K-Town Stories
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Cathy Yi
Food Cohort Elder Participant
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Lily Kim
LGBTQIA+ Cohort Elder Partcipant
“If you're in the field from The Korea Times or Radio Korea, and you interview politicians or policymakers, they know we are watching. Just the fact that we are there — it matters.”
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Judy Han & Jennifer Chun
LGBTQIA+ Cohort Elder Participants
“Whenever her mom visited, I was her roommate. We rearranged rooms and pretended like we were roommates. I don’t think anybody actually believed us.”
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Vida-Marie Adams
LGBTQIA+ Cohort Elder Participant
“You have the right to feel real feminine one day, and not so feminine the next day, somewhere in between—fluid. However you feel like expressing yourself or how you feel about yourself, that's true in that moment. “
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Jamie Issuh
LGBTQIA+ Cohort Elder Participant
“It was actually impossible to grapple with my queerness and ‘Koreanness’ at the same time because I had never seen them coexist in the same room and accept each other.”
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Lori Song
LGBTQIA+ Cohort Elder Participant
“Part of my transgender journey is an act of defiance, just by me being so different from the so-called norm. That's one small way I can make a difference in a person's life or [in a] group of people — just to be unafraid of being different.”
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Lana Yu
LGBTQIA+ Cohort Elder Participant
“My son, who I love, is a very healthy and very good boy. Why should I be ashamed of him, just for being gay?”
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Jennifer Wong
Eldercare Cohort Elder Participant
“I love that I can create tons of space where there is an acknowledgment and celebration of the multicultural nature that has become Koreatown.”
Intergenerational. Multiethnic. Multilingual.
We are high school students and elders who live and work in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. Read our stories, listen to our interviews, and look at our photos and videos to learn more about our thoughts and insights on our community.
OUR PARTICIPANTS →
The Traditional Healing Arts In Koreatown
In 2024-2025, KSP will explore the traditional healing arts in our Koreatown community. We are interested in learning from the diversity of healing practices and modalities from our largely Latine and API community, like acupuncturists, herbalists, shamans, botanicas, curanderas, and kabarajis. KSP will interview, gather and archive oral history narratives about the traditional healing arts from our primarily limited-income, immigrant community, where the majority of countries of origin (Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Korea, Bangladesh and Mongolia) have strong cultural roots in these modalities. Many residents of our community understand or practice these cultural traditions, rituals and methods, but these voices are rarely explored, documented and archived. We will invite traditional healing artists to lead workshops and demonstrations in their areas of expertise and are excited to learn from and with our Koreatown community.
Su historia es un regalo. Share Your Story.
당신의 이야기는 선물입니다.
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This program is supported, in part, by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts and Culture.
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit www.calhum.org.