in 1942, after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II. Marshall Carter — a colonel in the U.S. Army in Shanghai when Peter Kim joined that unit and, later in life, deputy director of the CIA and then director of the National Security Agency — early on recognized the discriminatory policies of the U.S. immigration structure that had prevented the Kim family from obtaining American citizenship, and this led him to personally spearhead the efforts within the U.S. military as well as in Congress that finally enabled the Kims to attain this long-deserved status. Especially riveting is author Robert Kim’s recounting of this struggle, documented in the Congressional Record.
Not to be overlooked in the life story of the Kim family is the toll taken on the members by decades of separation and uncertainty. Family patriarch Kim Chang Sei — subject of Part I of the book Americans in Exile — was one of the very first Korean medical doctors, and his experiences in Shanghai and then the U.S. proved crucial in the American-identity formation of his six surviving children. But just as he seemed to have arranged for the family to join him in America in 1934 he died by suicide, perhaps disappointed that those arrangements ultimately proved fruitless. Peter Kim, deprived at age 65 of his wife, and then 16 years later of Marshall Carter, his closest friend, and not in regular contact with his siblings scattered in distant parts of the country, likewise took his own life.
Family matriarch Lee Chung Sil, for her part, anchored the family during her husband’s years apart from them. Especially valuable were her years with her children in Los Angeles in the early 1920s, where they were initially welcomed by her sister-in law and husband Dosan Ahn Chang Ho, Korean independence activist and pioneer among the early Korean American community. The photo of her progeny that graces the cover of Victory in Shanghai is arresting.
As one with an abiding interest in the literature of the Korean diaspora, and especially the memoirs and autobiographical fiction that document the lives of those who have made the transition to a new linguistic and cultural environment, often during a formative period of their lives, I was intrigued by the arrival of Victory in Shanghai on my doorstep. Little did I imagine, though, that the story of the eight members of the Kim family would become so consuming. At a time when the U.S. immigration establishment seems to be reverting to the exclusionary policies of the past, Victory in Shanghai reminds us of the mostly anonymous millions who made this country great in the first place.
Bruce Fulton occupies the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation at the University of British Columbia, where he serves as a Professor in the Department of Asian Studies. He is the co-translator, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of numerous works of modern Korean fiction, most recently Togani by Gong Ji-young and Chinatown, four stories by Oh Jung-hee (Penguin Modern Classic); co-recipient, with Ju-Chan Fulton, of the first U.S. National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean literary work and the first residency at the Banff International Literature Translation Centre awarded for a translation from any Asian language; and editor of The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories.
