Tour of Korean War memorials to visit ABQ
Hannah Y. Kim is traveling to Korean War memorials in all 50 states to honor the soldiers who died and were wounded, physically and emotionally, by their fighting. She says their sacrifices directly affected her life, opening up opportunities she wouldn’t have had otherwise.
Her tour, which stops in Albuquerque today at 11 a.m. for a wreathlaying ceremony at the New Mexico Veterans’ Memorial, aims to raise awareness and funds for the construction
of a Wall of Remembrance at the National Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The wall, she says, was federally authorized but hasn’t been funded.
“This for me is all so extremely personal, and the cause is to actually bring awareness and raise funds for the wall of remembrance,” she said from her stop in Colorado, her last before hopping a flight to Albuquerque on Friday. “I hope people can come out with their family, even if they are not descendants of Korean War veterans. It is on their account we are enjoying the freedoms we enjoy.”
That statement for her, she says, is absolute truth.
She says the international intervention, populated mostly by American troops, in the Korean civil war in the early 1950s ultimately opened the path for South Korean immigration to the U.S.
Kim’s parents immigrated to the U.S. in the wave of Korean immigration that come in the 1970s and 1980s, and now, she said, she looks back at her life full of opportunity she “never would have had.”
“Literally they saved South Korea, and South Korea became free, and many South Koreans have been able to immigrate,” she said. “There are 2 million Korean-Americans not just living but thriving in America. That’s the American dream. And I am doing this journey because it wouldn’t be possible without them. It’s a fact. I wouldn’t be here.”
Kim, from Los Angeles, started the group Remember727 when she was 24 after working as a spokeswoman for a federal representative in Washington, D.C. The group honors Korean War Armistice Day, which was in 1953 on July 27 — hence the 727. She worked for remembrance of the war, it’s semiresolution and for a wall remembering those killed in the conflict, considered the first of the Cold War.
She livestreams her events on the Remember727 Facebook page, a link to which can be found on the Remember727.org webpage.
From Albuquerque, Kim will make her way to Phoenix and then east zigzagging her way to every state.
“I’m visiting all 50 states because there was a casualty in each state, and I would like for people locally to kind of viscerally feel that freedom isn’t free. Their neighbors went and died and were wounded and sacrificed, and people don’t have to travel to all 50 states more than 15,000 miles like me to say ‘thank you.’ They can come to the park and say ‘thank you’ there. It’s a little bit easier.”
At least 228 New Mexicans were killed in the Korean War and at least 44 New Mexicans who went to fight on the Asian peninsula are recorded as unaccounted for.