Excerpt from forthcoming book on the life of Dora Yum Kim by Dr. Soo Young Chin.

INTRODUCTION

"When I think about my life, it's as if I've lived in many different worlds. The world has really changed in my lifetime. Not only have there been advances in our standard of living, my life has been marked by the opening up of possibilities for Orientals in America. This isn't to say that racism is gone. My entire life has been a struggle against racial and sexual discrimination. But in my life I've washed dishes at my parents restaurant in Chinatown and ridden in presidential motorcades. I've been prevented from leaving Chinatown and traveled all around the world. I've known garment workers as well as international lawyers and businessmen. Looking back, I've had a very full life. But I think my early years really stuck with me. In those days we had to struggle for survival--not just in terms of making a living as Orientals in America, but also in terms of maintaining a positive sense of who we were as Koreans, one of the minority Asian groups clumped in with the Chinese in Chinatown. When you have to struggle for survival, you learn that there are things you just have to do. And that's how I've lived my life. Through it all, I just did what had to be done.

"In many ways I've had an ordinary life. Like most of the girls from Chinatown that I grew up with, I got married and had children. Growing up, most of us worked in our parents' businesses. But we didn't really think of that as real work. For us, real work meant working in an office in the financial district. We thought that was glamorous. However, for us girls from Chinatown, working in the financial district was just a dream. I don't even think we really thought about what working outside our family businesses entailed. It didn't take long to realize that those dreams were not available to us. So we focused on getting married and having children.

"My life has been different from my Chinatown girlfriends because I ended up working, having a career outside Chinatown, after I had children. I don't think it was really that unusual to want both a family and a career. But wanting something is different from going out and doing it. I think most of my friends were content to raise children without having to work as hard as their mothers had. It was a luxury to be able to stay home and raise the kids.

"Finding work outside Chinatown wasn't easy, and I was rejected many times. My life work as a social worker certainly wasn't the career I intentionally embarked upon. I started out as a typist at the California Department of Employment, and eventually managed to become a social worker. It's funny--initially I was barred from working because I was an Oriental female. As it turned out, sometime in the early 1970's, my career actually became dependent on my Korean heritage because I was one of the few people who could work with the influx of Korean immigrants after 1965. And for me, the experience with the Koreans really shook up the way I thought about my heritage.

Born in 1921 to Korean Christian immigrant parents, Dora Yum Kim was only one of about a hundred Koreans living in San Francisco Chinatown. Her life was structurally different from the lives of other second generation Asian American women with whom she grew up. While her childhood girlfriends gave up their girlhood dreams of becoming office workers and embraced the chance of becoming wives and mothers without having to work as their mothers had, Dora ended up with both a family and a career. In telling her life story, Dora speaks of her life long struggle to resist mainstream racial constructions as well as the limitations placed on her as a female from within the ethnic communities which she lived.

Today Dora Yum Kim is a prominent figure in Korean America as well as in the larger San Francisco community. Between 1965 and 1977 when she worked for the California State Department of Employment, Dora placed over 3,000 Korean immigrants in their first jobs. In 1977 she took early retirement so that she could focus on the first Korean community center in the United States that she had co-founded in 1976. In 1986 Dora retired from her position as coordinator of the Senior Center at the Korean Community Center. When she retired from the Center at age 65 the Korean community gave her a hwan'gap celebration, a Korean rite of passage into old age conventionally marked at 60, of grand proportions that is still unsurpassed in the San Francisco Korean community. While Dora is not involved with any Korean service group in an official capacity she still works as a medical interpreter for Korean immigrants. Dora Yum Kim is viewed by many community members as a heroine because of her activism on behalf of the Korean immigrant community.

Dora, however, does not see her life as singularly focused on the immigrant community nor exemplary in any way. Instead, Dora sees herself as someone who "did what had to be done" to overcome the limitations that she and other Asian Americans faced based on race and gender. In "doing what has to be done," the overarching logic Dora invokes to make sense of her life is the discourse of moral action, of making ethical choices. While the idea of overcoming the inequities of social and cultural constructions of race and gender are embedded in notions of rights, justice, and harm, Dora's sense of corrective moral action, "doing what has to be done," is tied to changing social relationships and situations over different periods in her life. Dora speaks of her life in periods associated with places she lived: she referred to "Chinatown, San Francisco" where she lived until age 37; she spoke of "Dewey Boulevard" where she resided between ages 37 to 61; and since age 62 Dora has maintained "A Room of Her Own" separate from her primary residence she and her husband share on Dewey Boulevard.