LETTER FROM THE EDITOR - VOL. 15
KCCNYC Monthly - August 2025
By Eun Byoul Oh
🇰🇷Long live Korean independence 🇰🇷 A collection of famous lines from dramas and movies about the independence movement. You can read more about these dramas in our K-DRAMA SPECIAL this month.
August is blazing, and here we come again with our monthly newsletter. The thundering roars of Koreans are particularly loud in August.
Without the leaders of independence, what we have as Korea now could have been just called Japan, and Korean food may have been just Japanese food; what we know as K-Pop could have been just J-pop.
In August, KCCNYC celebrates Korea’s independence and liberation by remembering the victims of 40 years of Japanese colonialism.
KCCNYC has centered its mission around memorializing the sufferings of Koreans and all the victims who were impacted by the atrocities of the war.
KCCNYC has been commemorating Comfort Women by holding seminars with Triple A project in 2017, 2018, 2019—A bicycle team from Korea crossing the U.S. to raise awareness of the issue in the U.S— along with YKANY, also known as Hung Sa Dahn, the very organization that Dosan Ahn Chang Ho created to build Korean-American community and to educate Korean independence leaders.
In 2019, KCCNYC also prepared the shrine for the late-Kim Bok Dong, a Comfort Women survivor and Human Rights activist of Korea, so that we can all pay respect to her.
In this month’s KCCNYC monthly, we are presenting very special voices in our community. We are grateful to have the opportunity to share the voices of Justine and Sergey, who are descendants of those who survived WWII, and are the living witnesses of the Korean diaspora.
Through their voices, we think about how memories erode with time, and maybe how these voices are also forgotten by Korea, their motherland. The voices of people often are erased by the interests of a nation and its allies, or just the passage of time is enough to let the memories fade away.
While August is inevitably focused on Korean history, the drama section is prepared for you, and in the spirit of independance - check out our Indie Playlist No. 1, and the folktale section is also awaiting for you.
In our Dosan Hakdang, we celebrate the voices of resistance by poems from four poets—Yun Dong Ju, Yi Sang Hwa, Sim Hun, and Yi Yuk-sa. The book club information can be found here. The reading is very short, given these are poems. I would highly recommend everyone to read them even if you may not make it to the meeting!
As the book club team, we thank everyone for making it to last month’s book club. Every meeting is so special for everyone!
We also celebrated the end of last semester by meeting everyone in our Norraebang Night on Friday Aug 8 — as a part of our KCCNYC After Class Series. It was very fun to see each other in person and chill. Thank you for joining us.
The new semester is kicking off this week— registration is still open—I can’t wait to see all the faces that are returning and the eager faces of the new students.
I have decided to close the August Letter from Editors the same way:
Long Live Independent Korea, 대한 독립 만세!
Eun Byoul Oh
